| Wednesday,
July 27, 2005
It's more than likely that the reports on Microsoft's
suicide pact (suicide by data
mining) are exaggerated, confounding the error analysis which does
require some information on drivers and information flow within the
computer, and the verification procedure for determining the
authenticity of the OS on the computer. There's a full discussion in
mail. Be sure to read it all, particularly
today's section. See also below
==============================
Two Important Articles about the
War in the Middle East
I am not a great fan of neo-Jacobinism and the oxymoronic "Big Government
Conservatism", and I remain convinced that we should never have gone into
Iraq (even Buckley now says that if he had known then what we know now he'd
have opposed the invasion; of course Bill Buckley is a bit older than me,
and perhaps didn't keep up as well as I did, and besides, he may have been
advised by the egregious Frum).
Having said all that, there are two articles in the July 25 issue of The
Weekly Standard that are very much worth your attention. One, Jihad
Made In Europe by Reuel Marc Gerecht,
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/836esgwz.asp
is nearly required reading. Gerecht has done several cool-headed analyses of
the war and its consequences. Two weeks ago
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/view370.html#Gitmo I recommended his
article on Guantanamo Bay and the progress of the war. If you missed that,
go read it.
This week I can definitely recommend his Jihad Made In Europe
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/836esgwz.asp
. He argues his case well.
Another article in the July 25 issue of the Weekly
Standard, Nervous in Baghdad by Austin Bay,
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/838lfyxk.asp
is also worth your time. It presents a pretty good argument for the
success of our efforts in Afghanistan. Yes, that regime is going back to
opium farming, something the Taliban stopped. Interestingly, there wasn't
much of a change in the world price of heroin as a result of the
interruption then restoration of the Afghan supply, leading one to ask other
questions about the success of the opium wars; but that is surely another
issue. In any event, Bay presents his views well and writes from the
location. Agree or disagree with what is happening in Afghanistan, it's an
article worth your attention.
The real question now is not whether we ought to have gone into
Afghanistan and Iraq in the first place (I'd say yes on Afghanistan, no on
Iraq), but what we do now that we are there; and while some of my friends
long for great public humiliation of Bush and his advisors as a salutary
lesson to all imperialists in the US, I am not sure that we can afford the
cost of such a lesson.
The opposite view is presented in The American Conservative, in an
article entitled "Failure is an Option" by Christopher Layne. Unfortunately
is it not on line. I was not impressed with Layne's historical views, and
his analogy of Iraq with Viet Nam is dead wrong. The US was not faced with
an insurgency in Viet Nam, and we did not lose the war; in 1972 the Army of
the Republic of Viet Nam, with US materiel supplies and air support, beat
back a large invasion from the North with about 300 American causalities for
the year, in a land battle all but forgotten in the history books, but which
demonstrated precisely how US supported allies could defeat any attack:
something we put to good use in Afghanistan. Yes, we left Viet Nam in 1975,
but not as a result of defeat. The Democrat controlled US Congress pulled us
out, betraying our allies and throwing away the 1973 victory along with all
the blood and treasure we had put into Viet Nam. There's plenty to be
ashamed of about the US withdrawal from Viet Nam, but calling it a defeat
and using it as an analogy to the Gulf Wars is dead wrong.
(Note: originally the above read 1973, which is incorrect; the forgotten
victory was in 1972, see below.)
=======================
To Reduce the Cost of Teenage Temptation, Why Not Just Raise the Price of
Sin?
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/25/business/25consuming.html
====================
I am often impressed by Thomas Sowell, enough so
that I suppose it fair to call me one of his fans, but then:
Dr. Clyde N. Wilson: The Rednecks Did It!
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/cgi-bin/wilson.cgi/Race/2005/05/16/The_Rednecks_Did_It!
Monday, May 16, 2005
Alas! it is delusion all;
The future cheats us from afar,
Nor can we be what we recall,
Nor dare we think on what we are.
--Lord Byron
The neocon celebrity economist Thomas Sowell
has attracted a good deal of attention with his "redneck thesis," expounded
in his most recent book and in a Wall Street Journal piece. The thesis is
one more in the endless chain of fanciful explanations for the well-known
pathologies statistically prominent in the lives of African Americans.
