| Monday
September 30, 2002 Column
time coming up. Where did the month go?
There was some fairly interesting stuff
Saturday.
 I
have fifty letters pointing to this article. Go Read It. Now.
Subject: Can Global Warming Trigger a
'Little ice Age'
He points to a very reasonable scenario that we're
walking towards a cliff that will trigger a "Little Ice Age",
and that we *desperately* need more data:
http://www.whoi.edu/home/about/
whatsnew_abruptclimate.html
which, of course, is what you've been saying all
along.
Pete Flugstad
Indeed. Anyone at all interested in
this subject simply must read that article.
And in case anyone gets complacent:
Jerry:
This came my way, because I subscribed to the
mailing list.
-----Original Message----- From: JunkScience.com [mailto:JunkScience@lb.bcentral.com]
Clean-up Confusion By Steven Milloy, Fox News
September 27, 2002
A rocket fuel component has been detected in
drinking water sources in 18 states. It's a limited problem the
Environmental Protection Agency's junk science is about to make much
worse...
The full column is at http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,64198,00.html
Steve Milloy
_______________
I had some comments on the article for my regular
zine, which I'll repeat here:
"Now, there are those who will discount this
report out of hand because the Cato Institute is an evil right-wing
anti-environment group of mean people. This saves them from having to
rebut the facts in the article. Note, however, that perchlorate is a
byproduct of rocketry. If the statements made in the article are factual,
then it seems that we're going to be socked with a huge bill for cleaning
up something that doesn't need cleaning up. Furthermore, anyone who has
any kind of thyroid condition and who drinks water could file suit.
Lawsuits will wind up incurring defense costs, even if the plaintiff
loses. And who's the obvious target for a lawsuit? Anyone associated with
the space industry. Those of us who are interested in space exploration
and space exploitation ought to be concerned about the chilling effect
this could have on the industry. Can anyone think of any approach to space
with no health-related externalities? I can't."
........Karl Lembke
Sigh.
Here's one (important to me & others) thing:
restore the customization options that were in 98 through 2000, then
removed in XP (for instance, putting wallpaper in individual folders -
that's a big part of what makes a PC a *personal* computer; getting rid of
the hideous Fischer-Price title bar blue - you used to be able to do
two-tone title bars, now you can't change them at all?).
The ability to customize a desktop, folders, etc, is
one of the things that puts fun into a PC. Now Microsoft, well-known for
feature bloat, has actually taken *away* some of the "fun"
features? Let's get them back... We are not all "Aunt Susie" out
here. Some of us actually know how to use these things.
Thanks - I feel a little better now...
Drew Parkhill
You're welcome...
I must disagree with this
quote:
Israel has done a good job of throwing away
the moral high ground -- this latest action of firing rockets into streets
of civilians in order to take out certain individuals quite deserving of
assassination seems to me morally indistinguishable from many other acts
of terror...but with the moral high ground crumbling, Israel has fewer
levers to use here.
I am uncertain how Israel has committed any major
wrongdoing at all. They used a tactical option which minimized their
casualties and maximized those of their enemies (the individuals you
mention) and those enemies supporters. Carried to it's logical conclusion,
this is exactly what we did at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and we were morally
correct in doing so. Frankly, if Saddam is serious about pulling his
troops back into his cities and trying to force us into a bloody street
fight (where civilian casualties will be high anyway), I hope we nuke
Baghdad for the same reasons we did then.
As you replied to an earlier missive of mine, War Is
Hell. Unfortunately, until Christ returns and God corrects a couple of
design flaws, such as allowing the concept of evil to exist in the
Creation, war will also be necessary. Given that war is necessary, I hope
our military pursues war by strategy and tactics that minimize our
casualties while getting the objective accomplished. If our enemies don't
like the fact that we value their lives infinitely less than our own, the
solution is simple: don't become our enemies. If their leaders can't grasp
this simple concept, then they should be aware that overthrowing those
leaders will get far fewer of them killed than our response. For example,
If the street full of civilians were turning the terrorists in whenever
they found them instead of cheering whenever they succeed, Israel's
actions would not have been necessary.
At some point, swift surgery is better than slow
torment. If Bush 41 had told Colin Powell (and the rest of the mushy
crowd) to stick it, gone to Bagdad, and strung Saddam, his ministers, and
his sons up from lampposts much misery and death would have been avoided.
Sincerely,
Stephen Nelson
I do not call firing rockets into
crowded streets in retaliation for suicide bombs going off in crowded
streets swift surgery. And I do not retract the statement that Israel is
busily throwing away the moral high ground: something that others have
remarked as well.
