Category Archives: View

View 721 Saturday, April 28, 2012

In an hour or so Niven and I will go off to blather about something or another at a book festival that our tireless LASFS marketing director  has arranged.  Yesterday I went out to Fry’s for the first time in months, and got a 27” flat screen monitor for Alien Artifact, the new Sandy Bridge system in the highly advanced (and by me recommended for its accessibility, cool, and quiet) Thermaltake case. I’ve been working on a column, and on the novel Niven and I are doing, and trying to keep up with everything.

I confess that I haven’t seen much in the news that sparks a strong desire to comment on it. The Reverend Al Sharpton and company came out to Los Angeles to commemorate the 1992 riots that burned out the Wilshire district and was commemorated by Public Television watching as crowds “Shopped” in stores across the street from them. Many of those stores never reopened but it’s prime enough real estate that it has new uses.

Obviously having parts of your city burned out is good for business. The economists will tell us so.  Or you can read Bastiat on What is Seen and What is Not Seen http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html which will give you a better view of the effects of lowering the price of bread by burning down the bakeries. Los Angeles seems to have survived this visit by the Reverend Sharpton. One does wonder at the moral perspicacity of those who would accept him as their leader.

Anyway, I’m alive and well and working. Thanks to those who asked.  And I’ll do a mail bag sometime this weekend.

View 721 Thursday, April 26, 2012

Of course TSA followed proper procedures, shouting at a four year old girl in a princess costume and saying “the suspect is not cooperating.” The purpose of TSA is to make it understood that Americans are subjects, not citizens, and they are the hired captains who jeer at us and rejoice in their status. They are doing the job they were hired to do. They cloak it with the drama of the security theater. They also moonlight as protectors for cartel mules and smuggler enablers, but that is to be expected. As the Praetorians avail themselves of the best in the joys of degeneracy is also expected behavior. All power corrupts. Salve Sclave.

The Reverend Jesse Jackson, the Reverend Al Sharpton, and many others will be in Los Angeles tonight in a rally having something to do with the Zimmerman/Martin case that took place in Florida. This is the anniversary of the Los Angeles riots. Since there hasn’t been a full fledged Zimmerman/Martin riot, perhaps Los Angeles can be induced to substitute for it. The Reverend Al Sharpton gained national prominence in the Tawana Brawley incident in New York in 1987 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tawana_Brawley_rape_allegations, and often appears in a leadership role in black demonstrations. The Reverend Jesse Jackson is another national leader. Their rally will be in the name of peace and brotherhood and more government activities in support of these principles. 

Much of the day was consumed with home matters. I hope to get at the new column tomorrow morning. I did manage to get some of it done. I also have a huge number of books to review.

View 721 Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Newt Gingrich, who always began his debate speeches by saying that anyone on the platform of Republican candidates for nomination as President would be preferable to the incumbent, has formally withdrawn from the race. Well, not quite formally withdrawn, and of course he will only “suspend” his campaign, but that’s a complication of the campaign funding laws: all the candidates who don’t win generally end up with debts, and they have to have a mechanism for trying to raise money to pay that off. It’s the toughest form of fund raising to begin with and the laws make it worse if you’re not formally running for office even if you’re really out of the game and just want to go home.

Gingrich will now go make whatever peace he can with Mr. Romney, who will be as gracious as his temperament permits. It’s unlikely that he will offer Gingrich anything important, but for that matter Newt is unlikely to ask for anything. It would be valuable for the republic if Romney were to listen to Gingrich on matters of foreign and domestic policy, and he may be smart enough to know that. Romney is not quite the typical country club establishment republican. His speech last night was quite Presidential:

Four years ago Barack Obama dazzled us in front of Greek columns with sweeping promises of hope and change.  But after we came down to earth, after the celebration and parades, what do we have to show for three and a half years of President Obama?

Is it easier to make ends meet? Is it easier to sell your home or buy a new one?  Have you saved what you needed for retirement? Are you making more in your job?  Do you have a better chance to get a better job?  Do you pay less at the pump?

If the answer were “yes” to those questions, then President Obama would be running for re-election based on his achievements…and rightly so.  But because he has failed, he will run a campaign of diversions, distractions, and distortions.  That kind of campaign may have worked at another place and in a different time.  But not here and not now.  It’s still about the economy …and we’re not stupid.

People are hurting in America. And we know that something is wrong, terribly wrong with the direction of the country.

We know that this election is about the kind of America we will live in and the kind of America we will leave to future generations.  When it comes to the character of America, President Obama and I have very different visions.

Government is at the center of his vision. It dispenses the benefits, borrows what it cannot take, and consumes a greater and greater share of the economy. With Obamacare fully installed, government will come to control half the economy, and we will have effectively ceased to be a free enterprise society.

There is considerably more in that vein , and even Rush Limbaugh approved it as conservative and perhaps the best Romney has made yet.

