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THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR View 347 January 31 - February 6, 2005 |
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Monday
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Monday
January 31, 2005 The hastily held elections in Iraq went much better than I had supposed they will, and if this generates a peaceful end to the Iraq Wars, I for one will rejoice. Whether the result was worth $200 billion to the people of the United States of America will remain worth debating, but there is a possibility of profound changes all through the Middle East. Possibility; not certainty. We can continue pumping in money and troops and hoping for the best. The best we can hope for is that the Sunni minority will accept the facts on the ground, that they are no longer the ruling class in Iraq, and they have to get used to it and compete for their place in the sun through political rather than violent means; the monopoly on violence which is government has been transformed to the Shiites, and we and the Sunni can hope they will not use this to extract revenge. There remain the first principles I outlined before we went in: whose house is this? If we have an innocent third party purchaser of a house that was originally owned by a family out of favor with Saddam, confiscated by him, and given to one of his cronies; who then sold it to the present owner; whose house is it? This is not a trivial matter. Make it more complex: make it that the family out of favor with Saddam had received it as a gift of the Hashemite Monarchy, who confiscated it from a rebel against that government. Now complicate it further: the innocent third party purchaser has sold it to an innocent fourth party purchase who had no hand in any of the violent changes in ownership. Now whose house is it under Rule of Law? Those are the kinds of questions that must be sorted out in Iraq, and we aren't going to have much to do about them: local institutions trusted by the locals will be built or they won't, and if they aren't, there isn't going to be tranquility. One thing we will have some influence over is the allocation of the oil revenues, assuming there are some (that the violent attacks on oil pipelines, drilling and storage facilities, and oil workers are controlled). Giving all the money to the majority winners of the election is a pretty sure way to generate civil wars. There needs to be a way to allocate money to the losers in rough proportion to their numbers and the votes they can gather. It's time for Chicago politics, old style, in Iraq. Meanwhile, cheer: there was an election, it was honest, and the turnout while not overwhelming was respectable. ========== I took the weekend off. I'm recovering from my low blood oxygen, which you can call bronchitis or a mild pneumonia; it is responding to a combination of antibiotics and an inhaler, and I am getting some energy back. Of course it's column time: fortunately I am up to it. ======= I have not recorded subscribers and renewals since December, which is very remiss of me and I render my apologies. I am catching up today, and by evening I should have them all, along with a short letter to subscribers.
Thanks to all for putting up with me. It wasn't precisely sloth, although that may have been an element.
FLASH: I am caught up with renewals and subscriptions and have send a mailing. THANKS TO ALL who renewed and subscribed recently. ================ This is very worth reading: http://www.clevescene.com/issues/2005-01-26/news.html
Originally published by Cleveland Scene Jan 26, 2005 ©2005 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.
Woosteria! When marker-wielding racists rocked the College of Wooster, the hunt for justice was on. BY JOE P. TONE
They were still in their pajamas, still standing in their fungus-fighting flip-flops, when the girls of Bornhuetter Hall first noticed the words scrawled outside their doors. Perhaps some sanity is returning to the world. Perhaps?
