View 729 Wednesday, June 20, 2012

A House Committee has voted that the Attorney General is in contempt of Congress. The vote was along party lines, which is a pity, because the contempt is obvious and definitely indicated. This should not be a Party Lines affair. The Congress is the Grand Inquest of the Nation, and constitutionally is empowered to see that the President does indeed take care to see that the laws are faithfully enforced. There is no compelling reason for withholding the documents demanded by Congress in this matter.

To make it more interesting the President has bought into the ownership of Fast and Furious: he did so by invoking Executive Privilege in this matter, thus taking responsibility for the Attorney General’s refusal to hand over the papers. This make this contempt by the President, and a genuine Constitutional Crisis unprecedented since the Watergate breaking and Congressional subpoena of the Watergate Tapes.

That last affair ended with the resignation of a President and an unconditional pardon by his successor.

Nixon could have personally burned the Watergate Tapes, thus making it impossible for Congress to demand them. He chose not to do that, which would have precipitated an even more severe constitutional crisis.

This will be played for political points. It ought not be. The Constitution was clearly intended to allow Congress full powers of investigation, and that power is critical for constitutional government. Yes, the public has little confidence in the Congress, largely because everyone now expects grave matters like this to be voted along party lines; but is it still Congress that must decide whether public officials are covering things up.

The President is claiming Executive Privilege only for documents that came into existence after the Fast and Furious became public, and which pertain to discussions between the President and the Attorney General. This is very curious, and worth debate : is there some kind of attorney client privilege here? It’s worth debating.

But in that case, the Attorney General is still in contempt of Congress because Congress has demanded a lot more than just transcripts of personal conversations between the President and the Attorney General. To this moment no one knows who authorized Fast and Furious. Unless a Special Prosecutor is appointed we will never know – and probably not then. And it is a matter of importance, far more than the matter of who leaked Valerie Plaime’s connection to the CIA.

This affair will not end well for the Republic. The House has little choice but to declare the Attorney General to be in contempt. It then has the power to send the Sergeant at Arms to arrest the Attorney General and convey him to the warden of the District of Columbia jail to be held until purged of contempt, and proper return to any writ of habeas corpus would be just that: held by order of the House of Representatives. Of course this is not likely to happen. It has been very rare, although that kind of activity wasn’t entirely unknown during Civil War and Reconstruction days. But Constitutional crises do not usually end well. The Hayes-Tilden compromise, which ended Reconstruction and made a deal with General Nathan Bedford Forest to disband the (original) Ku Klux Klan comes to mind.

The investigations won’t end, the partisan spins will continue, and the question becomes – why? Just what is so mysterious here? Who really did think up Fast and Furious, and what was its real purpose? Conspiracy theories abound. Was the notion to send more guns to the drug lords in the hopes they would kill each other off? No one would want to admit that. It’s also hard to believe anyone would actually do such a thing. But it is one possible explanation: only why would the Attorney General  act in contempt of Congress to protect someone who wanted to do that? Surely that was not its purpose.

So just why was Fast and Furious implemented? Who really wanted hundreds of assault rifles and other such weapons to be sold and allowed to be taken across an international border? In theory the weapons and ammunition were to be tracked, but the tracking wasn’t competently done. Why? The technology for doing it exists and isn’t that difficult. Was this failure simple incompetence or something more sinister? It is the right of the Congress to find this out; in whose interest is it to keep secret the origin and true purpose of Fast and Furious? Why does the Attorney General protect this operation?

Several thousand weapons and a lot of ammunition went to Mexico. Apparently we don’t know how many, or to whom they went, although we know that many ended up in the hands of the drug lords. And the Attorney General of the United States is unwilling to give Congress the documents authorizing this action, and claims he does not know who authorized the action in the first place. The President is standing by his man. And no one knows why.

Curiouser and curiouser. And it is far from over.

