We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Anyone in Britain who wishes to file a tax return to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs must do so online. Oh goody:
The security of the online computer system used by more than three million people to file tax returns is in doubt after HM Revenue and Customs admitted it was not secure enough to be used by MPs, celebrities and the Royal Family.
Thousands of “high profile” people have been secretly barred from using the online tax return system amid concerns that their confidential details would be put at risk.
Of course, as the Daily Telegraph rightly points out, the HMRC is the department that managed to lose details of 25m people back in the autumn; it may be a rash prediction to make, but the more this sort of nonsense piles up, the less likely it is that the ID card will go ahead as planned. We can all live in hope, anyway.
It is not widely known even in Australia that in 1808 the NSW Corps of the British Army deposed the Governor of New South Wales, William Bligh, in a coup. This is known as the ‘Rum Rebellion’, but it was not really about rum. Reading about it on Wikipedia, it is clear that Governor Bligh, a Captain in the Royal Navy, who had already endured the Mutiny on the Bounty, was not fit to govern a colony like New South Wales was at the start of the 19th Century.
For there were already free settlers in New South Wales at that time, and they wanted their rights and liberties as British subjects respected. Chief among them was John Macarthur. Michael Duffy writes about the rebellion and Macarthur’s role in it here.
As for myself, since it is also Australia Day today, I am going to do the patriotic thing and toast my nation onwards- with good old Australian Rum.
Glenn Reynolds links to an interesting-sounding book about South Africa’s poor whites, a group completely obscured – globally, by the international perception of the apartheid society and locally, by post-apartheid positive discrimination efforts to raise the country’s recently oppressed blacks out of poverty. It made me recall a piece I saw some time ago on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s international current affairs programme, Foreign Correspondent, that also examined the lot of disadvantaged white South Africans. It contained a very interesting interview of the ANC government minister Essop Pahad. I have reproduced the business end of the discussion below (the emphasis in bold is my own):
→ Continue reading: The new face of South Africa
On the face of it, who could object to a company deciding to do more to help the world’s poor? Reuters has a story titled Gates calls for “creative capitalism” (which is a bit like saying ‘Gates calls for agriculture that creates food’).
Gates said the self-interest behind capitalism had driven multiple innovations but to harness it to the benefit of all required the system be refined. Greater focus on recognition for improving the lives of others could provide a spur for companies to focus more on making money out of providing valuable products at affordable prices to the world’s poor. He urged multinationals to pledge the services of their top people to the work.
Ah, I get it. White man speak with forked tongue… “but to harness it to the benefit of all required the system be refined”. Bill Gates is not in fact calling for voluntary anything, he is calling for The System to be ‘refined’, which means he wants to make capitalism less capitalist and more politically directed by our caring masters. Could the fact he hangs out with show biz types and politicos who are all solidly statist give us a clue to decoding his words here?
So is Billy Boy just another dissembling corporate stuffed shirt looking for more ‘feel good’ photo opportunities with such deep thinkers as Bono or that Guy Who Thinks He Invented the Internet?
In 2004 in this space, Gabriel Syme noted some disturbing revelations from an FBI translater, Sibel Edmonds. It turns out that Edmonds had, in fact, plenty more to say, but had kept her own counsel. Until now.
A WHISTLEBLOWER has made a series of extraordinary claims about how corrupt government officials allowed Pakistan and other states to steal nuclear weapons secrets.
Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency’s Washington field office.
She approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey.
Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions.
Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan.
The allegations, to say the least, are explosive. The FBI has denied everything, as you might expect. But a disturbing picture is emerging, and given the fairly dodgy reputation of American government officials to start with, it is not hard to believe that Edmonds, if anything, understates the scale of the dirty dealings going on between the United States and various regimes.
As I mentioned in an earlier article, Virgin Galactic unveiled the design of SpaceShipTwo in New York on Tuesday. This is the first ever commercial tourist spaceship.
There are two ‘stages’ to this vehicle. A very large mothership, White Knight Two, and a not exactly tiny underslung SpaceShipTwo. The design is similar to that of SpaceShipOne and the White Knight One mothership but much larger. Notice Burt has gone to a dual hull ‘catamaran’ like structure so the space going craft is slung between them instead of underneath a center hull.
Another thing which jumps out at me is the use of four Pratt and Whitney PW308A turbofan engines. These are the sort of engines you would find on a large business jet and they need this sort of power to get SS2 up to the 50,000 foot MSL drop altitude.