This election is crucial to the survival of the republic. It is a lot easier for conservatives to influence a Republican president, House, and Senate, than it is to have any say at all when those bodies are controlled by the current crop of Democrats.

And it will be a lot easier to take back our government from Republicans than from the current Democratic Party, which has pretty well become the party of ever-growing government. And yes, I understand that it was the post-Gingrich Republicans who endorsed “big government conservatism” as if such a humbug could exist; but their efforts were redoubled in spades and big casino after the election of 2006. Some of them learned a lesson from that. We may not be able to restore the republic with Romney as President and a Republican House and Senate. We certainly will not be able to do so under a reelected triumphant President Obama.

The President is concerned about the average $25,000 owed by each graduating student. Given that half of them will find their undergraduate education nearly worthless, this is a matter of considerable concern, but compare it to other numbers. Every taxpayer – and presumably those students will become taxpayers – inherits a debt of more than $100,000. If the student becomes a citizen but not a taxpayer, that student will still owe about $50,000 as a share of the national debt. Add that to the personal debt of $25,000 in student loans. The President doesn’t seem so much concerned about those debts.

I managed to write that paragraph without using the ancient English practice of assuming that the masculine is the generic pronoun, but it took a bit of thought and rewording. Damon Knight tried to get yeye accepted as the generic non-sexist pronoun, which may be a comment on Damon’s view of the feminist outrage on the subject, or may simply be whimsical. Of course yeye brings about a break in the flow of thought, she or he is simply awkward, the masculine pronoun is ignored and lets the reader get on with the subject for about 90% of the readers (a guess, of course), but the one offended by the practice are so offended that one seeks to avoid their attention. Ah well. It’s merely an aside. Sometimes I am tempted to use Damon’s yeye and be done with it.

It turns out that the coming rise in student loan interest rates is a time bomb deliberately inserted into the law nationalizing the student loan business: the rate was set at double what is being collected, with a temporary cut set to expire in the summer of an election year. One may make as much of that as one wants to. Bonaparte said one should no ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence, but this seems more a deliberate act of will. Whether that’s incompetent or malice I leave as an exercise for the reader. It was done in 2007 by a Democratic congress, and was certainly deliberate by the Democratic leadership. Then Senator Obama was not present when the bill came up for a vote, so his opinion on the subject is not recorded. He is at present in favor of extending the interest cut. So, I suspect, is everyone else.

The TSA has made the front page of the Daily Wail along with stories about Octomom and Posh Spice Beckham. Rejoice.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2134280/Weeping-year-old-girl-accused-carrying-GUN-TSA-officers-hugged-grandmother-passing-security.html

View 721 Tuesday, April 24, 2012

The President has discovered that colleges are expensive and people are graduating with crippling debt, and this is a hell of a way to start life. It’s not fair and unless Congress intervenes the interest rates are going up, and –

Of course Obama took over all college loans and ended the college loan business; it is now a Federal monopoly.

But the real question is, why does all this cost so much? My wife and I both worked our way through college, and all four of our boys got through without lifetime debts. In those days college tuition was high for prestige private colleges, but most people could afford state college or even state university tuition; the tough part was making a living. In my case the Korean GI Bill paid my tuition and left a little over for rent, but eating wasn’t included: I ate through the courtesy of Reich’s Café, two blocks from the campus of the State University of Iowa. Reich’s had what were known as “board jobs”, meaning that you worked an hour as a waiter and in return you got one meal off the regular menu with a few exceptions, except that on certain holidays you could order anything you wanted. You also got to keep your tips, typically in 1953 about forty cents in an hour. Reich’s had been doing this for generations; I found out about it before I decided to go to Iowa, and I got my board job before school opened. I continued at Reich’s until I got a position as an undergraduate assistant.

The federal government won’t allow board jobs now. It exploits the workers. Now waiters have to be paid minimum wage and get all sorts of benefits.

Even so, it’s not the rising cost of living that has made bondsmen of the graduating aspirants to the middle class. It’s still possible to live several to an apartment and eat Purina Monkey Chow (I can tell you from experience that it works: it’s wholesome, has all the vitamins and minerals and such that primate mammals need, and has the added benefit that you can eat all you want of it and you won’t get fat provided of course that you don’t eat anything else. If Purina Monkey Chow is hard to find – it wasn’t in most college towns in my day – you can manage on whatever brand of dog good you fancy but you may want to invest in a good one-a-day vitamin/mineral supplement; dogs have adapted to eat what humans eat, but they’re still no primates. And of course there are more appetizing low cost diets, ramen is cheap, mac and cheese with leeks is pretty good; the point is that the cost of eking out a living for four years isn’t what puts you in debt for life.