Note that Israel lately seems to be
saying "We hold the Palestinian Authority responsible for not
controlling the bombers, so every time a new bomb goes off we will do our
best to reduce the ability of the Palestinian Authority to control
anything at all. Have a nice day." I am not at all certain that
I understand what Israel hopes to accomplish by barricading Yasser Arafat
into his headquarters. Do they hope be will be killed? Assassinated? That
he will have had enough and retire to Tunis or some other place that will
let him live out his days in oblivion? What? They can't possibly be trying
to make him DO anything since they have worked very hard to take away from
him any knobs he might have left to twist.
What is happening over there is
hardly swift surgery.
My friend John McCarthy thinks the
best thing Israel can do is hang on and wait for a new generation, hoping
that the world will change. Time heals many wounds. Perhaps he's right. My
friend Ron Unz thinks that unless Israel denounces the settlements, there
will never be any peace over there. Perhaps he's right. I think I don't
know how to govern that country.
But I do not believe that Israel is
retaining the moral high ground.
As to Iraq, of course we ought to
have hanged Saddam for war crimes in 1991. I said so at the time. (Continued
below.)
==========
You probably already know about this.
http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/qed/index.html
Quote from the page:
The aim of the QED project is to build a single,
distributed, computerized repository that rigorously represents all
important, established mathematical knowledge. The construction of this
system will be a scientific undertaking of significant proportions,
requiring the cooperation of many mathematicians, computer scientists,
research groups, research agencies, universities, and corporations. This
system will have benefits for mathematics, science, technology, and
education.
--John
and
How about the complete works of St. Thomas
Aquinas... in Latin?
http://sophia.unav.es/alarcon/amicis/ctopera.html
The complete and total knowledge of Man will sooner
or later be available to ANYONE with a computer and an internet
connection, limited only by the number of people willing to stand in front
of a scanner (and of course obvious classification issues).
=================
From JoAnne Dow:
Subject: Fujitsu Hard Drives are worse than
Deathstars
It seems they are VERY failure prone, it would seem.
Some customers are seeing virtually 100% failure rates over 2 years or so.
Fujitsu is in deep denial, it appears.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/27316.html
{^_^}
I have no experience whatever with
Fujitsu drives.
Subject: Hilary Rosen Agonistes
Doc,
If you're not going to do a thing, you say so. If
you are going to do it but don't want to admit it, you say something like
this:
"Frustrated by the continuing presence of free
music on the Internet, the recording industry asked for Congress' blessing
on Thursday to gum up the online networks they blame for slowing their
sales. Congress is considering expanded legal protection for record labels
who resort to sabotage in their ongoing battle with "peer to
peer" networks..."
"..."I can't foresee any scenario where it
would be in our interest to go into anybody's computer and delete a
file," said Hilary Rosen, chairman of the Recording Industry
Association of America..."
http://home.nc.rr.com/dwmhome/0209.html#778
Don ***************************************
"There are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand
binary, and those who don't." ***************************************
Come visit The Misanthropyst at http://home.nc.rr.com/dwmhome/
Indeed. Thanks
And my periodical reminder:
Dear Jerry:
Once again a brief motivational lecture: it's time
you bought a Mac. No wonder you're tired & run down, you spend endless
hours fighting with your OS! Who needs the aggravation?
But seriously, folks, since Apple introduced Jaguar
I don't think there's really a debate any more: it is truly a far superior
OS for the single-user environment. I can't speak to its networking
abilities yet, but have read they are outstanding, with easy configuration
and interoperability with Windows-based networks.
Six months ago I had one Mac and five Windows
machines; it's now 50/50, three Macs (an iBook, a Powerbook, and a
17" flat panel iMac) to three Windows PCs. But I spend, by preference
and design, 95% of my time on the OS X side now, and after I migrate my MS
Money files over to Quicken 2003 on the Mac I expect that to go to darn
near 100%. I'm even weaned from the bloody first person shooters I used to
dearly love to play under Windows!
But I know you have serious work to do on your
computers, so I wanted to tell you about a feature of OS X I think may
"sell" you: external drive booting. Using ANY Apple computer you
may have!
All current Macs come with at least one six pin
Firewire port which means that adding an external Firewire hard drive is
simplicity itself: once you format for the Mac OS there are no drivers to
install or anything like that, you simply plug the Firewire cable in and
Bob's your Uncle. So backup space and additional program storage couldn't
be easier.
But better yet you can make the external drive
bootable. It takes a couple of extra steps: you have to boot your local
machine from the Jaguar CD and install the OS to the external drive from
there, but it's no big deal.