According to Sowell, the disdain for employment and education and proneness
to violence evident in of much of the black non-community is behavior that
black people unfortunately picked up from Southern "rednecks."
This idea is so ludicrously false in a hundred
different ways that it could never have been put forth except in a society
that was pre-conditioned not only to believe the worst about us rednecks,
but actually to blame us for everything that goes wrong in America. I am
reminded of the pundit who ascribed the crimes of Timothy McVeigh and the
Unabomber to "the evil Southern gun culture," though neither was Southern or
used guns.
This is an old, old trick in American life,
going back to 17th-century Massachusetts. It involves a falsification of
history and an evasion of responsibility and honest analysis by projecting
guilt onto the eternal American "Other"--Southerners. It shows something
seriously defective, even dangerously delusional, in what passes for the
mainstream American public mind.
The able www.vdare.com columnist Steve Sailer
exposes some of the many defects of Sowell's thesis, but his treatment
exhibits the same tendency to dismiss us rednecks as the "Other." As Sailer
recounts, he mentioned to his wife that the thesis was false. She replied
that such was OK as long as it worked (to improve attitudes among African
Americans). Translation: It is perfectly alright to bear false witness
against us rednecks and libel us on the outside chance that it might help a
misbehaving but more favored group to behave better.
"Redneck" is, of course, an elastic term but seems to
describe a category of Americans, centered in the South, who have done and
continue to do more than their fair share of the working and fighting (and,
yes, the thinking) that has created and sustained the American commonwealth
and its freedom. (Never mind that the understanding of these Americans has
been lately befuddled by a lot of careless theorizing about "Celtic" race
and culture.)
If the thesis is true, we are left to the mystery of
why African Americans picked such a bad example to follow when they had the
spectacle of industrious, public-spirited, clean-living Northerners before
them. One dare not raise the question in polite company, but might it be
because those Northerners, in general, kept themselves and their example as
far away from black Americans as they could?
<snip>
Having grown up in Tennessee, I suppose I feel a residual obligation to
defend the South from unfair attacks. You will note, though, that I no
longer live there. When I was a young man I was thought both mad and a
hopeless radical because I thought (and said) that the law ought to be color
blind. Of course today I am thought a hopeless Redneck Conservative for
holding precisely the same views...
===================================
New Study
Shows We Can Afford Border Control!
$41 Billion Cost Projected To Remove Illegal
Entrants
By Darryl Fears Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 26, 2005; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/25/AR2005072501605.html
A new study by a liberal Washington think tank
puts the cost of forcibly removing most of the nation's estimated 10 million
illegal immigrants at $41 billion a year, a sum that exceeds the annual
budget of the Department of Homeland Security.
The study, "Deporting the Undocumented: A Cost
Assessment," scheduled for release today by the Center for American
Progress, is billed by its authors as the first-ever estimate of costs
associated with arresting, detaining, prosecuting and removing immigrants
who have entered the United States illegally or overstayed their visas. The
total cost would be $206 billion to $230 billion over five years, depending
on how many of the immigrants leave voluntarily, according to the study.
"There are some people who suggest that mass
deportation is an option," said Rajeev K. Goyle, senior domestic policy
analyst for the center and a co-author of the study. "To understand
deportation policy response, we had to have a number."
As many have pointed out, that's less than the cost of the Iraqi War;
which would you rather see the money spent on? Of course I doubt the $41
Billion/year to begin with. In Los Angeles a great deal of the cost would be
borne by local police once they were freed of the restrictions on checking
citizenship and residency status -- and in Southern California at least $2
billion a year would be saved instantly by relief of public institutions
such as hospital emergency rooms from the burden of providing services for
illegal immigrants. Other such savings come to mind.
And of course some of the job could be farmed out to bounty hunters. At
ten million illegal immigrants, what could we afford to pay bounty hunters
per individual delivered at a Border Patrol station or INS Detention Center?
