New DP cal - Dirty Pair

ST / Amiga Format (July 1988)

ST / Amiga Format (July 1988)

ST / Amiga Format was a U.K. based magazine dedicated to the Atari ST and Amiga computers. It would only last for about a year before being split into two separate titles. The first issue of ST / Amiga Format from July 1988 inlcludes:

• News - Hot gossip from both sides of the Atlantic with a Comdex report and news from Atari's dealer product show.
• Futures - Transputers - are they all hot air? We've had a close look at what's really going on, and reveal the shape of tomorrow's computers.
• Letters - How can you have readers' letters in issue 1? Okay, so we're telling porkies - but read it anyway.
• Gold Dust - Steve Gold plugs into the electronic grapevine. 68020, 68030, Unix, ST Laptops, Amiga graphics upgrades... all the best news is leaked here first.
• Questionnaire - Yes, we want your personal details - inside leg measurements, favorite colors... Tell us all and we'll build a better magazine.
• Special Offers - All the best ST and Amiga-ware at rock-bottom prices.
• Escape Sequence - Scraping rock bottom at the rear end of the issue. A caustic cast around the months' worst stories. Also the first episode of our 16 bit cartoon strip.



• Disk Extra - Demos of Oids (ST) and Interceptor (Amiga) plus a host of invaluable utilities for mortals and boffins alike.



• Graphics
• Photon and Spectrum - Reviews of two brand new graphics packages - Photon Paint for the Amiga and Spectrum 512 for the ST.



• Music
• Animal House - Chris Jenkins went along to the Animal House recording studio to see how professional rock stars use the ST's MIDI capabilities.
• Pro-Sound Designer - A look at what promises to be the most exciting music package yet for the Amiga, courtesy of Eidersoft.



• Special
• Word Processors
- It's the single most important serious application for a computer. We check out the full range of WP packages, on both ST and Amiga.
• Competition - An Epson GQ3500 laser printer must be won in this brain-taxing competition, plus a consolation prize of a 24-pin LQ850.

...and more!

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (525-528)

See the previous post in this series here. Feel free to skip the quoted intro text if you have read it before.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides recently. These are pictures spanning from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s (maybe earlier and/or later but these are what I have sampled so far). These came to me second (third?) hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are several thousand...maybe as many as 10,000. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.

Apparently, getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides (circa late 1950s) that I acquired after he died. That along with some negatives is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives (an Epson V600). That was the most money I was willing to spend on one anyway. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job. The scanner has been mostly idle since finishing that task but now there is plenty for it to do.

This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. He career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides (thousands of them) contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/

Many of these slides had the date they were processed (presumably) stamped or printed on them (month and year). I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date. No doubt there are some exceptions.

All of these photos are from the 1960s. The first shows the interior of a kitchen, the second shows some kind of construction...maybe a house being built, the third is an old church somewhere (anyone recognize it?) and the fourth is a new carport being built. Probably because the attached garage converted to be another room in the house from the way it looks.

Click on one of the images or the link below to also see higher resolution photos and also versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.

processed February 1964
processed February 1964
processed March 1967
Roy Long Carport 1065 Bell Ct. before - processed December 1963

The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can be found here.

SpaceX Falcon 9 Launch (2019-02-21)

SpaceX Falcon 9 Launch (2019-02-21)

litldp05 - DIrty Pair

Compute! (March 1987)

Compute! (March 1987)

Compute! was, in my opinion, the best multi-format computer magazine of the 1980s. I still preferred the Commodore 64 specific magazines but if you were looking for coverage of multiple computers, this was a great magazine. The March 1987 issue includes: Features

• Commodore's New, Expandable Amiga 2000: A Hands-On Report
• New Peripheral Technologies
• An introduction to Hard Disk Drives
• The New High-Quality Dot-Matrix Printers
• The Big Picture: Advances in Screen Display
• A Buyer's Guide to Printers
• Euchre

Reviews

• Little Computer People
• Certificate Maker and Walt Disney Cart & Party Shop
• Roadwar 2000

Columns and Departments

• The Editor's Notes
• Readers' Feedback
• Computers and Society: Demons and Events, Part 2
• Microscope
• Telecomputing Today: Packet-Switching Rule Changes
• The World Inside the Computer: When Buying a Computer: Don't Ask Me!
• The Beginner's Page: Getting Started with a Printer
• ST Outlook: Who Is That Man, and Why is He Smiling?
• AmigaView: The Sidecar Arrives
• IBM Personal Computing: Two Winners and a Laser
• INSIGHT: Atari - Corrected File Conversions

The Journal

• 3-D Surfaces for Amiga
• Fixing Atari Revision-B BASIC
• Custom Characters for Atari XL and XE
• Applecoder
• 128 File Viewer
• Filedump for IBM PC/PCjr
• DOS Calc
• Diskcheck: Apple Sector Editor for DOS 3.3
• 128 Editing Functions for Commodore 64
• Amiga Banner Printer
• Using PUT and GET on the PC/PCjr
• Superplotter

...and more!

