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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I am an avid reader of science fiction, and the use of futuristic fiction as a source of ideas is a welcome development. The best science fiction is that which explores the boundaries of our concepts whether in the mind, the computer or how we relate to each other. This is one of the advantages of defending the freedom of the mind, the expression of which is usually described as freedom of speech
Anti-terror chiefs in the United States have hired a team of America’s most original sci-fi authors to dream up techniques to help them combat al-Qaeda.
Ideas so far include mobile phones with chemical weapons detectors and brain scanners fitted to airport sniffer dogs, so that security staff can read their minds.
The writers have also put government scientists in touch with Hollywood special-effects experts, to work on better facial-recognition software to pick out terrorists at airports.
The Department of Homeland Security has set aside around $10 million – one tenth of its research budget – for projects dreamt up by the best brains in futuristic fiction.
Whilst DARPA is a useful channel for futuristic ideas, ten percent of a research budget handed over to any project is not such a good idea. Once the institutional apparatus is set up, with a secretariat to flesh out the innovative ideas, and the bureaucratic accretions which turn gold to mud, what will be left. A few nuggets from the civil service quicksand.
More useful is the Sigma organisation set up by Andrew Arlen some years ago, if it survives the seductive sirenic call of the public sector:
Mr Pournelle said the facial recognition plan was one of a number that aimed to replicate ideas seen on television shows such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and NCIS, a similar show. "In real life, the computers are still nowhere near as good as they are on TV," he said. "It’s just one of several high risk, high pay-off projects we have suggested.
He is a member of Sigma, a group set up by fellow writer Arlan Andrews to pursue "science fiction in the national interest. Mr Andrews, who predicted handheld, electronic books long before they became a reality, said: “We spend our entire careers living in the future. Those responsible for keeping the nation safe need people to think of crazy ideas.”
How unusual that CSI, paraded as an authentic and naturalistic program, can be classified as science fiction, on the grounds that the technology deployed is probably three or five years ahead of our current capabilities. Yet, the same confusion may dazzle the Department of Homeland Security. The politicians will reach for science fictional solutions when actual success probably stems from incremental graft on current processes and clear procurement and privatisation.
Research is often touted as a PR solution for public sector problems. Treat this with scepticism.
“One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.”
Victor Hugo.
If you are not regularly reading Michael Yon, you are really missing out on something interesting.
There’s a new social trend in Belfast whereby women are dropping their children off to school still in their pajamas. This has got the local worthies of Belfast worried, and a little peeved.
In a bulletin to parents, Mr McGuinness wrote: “Over recent months the number of adults leaving children at school and collecting children from school dressed in pyjamas has risen considerably.
“While it is not my position to insist on what people wear, or don’t, I feel that arriving at the school in pyjamas is disrespectful to the school and a bad example is set to children.”
Women walking round Belfast estates in all-day pyjama gear is a phenomenon that has been well documented by Robin Livingstone, a columnist in the Andersonstown News, but until now it has been confined to the west of the city.
Mr Livingstone said that he first identified All Day Pyjama Syndrome (ADPS) in 2003. He knows a student at the Belfast Institute for Further and Higher Education who is writing a dissertation on the subject.
The women are colloquially known as “pyjama mamas” or “Millies”. Their pyjama ensembles are often complemented by large, gold hoop earrings known as “budgies” – because such cage birds could swing from them. They also sport “scrunchies” to create the “Turf Lodge facelift”, in which the hair is scraped so tightly to the back of the head that it pulls the facial skin taut.
There is even a dress hierarchy among those suffering from APDS: the wearing of silk-effect, baggy pyjamas with fluffy, mule-type slippers contrasts, for example, with the traditional dressing gown and hair rollers.
Bloggers, who of course are famous for working in their pajamas, should rally around the millies, and defend their right to drop off their offspring at school, no matter how unsightly it may appear.
First they came for the millies….
I am not particularly in favour of sucking up to the Saudis, or of political subsidy for the British arms industry; but can someone please explain why this is vicious nasty corriuption that ought to be internaltionally banned even if it is the custom where the deal is done, and this is a UK local government policy raising a mere £2,500 million a year, in extortion bribes grateful contributions from property developers (on top of which HMRC now is trying to arrange to take a further20% rake-off supplement)?
Have reports of the death of the mainstream media been greatly exaggerated?
I will be travelling (with another esteemed Samizdata editor) to Addis Ababa this weekend and stay in Ethiopia for about a week. I have read many fascinating things about the country but I have no idea what to expect. So tips and suggestions are welcome.
I plan to travel outside the capital – it was a toss up between Axum and Lalibela. In the end the latter won as the rock-hewn churches are amazing. Also it is a shorter flight, which given time constraints is preferable.
Thanks to Graham of Noodlepie I have learnt about the vibrant Ethiopian political blogosphere. Any Ethiopian bloggers worthy of note?
I have no idea what it tastes like, but what a name. I am in the village where they make the stuff.
