| Sunday, December
10, 2006
Someone actually gave me credit.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/magazine/10section3a.t-9.html
I have been clearing off open tabs in Firefox. Here is one you really
have to read:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2006/08/fake_but_accurate_science.html
It will tell you some of what's going on in the "Global Warming" debates,
including some rather unfair tactics by Big Science whose grants are at
stake.
==========
I have had a productive few days at the beach. We need to get back home.
Sable doesn't get to come with us, and she misses us (although we have a dog
runner to see that she gets exercise). More to the point, we see people
playing with their dogs, and we miss her.
I am accumulating the parts for a new "sweet spot" Vista System to write
about, and I am about to acquire an Intel-based Apple MacBook Pro. I need
to get back to work on that. But mostly I have done very well with both
Inferno and Mamelukes, and I need to keep grinding.
==================
Subject: UN downgrades man's impact on the climate
Jerry:
From the Telegraph:
"UN downgrades man's impact on the climate"
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/12/10/nclimate10.xml
-- Right now the Republicans and Democrats in
Washington seem, from the outside, to be an elite colluding against the
voter. Peggy Noonan
Chris
Good article, and I have always found Peggy Noonan to be an astute
observer. I much like her observation.
=================
General Augusto
Pinochet, RIP.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16139367/
- Roland Dobbins
Without his intervention, Communism would have had a much firmer foothold
in an industrializable nation in the New World. The consequences of that
could have been severe. Most forget that in 1973 the Seventy Years War was
far from over, and its outcome was far from certain. Both Jimmy Carter and
Henry Kissinger thought that Communism would eventually win, and the best
the west could do was to negotiate long term truces while we slowly lost.
Carter and his National Malaise, the "era of limits'; all those were in
effect, and had a full Cuban style communist regime allied with the USSR set
up in Chile, the course of history would have been different.
Unlike most dictators, Pinochet made the mistake of trusting liberal
reformers. Once the national peril was over, and it was safe to let go, he
accepted an amnesty and immunity for life in return for simply standing
down. The result was an object lesson for any future dictators: never let
go. There is no honor among those who claim to rule because they are the
enlightened who have eaten the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good
and evil. They decide what is right and what is wrong, what is honorable and
what is not; and their promises are worthless. This was the final lesson
Pinochet left for history.
It is said that 3,000 were killed during his dictatorship. That makes him
a piker; and while we cannot know what Allende would have done, we know what
Castro has done; just as, thanks to Orwell, we know what the Stalinists did
in "republican" Spain; what happened in Hungary in 1956.
Once Allende was in power his regime would have been subject to the
Brezhnev doctrine, which under Carter would have trumped Monroe. Recall
Prague Spring where "the Czechs acted like Poles, the Poles acted like
Hungarians, and the Germans acted like swine." Pinochet saved us all from
that.
As to Pinochet's accumulations of money in overseas banks, given the
trustworthiness of liberal reformers, who wouldn't have an insurance policy?
But it is conventional and politically correct to detest Pinochet and
mourn his victims, and give no thought to what would have happened had he
not acted.
RIP
===========
FIrefox yet again. Good grief. I installed the
Google Notebook, and once
again Firefox did it to me. All the displays changed. The number of tabs on
each row changed, and I was back to a horizontal scroll. I knew how to fix
that -- it's in the upcoming mail and column -- and now when I hover the
mouse over any tab it immediately opens what's on that tab. It used to give
me a tooltip but no, now it has to thrash the system to bring up the new
tab. I HATE THIS.
Apparently the goal is to drive me back to Internet Explorer. I
can' find the setting that gets me back where I was before it allowed the
blankety blank thing to update a bunch of extensions. After that I had to
disable some old ones because they were incompatible. Now it's doing this.
Firefox, you are driving me mad. How about letting me PAY SOME MONEY and get
some instructions and STOP CHANGING THINGS once a week? Ye gods.
I haven't been able to get the Google notebook working but I suspect this
new tab behavior has something to do with it.
============
Harsh, scary words
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110009364
<snip>The creation of the Iraq Study Group
reflects the vain hope that well-meaning, senior, former public
officials can find ideas that have not already occurred to people inside
government; that those new ideas can redeem incompetent execution and
insufficient resources; that salvation can come from a Washington
establishment whose wisdom was exaggerated in its heyday, and which has
in any event succumbed to a kind of political-intellectual entropy since
the 1960s; that a public commission can do the work of oversight that
Congress has shirked for five years in the misguided belief that it
would thus support an administration struggling to do its best in a
difficult situation. This is no way to run a war, and most definitely,
no way to win it.
============
We'll head for home in the morning. Updates tomorrow, probably evening.
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