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (521-524)

See the previous post in this series here. Feel free to skip the quoted intro text if you have read it before.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides recently. These are pictures spanning from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s (maybe earlier and/or later but these are what I have sampled so far). These came to me second (third?) hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are several thousand...maybe as many as 10,000. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.

Apparently, getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides (circa late 1950s) that I acquired after he died. That along with some negatives is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives (an Epson V600). That was the most money I was willing to spend on one anyway. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job. The scanner has been mostly idle since finishing that task but now there is plenty for it to do.

This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. He career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides (thousands of them) contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/

Many of these slides had the date they were processed (presumably) stamped or printed on them (month and year). I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date. No doubt there are some exceptions.

All of these photos appear to have been taken in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The first is in front of a building with the title 'The Sherry Elm'. I couldn't find a reference to it anywhere but it appears to be some sort of motel or possibly apartment building somewhere in Florida (maybe Miami). The 2nd and 4th photos are from Marineland in Miami, Florida. The second photo was taken at Bok Tower on Iron Mountain, the highest point in Peninsular Florida.

Click on one of the images or the link below to also see higher resolution photos and also versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.

processed February 1959
Marineland - f8-1/250 - processed April 1963
processed March 1962
processed April 1963

The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can be found here.

The Antifederalists Were Eerily Prophetic

Most school kids are left with the impression that the US Constitution was the inevitable follow-up to the Declaration of Independence and the war with King George. What they miss out on is the exciting debate that took place after the war and before the Constitution, a debate that concerned the dangers of creating a federal government at all.

The Antifederalist Movement

Everyone knows about the Federalists who pushed the Constitution. But far less known are the Antifederalists who warned with good reason against the creation of a new centralized government, and just after so much blood had been spilled getting rid of one.

The first of the Antifederalist Papers appeared in 1789. The Antifederalists were opponents of ratifying the US Constitution as it would create what would become an overbearing central government.

As the losers in that debate, they are largely overlooked today. But that does not mean they were wrong or that we are not indebted to them.

In many ways, the group has been misnamed. Federalism refers to the system of decentralized government. This group defended states’ rights—the very essence of federalism—against the Federalists, who would have been more accurately described as Nationalists. Nonetheless, what they predicted would be the results of the Constitution turned out to be true in most every respect.

The Antifederalists warned us that the cost Americans would bear in both liberty and resources for the government that would evolve under the Constitution would rise sharply. That is why their objections led to the Bill of Rights, to limit that tendency.

Their Oppositions to the Constitution

Antifederalists opposed the Constitution on the grounds that its checks on federal power would be undermined by expansive interpretations of promoting the “general welfare” (which would be claimed for every law) and the “all laws necessary and proper” clause (which would be used to override limits on delegated federal powers) creating a federal government with unwarranted and undelegated powers that were bound to be abused.

One could quibble with the mechanisms the Antifederalists predicted would lead to constitutional tyranny. For instance, they did not see that the Commerce Clause would come to be called “the everything clause” in law schools, justifying almost any conceivable federal intervention—because the necessary distortion of its meaning was so great even Antifederalists couldn’t imagine the government could get away with it.

And they could not have foreseen how the 14th Amendment and its interpretation would extend federal domination over the states after the Civil War. But despite that, it is very difficult to argue with their conclusions in light of the current reach of our government, which doesn’t just intrude upon, but often overwhelms Americans today.

Therefore, it merits remembering the Antifederalists’ prescient arguments and how unfortunate is the virtual absence of modern Americans who share their concerns.

One of the most insightful of the Antifederalists was Robert Yates, a New York judge who, as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, withdrew because the convention was exceeding its instructions. Yates wrote as Brutus in the debates over the Constitution. Given his experience as a judge, his claim that the Supreme Court would become a source of almost unlimited federal overreaching was particularly insightful.

