| Tuesday, September
26, 2006
Subject: shameful
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=
NzNjYTc4ZTIyZWNmMDEyZjNkNGM4Mjg0NjEzNTZlNzg
For the descendants of the Vikings who once ruled the
Atlantic, Mediterranean and all the rivers of Europe and Asia as far as
Tashkent.
Michael Z. Williamson
==========
Subject: Anthrax Update
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content
/article/2006/09/24/AR2006092401014.html
FBI Is Casting A Wider Net in Anthrax
Attacks
By Allan Lengel and Joby Warrick Washington
Post Staff Writers Monday, September 25, 2006; A01
Five years after the anthrax attacks that
killed five people, the FBI is now convinced that the lethal powder sent
to the Senate was far less sophisticated than originally believed,
widening the pool of possible suspects in a frustratingly slow
investigation.
The finding, which resulted from countless
scientific tests at numerous laboratories, appears to undermine the
widely held belief that the attack was carried out by a government
scientist or someone with access to a U.S. biodefense lab.
What was initially described as a
near-military-grade biological weapon was ultimately found to have had a
more ordinary pedigree, containing no additives and no signs of special
processing to make the anthrax bacteria more deadly, law enforcement
officials confirmed. In addition, the strain of anthrax used in the
attacks has turned out to be more common than was initially believed,
the officials said.<snip>
===========
Subject: Safer and safer
Jerry,
My favorite part on the new, new, uh, -really- new TSA
rules on liquids in carry on luggage:
> The new guidelines require items to be
stored in bags quart-sized
> or smaller, but TSA officials in Atlanta allowed passengers to
> board planes with items stored in one-gallon bags since Tuesday was
> the first day the new rules were being enforced.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Air-Travel-Security.html?hp&
ex=1159329600&en=35d863b63667dc66&ei=5094&partner=homepage
It is just SWELL of them that they don't care
(temporarily) what SIZE clear plastic bag you use to enclose small
containers of those dangerous eye drops, toothpaste and deodorant.
I think the reason that we've had no airline related
security incidents since 9/11 is that the people who might want to commit
such acts have decided that the disruption already created, and the wasted
resources, is the best outcome they could have hoped for. That, or they just
can't stop laughing....
Chuck
The purpose of TSA is to demonstrate to the
people of these United States that we are no longer citizens. It serves that
purpose well. We are now subjects, and we are to be deferential to those who
cannot get better jobs than as TSA screeners. As you say, the disruption to
air travel is an effective tool of economic warfare. Even as insanely rich
as we are, this is costly. And of course the principle of "equality"
(meaning equal misery) demands that we treat 80 year old grandmothers
exactly the same as we treat bearded young men clutching Korans and glancing
nervously about.
Our masters have gone barking mad, and
there seems to be no way to cure this. Electing Democrats won't do it.
They'll do worse.
Competent Empire we might be able to
tolerate. What we have now is clowns in command.
=========
Jerry
Fred is grumpy. Among other things, he says we are
over-governed:
http://www.fredoneverything.net/Cultural%20Psychiatry.shtml
Ed
So. Everyone read this and think on it. Then
comment. I'll have my own after you get a chance to look at it.
========
Subject: Daily Diatribe -
Maybe I seem a little harsh on the Mohammedans of
late. Perhaps just a wee bit of it involves the way they treat their women.
They "relieve us of the responsibility to spend the income we earn." The men
take it all. When it comes to a court of law the word of a woman gets half
the weight of the word of a man. That is in the Qur'an. In practice it is
much worse.
So in Afghanistan there was a leading official working
on women's rights. She was gunned down as she left her home for work in
Kandahar. It is not unreasonable to suspect the Taliban is responsible. She
was a sharp, eloquent, and ardent critic of them.