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Monday
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Tuesday, February
1, 2005
It is column time and I am far behind in everything. The good news is that I am pretty well over my oxygen deficiency, I have only a couple more days to go on the anti-biotics, and I am getting some energy back. Maybe I'll get some work done. The bad news is that I have to write the column, pay the bills, clean up messes I left untended for a month in which I deferred anything that didn't have to be done, and I have a big backlog of mail, some of it rather good. And the world goes marching on. Yesterday I caught up with all the subscriptions, and got off a mailing. That resulted in some renewals I have not had a chance to post, but I'll catch up with all that as soon as I have Paid The Bills, a ritual that cannot be put off any longer. And no, I don't do that electronically. I probably should, but what I do is enter the amounts for regular bills using an accounting program I wrote in 1981 in Commander Gordon Eubanks's Commercial BASIC (compiles to a p-code). This generates a standard accounting journal, and also writes the checks, which I have to sign and stuff into envelopes and put stamps on. That part takes time I wouldn't have to take if I did this electronically. Monthly the journals are posted to ledgers, and the ledgers look to IRS accountants like the accounting textbooks books as taught in the 1980's : right out of the UCLA accounting class textbooks in fact. As a result audits have gone easily since I can show precisely what each deduction was and why it was made. Being a creature of habit I have not cared to change this procedure: changing to a new accounting system would be tedious, and this works. Note that I sent a mailing to every subscriber yesterday. I got many returned. I have NOT updated the badmail page; but if you think you are a subscriber, and you did not get the mailing, SEND ME EMAIL. Send: Your name; when and how you subscribed; the email address under which you subscribed; and the current email address you use now. If you have forgotten the former email address that is no great problem, but if you have changed email addresses and forgot the name you subscribed under, I will never be able to find that: I can search on the one or the other but I need one of them. How you subscribed: by snail mail (rare now), Paypal (the usual way now), or through credit card payment to Roberta's web page (not uncommon). Let me repeat: if you think you are a subscriber, and you did not get the "belated Happy New Year from Chaos Manor," (1) CHECK YOUR SPAM FILTERS, and then (2) SEND ME EMAIL. Wednesday: I have a number of returns due to full mail boxes. Nothing I can do about that.
I also have about 100 returns from Compuserve and other "services" that say "Too many recipients." I don't know what to do about that. Breaking the list into chunks and sending to each chunk is tedious indeed, and will mean I don't sent many mailings. Since some mail to some people in some of those services DID get their mail, is there some filter setting? Many of you have sent notices that you didn't get the mail. I check and see you are enrolled and it was sent, and returned due to "too many recipients"; now what do I do? We have both wasted considerable time. I suggest that first you put jerryp at jerrypournelle.com into your system as "trusted" so that mail from me will get through. Of course spammers have been known to fake my return address so perhaps that doesn't work either. I'll have to look into this: perhaps my ISP can give me a mail address I will use ONLY for subscription mail. There has to be a way around this but I confess I do not know it.
I have a great deal of mail on education that deserves posting with answers, since apparently some think I advocate some things I do not. As a general rule, what I advocate is the ending of Federal bureaucracy in education; returning control to the states; and having the states return the control of the public schools to local school boards with real power to govern the schools, hire and fire teachers, set the "qualifications and credentials" of teachers, defy teacher unions, end tenure in public elementary and high schools, give teachers power to enforce classroom discipline even if they act in an arbitrary and capricious manners, select hire and fire principals, and in general, to rule the public schools; and a much stronger dependency of public schools on local taxes raised in the school district. Given that, I believe, we will have some truly horrible cases of unfair treatment of teachers and students; but overall, a great rise in the efficacy of the public school system. Without that we have problems, and no national system is going to work. I also believe that the major failure of the schools is that they do not develop the potential of the great majority of the future citizens and taxpayers, neglecting them to the benefit of the less able; and this is a formula for predictable disaster. Now to work. I'll get some mail up.