Expanded Judicial Power

Brutus asserted that the Supreme Court envisioned under the Constitution would become a source of massive abuse because they were beyond the control “both of the people and the legislature,” and not subject to being “corrected by any power above them.” As a result, he objected to the fact that its provisions justifying the removal of judges didn’t extend to rulings that went beyond their constitutional authority, leading to judicial tyranny.

Brutus argued that when constitutional grounds for making rulings were absent, the Court would create grounds “by their own decisions.” He thought that the power it would command would be so irresistible that the judiciary would use it to make law, manipulating the meanings of arguably vague clauses to justify it.

The Supreme Court would interpret the Constitution according to its alleged “spirit” rather than being restricted to just the “letter” of its written words (as the doctrine of enumerated rights, spelled out in the 10th Amendment, would require).

Further, rulings derived from whatever the court decided its spirit was would effectively “have the force of law,” due to the absence of constitutional means to “control their adjudications” and “correct their errors.” This constitutional failing would compound over time in a “silent and imperceptible manner,” through precedents that build on one another.

Expanded judicial power would empower justices to shape the federal government however they desired because the Supreme Court’s constitutional interpretations would control the effective power vested in government and its different branches. That would hand the Supreme Court ever-increasing power, in direct contradiction to Alexander Hamilton’s argument in Federalist 78 that the Supreme Court would be “the least dangerous branch.”

Judicial Tyranny

Brutus predicted that the Supreme Court would adopt “very liberal” principles of interpreting the Constitution. He argued that there had never in history been a court with such power and with so few checks upon it, giving the Supreme Court “immense powers” that were not only unprecedented, but perilous for a nation founded on the principle of consent of the governed. Given the extent to which citizens’ power to effectively withhold their consent from federal actions has been eviscerated, it is hard to argue with Brutus’s conclusion.

Brutus accurately described both the cause (the absence of sufficient enforceable restraints on the size and scope of the federal government) and the consequences (expanding burdens and increasing invasions of liberty) of what would become the expansive federal powers we now see all around us.

But today, Brutus would conclude that he had been far too optimistic. The federal government has grown exponentially larger than he could ever have imagined (in part because he was writing when only direct, e.g., excise taxes and the small federal government they could finance were possible before the 16th Amendment opened the way for a federal income tax in 1913), far exceeding its constitutionally enumerated powers, despite the Bill of Rights’ constraints against it. The result burdens citizens beyond his worst nightmare.

The judicial tyranny that was accurately and unambiguously predicted by Brutus and other Antifederalists shows that in essential ways, they were right and that modern Americans still have a lot to learn from them.

We need to understand their arguments and take them seriously now, if there is to be any hope of restraining the federal government to the limited powers it was actually granted in the Constitution, given its current tendency to accelerate its growth beyond Constitutional limits.

This article is republished with permission from the Mises Institute. 

Gary M. Galles

Gary M. Galles is a professor of economics at Pepperdine University. His recent books include Faulty Premises, Faulty Policies (2014) and Apostle of Peace (2013). He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

dpflsh20 - Dirty Pair Flash

EDGE (December 1993)

EDGE (December 1993)

Edge is a video game magazine published in the U.K. It is a very long running magazine (at least for video game magazines). The first issue was published in 1993 and it is still being published. The December 1993 issue includes:

• News - 3DO hits the streets, Jaguar licensees announced, Edge has the latest on the world of video gaming.
• Charts - Think of it as a guide to the games market. We show the games that are selling best worldwide.
• Prescreen - After tracking down the best new games on all formats. Edge's investigation team reports back.
• Competition - Win a brilliant Acorn A3010 with a bundle of games and a printer. Just answer one question...
• Release dates - You know what you want, you know where to get it. Here's when you can expect it to appear.
• Rise Of The Robots - The ultimate beat 'em up, or just Street Fighter clone? Edge profiles the real mean machines.
• Virtual Reality - Opening the doors of perception, and charting new realms. Edge explores the real world of VR.
• Game genres - This may be the age of new hardware, but games haven't changed since the 80s. Find out way...
• Supergun - Arcade games in your home? Get a Supergun and it couldn't be easier. Edge shows you the way...
• Testscreen - The first 3DO game gets an official once over, plus all the very best of the month's releases.
• An audience with Core - An Edge reader meets Core Design - the team behind Thunderhawk. Find out what they said...
• Subscribe - Do the right thing and get Edge delivered every month. You save money, and get a free slipcase.
• Letters - So many letters, so little time. Here we answer a selection of the best of the month's missives.
• Recommended reading - Edge reveals what can you expect from the other leading games magazines next month.
• Over the Edge - A lone image from next month's issue. Edge four is out on November 25th. Be seeing you...

