Chaos Manor Home Page > View Home Page > Current Mail Page > Chaos Manor Reviews Home Page THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR View 454 February 19 - 25, 2007 |
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This week: | Monday,
February 19, 2007 Mailbag is up today. New column tomorrow, discussing net neutrality and IPv6 among other things. I have more to say but it will have to wait until tonight; it's about time to go write on Inferno 2. It's a great life if you don't weaken...
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This week: | Tuesday, February
20, 2007
Thanks to Greg Hemsath, we have a copy of my March 1983 SURVIVE Magazine column. I include it in Reports as a curiosity. We have a special report. I have known Frank Forman for some years. He has recently had a cochlear implant. His journal can be found here. ===== I am learning about some of the benefits of our service economy. My mail order pharmacy order was cancelled. Not one told me that, or told me I had to re order. Well, they did: there was a telephone message. But when I called back I spent 3 days trying to get through to Kaiser Pharmacy ("We are experiencing a high volume of calls. Your call is important...") Eventually I get someone who tells me my order was cancelled and I have to start over. So I am taking Aleve instead of the prescription anti-inflammatory I need. No one seems to care much. I would swear the girl who finally answered the phone is either bored out of her mind or actually stoned on something; she certainly couldn't have cared less about this. I can't really blame her: she must spend the day listening to thoroughly disgusted people. So now I start over. It would of course have been a lot simpler to go out there. Only -- have I thrown the old bottle away? It had the prescription number on it. If I have, I presume I am completely out of luck. This is the modern service economy in action. One wonders when this function will be exported to Bangalore. They could put far more people to answering the phones for what they are paying now. This might work better than what we are doing: better service from people who actually want to keep their job. Of course that will simply hasten the death spiral under which we send wages overseas and overseas banks send money back as capital to buy US debt and capital assets. I suppose I am merely being gloomy because my hip joint hurts. ===================== The Democratic Majority in the Senate hangs by a slender thread:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content What an interesting way to run a superpower. =============== Is Wikipedia about to vanish? Probably not, but apparently they need several million a year to continue, and they don't have it. Does this mean we can look forward to Microsoft Wikipedia, or Google Wikipedia? That could be interesting. ============== Subject: Another item for your anarcho-tyrrany file <http://www.daily-tribune.com/NF/omf/ -- Robert Bruce Thompson Just to make us all feel better.
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This week: |
Wednesday, February
21, 2007 Ash Wednesday Good hike to the top of the hill with Niven this morning, lunch at Todai. We got a great deal more done. I solved a dramatic pacing problem, and we worked out a way to observe the Fifth Bolgia where the demons are up on the rim. === I am listening to the local talk show media goons playing tapes of the Anna Nicole hearings, with the judge playing -- God knows what? He is asking people for facts they cannot know better than anyone else, and everyone is acting in a ghoulish manner. Every one of these harpies belongs with the barraters! That includes the judge, and all the clients. Ghouls and barraters. Alas they are not dead, so I cannot deal with them as they should be treated. The proceedings are disorderly, most of this "testimony" is about opinion and assumes facts not in evidence, the judge seems to have a prurient interest in the whole matter and has "jumped the gun" and has he says a gun to his head. I don't know how they select judges in Florida, but if this chap is representative I am not much impressed. Well, I should get to work. But calling that man "your honor" would probably require more self control than I have. This judge is a clown, and his court sounds like a comedy talk show. "You have a spiritual nature" says the judge. A judicial observation. This court takes judicial notice of your spiritual nature. This judge is a clown. ===== Note in passing: the web is much slower the past couple of weeks than it has been. FTP takes about twice as long as it used to. ======== One of these days I need to examine the Federal Law regarding child pornography images on a disk drive and long prison sentences. Do those laws actually protect anyone? Is the public well served by putting people in prison for having certain images on their computer drive? ======== Subject: Ghost Writers.. Did you ghost write this WSJOpinion item about global warming, Dr. Pournelle? It sounds as though you could have. http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pdupont/?id=110009693 "The Earth was warming before global warming was cool." Enjoy! Charles Brumbelow
I have done stuff for WSJ Op Ed but not for years. Glad to see I am not entirely alone.
