| Monday
October 8, 2001
The war continues. The best sources I have seen easily
available are at DEBKA.
http://www.debka.com/
For more on who these people are:
http://www.observer.com/pages/story.asp?ID=4905
attached item from above url
gz
More as I get more. The satellite system seems to be working
properly again. And the column is done and on the wire. Now to clean up a
bit.
There is a high state of alert everywhere. Be careful. We
can expect retaliation, not merely by organized groups, but by frenzied
individuals and unconnected groups. The latter may be more dangerous than
the first.
And I continue to worry about smallpox, the most easily
weaponized one of the lot: it only requires that you have some, and have a
population of prisoners or willing volunteers.
My last vaccination was a long time ago. Immunity does wear
off. I presume the government is inoculating health care workers even as I
write this.
Of course the satellite decided to die as I was attempting
to post this. It really does have a critical need detector. It looks as if I
will have to turn off the stupid satellite system and go back to dialup
again. Whenever I need the satellite it simply stops working. There is no
discernable reason. It just stops connecting to servers, as if the servers
simply don't want to talk to it any more.
The problem is, I can never tell. All I know is
suddenly I cannot connect to my web site by ftp. I can't get mail. I can't
update pages. The satellite lights blink furiously, the field strength
meter shows a good signal, and nothing whatever happens. If I shut
the darned thing down and go back to the Netwinder and a land line all
will work, and of course if I then bring the satellite system back up that
will work too.
I really and truly hate this. But for the moment I am
simply cut off entirely; if I wait long enough it may work again. And it
may not. And there is no information whatever. If you are
contemplating DirecPC satellite service, think about pounding yourself on
the head with a hammer instead. It won't be a lot less pleasant.
What happens is that there are a few bursts of
communications, so that it looks as if something is going to happen -- and
then nothing at all. But just enough happens that you try again. Stupid
Stupid Stupid.
425 HTTP Error unable to connect with remote host. Get
used to it. This is worse than unreliable.
I am going to go shut it down and bring back my Netwinder.
Of course it is possible that the entire net is dead. It may as well be...
And just as suddenly, it begins. The best way to fix the
satellite system is to sincerely threaten to shut it down and go with an
alternative.
"War is an ugly thing, but not the
ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic
feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who
has nothing for which he is willing to fight: nothing he cares about more
than his own personal safety: is a miserable creature who has no chance of
being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions and blood of better
men than himself."
- John Stuart Mill
Smallpox: if they work it just right they will manage to
kill most of our women and children, leaving only 40 year old veterans.
As John Ringo said elsewhere, that scenario works out to
the last bounty hunter tracking down the last terrorist in a pretty dead
world.
NOTE that this is a day book and a log of sorts that I
share. Do NOT expect it to look like final copy...
Of course the egregious satellite has stopped working
again. I guess I better opt for reliability. And as soon as I went in to
the other room to do it, it started working again...
Then as soon as I wrote and sent that, whammo! Can't
connect to mail server. Reliable this ain't. It could be pair.com server.
of course. It might be evil spirits. But I hate this thing.
Well, it wasn't the satellite. NOTHING will connect me to
my mail servers. Earthlink has gone bonkers, or Pair.com has. I have been
holding off sending the column to Tokyo because I hoped to get some last
minute revisions. Now I can't connect. If you see this then I will have
managed, but for the moment we're dead by satellite and dialup.
The Internet seduces
you into counting on it, then fails.
And as soon as I wrote that, it all started working again.
Meaning that the satellite wasn't at fault at all. But how can you KNOW?
There must be some way to know which has failed.
The Internet itself seems to fail a lot lately. Maybe if
we dropped spammers on Afghanistan it would be beneficial to all. I am
darned tired of elaborate unsolicited crap that has the nerve to say I
signed up for it, and it gets fancier and fancier all the time. Something
terrible, physical, and very public should happen to enough spammers that
the rest get the idea.
Does anyone have real information on whether smallpox
drifted out of the USSR in the collapse? That is the one biological agent
that would be easy to cultivate, and easy to vector, and damned
effective.
Great. Now we scramble jets and break windows with sonic
booms because a nutty kid tried to get into the cockpit of an airliner,
and freaked out after being subdued.
From silly security: "Did you pack your bags? Did
anyone ask you to carry anything on with you? Are you a
terrorist?" to this? Sigh.
I have a question on anthrax. When I
was young, anthrax was a cattle disease, and dreaded because if it
appeared, the county agent and some sheriff's people showed up and killed
the animal. Mules with slip shovels were used to dig a fairly deep pit,
and the animal was dragged into the pit. Gasoline was poured in and
ignited, then the pit was filled in.
And they watched all the other cattle in the herd. The
Jones place down the road had a case and that's what happened, and we were
all worried that it might hit our dairy cows. It didn't. We were told
humans could get it too.
It was considered contagious. Now I am told it is
not contagious in that it can't be passed from person to person. I
also know that a weaponized version got loose in the USSR -- I have a book
on this -- and killed a bunch of people around the plant.
What is the infection mechanism? I know that there are
places contaminated with the spores that are considered too dangerous to
approach.
No speculation, please. Does anyone know? I know
some contagious diseases that could be used as biowar agents, including
some endemic in certain parts of the country, and I would think that if
anyone was going to use a biowar agent a contagious one would be selected,
so why the fear of anthrax?
I'd appreciate some simple truths. I can speculate with
the best...
OK! I have enough. Thanks.
I'll try to make sense of it all.
Thanks.
For a summary on anthrax
as a threat, see mail.
For what our intellectual class thinks about the
situation, see
http://interactive.wsj.com/articles/SB100223834682375520.htm
Towers of Intellect
By JAMES BOWMAN
Earlier this week, The
Wall Street Journal, on its front page, told the sad story1 of Jennie
Traschen, professor of physics at the University of Massachusetts, who had
the bad luck at an Amherst town meeting on Sept. 10 to have called the
American flag "a symbol of terrorism and death and fear and
destruction and oppression."
Her words were
circulated on the Internet just as real terrorism and death put them in an
unwelcome perspective. Suddenly she started getting irate phone calls and
e-mails, some of them threatening or obscene. "There's been a level
of repercussion that was totally unanticipated," she said.
Well, maybe it's time
that she did a bit more anticipating. The same goes for the professor at
the University of New Mexico who said that "anyone who can blow up
the Pentagon gets my vote." Later he called this claim "the
worst attempt at an incredibly stupid joke," and I'm sure he is
right. The language of politics in the rarefied world of American higher
education had not prepared either professor for a reality like the terror
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Oh! So that's what
"terrorism" means!
They were caught
unawares, with their assumptions showing. But others in the academy spoke
deliberately after Sept. 11 of the provocations given to the terrorists by
America. Prof. Robert Jensen of the University of Texas wrote that the
suicide mission "was no more despicable than the massive acts of
terrorism . . . that the U.S. government has committed during my
lifetime." Prof. Barbara Foley of Rutgers University wrote of the
terror attack that "whatever its proximate cause, its ultimate cause
is the fascism of U.S. foreign policy over the past many decades."
Not Thought but Reflex
For those unaccustomed
to the jargon of the professoriate and unable to recollect the mass
rallies of American black-shirts, I should mention that the word
"fascist" in the preceding phrase is used in the Stalinist sense
to mean anything that is not, well, Stalinist. So automatic has such
jargon become to the likes of Prof. Foley that she probably never even
stopped to reflect on how much more like the actual fascists known to
history were the fanatical theocrats who brought down the towers.
< snip >
Which leaves one to wonder, why do people pay large sums
of money to expose their children to people like this?
Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for the West as
it commits suicide.
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