...and more!

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (517-520)

See the previous post in this series here. Feel free to skip the quoted intro text if you have read it before.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides recently. These are pictures spanning from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s (maybe earlier and/or later but these are what I have sampled so far). These came to me second (third?) hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are several thousand...maybe as many as 10,000. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.

Apparently, getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides (circa late 1950s) that I acquired after he died. That along with some negatives is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives (an Epson V600). That was the most money I was willing to spend on one anyway. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job. The scanner has been mostly idle since finishing that task but now there is plenty for it to do.

This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. He career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides (thousands of them) contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/

Many of these slides had the date they were processed (presumably) stamped or printed on them (month and year). I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date. No doubt there are some exceptions.

Assorted pictures in this set. None are really labelled except for that the 2nd and 3rd have dates stamped on the slides presumably from when the film was developed or the slides were made. The 2nd shot appears to show some sort of water going fire fighting/rescue crew and the date stamped on the slide is from 1970. The 3rd shot from a funeral I believe. The date stamped on this slide is from 1960 but I believe the photo was actually taken a couple of years earlier. I believe there have been some other photos from this same funeral with hand written dates from the late 1950s.

Click on one of the images or the link below to also see higher resolution photos and also versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.

processed August 1970
processed August 1960

The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can be found here.

MicroComputer Printout (November 1982)

MicroComputer Printout (November 1982)

MicroComputer Printout was a U.K. based computer magazine published in the early 1980s. It covered the various mostly 8-bit computers of the time and included type-in programs. The November 1982 issue includes:

• Brochures - How to see through the sales talk.
• Computer People - How to recognize them, and how to be one-up!
• Alternatives to Keyboards - Speech recognition, light pens and bar codes are all ways of getting round this bottleneck.

Features

• Seven Deadly Sins - The right and wrong way to run a business computer.
• Japan - and a Thinking Micro - The Japanese are now developing a personal computer with frightening powers of reason.
• Player-Missile Graphics - How to get stunning effects from your Atari.
• Meeting Scheduler - An invaluable program for busy managers. Full listing.
• How it Works - What does a Disk Operating System do?
• Microscope - How much memory do you really need?

Regulars

• Tommy's Tips - Programming problems solved here.
• Read/Write - Where the readers fight back.
• Hotline - Lots of new micros and an interview with the man who invented Microsoft BASIC.
• Rex Malik's Joke Book - Some 'unofficial' laws of computing.
• Inside Trader - More writ-defying libel.

Cover Story

• Database - Probably the most heavily promoted and least understood computer program on the market, a database is one of the most efficient ways of computerizing your business. But how do you chose between the many packages on the market? We explain.

...and more!

dpflsh19 - Dirty Pair Flash

Brevard Renaissance Fair 2019 – Music the Gathering – Part 12 (Battle Raven)

Brevard Renaissance Fair 2019 – Music the Gathering – Part 12 (Battle Raven)

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (513-516)

See the previous post in this series here. Feel free to skip the quoted intro text if you have read it before.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides recently. These are pictures spanning from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s (maybe earlier and/or later but these are what I have sampled so far). These came to me second (third?) hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are several thousand...maybe as many as 10,000. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.

Apparently, getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides (circa late 1950s) that I acquired after he died. That along with some negatives is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives (an Epson V600). That was the most money I was willing to spend on one anyway. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job. The scanner has been mostly idle since finishing that task but now there is plenty for it to do.

This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. He career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides (thousands of them) contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/

Many of these slides had the date they were processed (presumably) stamped or printed on them (month and year). I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date. No doubt there are some exceptions.

The first and the last photos in this set are labeled and were taken in June 1954. Both show daily household life in the 1950s. The other two are also most likely from the 1950s. One is an outdoor shot with a farmhouse in the distance while the other appears to be of an old fire...engine...in a parade. Maybe an Independence Day parade? I swear I see Jessie from Toy Story sitting in it.

Click on one of the images or the link below to also see higher resolution photos and also versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.

Making ice tea - June 1954


Dad & Art resting - June 1954

The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can be found here.

