| Monday
March 15, 2004 As usual
there was mail last weekend. Begin with
that...
Subject: MPAA writes the CA AG's
opinion for them
I guess its lucky so many people are clueless about
the zillions of features in Word and how to use them...
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,62665,00.html?tw=newsletter_topstories_html
-- John Harlow, President BravePoint
Oops!
=================
Subject: essay on Islam
Dear Dr. Pournelle,
I have written you about Islam and my observations in
Saudi Arabia. I stand by my observations, but the essay on Islam at
http://www.hissyfit.com/hissyfits/2001_10_02.shtml by Deborah
Birkett is much better than than anything my limited experience and
education could provide.
regards,
William L. Jones
wljones (at) dallas.net
Well, it's an exposition on formal
religion, and good as apologetics, but as far as I read, at least, it
doesn't seem to cover the important points about jihad and undoing the
reconquista. In particular there's nothing about forced conversions and
tribute.
It's a respectable attempt to make an
enlightenment religion out of Islam, and I am sure that it covers most of
the Muslims who live in the US. Most. Not all. It isn't so applicable to
Tehran and it's not at all applicable to Wahabbi sects. And the Wahabbi's
are powerful because they have lots of money and considerable access to
government assets.
===================
It's another world ... but is it our
10th planet?
15 March 2004
SCIENTISTS have found a new world orbiting the solar system – more
than 3 billion kilometres further away from the Sun than Pluto and 40 years
away from Earth in a space shuttle.
The full story is available at:
http://theaustralian.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,8968352%255E29098,00.html
Jim Woosley
===========================
Dr. Pournelle:
This site comments upon the Attorney General's staff
proposal to add to the Patriot act. It contains links to sites which have
the full text. The full text is a biggish .pdf file.
http://www.public-i.org/dtaweb/report.asp?ReportID=502&L1=10&L2=10&L3=0&L4=0&L5=0
Mark Thompson jomath # mctcnet.net
===============================
I received this
from a dozen people:
Jerry
A glimpse of our future? The rich and the poor and few
in between:
From
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56562-2004Mar13.html
In New York City, Fewer Find They Can Make It
By Michael Powell
NEW YORK -- Michael Bloomberg, this city's
billionaire mayor, looks at Manhattan's glittering economy and all but
chortles. "Jobs are coming back to the Big Apple," he said recently. "Our
future has never looked brighter."
The Wall Street bull is snorting. Investment
bankers arm-wrestle for a $18 million Park Avenue apartment. Slots at
prestigious private kindergartens retail for $26,000. Lines trail out of the
latest, hot restaurants, and black limos play bumper car in Tribeca.
"New York," a recent newspaper article
proclaims, "it's HOT."
Except that a closer look at this largest of
U.S. cities reveals much that's not so hot. New York's unemployment rate
jumped in January from 8.0 to 8.4 percent, the worst performance among the
nation's top 20 cities. It has lost 230,000 jobs in the past three years.
Demand for emergency food has risen 46 percent over the past three years,
and 900,000 New Yorkers receive food stamps. Inflation, foreclosures,
evictions and personal bankruptcies are rising sharply. Fifty percent of the
city's black males no longer are employed.
Ed Hume
Democracy works if and only if there
is a middle class to rule, and it is reasonably satisfied with the
distribution of the goods of fortune. It is unstable in times of economic
instability, and the government must either find ways to ameliorate the
instabilities or watch the people try to find measures for themselves.
Encouraging people to believe in the power of government usually results in
unreasonable expectations of the fruits of winning elections, followed by
more schemes to vote benefits on the masses while imposing taxes only on the
few. That experiment has been run many times in history.
"There never was a democracy that did
not commit suicide."
The Framers' remedy was division of
power between Federal government and the States, lowering the expectations
from capturing control of the central government, while limiting the extent
to which State schemes affected the country as a whole and thus giving some
room for experiments.
The Warren Court, by removing such
things as residency requirements for state largess, and changing the very
nature of State legislatures, destroyed this balance. We have sown the wind.
Earl Warren sowed the wind.
===========================
Subject: Pavarotti's last
hurrah
Hi Dr P.,
Given your love of opera, you probably already know
this, but Pavarotti's last opera (
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,8965404%255E663,00.html
)
was the lead entertainment story on Google news just
now.
<snip> "I think it's time," he said.
"Let's say that in the last 10 years there are
a lot of performances that are not super. They are very good -- like many
other tenors would have liked to do -- but still, they are not super."
Bad knees and hips have forced stagings to be
changed; he often sits on chairs and hides cups of water on sets. Reviewers
of weekend performances said he was nearly immobile.