This tells us two things, there is a resurgence of
Taliban violence, and the general Mohammedan notion of a strong woman
pushing education and women's rights is worthy of murder.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/5376968.stm
And they we can offend Christians to a farethewell. We
can offend Jews to a farethewell. We can offend pagans quite freely. We can
offend everyone but Mohammedans. An automobile commercial and promotion by
an auto dealer was censored. It was too inflammatory. Yeah - why do these
Mohammedans think and demand that they receive a higher standard of
protection from insults than the rest of our world here in the US. WE can
laugh at ourselves. That is part of our culture. They can't. It is time they
joined our culture if they intend to live here.
http://releases.usnewswire.com/
GetRelease.asp?id=73122
And we all remember South Park - It is open season on
Jesus but not on Mohammed. Of course Mozart gets censored too.
http://sugiero.blogspot.com/2006/09/i
ntimidation-through-violence-works.html
And so do newspapers in Egypt
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtm
l?itemNo=766387&contrassID=1&subContrassID=1
Them thar Mohammedans have no sense of humor. And if
they do not then perhaps they do not belong in this country. I am sure there
are some countries that would welcome them and their attitude. It is not
welcome here, IMAO.
So the Italians are deciding it is time to do
something about their rapidly growing population of embedded terrorists er
Mohammedans. The Interior Minister is drawing up a charter of values to
which the Mohammedans will be expected to subscribe to indicate their
readiness to be fully integrated into Italian society. Allowing them to stay
separate has not worked. He's developing an alternative approach. He has my
applause. Robert Spencer takes him to task on details. But we all must start
somewhere. I'm willing to applaud the guy and give him a chance to try it.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/013289.php
For a nice snicker consider that these are the UN guys
guarding us from nuclear proliferation. The IAEA commissioner falls into
water tank at a Czech nuclear plant.
http://www.praguemonitor.com/ctk/index.php?
story_id=w41955i20060925;story=IAEA-commissioner
-falls-into-water-tank-at-Czech-nuclear-plant;set=yes
OK OK, the water was not radioactive. But still, when
you are in a group and are instructed not to leave the group there is
usually a pretty good reason to listen - and stay with the group. But then,
it is the UN. And we've all learned not to expect brilliance from them
unless there is corruption opportunity at stake.
{^_^}
=========
Subject: Virginia Heinlein
The Rio film festival RAH and Ellison attended
occurred in March 1969, while Harlan Ellison didn't pass Robert A. Heinlein
for total number of Hugos (5-4 at the time) until Labor Day weekend 1969, in
St. Louis. In March 1969 both would have had four Hugos.
Cheers, Jon
========
Subject: Unskilled Jobs
The issue is that over time capital accumulates,
reducing the marginal value of labour and eventually eliminating all but
highly skilled jobs. If debts are inherited, it becomes even worse as a
small minority eventually owns all the capital, producing a society that
requires only the small amount of production to satisfy the needs of the
owners. To overcome this, you have to do two things:
1. Allow each generation to start anew without holding
them accountable for the debts of their parents, and
2. Give each generation a free and effective education
to endow them with effective skills.
This was the solution seen in New England during the
first century of the Republic, underlay the Northern opposition to slavery
(which was a threat to the marginal value of skilled labour), and produced
the land-grant universities. The recent papers on expertise that I've cited
elsewhere strongly suggest that even the lower half of the population can
develop expert-quality skills; the only things holding them back being
effective education and motivation. I might even suggest that the last fifty
year's destruction of the educational system in America might have been
deliberate policy on the part of those who stood to gain in the short to
medium term (not long term) from the centralisation of capital in their
hands.
-- Harry Erwin, PhD, Program Leader, MSc Information
Systems Security, University of Sunderland.
<http://scat-he-g4.sunderland.ac.uk/~harryerw> Weblog at:
<http://scat-he-g4.sunderland.ac.uk/~harryerw/blog/index.php>
Yes, but the education system must accommodate
both those who require EDUCATION, and those who require SKILLS. Skills
are learned in a different manner and appeal to different people from the
symbol-manipulation set.
Belloc and the distributists thought a
periodic redistribution of ownership would suffice: a fool and his money are
parted, but it takes a while, and meanwhile everyone has a good start, some
better than others but none at rock bottom. Henry George had similar views
with a different remedy.
The education bureaucracy has utterly
destroyed public education although there are exceptions. Skills are mostly
a matter of inheritance now, with some learned by apprenticeship, but since
skills aren't taught there is less and less ability to compete with offshore
workers.
It is pretty clear that the US would
survive and be wealthy if, magically, all imports and exports were
blocked. The Technocracy people for all their odd views did a pretty good
resource survey and concluded that a Technate of North America could be
quite self-sufficient. I understand there are a few vital resources like
chromium that must be imported, but there cannot be many vital resources
with no substitutes whatever. An economically isolated United States is not
only possible, but one could argue that by requiring the contribution of
nearly everyone in the country, it might well be better off in the sense of
being a working republic.