The Origins of the Thought Police—and Why They Scare Us

There are a lot of unpleasant things in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. Spying screens. Torture and propaganda. Victory Gin and Victory Coffee always sounded particularly dreadful. And there is Winston Smith’s varicose ulcer, apparently a symbol of his humanity (or something), which always seems to be “throbbing.” Gross.

None of this sounds very enjoyable, but it’s not the worst thing in 1984. To me, the most terrifying part was that you couldn’t keep Big Brother out of your head.

Unlike other 20th-century totalitarians, the authoritarians in 1984 aren’t that interested in controlling behavior or speech. They do, of course, but it’s only as a means to an end. Their real goal is to control the gray matter between the ears.

“When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will,” O’Brien (the bad guy) tells the protagonist Winston Smith near the end of the book.

We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him.

Big Brother’s tool for doing this is the Thought Police, aka the ThinkPol, who are assigned to root out and punish unapproved thoughts. We see how this works when Winston’s neighbor Parsons, an obnoxious Party sycophant, is reported to the Thought Police by his own child, who heard him commit a thought crime while talking in his sleep.

"It was my little daughter," Parsons tells Winston when asked who it was who denounced him. "She listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was saying, and nipped off to the patrols the very next day. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh?”

Who Are These Thought Police?

We don’t know a lot about the Thought Police, and some of what we think we know may actually not be true since some of what Winston learns comes from the Inner Party, and they lie.

What we know is this: The Thought Police are secret police of Oceania—the fictional land of 1984 that probably consists of the UK, the Americas, and parts of Africa—who use surveillance and informants to monitor the thoughts of citizens. The Thought Police also use psychological warfare and false-flag operations to entrap free thinkers or nonconformists.

Those who stray from Party orthodoxy are punished but not killed. The Thought Police don’t want to kill nonconformists so much as break them. This happens in Room 101 of the Ministry of Love, where prisoners are re-educated through degradation and torture. (Funny sidebar: the name Room 101 apparently was inspired by a conference room at the BBC in which Orwell was forced to endure tediously long meetings.)

The Origins of the Thought Police

Orwell didn’t create the Thought Police out of thin air. They were inspired to at least some degree by his experiences in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), a complicated and confusing affair. What you really need to know is that there were no good guys, and it ended with left-leaning anarchists and Republicans in Spain crushed by their Communist overlords, which helped the fascists win.

Orwell, an idealistic 33-year-old socialist when the conflict started, supported the anarchists and loyalists fighting for the left-leaning Second Spanish Republic, which received most of its support from the Soviet Union and Josef Stalin. (That might sound bad, but keep in mind that the Nazis were on the other side.) Orwell described the atmosphere in Barcelona in December 1936 when everything seemed to be going well for his side.

The anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing ... It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle,

he wrote in Homage to Catalonia.

[E]very wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle ... every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized.

That all changed pretty fast. Stalin, a rather paranoid fellow, was bent on making Republican Spain loyal to him. Factions and leaders perceived as loyal to his exiled Communist rival, Leon Trotsky, were liquidated. Loyal Communists found themselves denounced as fascists. Nonconformists and “uncontrollables” were disappeared.

Orwell never forgot the purges or the steady stream of lies and propaganda churned out from Communist papers during the conflict. (To be fair, their Nationalist opponents also used propaganda and lies.) Stalin’s NKVD was not exactly like the Thought Police—the NKVD showed less patience with its victims—but they certainly helped inspire Orwell’s secret police.

The Thought Police were not all propaganda and torture, though. They also stem from Orwell’s ideas on truth. During his time in Spain, he saw how power could corrupt truth, and he shared these reflections in his work George Orwell: My Country Right or Left, 1940-1943.

...I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened.

In short, Orwell’s brush with totalitarianism left him worried that “the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.”

This scared him. A lot. He actually wrote, “This kind of thing is frightening to me.”

Finally, the Thought Police were also inspired by the human struggle for self-honesty and the pressure to conform. “The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe,” Rudyard Kipling once observed.

The struggle to remain true to one’s self was also felt by Orwell, who wrote about “the smelly little orthodoxies” that contend for the human soul. Orwell prided himself with a "power of facing unpleasant facts"—something of a rarity in humans—even though it often hurt him in British society.

In a sense, 1984 is largely a book about the human capacity to maintain a grip on the truth in the face of propaganda and power.

More Prophetic Than He Knew?

It might be tempting to dismiss Orwell’s book as a figment of dystopian literature. Unfortunately, that’s not as easy as it sounds. Modern history shows he was onto something.