The best part, however, and the reason this might
"make the sale" for you, is that once you install the OS on the
external drive you can use that drive to boot any OS X capable Apple you
have, with full access to the hardware connected to the local machine!
UNIX, from what I understand, initializes itself for the hardware it
encounters on boot, it doesn't keep a Registry record like Windows.
So here's where I think it could get very nice for
you: you keep your Firewire drive fairly "pure" - not a lot of
third-party shareware on it or the like, but loaded with diagnostic and
troubleshooting utilities. Then when something goes wrong with any local
Apple machine all you have to do is move the Firewire drive to it and boot
from the external drive to discover if the problem is hardware or
software, network-wide or local. And you have your full "fix-it"
toolbox on a drive you know works so you can patch whatever is wrong
without the endless reboots and fiddling that troubleshooting Windows
requires.
Also imagine how easy it would make your sessions
with Niven: all either of you would have to carry to the other's house is
a drive enclosure about the size & weight of a trade paperback. You
plug in and boot from that drive, the user settings are and remain EXACTLY
the way you want them, you have all your favorite programs, bookmarks,
e-mail addresses, etc. with you as well as full access to the local
machine's hardware including the network, you can pass files back &
forth with drag & drop, and at the end of the day the visitor simply
unmounts this drive & takes it home. No more dedicating a whole
machine to the task - just the drive itself: the drive IS the computer, in
a very real sense.
Frankly I don't know theoretically why this wouldn't
work with an iPod, which can be accessed as an external Firewire drive and
is now available in sizes up to 20 GB, but I haven't tried it. I DO have
an external 80 GB Maxtor Firewire drive attached to my iMac and it'll boot
the local host machine with the flick of one software switch. BTW you can
also make individual partitions on a hard drive bootable; one could be OS
X, another the Classic Mac OS, 9.22, for example, or one "clean"
install and another partition loaded with all kinds of stuff you want to
experiment with without exposing your local drive to any danger.
It's time, Jerry! I'd say the sweet spot for you
would be one of the new dual CPU gigahertz PowerMacs with Jaguar
pre-loaded. Plenty big, plenty fast, plenty expandable, and not a ton of
money even if you have to buy it yourself. MS Word for Mac is readily
available as well as most other major software packages and hardware
driver sets... the bad old days of no OS X ports are fading fast.
Jaguar is fast, stable, secure, powerful, intuitive
and attractive; compared to any flavor of Windows it's just a whole lot
more fun to use. And the deeper you go in the OS the more power and
features you find... besides the whole suite of "digital hub"
applications which ship with every Mac and make it "home
entertainment center ready" out of the box.
I really don't think you'd ever regret it.
It's time!
All the best--
Tim Loeb
I suspect there will be comments...
On DVD:
Your correpondents wrote:
Think of how many people only own a single CD-R/W
disc and they only have that one because it came with the drive. The last
time I saw sales figures for CD-R and CD-R/W blanks the ration was over
100:1. The rewritable format could cease to exist tomorrow and a huge
number of people who burn CD-Rs daily would never notice. If a DVD+/-R
fell below a buck a disc in packs of ten I'd expect to see the trend
reproduced.
Ain't gonna happen. The entertainment/extortion
business has already got there. Writeable media of all sorts will have the
taxes raised on them, because we are all copyright pirates.
In Canada this is part of the Copyright Act, and a
Board sets the tax which we must pay on each type of media... as
recompense to the 'artists' and 'copyright holders'. The proposed charges
are outrageous increase. At present I can buy 100 CDR's for $35 CDN or .14
cents each ex tax. That will become $73 at the same .14 cents each... Oh,
BTW, I then will have to pay Provincial Sales Tax and Federal Goods and
Services Tax of 15% together, on the already tax-included total.
I understand the same thing is about to happen in
the US...
That will change things. I think lots of people
would rather then buy some re-usable CDRW's since the price/usability
ratio has changed. And similarly for DVD-/+RW's.
So, commencing Jan 1, 2003, taxes on media is Canada
will change:
The CPCC has proposed substantially higher rates for
the media levy in 2003 and asked it be applied to a larger range of media.
Below is a chart of current levy charges and the proposed new charges.
