The enemy of my enemy is still my enemy. When work Disappears.

View 778 Sunday, June 16, 2013

Rumors abound as to how we will be involved in our new little war in Syria. We are about to subsidize al Qaeda, against whom we are in a formal war if we assume that our War on Terror has an actual opponent to be at war with, against the government of Syria which as the support of Hezbollah and Russia. I don’t know how this ends, but it is easy to predict some results: things will go badly for someone. There will be civilian casualties with a teddy bear involved. The US will be blamed for it. Eventually someone will win. If they don’t hate us, there will be a subsidized terror program designed to install a government that does hate us.

Our enemies are shooting at each other.

Jerry-

Has it been considered that the Sunni Shiite conflict has been suppressed since colonial times? And that our enemies are basically shooting at each other?

Could Obama be trying to balance the sides and keep the young men fighting each other and wasting energy and hate on each other. Last face off was Iran/Iraq war 1980-1988. I was in high school (and hence oblivious), but I don’t recall that being a time when we were concerned about terrorism. Facing down Russia, yes.

The strategy has been used, and filed in the back of my head is the notion that it is unpredictable and risky. But could it be the strategy? Could it be Putin’s strategy to encourage their Muslim minorities to send off the young hotheads to . . . I confess the temptation to insert something about David and Goliath and blood in the sands and I really must stop.

But, freely quoted "I will have more freedom of action after I am re-elected." And on Fox News Sunday Britt Hume noted that Whitehouse strategy for presidential exposure seems to have changed in the last few weeks. NSA basically sent out the press secretary to the Sunday shows. Hmm. . .

David Schierholz

Playing balance of power games, subsidizing one enemy to fight another, is a game of high risk and high skill.

Roberta doesn’t compact her Outlook.pst file often and the result is that today we got the dreaded corrupt pst message instructing us to run scanpst. That works – it’s running now and I assume it will run to completion and all will be well since it always has worked for me – but first you have to get it working. Windows and Outlook between work to make that difficult. First off, although the error message tells you to run scanpst.exe, you will not easily find scanpst on your Windows machine. The new and improved Windows search program sucks dead bunnies through a straw. Roberta’s computer had never heard of scanpst and told me to go away. Microsoft Help was as helpful as usual, which is not very. Since Roberta’s system was installed with everything using the default places you’d think this would be easy, but the Microsoft Find can’t find many program files. It doesn’t think it should let you know they exist.

Eventually I figured out where scanpst resides, which is in the same place the outlook startup file resides, hidden away in a deep drill; once you find the scanpst file you can click on it to open it, and browse for the outlook.pst file it needs to scan. Good luck on that one. It’s buried deep in the users area. Fortunately the actual path is given in the error message that sent you doing this task, so if you kept it alive can find where the pst file is hidden; if you didn’t you can try to start Outlook again, which will produce the error message again. This time keep it. Now start scanpst.exe again because the program can’t work if any part of outlook is open. Now browse down and down and down until you find the outlool.pst file, and Bob’s your uncle.

The default place for scanpst.exe is in program files (or program files x86 on a 64 bit machine) Microsoft Office/Office 12/ for Office 7. There are other folders for other versions of Office. Whoever thought up the Microsoft default folder scheme must have had access to controlled substances and a wicked sense of humor.

When Work Disappears – Excellent essay and comments

Dear Jerry,

Megan McArdle had an excellent essay Friday on the point that you have been making for decades: What happens when work opportunities disappear for those who most struggle to be employed?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/14/when-work-disappears.html

Jim Ransom

Good essay. Recommended.  Thanks.

The free trade people, the comprehensive immigration reform people, the unions, the ruling cless and all its branches, and almost everyone else have been talking past each other on these points for years to no effect.

One would presume that “social scientists” would at some point see that as Moore’s Law continues the need for low skill work other than personal service vanishes into automation, and that a “Better Safety Net” translates into a large part of the population living off the dole and enjoying television. I believe back when historians studies history they called I Bread and Circuses, perhaps spiced with subsidized drugs. A nation with a large voting bloc that knows it does no useful work – I vote the X Party for a living – often develops undesirable character traits. We have known this for a long time, but it is now not politically correct to say so.

And we are still discovering what is in the Affordable Health Act, which turns out to be incentive to eliminate much of the health care that is already afforded.

We live in interesting times. And we have yet to discover what else is in the Act that we had to pass so that would could find out what’s in it. Sometimes I think they put things in the DC water supply several years ago and are now getting around to doping the water in Fairfax County.