Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Kingdom of North Dumpling



North Dumpling is America’s real life “mad scientist’s island.”


Well, to be fair, Dean Kamen isn’t really mad. He is an eccentric inventor, to be sure. Still, it’s possibly the closest thing in the U.S. to the fictitious island with the reclusive scientist creating wild inventions.

Dean Kamen is best known as the inventor of the Segway, and he has a home called Westwind in Bedford, New Hampshire. That home is unique, with hallways that look like mine shafts, 1960s novelty furniture, antique wheel chairs, among other oddities.

Read more here



Friday, August 19, 2011

Powerful symbol of past and future


Dr IAN LOCHHEAD surveys the possible future for the badly damaged Canterbury Provincial Council Buildings.


The collapse of the stone council chamber of the Canterbury Provincial Buildings was for many, the greatest single heritage loss of the February 22 Christchurch earthquake.

Designed by New Zealand's pre- eminent Victorian architect, Benjamin Mountfort, it was recognised internationally as an outstanding example of colonial Gothic Revival architecture, illustrated in standard texts on the subject such as Chris Brooks' The Gothic Revival (Phaidon, 1999).

For Canterbury it was much more; the buildings as a whole, and the stone council chamber in particular, were a powerful symbol of the province's belief that it had an outstanding future.

It exhibited a sense of confidence and self-belief as well as the prosperity of the 1860s.

When the system of provincial government came to an end in 1876, Canterbury was the only province that paid money into the Treasury in Wellington; all the others brought their debts with them.

From a national perspective the Canterbury buildings are the only surviving example of a complete, provincial government complex, a unique survivor of an important phase in our constitutional development.
Read more here


Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Silicon Valley billionaire funding creation of artificial libertarian islands


The Lookout

National Affairs Reporter

Seasteading Institute city design (Anthony Ling)
Pay Pal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel has given $1.25 million to an initiative to create floating libertarian countries in international waters, according to a profile of the billionaire in Details magazine.

Thiel has been a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties. The idea is for these countries to start from scratch--free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place. Details says the experiment would be "a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons."
Read more here

Monday, August 15, 2011

The London Dispatches — Vol. II. Texas has seceded!




It’s been astonishingly underreported in U.S. media, but
apparently Texas has seceded from the United States, and has been recognized as a sovereign nation by the UK government!  I saw the Texas embassy with my own eyes, plain as day, mere steps from my hotel.  This must be a fairly new development, because the building still has a sign that says “Bar & Grill” on it.  Or maybe the “Bar & Grill” sign was just a ruse to keep the U.S. government from knowing of Texas’s big plans, since no one would be crazy enough to put a pub in a building as spectacular as this one.
Source

Saturday, August 13, 2011

Theses and Timely Questions

  1. Markets work extremely well in dealing with the sorts of problems with which markets deal.
  2. Governments work extremely poorly in dealing with the sorts of problems with which markets deal.
  3. Governments work extremely well in causing the sorts of problems which governments enjoy pretending to solve.
  4. Within fewer years than you might think, intelligent design theory will be giving the Darwinist money-changers a hard time in the scientific temple.
  5. Sixty years on, there is still something fishy about FDR and Pearl Harbor.
  6. Stalin killed more people than Hitler.
  7. Mao killed more people than Stalin.
  8. In terms of what he had to work with, Pol Pot killed more people, proportionately, than Hitler, Stalin, or Mao.
  9. Pol Pot was educated in France. This may not mean a thing.
  10. Multiculturalism is not a reliable means of resolving the Rodney King Problem (‘Can’t we all just get along?
  11. Read more here
The map showing territories in Europe in which secessionist movements exist

Saturday, August 6, 2011

The time lag in news reporting, 1776…

Communication throughout the colonies in the 18th century was a slow process, particularly in winter. It took postriders a week to journey from New York to Boston, at least two days from Philadelphia to New York, and two weeks or more to the Southern states.

A good example of the slowness of mail delivery is revealed by an analysis of the printing of the Declaration of Independence in the various colonial newspapers. The first printing was in the Pennsylvania Evening Post of July 6. Three days later it appeared in Baltimore, and four days later in New York.

The list below gives some indication of the time lag distances required, but it should be remembered that the printing often had to await the proper day of the newspaper’s publications as many were just weekly while others were bi-weekly or tri-weekly, although a few of the papers published “extraordinary” issues.

DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE NEWSPAPER PRINTINGS

July 6 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Evening Post
Read more here

Monday, August 1, 2011

BALKAN HUMOR

In case you are having trouble figuring out who is who in this war we are in

From: Tom Seals
Now let me make sure you understand this. It's pretty complicated. Listen closely. We've got troops (young Americans who have volunteered to risk their lives defending American freedom and independence, in exchange for the chance to learn electronic repair and to drive tanks) in Bosnia because the Bosnian Muslims were mistakenly included in Yugoslavia by the victorious allies when they broke up Austria-Hungary in 1918. Or maybe the Austro-Hungarians made the mistake when they took Bosnia and Herzegovina from the Ottoman Turkish Empire in 1906 and gave it a hyphenated name because the Austrians spoke German and like to shove words together, like Austro-Hungarian. Anyway, Woodrow Wilson and the boys shoved the people together, and that was definitely a mistake.


Herzegovina was inhabited by Croats, who are basically Serbs who are Catholics instead of Orthodox and who write their dialect of Serbian using Latin letters instead of Cyrillic. This looks less funny to us, so they must be the good guys and the Serbians are bad. Maybe it's that the Serbians write their dialect of Croatian in those weird Russian letters, which is even more perverse; they're definitely the Bad Guys.

So we bravely side with the Bosnians and the Croats against Serbia, until the Croats cheat by massacring Bosnians. That's why we had to send in troops, right, because everybody was massacring Bosnians? And the Bosnians couldn't fight back because the UN wouldn't let anybody sell them guns, on the grounds that if nobody had guns nobody could shoot anybody there. Somehow the UN forgot that the Serbians and the Croats already had lots of guns; only the Bosnians really needed them.
Read more here