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This week: |
Thursday, February
22, 2007
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/ is one of the stories that greeted me in this morning's paper. Another was that a soldier's wife was given 5 years probation rather than 2 years in the slammer for throwing a MacDonald's cup with some ice in it into another car. Anarcho tyranny is in fine form, and the world seems to have gone entirely mad. ==== But Geffen and Hilary and Carville are producing headlines. What was that remark about little vipers fanging each other... ===== How does a Florida court have jurisdiction to appoint a guardian for a child born in the Bahamas, physically resident in the Bahamas, and in the custody of the person named on the birth certificate as the father? I don't think the Common Law has any provisions for upsetting the facts stated on a birth certificate. It has been a long time since I taught introduction to public law, and perhaps the world has changed a great deal in forty years, but I am unaware that an over-emotional Florida judge can issue writ that runs in the Bahamas, which last I heard was a sovereign nation with a legal system based on the English Common Law and a functioning court system. Because Ms. Smith died in Florida, the state has physical custody of her remains, and that apparently is sufficient for a clownish judge to assert authority; but I would not suppose that her legal father would be in any hurry to bring the little girl anywhere near any territory in which Florida courts have any actual physical power, so why a court appointed guardian of the child should now have custody of that unfortunate woman's remains entirely escapes me as a matter of either law or good sense. But then Florida probate judges seem to have both the High and the Low justice, and the power to condemn someone to death by thirst and starvation, even to order the police to prevent giving a dying woman an ice cube, so I guess this isn't such a great leap. Will the Florida courts now order the National Guard to invade the Bahamas to take possession of the little girl and bring her to Florida? Will the US Department of State send the Marines? At one time I would have thought those questions absurd, and I suppose I still do, but now I am not so sure I would be astonished if one of those events happened. I do wonder if the world has not gone mad. Or perhaps I am spending too much time in worlds of my own making, and I just don't understand?
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This week: |
Friday, February
23, 2007
Are we prepared for the Global Warming Oscar Al Gore will pick up, and the coming storm of legislative proposals to make Global Warming Denial a criminal action? There is in gaol in Germany a Canadian legal resident who posted items
questioning the Holocaust on a Canadian web site. He was deported to Germany
and sentenced to five years because the web site is available in Germany,
where Holocaust Denial is a criminal offense.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/02
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/story.html?
My point in bringing this up is not to open debate on the Holocaust. (The only debate I can see would have to do with numbers and intentions; it is not questionable that the Third Reich deported Jews to camps where they died in great numbers; how many by being worked to death and how many by Zyklon B is important to scholars, but not that interesting to moralists. But, as I say, that is not the point of bringing this up.) Whatever one's view of the degree of proof of the Holocaust, it is rather certain that one would not be sent to five years in prison for asserting that the Sun rises in the West. I can conceive of imprisonment for Global Warming Denial. Scenario: A US citizen posts essays questioning Global Warming. He then travels to, say, Germany. Meanwhile, some other nation in Europe makes Global Warming Denial a criminal action, and says that anyone asserting this is a political con man from whom the, say, Danish or Belgian people must be protected. The Global Warming Denials are on the web, and thus visible in places where they are proscribed, and under European Union rules the US citizen is handed over for prosecution. Will the US government act to protect that citizen? Or would that depend on who is the President of the United States at the time. Now let us change that to a National Guardsman, who runs a web site denying Global Warming, and is subsequently sent to Iraq, wounded, and transferred to a US military hospital in Germany. Or -- but you can imagine other such scenarios for yourself. These all seem unlikely. Alas, the word is unlikely; a few years ago, the words ridiculous or impossible would have come to mind. They no longer do. Global Warming will get its Oscar this Sunday, and we will be bombarded with arguments to the effect that the debate is over, and anyone denying Global Warming must have evil motives. Look for it. ==== I continue to grind away at Chaos Manor Reviews, and fiction. I do thank those who have recently subscribed or renewed