MEDIA TYPE CURRENT LEVY PROPOSED (for 2003/2004)
CD-R & CD-RW (non audio) $0.21 per CD $0.59 per
CD ($0.93 per Gigabyte)
Minidisc / CD-R Audio $0.77 per CD/Disc $1.23 per
CD/Disc
Cassette tapes (under 40 min.) no levy no levy
Cassette tapes (40 minutes+) $0.29 per tape $0.60
per tape
Flash Memory - Removable no levy 0.8¢ per Megabyte
Flash Memory - Non Removable no levy 2.1¢ per
Megabyte
Micro Hard Drives (mp3 players etc)no levy $21.00
per Gigabyte
DVD-R/RW no levy $2.27 for each disc
R. G. Newbury
Thanks
A LONG piece from Ron Unz:
Dear Friends,
Today's Boston Globe carried a short piece buried on
page B3 that might signal the most important change in American political
campaigning in one hundred years.
Some months ago, the political campaign committee
organized to defeat our proposed "English" initiative in
Massachusetts received a $100,000 check from a Philadelphia- based
philanthropy, the Shefa Fund, which they subsequently reported on their
financial disclosure statement filed earlier this month.
Since this donation was quite large---representing
nearly two-thirds of all the money raised by our opponents during that
period---and the name of the donor seemed rather odd for a political
committee, I investigated, and quickly learned that just as the name
seemed to imply, the Shefa Fund was a 501(c)3 non-profit tax-deductible
charitable trust.
Shefa is involved in supporting a wide variety of
ultra-progressive political causes, and seems to specialize in acting as a
conduit for earmarked donations, in which donors can use Shefa's tax-
deductible status to allocate their charitable giving to causes that they
find particularly worthy. http://www.shefafund.org/
Fine, I said, but since they are a 501(c)3
charitable trust, their donation to a political campaign is illegal. After
all, "everyone knows" that tax-deductible charities can't
directly contribute to political campaigns or fund advertising urging a
vote one way or the other on a candidate or issue.
All of modern American politics, and the tens of
billions of dollars each year donated to tax- deductible 501(c)3s and
non-tax-deductible 501(c)4s is built around that fundamental rule. The
most junior fundraiser in the smallest city council race knows that donors
can't take a tax-deduction on their contributions, and that co-mingling
tax- deductible charitable money and non-tax-deductible political money is
obvious tax evasion, soon leading to a pinstripe wardrobe, perhaps with
Dennis Kozlowski formerly of Tyco as your cellmate.
But sometimes what "everyone knows" just
isn't true.
As the Globe article indicates, The Shefa Fund
appears to have received an official IRS administrative opinion indicating
that they can donate their tax-deductible charitable contributions
directly to political campaigns. If this opinion stands, The Shefa Fund's
discovery of tax-deductible politics will constitute a financial
innovation amounting to a magnitude twenty earthquake in the world of
American campaigning.
By following the simple expedient of utilizing a
501(c)3 organization as a conduit (or more pejoratively, as a laundromat)
political campaign contributions of any size will immediately become
tax-deductible---and since charitable organizations can never be forced to
reveal the names of their donors---absolutely anonymous. Only the most
ultra-extreme conservatives or libertarians have previously advocated both
the elimination of campaign finance limits and campaign finance disclosure
laws. Suddenly, a small leftist foundation has made Tom Delay look like
Ralph Nader on campaign finance issues.
As one of the investigating reporters mentioned to
me, the donor of the $100,000 contribution decided to make his political
contribution through The Shefa Fund because he wanted to take a tax-
deduction on the money and also wanted to ensure that his name remained
secret. These are certainly understandable objectives, which
coincidentally apply to probably every other major donor in America, both
corporate and individual.
If this unprecedented development stands, any future
donor who does NOT use a public charity as a conduit for his campaign
donations is a complete and utter fool. I most assuredly regret that all
my previous political contributions have not been made through a
tax-deductible vehicle.
Consider the obvious implications for both the left
and the right.
Several years ago, America's largest tobacco
companies spent over thirty million dollars in an effort to pass a
California ballot initiative overturning all that state's anti-smoking
restrictions. The effort was narrowly defeated, and lost solely because
California's disclosure laws allowed the public to learn that the source
of the funding was the tobacco industry, which obviously has considerable
political baggage. If that tobacco money had instead been funneled through
one or more charities with nice-sounding names, not only would the measure
surely have passed, but the corporations involved would have effectively
received millions in federal and state tax subsidies for their political
campaign.
Apply this same reasoning to all the other major
corporations in America, especially those in disreputable areas such as
gambling, alcohol, tobacco, firearms, pornography, and industrial
pollution. Political liberals should take careful note.
