| Monday
April 16, 2001
I will be away for a week. I'll try to put up a fair
amount of mail before I go. You may also want to visit
http://www.ttgnet.com/rbt/thisweek.html
which is Bob Thompson's site.
You probably saw this last week but
it is worth repeating:
Jerry, I swear, this is the funniest thing Microsoft
has ever done:
http://www.officeclippy.com/
This Web site, part of the Office XP ad campaign,
shows how Office XP makes Clippy unnecessary.
There are some hilarious Flash animations featuring
Gilbert Gottfried as the voice of Clippy. In the first one alone,
representative computer users call Clippy "moronic" and
"next to Microsoft Bob, the most annoying thing in computer
history"!
It's just wonderful. :-)
. png
And it is all true...
And Talin asks some good questions:
1. After the AAAS meeting, you said you had some new
views on global warming, and that you were going to send a write-up to
subscribers about it. I must have missed this, and I searched the site and
couldn't find anything more recent than December of last year.
2. What do you think of this new cattle virus? My
friend tells me that the beef industry in England is basically dead, and
it's very easy for the virus to spread on tourist shoes and such so we may
soon have the same problem here.
I think that we as a civilization have far too many
monocultures in our food and other survival chains. Although in this case,
I don't think having more varieties of cattle would have helped.
3. What's your prescription for the power situation
&; PG&;E bankruptcy? We know why it happened, what should be done?
4. With the increasing popularity of ADSL, there is
an increasing disparity between how fast you can serve up content and how
fast others can consume it. Large, well-funded commercial sites can afford
tons of bandwidth, but what about the smaller, independent content hosts?
Given that there are far more consumers than servers, and the consumers
now have much faster bandwidth, how long will it take before hobbyist
servers are perceived as unacceptably slow? Will the web become a sea of
broken links as the smaller sites decide to call it quits? Will the only
"pleasurable" browsing experience be obtained by going through
AOL or MSN? I see a possible tipping point here...
-- Talin "I am life's flame, respect my name,
Explorati, Inc. my fire is red, my heart is gold. http://www.explorati.com
Thy dreams can be, believe in me, http://www.sylvantech.com/~talin if you
will let my wings unfold!" -- Heather Alexander
Global Warming: I think it is
happening. I don't think we can do a lot about it, but perhaps we can. I
do think we need to know a lot more, and we ought to be spending several
billion on finding out more: more about what is happening (is it a solar
cycle, which seems reasonable since we have been through periods with
warming that look like this at about 10,000 year intervals); is the CO2
doing anything (we have a higher CO2 level than we have ever had in the
ice core histories) and if so what can be done? And so forth.
The key to all this is LOW COST
ACCESS TO SPACE. By low cost I mean at a cost per pound down there around
what you pay per pound for a first class airline ticket to Sydney from LA.
That can be done, and if it is done, we will have the means to (1) measure
what is going on, and (2) do something about it. Do that and we will be if
not all right, then better off.
Depriving the west will do no good.
It won't work. This generation is not precisely noted for its positive
attitudes toward deferred reward. And those who are not going to be harmed
by deprivation will find it hard to impose their solutions on those who will than they
seem to think...
The proper answer to most economic
questions is a larger pie. It is just a lot easier to divide a BIG pizza
among a bunch of hungry children than it is to divide a small one. Of
course all know that but we don't always seem to act as if we know it.
--
I don't know of a new cattle virus.
Foot and mouth has been around a long time although not in the US. As a
child in rural Tennessee I was aware of it and knew the symptoms. Never
saw it. As to scrapie, I don't know anything at all that hasn't been in
the literature recently.
--
There won't be any solutions to the
power crisis until we have more power plants, and that doesn't mean
windmills. Nuclear power is the most environmentally benign. And forcing
the ratepayers to pay what power costs is the simplest short term remedy.
But they won't. The State "surplus" is gone, of course. And the
madness will continue.
We need more power plants and lots
of them. But then I said that in my columns and articles 20 years
ago. Things haven't changed much.
