THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

View 181 November 26 - December 1, 2001

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Order Windows Version Reading TLC Now

Did about 1,000 words on Burning Tower today. Cleaned up some stuff. There's an odd kind of virus looking thing floating around: see mail for a description. I don't quite know what it is although I have some guesses, but I suspect one or another reader will tell me definitively within a few hours.

The holidays are over, it's a brisk fall here in Los Angeles, and I have more work to do than I like, but that beats the alternatives.

The war goes well. More on that another time.

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This will be a fiction day.

If you have not looked at yesterday's mail about the odd messages, do that now. Click Here.

I have about twenty of those emails with subject "Re:   " and seemingly blank message body that turns out to have some html you can see with right-click/View source. 

Last night before I went to bed I let Norton Anti-Virus do it's thing, and this morning it had looked at all the systems on the network. I don't have any viruses. I am told that this "Re:  " thing is the remains of a virus running rampant about the web, but something in my filtering system has removed the payload before it gets to me. I did open one of the mails early on before I realized there were several identical ones, but nothing happened. I also attempted to reply to a couple of them, and nothing happened other than that the reply was returned as undeliverable.

More on this stuff when I know more, but there is a pile of information coming in, which I am putting in today's mail.

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I got this a few minutes ago:

http://www.newsandopinion.com/cols/leo.html 

Jewish World Review Nov. 27, 2001

John Leo

Our shattered chatterers

THE chattering classes are sullen. The president they were sure was a stupid bumbler is doing rather well. He has been patient and forceful. He glued together a coalition that includes a Labor prime minister of Britain, a Russian president, and a Pakistani dictator. A number of prominent Democrats admitted--anonymously, of course--that they are relieved that Bush is president, not Gore.

There is considerably more in the article.

Today I will work on fiction again. Updates here tonight.

So I took the time to update this page, and now I want to send it off, and OF COURSE I cannot connect to my site with FTP.  Why not? I hate the World Wide Wait today. But as soon as I wrote that, it fixed itself. Why not?

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The critical need detectors are working fine. A spate, a barrel, of spam, and I cannot get to SpamCop. Page cannot be displayed when I try to report it. Why not?

The big problem with the war is what do we do with the non-Afghan Taliban fighters when they surrender? There are said to be about 30,000 of them although I suspect that number. Still there are many, and their home countries understandably do not want them back. Imprisoning them is expensive. Shooting them offends civilized values, and shooting them off stage is probably impossible.

I suspect what we do not want is custody of any great number of them. But what should we have as an official position on their status?

On another subject you may or may not find this site interesting:

http://www.rubberhose.org/ 

My first professional aerospace work was with the B-52 bombers. Boeing built those planes well indeed. I just wish we had more of them. Only 100 heavy bombers in the entire US force inventory, and that includes B-1 and B-2. Yeeps!

But we also need and needed Warthogs over there. But USAF doesn't want to fly them and will not give them to the Army.

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Columns are due. Two of them.   Work, work, work...

I put the following together hurriedly in answer to questions about what to do about Iraq. Someone suggested we make alliance with the Kurds. I say:

Some realities:

The Turks are FAR more important to us than the Kurds.

The Turks are reliable friends, and have been for a long time. Turks and Russians hate each other but also respect each other. Having Russians and Turks as allies isn't easy, but it's possible, and in fact necessary. We have no strategic interests in common with the Kurds.

We don't want the Turks further into Europe. We want them to concentrate on other places. We want the Turks to be fairly strong, but not a threat to either Europe or the USA.

There are a heck of a lot of Turks in Russian and Chinese Turkestan.

Turkey has its fundamentalist Moslems firmly under control. Few other places do. They have almost a democracy. No other Muslim country does. (The Turkish state uses the Army as its king: the army doesn't rule, but if fundamentalists win the elections, the army comes out of barracks and hangs the lot of them, then holds new elections. Oddest arrangement I know, but it seems to work.)

Turks need oil. We will not be unhappy if the Turks have oil. 

Iraq has oil. We would be happier if the Turks had the oil than that Saddam has it.

Iraq is not a nation it is a geographical expression, with the only national loyalty it ever had centered on the monarchy, which is gone.

Kurds are Saracens, and they have been a low level problem since they lost control of the Caliphate back in Crusader days before the Turks took over. There are Kurds in Iraq, Turkey, and Iran. They all say they want to get together, but they have not been genuinely united since they lost control after Saladin, and they haven't much been united since the Third Crusade.

The Turks know well how to deal with Kurds. It isn't pretty but it works, and they are actually a lot more humane about it than Saddam was.

There is no logical reason why Turkey should not control the land mass now known as Iraq, particularly if you give Jordan some of the western portion of that unhappy place.

Saddam must go. The message we need to give remains: muck with the United States, declare ware on us for real or symbolically, and we will tear your government out by the roots and replace it, and what we replace it with is not as important as that you, Ruling Class, will be gone: therefore do not muck with us and be zealous in seeing that your subjects do not plot or cause harm to the United States.

We are the friends of liberty everywhere. We are the guardians only of our own. But boy do we guard our own!

I hate this satellite with a passion beyond belief. You can't get any page without watching it, and half the time you get cannot find page errors when in fact there is no problem at all but the stupid satellite.

If there is a big complicated web site it takes forever to download a page once found. With the satellite it is a fast download but it won't find it without about 5 retries. 

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I seem to have a great deal to do. Best get at it.

I hate this satellite. Four tries to get to Google. It just loves 'page cannot be found' errors. Why not? But when it does work, it works well. Sigh. And given the failure of other high speed companies recently, I should count myself fortunate to have it.

Is there no way to let users pay a premium to keep their ISP open? But of course that encourages wasteful management. But this hybrid of regulation and deregulation is producing both uncertainties and less than optimum pricing.

Give the gift of reading! Order Windows Version Reading TLC Now 

It works, you know. There is a way to make sure your kid can read regardless of the schools...

Order Windows Version Reading TLC Now

There is a Mac version as well.

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I have taken the day off

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