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Wednesday,
February 2, 2005 Ground Hog Day
"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts." Isaiah I am reminded of this whenever I encounter advocates of "Intelligent Design" as an alternative to one or another form of Darwinian evolution. Intelligent Design is an attractive notion, but like the more fanatical views of Darwin, it explains everything and thus generates no falsifiable hypotheses. Moreover, it's pretty easy to see examples of birds and beasts and insects that defy any logic of intelligent design, although they may well indicate that God had a sense of humor. I was recently asked about my views on this subject, and it took me a bit to figure out if I have any. As Isaiah tell us, the notion that we are going to comprehend what God has in mind for this universe is unlikely to be true. Science is a powerful tool for understanding the mechanisms by which things happen, but it doesn't have ways to address the concepts of purpose, or for that matter, of Justice, or Good and Evil. To the Darwinian "good" means the species was better able to procreate more copies of itself (not "survive" as individuals; witness the mantis, whose male gives his all for procreation). If there is a Darwinian concept of "justice" I haven't been able to discover it. Generating a scientific view of justice is very difficult: look at the mess Rawls made of it despite the innumerable academics who espouse what they think Rawls said. Whatever his theory of Justice (which is really a theory of fairness and equality) it is hardly scientific. It starts with "fairness" as a given, and the assumption that it is "good" to be "fair" and "bad" to be "unfair". Now it may be "fair" that society shower the unfortunate with at least an equal share of its bounty as it gives to the most fit and superior, but there is no obvious scientific reason why this would be a good idea, and a very great number of scientific and Darwinian objections. A judge once ordered sterilization of a criminal daughter of a mentally defective criminal who was daughter of a mentally defective criminal with the comment "Three generations of criminal morons is enough." Good Darwinian science? Justice? Fairness, and if unfair, whence the notion of fairness to begin with? We are a long way from science in these matters. Jefferson could do no better than invoke Endowment by the Creator, and really we haven't come far from that: if you seek equality and rights and justice, you will probably not find them in the sciences, whether physics or anthropology. As to the Intelligent Design of Earth and the universe, I am reminded of Haldane's remark when asked by a bishop what science had taught him about the nature of God. "An inordinate fondness for beetles." Whether that is an intelligent design would depend on your definition of intelligence, and in any event would have to be inferred from some knowledge of the general purpose of this universe; and on that score science tells us little to nothing. My own views remain Thomistic: neither Reason nor Revelation will lead us astray, and if they conflict then we need to look into the conflict. Some resolution will be found that outrages neither. So far as I can tell, St. Augustine had the same view, and directed his wrath toward those who pretended an understanding of nature when they had none, and thus exposed the Church to ridicule. I suspect the Intelligent Design argument can be summed rather easily: If you find a watch in the garden, do you look for some random or non-purposive mechanism by which the parts generated themselves, came together, and assembled themselves into a watch, or do you look for a watchmaker? And if you find a watchmaker, what then do you look for? * * * I am aware of the mathematical models which, sort of, practically almost, show how some of the worst paradoxes of evolutionary theory can be resolved (how to get from one peak to another while passing through a valley of death without intending to make the journey). Of course the strict Darwinians say that you can't understand evolution at all until you understand those equations. I find that argument amusing, as did Sir Fred Hoyle the afternoon we discussed this. Whatever one's views of my mathematical understanding, the notion that Sir Fred was deficient is ludicrous. (Of course Sir Fred's views on the evolution of the human race would have really upset the clergy, but that's another story.) For some discussions see mail. =========================================
I have a number of returns due to full mail boxes. Nothing I can do about that.
I also have about 100 returns from Compuserve and other "services" that say "Too many recipients." I don't know what to do about that. Breaking the list into chunks and sending to each chunk is tedious indeed, and will mean I don't sent many mailings. Since some mail to some people in some of those services DID get their mail, is there some filter setting? Many of you have sent notices that you didn't get the mail. I check and see you are enrolled and it was sent, and returned due to "too many recipients"; now what do I do? We have both wasted considerable time.