The President’s ‘reset’ in relations with Russia does not seem to have gone well, if we can judge by the frost at the G 20 meetings in Cabo. Of course the US is far less relevant in these matters, and is getting less so as time goes on.

Our long dying TV has deaded itself, and of course we’re about to go off for the weekend tomorrow. If you have enough problems some of them will cancel out: in this case we have long needed to replace the bedroom TV, a 19” flat screen that certainly predates 911 and is probably about a decade older than that. It sort of still works but just barely, and the remote doesn’t work at all and – well, we don’t watch much TV in the bedroom since getting the HDMI set for the back room.

So I will have to replace the back room 40”, and the 19” Westinghouse flat screen in the bedroom, but I am not confident in my ability to carry the 40” out, much less bring in something that large or perhaps a bit larger (but not much larger, 42” or so at most. I managed to bring in the current 39” from the front door, but I don’t think I could do that now – it would be a bit risky anyway. And of course we are going off for the weekend tomorrow.

What I can do is go out to Best Buy and get a 24” TV, possibly a tunable monitor which might be used to replace the Last Bottle up here in the Great Hall, possibly to replace the bedroom TV. Either way it would be useful, it can be installed tonight (just put it in front of the big TV), and await its permanent replacement next week.

One amusement: my bedroom TV has only a coax input and the cable box has only a coax output. Obviously it is pre hi-def, and I suspect I have been paying for hi def. Possibly not, But anyway I can get Time Warner to replace it with something a bit more up to date, and take away the old box and another I’ve been paying for but haven’t used in many years, and yes, I know, that’s a waste of money. I can only plead that changing the subject is difficult with me, and when something is out of mind it stays out of mind until something causes me to think of it. Apparently multi tasking is one of those abilities along with balance that 50,000 rad tends to burn out.

View 729 Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Alas, the Bunhead TV series wasn’t able to continue what it did in the pilot. The show attempted to leap into the middle, becoming a sitcom without establishing the characters and the backstory; the pilot tries to do all that in one episode, and that was itself a mistake. I can agree that compressing the Los Vegas part into a few minutes was a good idea, but there wasn’t enough time given to the development of the characters once they got to ‘Paradise’, or indeed even to establish the small town (doesn’t even have a movie theater) as a real place; and the secondary characters, the four young dancers, are merely sketched in and never developed. Then they killed off Michelle’s husband just as we got to know and sort of understand him.

It was all too much. They can’t decide if they’re in a slapstick farce or a deeper comedy, so they keep skipping in and out, disconcerting the audience. I can’t imagine that anyone who hadn’t watched the pilot managed to sit through last night’s episode, and my apologies to any of you who tried.

I thought this had potential. Sutton Foster is nearly perfect for the role I thought she had, and the rest of the cast is great –

==

I got interrupted in writing the above by a phone call from my daughter, who missed Father’s Day for better reasons than I generally have for not calling someone. Then it was lunch time, my downstairs bathroom needed attention, and I thought I’d try to see if I could do anything about the growing problem with the TV. I used some Stabilant 22 on all the cables. I’ve been writing about Stabilant 22 since S-100 says, and it has won my Users’ Choice award more than once. They sent me a supply of the stuff a dozen years ago, and I still have some left. It is a contact enhancer, and will often fix mysterious problems – one of my early Pournelle’s Laws was that 90% of computer problems were with cables. Alas, this time it didn’t help. I also tried doing what the Time Warner manual says to try, which is hold the set top box power switch to off until the word ‘boot’ appears, but holding that button never creates that result. It would go to ‘standby’ but never to ‘boot’ or for that matter to ‘off.’ For those who missed this last time, my nice Samsung flat screen has taken to not turning on for about half an hour; that is, you turn on the set, and it flickers on and back off again, and hisses, and clearly is looking for a signal it can’t find, and then, suddenly, voila! It is working fine. I don’t have any problem with the set top box, but a couple of readers have suggested that I try to reboot the cable box since It may be sending confusing signals. I don’t think that’s it. Anyway, there’s one way to make a computer boot again, so I pulled the plug on both TV and cable box and waited a full minute.