White Knight Two test flights are expected to start this summer. If they are indeed going to meet that schedule, I would expect a roll out by late May.
Artists rendering of SpaceShipTwo and the Mothership in flight
Photo: Courtesy of Virgin Galactic.
This is no paper spaceship. Both WK2 and SS2 are under construction. In the photo you can see both hulls and the main plane of WK2 are well advanced.
White Knight Two hulls and main plane on the Scaled Composites shop floor.
Photo: Courtesy of Virgin Galactic.
SpaceShipTwo is also well along, as you can see.
SpaceShipTwo under construction
Photo: Courtesy of Virgin Galactic.
SpaceShipTwo is not a tiny cramped little thing either as you can see in this photo with Burt Rutan providing scale. It is definitely more business jet than Mercury capsule.
Burt Rutan sitting on the flight control panel in the nose of the SS2.
Photo: Courtesy of Virgin Galactic.
This is not a one off deal. There will be many of these produced and each will be flown as often as possible. That means they will need an ongoing training capability for pilots. So… they have a very nice looking flight simulator for training.
Test pilot Brian Binnie sitting in the SS2 simulator.
Photo: Courtesy of Virgin Galactic.
For the technically inclined, here is a cutaway drawing. The real cognoscenti will note SS2 is indeed using the original hybrid propulsion system. Hybrids have been around awhile now: Starstruck and AMROC (Jim Bennett’s old companies) pioneered them in the eighties and others have since developed them further.
Cutaway technical details of SS2.
Photo: Courtesy of Virgin Galactic.
Guido Fawkes, the blogger who focuses on political sleaze in Britain, can claim a fair measure of credit for exposing the odious Peter Hain’s financial misdeeds. Guido is on the BBC Newsnight programme. It starts at 10:30 tonight. I hope he handles it a bit better than last time.
In terms of sheer effectiveness, Guido is probably far more deadly than Private Eye is these days. If I were Ian Hislop, the Eye’s editor, I would start to wonder whether it was time to pack it in.
Well, why should the English-speaking world have all the fun when it comes to a banking disaster?
Société Générale, France’s second-biggest bank, has revealed that one of its traders in Paris had committed a 5bn euro (£3.6bn/$7.1bn) fraud.
3.6bn quid. However one looks at it, that is a lot of money. The Telegraph story I linked to has named the guy who is alleged to have perpetrated the fraud; the meltdown easily surpasses the collapse of Barings, the blue-blooded British bank that went down due to massive losses incurred by derivatives dealer Nick Leeson back in the mid-90s.
What early conclusions can one draw? First of all, it is not possible to argue that the more heavily regulated banking systems in continental Europe are inherently superior to those wild, anarchic Anglos. At the very largest banks operating out of Paris, New York or London, it seems that human venality, incompetence and dishonesty is no respecter of cultural differences. What investors need to realise is that banks contain human beings with all the weaknesses, as well as virtues, humans have. Regulatory zeal has not prevented frauds; and yet every time there is a fresh SNAFU, a chorus goes up demanding some new set of regulations – “something must be done”. In the end, the only course is to catch the wrongdoers, lock them up or force them, if possible, to repay the folk they have swindled.
To say that 2008 has started badly in the financial markets is an understatement; with banks like Citi taking huge losses linked to the falls in the US housing sector, this latest, Gallic twist of bad financial news is the last thing that investors needed. Jobs have already been axed in the City; it is likely to get worse before it gets better.
Here is a list of recent monster banking frauds.
I have been reading the Ron Paul Campaign blog on a regular basis and this portion of an interview with Glenn Beck brought a grin to my face:
GLENN: Okay. If you were President of the United States, what would you do?
PAUL: Well, the advice would be return to the market economy. First
we would have to deregulate. We had a crisis a few years ago, at least
a supposed crisis with Enron and they superregulated. So I would
repeal certainly major portions of the Sarbanes-Oxley. So we would
argue for deregulation. Then, of course, there should be major, major
tax reform…
I suspect Editor Perry will also gain a smile from this one. Sarbanes-Oxley has been a disaster to the US economy from the git-go and it is about time a politician got up and admitted it.
Of course the City of London has loved it… all those US IPO’s did not vanish, they just came over here to Merry Olde Englande.