They tell me there's a program I can use that will fix this. More when I learn more. =====
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Thursday,
February 3, 2005 It is column time, and I have been slothful. Now to work in full earnest. Alas. The German Prostitution/Unemployment story turns out not to be true. See MAIL. I have a number of indignant letters sent on the assumption that it was true, and I agree with their sentiments. It's also significant that we were willing to believe the story: it hasn't been that many years since we'd have all known it was false. On the subject of following the letter of the law to the despite of its clear intention, Judge Brennan in Orange County has ruled that San Diego's election for Mayor will not be overturned despite thousands of ballots (more than enough to change the election vote) on which voters wrote the name of the write-in candidate, sometimes crossing out all the other names on the ballot, but did not check the little oval to the left of the written-in name, thus allowing the optical vote reading machines to count the ballot; if the machine can't read it, then the voter's intention isn't clear. Oh -- but it was all right for electoral officials to darken the oval if there were marks in it insufficient for the machine to read the ballot, because the intention of the voter was clear. But the letter of the law says that the oval has to be marked: writing in your candidate's name, even obliterating the names of all the others, isn't sufficiently unambiguous. Anyone who believes that needs involuntary commitment to an assisted living faculty, and we should be taking up a collection to send Judge Brenner and all his supporters to such places. Clearly they should not be allowed to mix with people of reasonable intelligence. But the law is clear, Brenner says. It doesn't forbid election officials to "assist" by darkening the ovals for regular candidates, but if the voter writes in a candidate and does not then check the oval next to the write-in candidate's name (or any other oval) then the voter's intention isn't clear. So it goes. ========= A press release of some value: The State of the Union and other public documents in searchable formats, available from AskSam. See mail.
======= And for your eternal amusement: Subject: Doodling Megalomaniac Not Tony Blair, But Bill Gates I’m still laughing… http://www.techweb.com/wire/ebiz/59300182 Tracy Yet they allow such people to testify in court as experts...
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Friday,
February 4, 2005 Column time, deadlines approach. And the papers are full of news worth commenting on. Ah. Well. I am in the process of finding a final solution to the "too many recipients" problem which prevented many subscribers from getting my last mailing. It's a new problem, which is odd: in theory the notion I suppose is to reduce spam, but spammers have long ago discovered ways around that. The only real solution to spam is both legal and technical enforcement of truth in mailing: no anonymous or faked return addresses. That generates privacy issues, and we'll discuss that another time. Couple mandatory real return addresses with a small but finite charge for internet mails, say a half cent per email, and spam would end. Of course neither is likely. Spammers like spyware stealth companies, have good lobbies, and don't you forget it. More later. === Parker Hodgson your acknowledgment was returned; I must have the wrong address. === Well I tried the Vallen mailer; it sent fewer than a hundred and died. I do not know why. I had tested it with a dozen or so and it worked fine; but it chokes on a full mail list. It's free and worth what I paid, I guess. So I am still in need of a way to send mail to a subscriber list; my present method of sending a copy to myself with bcc to the list worked fine until last week, but now a large amount of mail is returned due to "Too many recipients" although there is nothing consistent about what gets through and what does not; earthlink blocks some, msn.com blocks some, yahoo blocks some, but they also let some get through. Very odd. Anyway I am still searching. Those of you who got the "Vallen" test message need not respond; I have a list of what it sent and where it clogged. Again there is no reason it should have done so. I fear I have wasted an hour or so setting it up, but that will go in the column so all is well. And of course there is no end of UNIX mailers and LINUX mailers, and this may push me over in that direction if I cannot find a Windows Mailing List manager.
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Monday
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Saturday,
February 5, 2005 Well, it is all grist for the column; I have been finding out a lot about mail management, Outlook, and small computers with big tasks. It will go in the column. It appears that Norton was the source of most of my woes, and if you send a lot of mail you will not want Norton monitoring it as it goes out. I may not be over that yet. ======= It looks as if I have solved the problem of mail handling and what went wrong before. PLEASE CHECK BADMAIL to see if you are in there. I am sending out mailings to the Chaos Manor subscribers; mostly these are mailing tests, but there is some substance, and there will be more later. I am putting up the returned mail on badmail; if you are there and should not be, please correct the situation. But it all looks like a giant conspiracy to move me to Mac or LINUS boxes. Microsoft is getting to the point of saturating very fast machines, and as I get older my patience wears thinner.
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Monday
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Sunday,
February 6, 2005 It's column time. But there is some interesting 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. If you have no idea what you are doing here, see the What is this place?, which tries to make order of chaos.
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