subscriptions. That's the only way I can afford to keep this place going. At the same time, I want to be clear: I'm not really neglecting fiction for this. What I am neglecting is grubbing for journalism to bring in quick income; so long as the subscriptions come in, I don't have to do that, and I can put as much time into fiction as I have energy for. Mr. Heinlein told us long ago that we -- writers, particularly fiction writers -- are professional gamblers. Our fiction income comes in fits and starts. Sometimes there's a lot: I had several best sellers. Of course that was when I had four boys to get through college. Sometimes there isn't much; BYTE took care of that for me for a very long time, and I am quite thankful for that; I didn't have to rush about looking for journalistic assignments. Now it's a matter of paying the bills while I turn out Inferno 2 and the next volume of Janissaries. After which I have a novel of a future society in which the trends to anarcho tyranny have continued. And another about an asteroid civilization. All of those are in various stages of preparation. Subscriptions allow me to pay the bills while I work on them. I'm not begging. I still have plenty of contacts in the world of science journalism. But I'd rather work for you... ==== I don't have a new XBOX, but I may be tempted:
http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/sim/
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This week: | Saturday,
February 24, 2007 Tracks Walking sticks, PAW PRINT rubber foot. These don't seem to be available any longer. Not long ago Mickie's Outdoor Place said they would sell me two of them. Then sent one, and it wasn't the Paw Print that screws onto the hiking staff but a rather more ordinary and mundane hiking staff foot that I can't use.
Mountain Sports on-line also sent me two useless things I didn't order. Their web site says they have what I need, and what I ordered, but I hesitate to keep sending money into a black hole which sends me back stuff I didn't order. This web commerce isn't what it's cracked up to be. Companies can take an order for one thing and just send something else; and what can you do about it? You've paid. They have your money. And the postage to return the junk is as much as the stuff is worth. Sigh. And the time it takes to straighten it out uses up and more all the time you "saved" by not going out to Sports Chalet or wherever and buying it yourself. Both these sales were made through Amazon. Amazon doesn't seem to be a lot more help, either. They arrange for sales, but they don't seem to do much for you if the sale goes bad. Not that they can, of course. But so far they haven't answered my messages about those sales. Nor has anyone else. I suppose I should not be astonished. ===== More lawyers are making money over a rotting corpse. News in a month. And the Global Warming Oscar is coming... === And for the past two weeks now the Internet is much slower than it used to be. === I have a letter and comments about me and SDI and how Larry Niven and I brought down the Soviet Union, over in mail. (And yes I understand how outrageous that claim is; go read the letter before you complain.) My reply also includes a few references to space papers available on this site. I suppose I will make another reference to all this in Monday's View. For the record, the Internet is fast and snappy this morning, back to the speed I got used to before the slump in the last couple of weeks. ====
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This week: | Sunday, February
25, 2007 Inferno 2 moves along nicely. I have developed a couple of new characters I think readers will like. The trick here is to stay consistent with Vatican II theology while doing an adventure story set in Dante's geography. And remember that the Almighty has a sense of humor.
I need to develop some words for the column. I confess I haven't a clue as to what to write, but doubtless something will suggest itself. Something always does. Alas, cutting back on the anti-inflammatory drugs seems to have let my neck/shoulder problem surface again. It's more Aleve I need until I get my prescription filled. One would not think that's something I would forget, but I did, until the middle of Tannhäuser last night. At which time it was a bit late. Four hours. But it was a magnificent production. The Venusberg scene would have been banned in Las Vegas twenty years ago; the dancers had to audition in their underwear, and some wore less than that in the performance. Little about the pleasures of the Venusberg was left to the imagination. The costuming was "modern dress" of the period of the opera (Dresden prior to the Revolution of 1848). Roberta liked that. I think the more traditional medieval dress works better -- the notion that Lutheran Thuringia sends Heinrich off to Rome to beg forgiveness for spending time in the Venusberg is a bit jarring to me -- but I expect I have an overactive imagination. But enough rambling: it's time to do the column. I can start with Vista ReadyBoost, which works very well.
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