So anyway, I had hard reset my TV system, and I turned it on and had lunch. It used to be that the TV took 31 minutes to turn on. This time it was more than an hour of hissing, partial signals, growling, flashing on and then popping off. It was ‘on’ in the sense that there is there is the soft ‘on’ light and the red power light sometimes blinks, but the screen was blank until it would suddenly flash on, then fall off again. This time, after my hard boot, it took over an hour for the darned thing to go on and stay on, after which it works reasonably well, but dropped off a couple of times over the next hour, none of those drop-offs lasting for more than a few seconds.

But it was working. The cable box menu was about half filled with “to be announced”, proving that it had rebooted, and many of the program announcements had been restored. I wanted to see if it remembered programs I had recorded, and lo! they were all there, including Bunheads, and for some reason I started watching that again.

I was mostly looking to see why I had ever liked it in the first place, and I ended up making a discovery. It really is a good show. The acting is good, Many of the scenes are well crafted. The problem is that it tries to convey too much information too fast. It’s a bit like an opera, which is more focused on individual scenes than on the story line. Since nearly all opera fans already know the story line, that’s just fine, but it can be confusing to newcomers, and is probably one reason for the slow decline of opera’s popularity. Anyway, ‘Bunheads’ is a bit like that. Once I understood the story line – Fanny is somewhat crazy and can’t face reality, and many of the town people know that but humor her because they like her; Michelle is as confused as she appears to be and is a lot more disturbed about the death of a husband she didn’t love but was just falling in love with. The high school girls in the tiny little town are in between worlds. Incidentally, they found a movie to go to although we were told last week that there’s no movie house in the town, but leave that. But it is a small town, the girls are not experienced at much in life, and – well, it’s a fantasy world, but one a lot more like my high school days than anything happening in the Hollywood region.

Anyway, I found myself watching the whole episode again, and it’s easy enough to admire the acting once you realize what the story line is. Or it was that way with me. I doubt that anyone who wasn’t smitten by the pilot will ever find this episode enjoyable, and I suspect the series is doomed. If watched from pilot on it will grow on some people, but it won’t be picking up more viewers as time goes on – at least, not with the pace I have seen. Pity. There’s some really good acting in there, and some good writing, and there’s actually a pretty good story going, but it’s being told too fast. You have to want to like this show, and not many will. Ah well.

I got this today from a long time reader:

“It is time to have a complete new debate on intellectual property laws, and a complete redrafting of copyright and patent. The problem is that those who make the laws know little about the technology, and those who use the technology know little about law.”

I submit that the wheels of Legislation turn exceedingly slow. By the time such a revision to the copyright law is passed computer technology will have advanced past the point where the law is relevant. In fact, I would not be surprised if the people in the ‘know’ can anticipate what the law will be and devise technological means to circumvent it.

B

All of which is true enough, but it doesn’t solve the problem. There is such a thing as intellectual property, and the current legal system isn’t doing too well with it. Perhaps there needs to be something like the common law, which evolves over time, judge-made law developed by applying the “reasonable man” standards and arguments. Of course it took a long time for the common law to evolves and develop, much of the long reign of Henry I and then (after the civil wars of the time of Maud and King Stephen) the reign of Henry II. Of course that would require judges who understand the technology and who have a flair for unifying practices into standards.

I don’t have a simple solution to the situation, but I am convinced that we need revision of the patent and copyright laws, and that I don’t know anyone who does have all the answers. I also know that there will be laws, and they will develop – and if the creators of intellectual property are not involved in their creation, they will probably not like them much. Victor Hugo was able to draft the international convention fairly well, but that was a century ago, and I doubt we have anyone of his stature in the intellectual community today.