When the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, it was revealed that the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, had a full-time staff of 91,000. That sounds like a lot, and it is, but what’s frightening is that the organization had almost double that in informants, including children. And it wasn’t just children reporting on parents; sometimes it was the other way around.

Nor did the use of state spies to prosecute thoughtcrimes end with the fall of the Soviet Union. Believe it or not, it’s still happening today. The New York Times recently ran a report featuring one Peng Wei, a 21-year-old Chinese chemistry major. He is one of the thousands of “student information officers” China uses to root out professors who show signs of disloyalty to President Xi Jinping or the Communist Party.

The New Thought Police?

The First Amendment of the US Constitution, fortunately, largely protects Americans from the creepy authoritarian systems found in 1984, East Germany, and China; but the rise of “cancel culture” shows the pressure to conform to all sorts of orthodoxies (smelly or not) remains strong.

The new Thought Police may be less sinister than the ThinkPol in 1984, but the next generation will have to decide if seeking conformity of thought or language through public shaming is healthy or suffocating. FEE’s Dan Sanchez recently observed that many people today feel like they’re “walking on eggshells” and live in fear of making a verbal mistake that could draw condemnation.

That’s a lot of pressure, especially for people still learning the acceptable boundaries of a new moral code that is constantly evolving. Most people, if the pressure is sufficient, will eventually say “2+2=5” just to escape punishment. That’s exactly what Winston Smith does at the end of 1984, after all. Yet Orwell also leaves readers with a glimmer of hope.

“Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad,” Orwell wrote. “There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”

In other words, the world may be mad, but that doesn’t mean you have to be.

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has appeared in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, and Fox News. 

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

dpflsh17 - Dirty Pair Flash

TV Gamer (April 1984)

TV Gamer (April 1984)

TV Gamer was a U.K. based gaming magazine from the mid 1980s. I suppose it was a competitor to C&VG but only for a relatively short time. TV Gamer was only published for about two years with the last couple of issues being incorporated in to Big K. The April 1984 issue includes: Cover Feature

• Space cockpit games - Off this month into outer space, we take a look at the universe from the front viewport of your own craft.

In Depth Reviews

• Yar's Revenge - Follow the exploits of the world's most lethal fly in his life-or-death struggle against the merciless Qotile and its deadly Swirl.
• Raiders of the Lost Ark - We give a map and game-plan for one of the most perplexing games ever produced for the VCS.

The Arcade Scene

• New Coin-op Games - Andy Harris has gone round to his local arcade armed with a barrel of tenpences to try out the latest, dazzling games.

Systems

• The Sinclair computers - TV Gamer's Darrin Williamson takes a look at four remarkable Sinclair computers and the incredible range of games software available for one of the, the ZX Spectrum.

Competition

• Prize Quiz - Here's a chance to win Britain's most popular home computer, the ZX Spectrum, with valuable peripherals and games software.

Special Feature

• Adventure Games - Look at your computer again and say "there's a whole new world in there", because, as Mike Lewis explains, this could be your chance to hobnob with hobbits and wisecrack with wizards.

Interview

• The Champs - Karl Dallas has been talking to the Atari world champs, and they're both British.

Reviews

• The new games - A fresh look at the latest carts and cassettes hot off the distributors' shelves.

Games Governments Play

• Battlefield video - This month Mike Roberts reveals the incredible electronic toys that the military can use to train soldiers while saving on weapons.

Research

• Games are OK - In answer to the games knockers here's some hard evidence that video games are good for you.

Regulars

• Editorial
• News
• Late news
• Top 20 video games and top 10 arcades
• Top scores
• TV Gamer club
• Advertisers, What's coming

...and more!

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (509-512)

See the previous post in this series here. Feel free to skip the quoted intro text if you have read it before.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides recently. These are pictures spanning from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s (maybe earlier and/or later but these are what I have sampled so far). These came to me second (third?) hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are several thousand...maybe as many as 10,000. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.

Apparently, getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides (circa late 1950s) that I acquired after he died. That along with some negatives is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives (an Epson V600). That was the most money I was willing to spend on one anyway. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job. The scanner has been mostly idle since finishing that task but now there is plenty for it to do.

This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. He career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides (thousands of them) contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/

Many of these slides had the date they were processed (presumably) stamped or printed on them (month and year). I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date. No doubt there are some exceptions.

Only the last photo in this set is labelled and it was taken at Lava Butte which is a cinder cone in central Oregon. I suspect the other photos in this set were taken in that general part of the country as well. They were likely taken in the late 1950s or early 1960s.