Tuition costs are going up. Even as we discover that for about half the college grads the education is useless. See:

 ‘1 in 2 new college grads jobless or underemployed’

What everyone seems to overlook is that the cost of college tuition will always rise to exceed the amount of money seeking tuition. The more money the government puts into the market, the higher the price of college, and it will trickle down from Harvard to the meanest community college. When more money chases goods, the price of the goods goes up; and if government then acts to increase the money supply, the price will rise without limit. Evan as I write this, the faculty of the California State Universities is voting to authorize a strike because they have not had raises in four years, poor things. The California State Universities were in the master plan to be the State Colleges, undergraduate institutions kept cheap and open essentially to everyone qualified to be in a a State College. They were to incorporate the State Teachers Colleges, and be the primary undergraduate education system; outstanding students would be accepted at or allow to transfer to the State University system, which would have a monopoly on graduate education.

The State College took over the State Teachers Colleges and next thing you know they needed to offer graduate degrees in education (although there is no evidence that those who have graduate degrees in education are any better at teaching, and in fact California State Colleges for twenty years taught such an ineffective system of reading that the illiteracy rate in California soared; but that’s for another story. If you know anyone about to enter the California state public schools, go to www.readingtlc.com and get my wife’s reading program so the kid will learn to read even if the teacher is a Cal State grad.) Anyway, all the Cal States offer graduate degrees in everything, and most of them are not very useful; but so long as the money supply lasts the costs will continue to rise, the faculties will be paid and paid and overpaid and pensioned off at very high levels, and the dance will continue.

So now it is becoming manifest that not only is the public school system nearly worthless, but half the graduates of the higher education system are unemployable.

There are solutions to this, most of them drastic, and we know how to have good higher education institutions. But so long as we are willing to pay for it, we’ll continue to have what we get. Charlie Sheffield and I played with this decades ago in a book called HIGHER EDUCATION. Alas it is not yet a Kindle book (I’m working on it). But the decay of our institutions of higher education under the relentless attacks of the government shoveling in money and the Iron Law assuring that the money will be accepted and overspent continues. And the beat goes on. We sowed that wind a long time ago, so why are we astonished at what we reap now?

Niven and I will address this in our new novel, which is a story of how we fixed things. Obviously there is a bit of a fairy tale in such a story. But you’ll like it a lot. Meanwhile, make sure your kids can read. By read, I mean that by the end of second grade they can read any word in the English language including “big words” like Constantinople and Timbuktu but also polyethylbichloridetoluene. If they can’t read that word – slowly and with difficulty and of course without understanding because there ain’t no such thing – they can’t read. “Reading at grade level” means illiterate. Make sure you understand that if you have children or grandchildren ‘reading at grade level.’ Go to www.readingtlc.com for more information.

Subject: Hundreds of thousands may lose Internet in July

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/04/23/hundreds-thousands-may-lose-internet-in-july/

I believe setting this network up in response to users back in November was a good idea, but it’s time to shut it down. The FBI is doing absolutely correct in shutting it down now as users need to be responsible for their own machines.

If you aren’t running a high quality Antivirus, get Microsoft Security Essentials, it’s free, updates automatically and is relatively unobtrusive: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/products/security-essentials

I’d also recommend downloading, installing and running Malwarebytes on a regular basis, the free version works fine: http://www.malwarebytes.org/products/malwarebytes_free

Tracy Walters, CISSP

There’s a flurry of mainstream radio show discussion of the DNS Changer Trojan (the subject of the letter above), enough so that it’s probably worth while for readers to check your systems. Those with properly updated Windows systems don’t have anything to worry about. Those with Mac systems may or may not have a problem, but if you aren’t careful you almost certainly will install an annoyance. There are a number of tools that will check your Mac for the DNS Changer, and they’re free and reliable; but they come with a confusing offer for a Mac Cleaner program that if you’re not careful will get you to download it. It’s not malware. It’s just annoying. It will find a ton of things that it will try to persuade you to do – all you have to do is pay them for their cleaner, which, as it happens, isn’t part of the scanning package.

And it will keep trying to scan, and stopping the scan isn’t easy. Eventually you can delete this thing and find a less annoying program that will scan for DNS Changer. Be careful who you get it from. There are, of course, places you can go for a virus scanner that will actually install the virus for you.

If you stay with major sources you won’t get the virus, but if you are not careful — remember you don’t have to do a general scan to find out if you have the DNS Changer, which you probably don’t have anyway — you can set yourself up for major annoyances, particularly if you’re using a Mac. I suppose there are as many annoyance traps for Windows users, too, but most people with Windows are used to finding ways periodically to scan their systems just in case something snuck in, and the Windows Live Security Essentials takes care of this thing anyway. Windows users get their annoyances in daily doses from Windows. Mac users don’t have so many of those, but because they tend to take security for granted, they don’t know just what’s coming when they do try to look into it.

Anyway, it’s good for your peace of mind to check for the DNS Changer infection, which used to be nearly ubiquitous before the scanners and fixers and updates got its measure.

I’m doing a column, and yes, it’s a bit late. But I’m getting there. We’ll cover the year, some trends, Alien Artifact my new computer with its really great Thermaltake case and power supplies, and I’ll review a bunch of books. And more.

I have a lot of mail, and I’ll try to get that up now.