“He must be a credit to his country and his newspaper abroad; he should be either a bachelor or a solidly married man who is happy to have his children brought up abroad; his personality must be such that our Ambassador will be pleased to see him when the occasion demands. He must know something of protocol and yet enjoy having a drink with the meanest spy or the most wastrelly spiv. He must be completely at home in a foreign language and have another one to fall back on. He must be grounded in the history and culture of the territory in which he is serving; he must be intellectually inquisitive and have some knowledge of most sports. He must be able to keep a secret; he must be physically strong and not addicted to drink. He must have pride in his work and in the paper he serves, and finally he must be a good reporter with a wide vocabulary, fast with his typewriter, with a knowledge of shorthand and able to drive a car.”
Ian Fleming, former Reuters and Sunday Times journalist, intelligence officer, and creator of 007. Quote taken from this book, on page 171.
Pretty good guidance. Suffice to say that this applies just as much to women as men, of course (Mr Fleming was not what you would call PC).
Some of you may have heard of the Google X-Prize for the first private lunar mission. There seem to be quite a number of teams lining up for the prize, including one based on the Isle of Wight.
Sir Richard Branson’s US company had a ‘do’ in New York yesterday at which they were to unveil the design of SpaceShipTwo. This is slated to be the first commercial suborbital tourist spaceship. I asked a friend who works for them to get some photos to me but nothing has shown up so I presume I will have to look for the official photos like everyone else. As they are making this public, one would presume they have finalized the propulsion system and will be using the hybrid engine as originally planned.
Mojave Spaceport’s license may still be up in the air due to the fatal industrial accident at Scaled Composites test rig last summer. I have been hearing flip flops on this for the last several months but despite assurances from Patty Grace Smith at the FAA it appears there is something behind the rumor. Last summer we all thought the accident, in which a pressurized tank blew up and killed three engineers, would be a matter for OSHA and Cal-OSHA only. If FAA enforcement on such accidents is indeed forthcoming, I predict the unintended consequence will be all non-flight related spacecraft development operations move off FAA controlled spaceports.
Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, is due for their third launch attempt some time soon. Not much information is floating around about an exact date. Somewhere between January and April is about the best I can guess. Given the switchover to the much more sophisticated and re-usable regeneratively cooled engine I think they will be moving very deliberately towards the next flight. Pretty much everyone expects them to make orbit this time.
For the last year a venture I am in has been slowly spooling up. I am now under so many Non-Disclosures that I hardly know what I can and cannot talk about in commercial Space so I have been erring on the side of silence as I have been too busy to check.
I have some nice photos from an old Atlas missile complex turned rocket test stand out in the Wyoming outback which I took last summer during a business visit. Someday I will get around to publishing some of them.
The International Space Development Conference is in Washington DC this year and we (at the National Space Society) have another good one lined up. Pretty much anyone who is anyone in the commercial Space industry will be there.
I imagine everyone knows that Messenger did the first flyby of Mercury in 33 years just a few days ago and the photos are still being downloaded to Earth. While not commercial in itself, the imagery will certainly be useful to future mining interests. It’s a great place to get the materials to build the close-in solar power satellites we’ll use to beam energy around the solar system and manufacture anti-matter fuel in the 22nd Century.
Oh, and I believe June this year is the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska asteroid explosion in Siberia. For a while many of us thought we would see Mars get pasted this February as part of the anniversary ‘celebration’ but the orbit of that rock is now known well enough to say it is a definite miss.
It is interesting how companies are so keen to get swept up in whatever profoundly illiberal fashions define the mainstream. Prêt a Manger, a high quality sandwich chain, proudly says they do not use air freighted produce. They are a major purchaser and they are refusing to buy from a great many Third World producers whose products depend on air freight. No doubt this is seen as a positive thing, hence the fact they go out of their way to let you know.
 Prêt founder Julian Metcalf is a fine entrepreneur and his company does make great lunch food. Moreover I approve of them giving their leftover food to homeless shelters, all enlightened stuff. From a business point of view I can see their thinking as a much higher percentage of their clientele are likely to be middle class Guardian readers with an eco-fetish than impoverished Kenyan farmers desperately trying to get the European trading system to let them sell their damn products and really not needing a meme infecting the private sector that makes it even harder for them than it already is.
I have no idea if the directors of Prêt actually believe the eco-bollocks or if it is just a marketing exercise. However as I am not saying Prêt a Manger should not have the right, for whatever reason they wish, to buy from who they wish, it does not make any difference to my argument because either way I would criticise them for it. I eat there in spite of the greener-that-thou crap, not because of it. But the thing that really gets up my nose and motivates me to look elsewhere is… → Continue reading: Prêt a Manger and fighting the Culture War
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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