Click on one of the images or the link below to also see higher resolution photos and also versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.

The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can be found here.

PC Player (April 1994)

PC Player (April 1994)




PC Player was a U.K. based magazine for PC games. PC in this case means DOS. The April 1994 issue includes a cover featuring one of my favorite game series of all time and includes: Regulars

• News
• Competition: US Gold
• Games Round-Up
• Column: CD Revolution
• Back Issues
• Subscription Offer
• PC Problems
• Letters

Features

• John Nichol Interview
• Book Review
• Intercept

Reviews

• Air Force Commander
• Archon Ultra
• Championship Manager '93/'94
• City 2000
• Conspiracy
• Doom
• Evasive Action
• Gettysburg
• Great Naval Battles
• Hired Guns
• Hornet Naval Strike Fighter
• In Extremis
• Merchant Prince
• Nomad
• Operation Desert Storm
• Pro League Football
• Reunion
• Shadows of Darkness
• The Journeyman Project
• Wizard

Previews

• Al Qadim
• Star Trek: 25th Anniversary CD
• Sim City CD
• Tie Fighter
• Theme Park

Players' Guide

• Shadowcaster
• TFX

...and more!

dpflsh15 - Dirty Pair Flash

Brevard Renaissance Fair 2019 – Music the Gathering – Part 11 (Fathom the Bowl)

Brevard Renaissance Fair 2019 – Music the Gathering – Part 11 (Fathom the Bowl)

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (505-508)

See the previous post in this series here. Feel free to skip the quoted intro text if you have read it before.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides recently. These are pictures spanning from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s (maybe earlier and/or later but these are what I have sampled so far). These came to me second (third?) hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are several thousand...maybe as many as 10,000. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.

Apparently, getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides (circa late 1950s) that I acquired after he died. That along with some negatives is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives (an Epson V600). That was the most money I was willing to spend on one anyway. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job. The scanner has been mostly idle since finishing that task but now there is plenty for it to do.

This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. He career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides (thousands of them) contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/

Many of these slides had the date they were processed (presumably) stamped or printed on them (month and year). I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date. No doubt there are some exceptions.

None of the slides in this set are labeled or dated. The most interesting one to me is the first one. I'm not that good with old car makes and models but I would say this picture is from the 1950s based on that car. The occupants have stopped along the road (apparently out West somewhere) to take pictures. The other photos show other outdoor scenery of mountains and waterways. Obviously some place different but they were probably also taken in the 1950s.

Click on one of the images or the link below to also see higher resolution photos and also versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.

https://supload.com/S1hJPBCMH

The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can be found here.

John Adams on the Purpose of Government

John Adams, who has become “virtually an asterisk in history books today,” in one writer’s words, is inadequately celebrated. He played a leading role in our revolution and the beginnings of constitutional government. He wrote a Stamp Act protest that became a model for other protests. He outlined principles of liberty for Americans on the cusp of independence.

He helped write the resolutions of May 10, 1776, declaring America independent, and defended the Declaration of Independence before Congress. He composed most of the Massachusetts Constitution (the oldest still in use in the world), acclaimed for its bill of rights. His A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States was often cited in the Constitutional Convention.

James Adam's Advocacy

Given Adams’s importance in establishing our country on the basis of liberty, we should remember his advocacy of the rights, or property, that is the content of our liberty and whose defense is the central reason our government was instituted.

• "Liberties are not the grants of princes and parliaments."
• "[People have] rights...antecedent to all earthly governments—rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws."
• "Each individual of the society has a right to be protected…in the enjoyment of his life, liberty, and property...no part of the property of any individual can, with justice, be taken from him, or applied to public uses, without his own consent."
• "In a free state, every man…ought to be his own governor."
• "To be commanded we do not consent."
• "Liberty is [government’s] end."
• "In order to have this liberty, it is requisite the government be so constituted… that one citizen need not be afraid of another citizen."
• "Property must be secured, or liberty cannot exist."
• "The end of…government is…the power of enjoying, in safety and tranquility, [individuals’] natural rights and the blessings of life."
• "[Government]...should be...for the preservation of internal peace, virtue, and good order, as well as the defense of their lives, liberties, and properties."
• "The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If 'Thou shalt not covet' and 'Thou shalt not steal' were not commandments of heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society before it can be civilized or made free."
• "Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people."
• "Trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty."
• "Liberty must at all hazards be supported."
• "A free constitution of civil government cannot be purchased at too dear a rate, as there is nothing on this side of Jerusalem of equal importance to mankind."
• "Be not…wheedled out of your liberty by…hypocrisy, chicanery, and cowardice."