As a great French historian has pointed out, the vineyards of France are perhaps the single greatest cultural legacy of the Roman empire, and it is now more than two millennia since people in Britain first became aware of the intoxicating powers of wine. In all that time, no government in history has yet thought the people so moronic that they needed to be told, on the bottle, that wine could go to your head
– Boris Johnson, discussing plans to put warning labels on wine.
A Carnegie Mellon study suggests that shoppers are willing to pay more if they are re-assured about privacy. The premium mentioned is about $0.60 (30p) on goods worth $15 (£7). This is good news. Privacy is one of the ‘goods’ with benefit distributed over time and like security you wish you had it most only when you discover you have none. Usually not in circumstances of your choosing. The heartening point about the report is that before many studies were showing that despite peoples fears about what happens to their data, they continued to surrender it in exchange for low prices.
Lorrie Cranor, director of the Usable Privacy and Security Lab at Carnegie Mellon and lead author on the study:
Our suspicion was that people care about their privacy, but that it’s often difficult for them to get information about a website’s privacy policies.
So if users are happy to pay a bit extra for re-assurances that privacy of their information is respected, perhaps they would be equally willing to use tools that give them control and ownership over that data. Of course, there are issues with that, especially with the current state of online security and lack of more flexible and selective privacy. However, there are people already looking into this so I might start holding my breath. 🙂
cross-posted from Media Influencer
The Home Office [Bureau of State Security for overseas readers] would be ludicrous in its crudity, if it did not present such a threat to liberty. Bids for more arbitrary power are always, but always, acompanied by a scare story.
Today’s example:
Reid proposes register for terror offenders
John Reid will today propose setting up a terrorist offenders register as part of a series of long-term counter-terror measures.
The proposal, based on similar lines to the existing sex offenders register, is one of a series of ideas that the Home Secretary will suggest should be part of the country’s antiterror defences.
One idea being studied by Mr Reid would be to allow the register to operate retrospectively, making an estimated 40 people convicted under terror laws since 2001 liable for immediate listing.
The Home Secretary will say that police should be allowed to continue questioning terror suspects after they have been charged.
He will also outline a plan to allow judges to impose a harsher sentence on people with links to terrorism who are convicted under the criminal law.
This would apply in particular to people convicted of credit card fraud who have links to terrorism.
Another measure would give police the power forcibly to enter the home of a terror suspect held under a control order.
But the pamphlet, to be published today, will not include firm proposals to extend beyond 28 days the length of time that police can hold terror suspects.
Is juxtaposed with:
Security checks on petrol tankers in London
Security spot checks are being carried out on petrol and chemical tankers, cement mixers and other vehicles that could be used by suicide bombers.
Police are monitoring lorries on key routes into London amid concerns that terrorists might copy tactics which have been deployed to deadly effect by insurgents in Iraq. […]
But Scotland Yard stressed today that there was no specific intelligence to suggest that any kind of lorry bomb attack was imminent. [….]
“A counter-terrorism element has been added to the routine work of checking vehicles carrying dangerous goods,” said a police spokeswoman.
The first story is filed by the Times’ home affairs editor. The second by an interesting chap called Sean O’Neill, co-author of The Suicide Factory a highly sensational account of Abu Hamza’s career at Finsbury Park mosque. According to his agent’s website:
“Sean O’Neill joined The Times in 2004 after working for the Daily Telegraph for twelve years. He has covered the Matrix Churchill affair and the Scott Inquiry into arms to Iraq, the Soham murders and the trial of Ian Huntley, and has reported extensively from Northern Ireland. Since 2001 he has focused largely on the al-Qaeda terrorist threat in the UK.”
Mr O’Neill has something of a speciality in reporting the suspicions of the authorities. He clearly has very good police and intelligence contacts, and can make a livid story out of a change in a police checklist. But the inclination of such unofficial official contacts will be to feed such tidbits to the press to suit themselves, knowing an energetic journalist will make much of them.
Alice Thomson has writen an interesting article called Be a ‘bad’ parent and let your children out in which she decries the enervating risk-averse trends in which parents, with the encouragement of our political masters, try to supervise and regulate every aspect of their children’s lives.
The comments are also quite interesting. One of them , calling herself ‘Mum’, bristles at the suggestion Thomson makes:
People who don’t have children are always telling those of us who do what we are doing wrong. I also had a free and easy childhood, but got flashed at, followed home twice and had numerous near misses at being run over. I don’t let my child play out, although she has the run of the garden where she can make camps, climb trees and do all the usual outside things, and usually has a number of friends out there with her.
Well ‘Mum’, I do not have any children either but I am very happy you were not my ‘Mum. Moreover I, like everyone else, am fully qualified to have on opinion on how children should be raised because believe it or not, I and everyone else was once a child.
I agree totally with Alice Thomson and think it is time people stopped indulging their neurotic need to control everything and just let children grow up without panoptic supervision.
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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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