Firefox seems to hate the latest Adobe Flash Player. I will go to a web site and there will be a black spot in the middle. I used Firefox to get and in theory install Flash Player after I noted that it wasn’t running. That got me the foo about it can’t install when Firefox is running. It turns out you can’t just close Firefox and continue the installation. In some disgust I closed off Firefox and went to Explorer. Tried to install Adobe Flash Player. That got me a bunch of stuff about installing Real Player. Which told me that I already had Real Player. So I told it to go ahead and do Real Player again, It did, and then told me I already had Real Player did I want to overwrite that?

Now it’s telling me it is installing Flash Player. We’ll see. All this used to work, except that every day Adobe Flash Player would tell me it had to update. Every day. Flash Player is still installing or thinks it is. I may just have to go uninstall flash player and real player and start over.  With luck that will work with Firefox when all this is over. Ye heavens.

Well it wants to install all kinds of stuff, including a tool bar from someone, Yahoo or maybe America on Line or something else not relevant to me. I got past all that and eventually after all the dodging about Real Player and some other application I don’t use, Firefox popped up, and half a dozen tabs began talking at once. I had to go through and find the ones that had Flash apps trying to play. That included a couple I didn’t even know had a background flash thing, or maybe it was something else. Anyway, Flash now works, I have silenced the cacophony, and I seem to be back in control of this computer again.

My advice to anyone using Firefox is to shut it down before doing anything serious about downloads and installation. Open one and only one tab of Explorer, and use that. I did that with the ESET on line scanner earlier after a phishing attack that I didn’t go for, and life would have been a lot simpler if I had done that for installing Flash.  And I have a lot of sympathy for Jobs’s decree that Flash wouldn’t sully his Apples…

And, of course, now Windows Live Writer isn’t working properly. It is uploading this stuff, but it it supposed to go to the browser and show me what it did. Instead the screen blinks for a second, but it doesn’t bring up the browser or jump to that window. I’ll now try publishing again with Firefox minimized and see if it now pops up. If that doesn’t work I can close Firefox and restart it. This is being nibbled by ducks…

Nope. It does not pop up Firefox. The good news is that the revision did upload, so I can open Firefox, refresh, and yeah verily there is what I did. Now let’s see if this will work properly after I restart Firefox.

Ah. That worked. It now actually puts this up in a new tab and goes to that tab. All is well. And Flash is working. Routine maintenance…

Nope. Now Flash isn’t working properly. Or in fact at all. I’m going to close everything, reset the system, and if need be start over with explorer and reinstall Flash. I don’t actually hate Flash, but I am finding that annoying.

All right. This all started with my trying to watch just what Romney said about the WaWa sandwich experience that drove the Huiffington Post to declare him completely out of touch with the world. On this machine the video won’t play. I just assumed that was Flash. But I find I can play that video from that site on Firefox on another machine, and on Explorer on this machine – and in both cases it pops up an ad that has to run before the clip will run.  Apparently I have set up Firefox to block ads, and now have forgotten how to disable the darned things. I expect if I thought about it I could figure it out.

But it does seem to me there’s something else here. Firefox has set it so that if you block the ads, the entire clip is blocked. Forever, if there’s a lead in ad. And it does not tell you why or how to do something about it. I am more and more becoming annoyed with Firefox.

As to the wretched Huffington Post and MSNBC which edited Romney’s speech so that his use of the efficiency of WaWa to contrast with government action into what appears to be Romney doing a Goshwow about how sandwich ordering works and isn’t he realy out of touch with the world – well, it’s about what I’d expect from Huffington Post and MSNBC, which are actually more partisan than the Chicago politicians who run Obama’s political activities (which, by the way, seem to consume far more of his time than his activities as President). 

I can’t do much about MSNBC and the Huffingrton Post other than point out their usual egregious behavior – but alas, the incident has shown me I need to revamp my system. I don’t like watching videos as a means to get information. I much prefer to read rather than listen to someone read to me, or see a video of someone reading to me. On the other hand, I do need to know what’s going on, and if Firefox blocks something it ought to tell me what it did and what I can do about it.