--
George Gilder calls it 'infinite
bandwidth". I said much the same thing a few years ago. It will come
and you can't stop it. I wish I had it now, but give it time.
I've nearly completed clearing the backlog
accumulated during Lent. Will someone please tell me whether I should read
the article below, or whether it is just one more AntiRacist who is on
"our side"?
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/19/apr01/sandall.htm
The perils of designer tribalism by Roger Kimball A
generalized tolerance will be best achieved if we leave undisturbed
whatever it is which constitutes the special character of particular
individuals and peoples, whilst at the same time we retain the conviction
that the distinctive worth of anything with true merit lies in its
belonging to all humanity. -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
[A] life without piety, including piety to the past,
courts grief and does damage to the life of the living individual. -Edward
Shils
They are very gentle, and know nothing of evil.
-Christopher Columbus
In 1983, the French writer Pascal Bruckner published
Le sanglot de l'homme blanc, an astringent, intelligently disabused attack
on recent European efforts to sentimentalize the Third World. Duly
translated into English a few years later as The Tears of the White Man:
Compassion as Contempt (Free Press, 1986), the book excited a brief spark
of interest among conservatives and then sank without trace into the
tenebrous limbo of the out-of-print.
It was an unfortunate, and undeserved, fate.
Bruckner's book is a vigorous indictment of "Third Worldism"-the
odious species of romance that glorifies everything foreign, exotic, and
primitive while simultaneously railing against civilization, science, and
modernity. (That other social philosopher, W. S. Gilbert, was right to
save a place on his famous list for "the idiot who praises with
enthusiastic tone/ All centuries but this and every country but his
own.")
The very power of Bruckner's indictment helps to
explain its neglect. The message he brought was distinctly unwelcome music
to the ears of politically correct intellectuals, whose smugness and sense
of moral superiority, then as now, was inextricably bound up with the
mendacities of Third Worldism and kindred specimens of emotional
blackmail. (Just listen to Susan Sontag on Kosovo or Michael Ignatieff on
Rwanda.) "Solidarity with oppressed peoples," Bruckner wrote,
is above all a gigantic weapon aimed at the West.
The logic of aggression is at work in Third World solidarity, and this has
made it a continuation of the Cold War by other means. Being non-European
is enough to put one on the side of right. Being European or being
supported by a European power is enough to make one suspect. The bloody
messes in banana republics, and butchery of political opposition and the
dictatorial lunacy by their petty chieftains are all brushed aside. Such
trifles will not restrain the progress of these peoples toward socialism.
What seems criminal in Cuba, Angola, and Guinea has the real purpose of
washing away the far greater crime of colonialism. Clearly, Bruckner's
message is as pertinent today as it was in the 1980s-more so, perhaps,
since the attitudes it chronicles, if often less histrionic, are today
more thoroughly institutionalized, more thoroughly absorbed into
established opinion. It is worth pointing out that, unlike many Third
Worldists, Bruckner had firsthand knowledge of the problems about which he
wrote. Having worked as a member of the International Action Against
Hunger, he animated compassion with deeds. If this tempered his
romanticism, it also sharpened his vision. Bruckner did not march
arm-in-arm with Jean-Paul Sartre. He was not a beneficiary of UNESCO's
extortionist escapades. He did not rail against Western oppression. He did
not curse the evils of colonialism. On the contrary, he understood that
the West's real crime was not pursuing but rather abandoning its
responsibilities as a colonial power.
And more. I found it an interesting
but disturbing article.
As was
http://thenewrepublic.com/030501/easterbrook030501_print.html
And finally from St. Onge:
From: Stephen M. St. Onge saintonge@hotmail.com
Subject: Waco Again
Dear Jerry:
See http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-395es.html
for an expose of the latest Waco coverup, and http://www.jewishworldreview.com/michael/kelly.html
for some of the facts on the public fool system mess.
Then, to get the bad taste out of your mouth, see http://www.adcritic.com/content/john-west-red-salmon-bear-fight.html
And perhaps that will give you all
enough to do while I am gone...
In case it isn't, there's a bit more below.
TOP
|
CLICK HERE for
a Special Request. 