As I have said many times, my own view is
that a tariff of between 10 and 15% on all imports would be about right; it
would provide enough protection for "inefficient" enterprises (such as those
that provide health care and pensions and
worker safety) without leaving the domestic industries utterly without
competition and thus grossly inefficient. I have yet to see a good economic
refutation of this taking into account the reductions in anomie, the lowered
costs of prisons and welfare systems and parole officers and the whole
machinery of compensating for a large underclass with no economic
importance. When I ask economists about this they wave their hands and say I
have not read Ricardo and do not understand comparative advantage, none of
which addresses the question I raise: given political realities, does
exporting jobs make sense?
Clearly exporting SOME jobs makes sense; the
question is how many, which ones, and what the hidden costs of job exports
are. The firm that exports the job gets the benefit of work at lower cost;
that firm does not bear the social cost of unemployment or downgraded jobs,
of casting someone from middle to lower class and from lower class to
underclass. Those costs are born by all. I have yet to see a real economic
model taking all this into account.
And see below
==========
Subj: Fred's Cultural Psychiatry
Bah! Fred seems to be running for Supreme Nattering
Nabob of Negativism.
Everything's gone to s---, nothing can be done about
it, we're all Doomed! Doomed, I say!
Me, I'd rather think about, and discuss, what we can
do to *improve* the situation.
How about let's light some candles, rather than just
cursing the Darkness?
Rod Montgomery==monty@sprintmail.com
We can begin by coming up with a way to teach
all the kids to read. Oops. We have that. Now we need a way to get it out to
them and get the teachers to use it. That doesn't seem to be working so
well.
We can also try to get someone
in authority to stop being so damned PC and admit that half the children are
below average, they can't be drowned, and schools have to have something for
them: there have to be ways to teach skills as well as "educate" in the
public schools. I've been trying to do that for 40 years. I don't seem to
have got it across. Instead we got No Child Left Behind and everyone is
proud of that imbecility. Mr. Gates wants to use his money to provide a
world class university prep education for everyone, as if that made sense
anywhere but in Lake Wobegon. The truth is that intellectuals hate skilled
work (usually), but there are plenty of skilled workers needed -- but
instead of teaching our kids to do them, we offshore that work when
possible.
Despair is a sin, but I do hope I will be
permitted to go write some books and make a bit of money, having put my
tender members in the Disposal for all these years...
===========
Re: free trade
Jerry, about this:
"I also have some thoughts on free trade
and political stability. Are we better off if everyone has a job being
reasonably useful, but common goods cost more due to inefficiency of
manufacture, or if there is unemployment particularly at the bottom end
of the skill set, but underwear and other common goods cost less for
everyone? And what happens if in addition to free trade you allow open
borders and unrestricted competition for the few meaningful jobs at the
low end of the skill set? Which "economists" have addressed this
situation with actual economic studies?"
There is a study cited in Emmanuel Todd's L'Illusion
Economique - I looked it up on Amazon and it doesn't look like it's been
translated into English. Unfortunately, I don't have the book with me right
now, and I don't remember the exact references. I'll try to get it back and
look it up if you're interested.
The study was about a short period at the end of the
19th century when most industrialised nations agreed on free trade
agreements. According to the study, international trade dropped and growth
in participating nations slumped, so after a few years protectionism
gradually crept back in and growth and international trade came back.
This is counterintuitive, but Todd's thesis is that
you can't dissociate economics from society - he's an ethnologue and his
basic theory is that family structure conditions both political and economic
structures, the main parameters being nuclear/extended,
patriarchal/non-patriarchal, endogamic/exogamic, and inheritance patterns.
In the case of free trade, however, his analysis is
that it dissociates supply from demand in the mind of economic
decision-makers. In a protected system, your employees are also your
customers, so if they're doing well, so will you. In a free trade system,
employees are just cost. Of course, at the end of the day, if employees all
over the world are getting pressured, demand falls for everybody, but it's a
classic game-theory situation where you're pushed into a sub-optimal choice.