There are ways in which Firefox is attractive, and I enjoy some of the effects of ad blocking, but this just won’t do.

All right. I have now used Explorer to let me look at the original Romney stump talk, in which he tells about an optometrist requiring a 30 page form to be submitted three times before Medicare/Medicare would accept his change of address. He goes months without getting paid for the work he has done. One presumes – but it is a presumption – that eventually he was sent the money owed him, but for months he could not get the government to note his change of address. Then he tells a story of going to a burger place and using a touch screen to order a sandwich, and says “Amazing” – as a contrast to business as usual with the government. It was a pretty good talk to a reasonable crowd.

So, of course, the execrable MSNBC edits out all but the story of ordering a sandwich and the expletive “Amazing” and the genius commentators say it looks like he’s out of touch, he doesn’t even know how to order a sandwich, and all the other breathless liberal commentators pile on. As I said, that’s not amazing. That’s standard liberal journalism. You can expect it whenever they can get away with it, and sometimes when they can’t. This one blew up in their face. MSNBC, Washington Post, Huffington Post, all jumped on, loving the story, and shouting in glee at the boob Romney’s insensitivity. That’s good liberal journalism. Hoorah.

But for me the lesson has been that I can’t rely on Firefox. If I want to watch Flash I have to go to Explorer or another computer with Firefox with different settings. Or something. You’d think I could figure out the settings but I haven’t so far. The good news is that the problem is apparently only on this machine and this Firefox.

As expected, Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC and her Washington Post colleague have not offered any apology for their sleazy editing of Romney’s “Wawa! It’s Amazing” speech. After taking salvo after salvo for its entirely unprofessional acts, MSNBC finally did run the entire speech, showing that it was in fact part of a commentary on the relative efficiency of government failure vs. private enterprise, but you have to watch the original video to see that: Mitchell doesn’t explain it. MSNBC has misled hundreds of people with this, Hundreds…

View 729 Monday, June 18, 2012

I’ve been busy for the past few days.

On Flag Day, which is Roberta’s Birthday, our first grandson, Zaddock Russell Pournelle, was born in Washington to my son Richard and his wife Herrin.

Zaddock is a name from his mother’s family history. Russell is the middle name of my son Frank, who is the godson of the late Russell Kirk.

Mother, baby, and big sister Ruthie are doing well.

Sunday we had a friend’s wedding to attend. Much fun.

I’ll scramble to catch up, but there is a TV show I intend to watch tonight. For those who missed the pilot last Monday, tonight is the second episode of “Bunheads”, a TV series that I would have bet money I would never watch, but for one reason or another I watched the opening of the pilot last week and I’m hooked. Sutton Foster, famous on Broadway but relatively unknown on TV, is the star and is perfect in a very strange role of an aging (30 claiming to be 25) Las Vegas showgirl with classic ballet training who finds one morning that she has a terrible hangover and married to a man who has been courting her for months. He comes from a coastal California town small enough that it no longer is a movie theater, and he lives with his mother who had filled the house with kitsch. The mother was once a ballerina and now has a small ballet studio where she teaches. She used to be mother of the only eligible bachelor in the town of Paradise, and now finds herself as mother in law to someone she assumes was a pole dancer. And that’s just the first fifteen minutes.

I have no idea whether the second episode will be able to keep up with the story it began, but the cast has been great in the various complex parts, and I wouldn’t miss tonight’s episode.

Dreaming

Much happened in the past few days. The President has decided to implement the “Dream Act” for illegal aliens brought to the United States as “children”. He couldn’t get it through Congress back when the Democrats had a majority there, and in fact concern over what Congress might do with amnesty laws (usually known as “comprehensive immigration reform” had a great deal to do with the 2010 elections and the Democrat loss of the House. He certainly can’t get it through the present House, or the Senate for that matter, so he is going to implement it by imperial rescript, also known as decree and formally known as Executive Order; in any event without Congressional action. The implications of rule by decree are fairly large.