At $1000 a head it would cost $10 billion to round up all of them, leaving
another $20 billion for actual cost of detention and deportation, and still
saving $11 billion for the first year. Spend that $11 billion on border
control, and the next year there would be, say, only 5 million, so the cost
is now $15 billion for the second year plus the $11 billion for border
control. Surely we would be down to a million in five years, so our cost
would be $3 billion for bounty hunters and deportation, plus the $11 billion
for border control. We could then look at streamlining the border control
operations, having spent $55 billion on it; one supposes that cost could be
got down to half? We are now at $10 billion a year, possibly forever.
But if they are right, and it will cost $40 billion/year forever, it will
still be affordable. We can afford the Iraq war, can't we?
(and see mail)
========================
Court Ruling Forces Austria to Revise
Foreign-Student Policy The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.7.29
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i47/47a04102.htm
By AISHA LABI
The European Court of Justice has invalidated
an Austrian law requiring students from other European Union countries to
prove that they have been admitted to universities in their home nations in
order to gain admission to Austrian universities. The ruling sparked fears
among Austrian academics that unqualified students from other countries,
chiefly Germany, would flood their campuses.
The court, which sits in Strasbourg, France,
said the Austrian law was discriminatory because it required foreign
students to meet admissions requirements set not only by Austria, but also
by their home country. The Austrian government responded swiftly to the
ruling by changing admissions procedures for the country's 21 public
universities, which have some 200,000 students.
Austria had been the only European Union
country to allow unrestricted university access to qualified citizens. All
Austrian students who had passed the matura, an examination completed at the
end of secondary school by about 35 percent of 18-year-olds, could enroll in
a university. Foreign students, however, were required to demonstrate not
only that they had completed a qualification equivalent to the matura, but
also that they had fulfilled their own country's requirements for pursuing
the course of study they wished to undertake in Austria.
In countries such as Germany, qualifications
such as minimum grades and examination scores have helped keep enrollment
down in oversubscribed programs like medicine.
The widely expected court ruling, issued this
month, raised the specter that German students who had failed to qualify for
courses of study in their home country would inundate Austria's
universities. "
Ain't it grand? I am sure the US Supreme Court will find this an
interesting precedent.
======================================================
I had to turn off Microsoft Outlook Junk Email
filtering. Even at the lowest level the stupid thing was taking out all mail
that had the word "spam" or "spammer" in the subject.
It also removed:
Subject: Windows Authentication Process
Dr. Pournelle:
All the info that I have found indicates that the
"Windows Genuine Advantage" (WGA) program is not as intrusive as indicated
by the report from the Globe and Mail link in today's mail. As an example,
this quote from The Register:
"To register for the WGA, users just need to visit the
Microsoft Download Centre, Windows Update or Microsoft Update. There they
will be prompted to download an ActiveX control that checks the authenticity
of their Windows software and, if Windows is validated, stores a download
key on the PC for future verification."
Although I haven't captured packets during an
authentication, the above statement is similar to what I have read at other
sites (Infoworld, etc).
Microsoft's WGA site says (in their faq):
" The genuine validation process will collect
information about your system, such as Windows product key, PC manufacturer,
and operating system version, to determine if Windows is genuine. This
process does not collect or send any information that can be used to
identify you or contact you. The complete list of information collected in
the validation process is shown below:
OEM product key PC Manufacturer OS version PID/SID
BIOS info (make, version, date) BIOS MD5 Checksum User Locale (language
setting for displaying Windows) System Local (language version of the
operating system)"
(link to site is http://www.microsoft.com/genuine )
All my research (so far) indicates that this process
is pretty benign, with no personalized information gathered.
Regards, Rick Hellewell
which came yesterday, but I didn't see until I went to look at the
Outlook Junk Email filter. Why Microsoft Outlook wouldn't want me to see
that is not known to me.
============================
From Jim Woosley:
Subject: SHUTTLE GROUNDED PRIORITY 1
NASA officials said Wednesday
they would ground future space shuttle flights because foam debris that
brought down Columbia is still a risk.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050727/ap_on_sc/
space_shuttle;_ylt=Ag9d04Xgb.VGnH43pZFFRqOGOrg
F;_ylu=X3oDMTA3b2NibDltBHNlYwM3MTY-
Couragio! And see mail.
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