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THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

View 437 October 23 - 29, 2006

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Highlights this week:

• Hungarian Freedom Fighters anniversary
• Anarcho Tyranny is alive and well in these United States
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•  

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This is a Day Book. Pages are in chronological, not blogological order.

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Magyar Szabad Radio!

Fifty years ago today.

http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/
2006/10/fifty-years-ago-today.html

-- Roland Dobbins

In 1958 I met a man who called himself "Mr. Lazlo". His Hungarian friends called him "Captain Lazlo." Lazlo is a first name, and certainly was not the name under which Captain Lazlo was born; but it was the name he legally adopted to protect relatives still in Hungary. He had been an officer in the Hungarian Army who joined the uprising, and was one of those who captured the state owned radio to name it Radio Free Hungary. He escaped when the Russians brought in Mongol troops to suppress the rising, and eventually crossed into Austria and thence to the United States. In the 1960's I was one of the Captive Nations Week coordinators in Los Angeles, and worked with a number of Hungarian exiles. One of them lost his legs in the uprising. Because he was active in anti-communist causes in America, some SDS students stole his artificial legs, one of those heroic acts of compassion that the Left seems to find congenial.

Heroes all. The uprising is long over, but it has not been forgotten.

=========

Monday   TOP    Current Mail

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Subject: Evangelical Atheists

Jerry,

Interesting commentary from the athiest side of your three way battle for humanity: http://www.wired.com/news/wiredmag/0,71985-0.html?tw=wn_index_1 

CP, Connecticut

  It's certainly long enough, and any part of it is pretty well done, but it reads as if he were being paid for a certain word length. I did find one passage interesting:

Harris is typically severe in his rejection of the idea that evolutionary history somehow justifies faith. There is, he writes, "nothing more natural than rape. But no one would argue that rape is good, or compatible with a civil society, because it may have had evolutionary advantages for our ancestors." Like rape, Harris says, religion may be a vestige of our primitive nature that we must simply overcome. 

Which is interesting, but it's wrong. Certainly Saddam Hussein's sons would and did argue that rape is good. On what grounds is rape not good? What are the criteria for saying that anything physically possible is either good or evil? Once you get into the world of the relative, then anything is either good or evil depending on your point of view, and whether it is happening to you or your friends, or whether you are the perpetrator or the victim. It's all relative. Alas, the author didn't ask that question.

Militant atheism is an interesting phenomenon. One understands martyrs for a faith.

We do live in interesting times.

=============

Anarcho-tyranny.

http://www.wpcva.com/articles/2006/
10/19/chatham/opinion/opinion01.txt

-- Roland Dobbins

Is there much to be said here? We will have more of this every year. The police cannot protect us from home invasions; they want us to disarm so we cannot protect ourselves; but they reserve the right to act like tyrants and shoulder no responsibility when they "make a mistake". How have we come to this?

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Tuesday   TOP  Current Mail

This week:

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A very busy day. Niven came over to join Roberta and Sable for my morning walk, then Niven and Sable and I went up the hill for a working session. Lunch after. Then I cranked out about 500 words for Inferno 2, and off to the airport to pick up Roberta's sister and her husband who are down for Richard's wedding this weekend.

Tomorrow it's off to Santa Barbara, and Friday our youngest gets married up there. With the whole family joining. So if I don't get this place updated before Sunday, you will know why.

======

Roberta finally got through to an official called "The Webmaster" at Earthlink, and between the settings she was able to make and his intervention, the 10,000 spam per day have stopped. This chap was in the Philippines. He spoke perfect English. Her original contacts were with someone in Bangalore, where they told her it would take 72 hours to make any changes; of course 72 hours later the 10,000 spams a day continued. It was then that she tried again, and this time got "the webmaster" in the Philippines, and that did the job.

=======

This might be interesting on your Tablet PC.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/
archives/adobe_digital_editions.php

-- Roland Dobbins

Indeed. I will have to have a look. Thanks.

 Wednesday  TOP  Current Mail

This week:

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Please subscribe. But when you do, please put jerryp at jerrypournelle.com on your white list for the return address of your subscription, if you employ those automatic interception "please fill out this form" spam controls that require several minutes' work here and about half the time don't work even when I do manage to discern whatever pattern of non-machine (and often non-human) readable letters it displays. It takes considerable time to batter may way through those, and time is the one thing I don't got much of.

I realize that spam control is important. (And I don't know why I bothered up above to put my email address in a circumlocution, since it has been harvested by every spambot known to man, and for that matter I expect most spambots can manage to read jerryp at jerrypournelle.com just fine. Or even jerryp at jerrypournelle dot com. It's not a hard program to write.

=========

We are off to Santa Barbara for a rehearsal tonight and a wedding tomorrow, so I may have no further updates here until the weekend.

=======

I have an inquiry concerning the police home invasion story:

It deserves an answer, and I haven't time to do that before we must pack and get out of here. The answer involves the increased federalization of everything: after a while you haven't time to pay attention to much of anything, and after being convinced by the TSA that you are a subject, you often do not think in the same way that a citizen of a self governing republic would think. That thought needs expansion, but that's the short answer. We are becoming inured to being treated as subjects by our masters.

It's also the reason why such incidents need to be publicized. A bit of indignation is good for the soul if not carried to far.

Turn the rascals out! used to be the usual cry of the self-governed, back when local elections were far more important than federal, and Washington was a small town in Maryland of no great importance in our lives...

Thursday   TOP  Current Mail

This week:

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In Santa Barbara. The Motel has high speed wireless in the lobby only. All is well, the clans are gathering. I have some interesting mail but not time to post it. I'll be home tomorrow afternoon.

Thanks to those who wished us well, and to the new subscribers.

The wedding went as planned, or better. Richard and Herrin are now thoroughly married, and a good time was had by all. Pictures another time.

Friday   TOP  Current Mail

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We are home, and about to go to Niven's Halloween party. It has been a busy weekend, and I still have both column and letters to do .

There is considerable mail, some quite interesting. I'll catch up when I can, which shouldn't be later than Monday.

Saturday   TOP  Current Mail

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 Sunday   TOP        Current View  

 Current Mail

This is a day book. It's not all that well edited. I try to keep this up daily, but sometimes I can't. I'll keep trying. See also the monthly COMPUTING AT CHAOS MANOR column, 8,000 - 12,000 words, depending.  (Older columns here.) For more on what this page is about, please go to the VIEW PAGE. If you have never read the explanatory material on that page, please do so. If  you got here through a link that didn't take you to the front page of this site, click here for a better explanation of what we're trying to do here. This site is run on the "public radio" model; see below.

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