Obama hopes to face Romney with a nightmare, but it doesn’t have to be one. This is a matter for Congress and national debate. It is a complex issue.

Assume someone brought to the United States at an early age, who has completed high school, and has no criminal record.

Item: it makes no sense to educate young people and then deport them.

Item: it’s not their fault that they are here.

Item: they don’t belong here because they are illegal.

Item: anything that looks like amnesty will be considered amnesty and attract more illegal aliens.

Surely we can all agree on all four items – and believing all of them does not lead to any single resolution.

There are some other things we can probably agree on:

Any “dream kid” convicted of a felony involving violence ought to be conducted to the border after serving an appropriate sentence. If his home country won’t accept him we should advertise: the first country to invite this chap gets $5,000.

Anyone with more than a dozen arrests involving gang activity should not be eligible for any kind of residency or citizenship program, and should be deported whenever possible.

If someone has served eight years in the US Armed Services and has an honorable discharge, that someone is eligible to apply for citizenship and ought to be encouraged to do so.

Anyone receiving a PhD in one of the hard sciences should have a citizen application attached to the diploma.

It wouldn’t take long to make up long lists of this kind, but surely the point is made? This is a matter for Congress, not for imperial rescript.

—

Specifically: for once I agree with deferring a matter. It is not Romney’s job to solve this problem as President. This is far greater than something that can be covered with an imperial rescript.

PIGS

Greece has bought itself some time, and will play out the game, going through the motions of accepting some kind of austerity reforms. It won’t work. Any real reforms will result in riots and a new election and more delays. At some point Greece must either leave or be thrown out of the Euro and return to the drachma. It isn’t that the drachma is better than the Euro, it’s that almost anything is better than barter, and Greece has spent nearly every Euro it can get. The new Greek parliament may or may not be able to form a government, and that government may or may not be able to convince the Germans to hand Greece another boon (which will be called a loan, but some will understand that it is not likely to be repaid), and we may go through another iteration of this; but there is almost no chance that Greece will actually reform and start working again. The attraction of working 40 weeks a year and retiring at age 50 is too great. Spain, Portugal, Greece, and others have borrowed money to live beyond their means without investing any of it in schemes t hat will actually increase income. They have spent the money. The investors who loaned it to them want it back. They don’t have it and aren’t likely to earn it.

The investors then try to get their governments to bail them out. That means transferring the debt from Greece and Spain etc. to the citizens of the countries whose banks loaned money to the PIGS.

Of course no one seems to think that this story may apply to the United States, which is also living far beyond its means and not investing in the future. For years we ran an economy consisting of opening containers of goods made in China, and paying for them with money borrowed from China.

And they never catch wise.

We live in interesting times.

Chinese back doors in telecom equipment

http://pjmedia.com/blog/are-telecom-companies-helping-china-spy-on-america/#comment-2992411

This is an important matter. It will bite us in the ass if we are not careful.

Phil

Hardly astonishing. Most of the routers are made in China, too.

I got hit with some phishing but since I see things only in plaintext and never go to html or open attachments unless I know a lot about where things are from and from whom, I don’t expect they got me. I did go to http://www.eset.com/us/online-scanner/ and let ESET go through things, Takes about an hour and it found noting…

I note that I am now getting over 1000 spam messages a day caught in my spam filters; over 800 get caught up at the ISP level, and my own rules a filters get several hundred more. that’s every day. Some, like the mail from myself offering me a Rolex watch, come in multiples of 50 or more. Some come as fake subscriptions  You need not worry: I generally find all the real subscriptions. If you want to subscribe – and you should if you haven’t – just do it. It will get to me.  I have ways of weeding out the junk and keeping the real things.

But it’s bad out there…