John Adams, because he recognized “an enemy to liberty [as] an enemy to human nature” and that “nothing is so terrible as the loss of their liberties,” wrote that “It has ever been my hobby-horse to see rising in America an empire of liberty.”

A Monumental Debate

Reflecting the central importance of liberty, Adams called the debate over the Declaration of Independence “the greatest question…which ever was debated in America.” Thomas Jefferson described his defense as having “a power of thought and expression that moved us from our seats.” Delegate Richard Stockton called him “the man to whom the country is most indebted…who…by the force of his reasoning demonstrated not only the justice, but the expediency of the measure.”

Adams also saw the importance of America’s revolution for the world:

Objects of the most stupendous magnitude and measure in which the lives and liberties of millions yet unborn are intimately interested, are now before us. We are in the very midst of a revolution the most complete, unexpected and remarkable of any in the history of nations.

And he made it clear why founding America on liberty was monumental: “Her cause is that of all nations and all men, and it needs nothing but to be explained and approved.” At a time when we often forget that liberty is both America’s rationale and its greatness, Americans would profit from Adams’s wisdom.

Gary M. Galles

Gary M. Galles is a professor of economics at Pepperdine University. His recent books include Faulty Premises, Faulty Policies (2014) and Apostle of Peace (2013). He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Computer and Video Games (March 1983)

Computer and Video Games (March 1983)

Computer & Video Games was a very long running U.K. based gaming magazine that started all the way back in 1981 and lasted until 1992. The March 1983 issue includes the following: News & Reviews

• Games News - The James Gang is in town and gunning for you and those little green men are slipping into their soccer gear for the intergalactic cup final.
• Video Screens - Our round-up of the best in joysticks plus a look at what's going on out in deepest space with our look at the Starmaster-type games available for the Atari VCS.
• Arcade Action - Amidar tips from our record breaker. And how much of an improvement is Super Zaxxon, plus those arcade top scores.
• Software Form - All you wanted to know but were afraid to ask about getting your listing published in C&VG.

Listings

• Defuse - Can you prevent an explosive situation getting out of hand? We hope so - because if you don't it's apocalypse time! Atom-powered adventure on the Texas TI-99/4 or 4a.
• Pool - Here's your cue to head for the pool hall and practice some of your favorite trick shots. You'll need them all for this screen-sized version of the real thing written for the Spectrum.
• Digger - The aliens are coming, the aliens are coming! Not again, I hear you cry! But this time you don't blast them out of the skies. You dig traps for the little monsters. Intergalactic gardening on your Sharp MZ80K.
• Connect 4 - The long-haird ancient is faced with a big problem - he just can't get those counters matched up! Can you help the old chap out before his brain gets befuddled? For Video Genie and TRS-80 owners.
• Dr. Who Adventure - Another time, another place...the Doctor is off on another time-trek and this time you can be his travelling companion. This time the Tardis comes in the shape of an Atari 400/800.
• Ski-ing - The air is cold and clear. The piste is perfect. Everything is set fair for a fast downhill race on your Atom.
• Turbo Car - Put the pedal to the metal and zoom off on a fast and furious race against time in your supercharged Dragon powered supercar.
• Rockfall - Dodge those falling stones and boulders as you attempt to scale Mount BBC.
• Positron - Is it an asteroid, is it a meteoroid...no it's a Positron! These superheroes streak through space at the speed of light to defend truth, justice and the right to have buttered crumpets for tea! The only trouble is they don't watch where they are going. Fun and games on the ZX81.

Features

• Mailbag - The Spectrum v. BBC battle rages on.
• Competition - Bally's pinball wizards against the rest of the C & VG readership. A Colour Genie goes to the best space commander.
• Bugs - Abandoning the micro, Snag takes to the living room floor!
• Chess
• Go - Life and death with Allan Scarff.
• Projects - Keith Mott begins a new series.
• Graphics - Gerry Marshall experiments with colorful patterns.
• Adventure - Keith Campbell falls in Love!
• Warpath - Ron Potkin's exciting wild west battle is taking shape with the positioning of pieces on the board.
• Puzzling - Trevor Turan sets some challenges to be solved by brain or computer.
• Machine Code

...and more!