Another point Todd makes is that Ricardian
specialisation at the country scale is plain stupid. Not everybody in
Switzerland is a genius at making watches or cheese, so if you insist on
everybody in Switzerland doing just the one or the other, you'll end up
turning great aerospace engineers into poor milkmen and overall efficiency
will drop. Of course, you could force Swiss aerospace engineers to relocate
to Seattle or Toulouse, but we all know it just doesn't work that way.
But the real problem according to him is that
globalisation forces everybody to use the same economic system - these days,
that's the anglo-saxon financial, stock-market driven model - and that
simply doesn't work because of societal pressures. You can think of it
roughly as the Germans being more efficient working in patriarchal
conglomerates, the French in a Jacobin, state-pushed system, etc... just
because it corresponds to the family structure in which they're raised.
An interesting point he makes is that in the US, de-industrialisation
started roughly at the time when in the 1970's - early 1980's families of
Germanic/Scandinavian ancestries got fully assimilated and the corresponding
family structure disappeared in the US.
At least one of Todd's books is available in English
on Amazon, After the Empire, about the US course to, well, just that,
written in 2002 and updated in 2004. You could find it worth your time.
As a final note, he's half American and half French.
Best regards,
Jean-Louis Beaufils, Paris
Fascinating. That looks like precisely the
kind of analysis I had in mind, and I like the notion that when there are
tariffs, employees are customers (as with Henry Ford) and not just a cost.
I have often said the same thing regarding
Ricardian specialization, but the economists just throw up their hands and
say I don't understand. I am not sure what I should have learned that I
didn't. I used to be pretty good at operations research and models, but
economics seems to make some very odd assumptions.
We all grew up hating tariff -- at least I
did, in the Old South, learning in 8th grade that Smoot Hawley caused the
depression. In those days Republicans were protectionists, and Democrats had
the platform plank "Tariff for revenue only." (Note that it was considered a
legitimate source of revenue to have an excise tax on imports.) Today I
wonder.
============
Subject: VML Exploit Fix from
Microsoft
Dr. Pournelle:
As expected, Microsoft released the fix for the "VML"
exploit that security researchers say is 'running rampant' (their opinion,
not mine). Details are in this KB article: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS06-055.mspx
<http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS06-055.mspx>
. Most users (at least those that have automatic updates set up properly)
will get the update by tomorrow; if you want it faster, just use the
"Microsoft Update" or "Windows Update" in the Start menu. Corporate users
should work with their help/support staff.
As I have said before, I don't think this is as urgent
as some have claimed. "Safe computing" practices work for me (for new
readers: fully patched OS/apps via automatic updates, current anti-virus,
using the 'preview pane' in Outlook, avoiding the 'dark side' of the
Internet, data backups). Note that users should ensure they have "Microsoft
Update" on their Start menu; this will get them the critical MS Office
updates.
Now, there are exploits out there for this. And all
varieties of operating systems (and applications) need to be kept current.
For instance, web sites hosted at one hosting place (HostGator) were
compromised by and exploit against the "CPanel" program (used to remotely
administer your web site). That exploit gave the hacker control ("root")
over the web site, and they installed HTML code on those pages that
redirected visitors to sites with malware-enabled pages. Since the hacker
had control of the web servers via the CPanel program, initial efforts to
recover worked for a while until reinfected. The CPanel program vuln has
since been fixed. (More info here
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2006/09/23/hostgator
_cpanel_security_hole_exploited_in_mass_hack.html )
The point is that no OS or application is immune from
attack. Some environments are attacked more than others. And sometimes the
attack can come from an unexpected direction. "Safe computing" practices by
users and administrators is important.
In the words of Sgt. Phil Esterhaus (the late Michael
Conrad) on Hill Street Blues: "Hey, let's be careful out there!"
Regard, Rick Hellewell
=======
Warning: follow the next link at your own
discretion. I advise you not to, actually. You may regret it if you do.
Jerry
Just when you thought you'd heard everything, this
from the BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/5371500.stm
Beijing's xxx
Ed
======
Two important articles from the Brussels Journal:
Dalrymple on Decadence, Europe, America and Islam.
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1345
The Benedictine Rule.
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1346
Roland Dobbins
TOP
CURRENT
VIEW Tuesday |
One
consequence of Federal Aid to Education; an important article