So should conservatives. Most of America's largest
charitable foundations---Ford, MacArthur, Packard, Gates---are heavily
dominated by liberals, whose views on social issues are especially
troubling to the Right. Since these organizations have combined liquid
assets in the hundreds of billions of dollars and are explicitly charged
with freely spending that money to promote the policies they advocate,
they have long been a source of great fear to under-funded conservatives,
whose own foundations are negligible in size by comparison.
Suppose that the Ford Foundation suddenly discovered
that it was free to write a small check of $100 million or $200 million to
fund political campaigns aimed at enacting sweeping gun control laws in
states and cities North to South, and the MacArthur Foundation decided to
spend a similar sum to legalize gay marriage throughout the country?
Given this plausible scenario, I would expect Tom
Delay may soon start *sounding* like Ralph Nader on campaign finance
issues.
Furthermore, 501(c)3s are not only tax-deductible
and completely anonymous, but have absolutely no restrictions on the
sources of their funds. Forget those typical bogeymen of the Left and
Right--- corporations and unions---and consider foreign governments,
including potentially hostile foreign governments?
If this bizarre administrative decision by the IRS
regarding The Shefa Fund had become widely known some time ago, perhaps by
this point in the election cycle we would have seen Republican candidates
throughout America buried under an avalanche of harshly negative
television issue advertising focusing on social security and abortion
rights, but entirely funded by one or more innocuously named 501(c)3s that
had received their $500 million advertising budget via direct wire
transfer from Baghdad, or perhaps routed through Switzerland or the Cayman
Islands.
501(c)3s are under absolutely no legal requirement
to disclose the names of their donors, and generally don't even have to
file any reports at all more than once a year. By that time, the election
involved in long over.
I suspect that the world---and certainly Congress--
-may soon become very familiar with the name of the highly-innovative
Shefa Fund of Philadelphia.
Campaign finance regulations share with accounting
regulations the important distinction of being among the least interesting
and most important rules in our society. The regulatory issues raised by
this small story buried on the inside pages of the local news section are
similar to those obscure matters of revenue and expense recognition that
over the last couple of years have cost American investors some seven
trillion dollars of their savings and may even now be propelling our
country into a deep, deep recession.
Perhaps journalist will pay greater attention when
one small $100,000 check from one small leftwing organization has become a
flood of tens or hundreds of millions of similar dollars during the next
election cycle.
On more mundane matters, several pieces in yesterday
and today's editions of the major Boston papers dealt with the potential
impact of the "English" initiative on the close Gubernatorial
race between Republican Mitt Romney and Democrat Shannon O'Brien. As
articles and editorials both note, their conflicting views on that measure
actually constituted the only real point of substantive policy
disagreement during their first official debate
If so, then Democrats should be quite worried.
Another article in yesterday's Boston Globe described how a local group of
working-class Democrats---the perceived base of the state party-- -were
surprisingly divided between the two candidates. Furthermore, even the
local Democrat who remained most loyal to his party's candidate actually
agreed with her Republican opponent on the question of
"English."
This anecdotal data merely confirms the enormously
strongly and bipartisan support that "English" has consistently
registered in Massachusetts surveys, both my own and those of major media
organizations.
By some measures, Massachusetts is the most liberal
Democratic state in America. Opportunistic politicians everywhere will
surely take careful note of the election results this November, both
regarding our "English" initiative and the major candidates who
share its ballot.
Sincerely,
Ron Unz, Chairman English for the Children http://www.onenation.org/column.cfm
============
"Bilingual foes fault donation" Anand
Vaishnav, Boston Globe Thursday, September 26, 2002
Leaders of a ballot initiative to end bilingual
education in Massachusetts filed a complaint against their opponents
yesterday, claiming that the pro-bilingual campaign received an illegal
donation from a Philadelphia nonprofit.
The complaint with the Office of Campaign and
Political Finance states that the Committee for Fairness to Children and
Teachers, or FACT, reported a donation of $100,000 from The Shefa Fund, a
Jewish philanthropic foundation. The complaint charges that the donation
is illegal because the fund is a 501(c)(3) charitable foundation that is
prohibited by federal tax codes from donating to political causes.
''If this precedent is allowed to stand, we would
expect millions of dollars in anonymous tax- deductible contributions to
henceforth flow into all future Massachusetts political campaigns,'' said
Lincoln Tamayo, head of English for the Children of Massachusetts, which
filed the complaint.
But an Internal Revenue Service spokeswoman said the
contribution appears to be legal. The law forbids nonprofits like The
Shefa Fund from donating to political candidates, but they can give money
for lobbying purposes or political campaigns involved in a referendum like
Question 2, the bilingual ballot question.
<snip>
TOP
CURRENT
VIEW |