Pavarotti has sung 379 times at the Met, 140
times at Milan's La Scala, 100 times at London's Royal Opera, 76 each with
the Lyric Opera of Chicago and the San Francisco Opera, 48 times at the
Opera de Paris and 45 times at the Vienna State Opera. He's also performed
31 Three Tenors concerts with Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras.~ AP <snip>
I hadn't realized that he had mobility problems of
late. I guess my opera experiences are limited to older performances that
show up on PBS every now and then.
cheers -Josh
It has been many years since my wife
tracked down Pavarotti's house in Modina and made me drive here there so she
could have her picture taking knocking on his gate. He was just beginning to
be well known then.
He has had a great run.
============================
On the Spanish
Election
Apparently the Spanish people decided the
incumbent party was too dumb to deal with the terrorist problem. On the
other hand, I'm now a good deal more optimistic about our ability to deal
with the perps. Whoever is planning these things is brilliant--he can
obviously outthink most security people--but has a complete tin ear for
politics (sounds like some hackers). There can't be very many people in that
category, and if we can catch him, it will probably shut things down. -
- Harry Erwin, PhD
"If you can't be a good example,
then you'll just have to be a horrible warning." (Catherine
Indeed.
Jerry,
The voters in Spain have sent the message that
terrorism works. The belief that the terrible bomb attack was incited by
participation with the United States in Iraq persuaded Spanish voters to do
exactly what the terrorists associated with Al Quaeda wanted. Now all the
winning Socialists have to do to complete this victory for terrorists is to
withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq.
Bob Delaney
=====
There's been a lot of to-ing and fro-ing over the past
24 hours in the press and on the BBs I frequent about what it all means. I
can't get over the thought that the Spanish people, when shown the whip,
couldn't be too quick to shove their head through the yoke. Your thoughts?
Tony Evans
We will see.
====
Dear Jerry:
Recent events in Spain bring to mind something that
Brian Jenkins, the RAND Corporation terrorism expert said about terrorism
being a form of theatre. The idea is to horrify the audience, to scare them,
but there's a point where it becomes too much and revulsion turns to rage.
Thus it is in Spain and so it was here after 9/11. The slaughter of
innocents does not advance your cause, but just pisses people off.
Little wonder ETA was quick to disavow the action. As
for the jihadists, they don't care if we get mad at them. My friend Jim
McDonogh put it best: You cannot reason with them, you cannot accommodate
them without adopting their world view, and you ignore them at your peril.
In the end, the only thing left is to hunt them down and kill them. This is
why I said the war will last a hundred years or more.
Seeing some of the training the replacement National
Guard troops are going through, as seen on television news, it's obvious
that this will be our solution. Armor and artillery units are being
converted to the kind of constabulary force that CBO said would be needed to
win in Iraq.
I would look for Spain to offer a division or so of
troops for Afghanistan and/or Iraq. Despite the Bush Administration's
unerring ability to offend our friends and muck up our alliances, events
like Madrid send a message. No one is safe. That being the case, other
nations will begin to get on board. I don't want an empire either, but I'm
still reading Mahan and our situation seems somewhat like that of the Brits
after the War of Spanish Succession. They got the job because everyone else
was too poor and too tired to compete.
The Problem is that we're pushing the envelope of our
capabilities. Expanding Special Ops sounds good on paper. The problem is
that people who can do that are very rare and people who want to do it as a
career rarer still. It goes beyond ordinary soldiering by an order of
magnitude, even in the American Army where every General wears airborne
wings and a Ranger tab. (An unofficial rite of passage, airborne training.
In the 195o's a friend of my father's, a 33 year old doctor went for the
training because he decided he wanted to be a general. Ultimately he was.
Two stars.)
I think the gentleman who referred to a division was
including the wounded, which now number close to three thousand, as well as
the dead.
Speaking of Generals, did no one take the true meaning
of Clark's candidacy? Or that pointed remark to Kerry, "Permission to come
aboard , Sir. The Army is here!" Clark may not be universally loved, but he
is a member of that tribe.
On another matter, Business Week does not blame the
lack of jobs on outsourcing , which they say accounts for "only" 300,000
positions, but rather our superior productivity. Having covered industry
since the days that numerically controlled machines were introduced, I have
to admit they may have something there, but I also think that there is a lot
of cost cutting that just goes too far. Try to find a retail clerk at a
store these days. Home Depot now has a self checkout counter. That increases
productivity only by imposing on the customer to do the work of the clerk.
This is progress?
Sincerely, Francis Hamit
But the Spanish Election may change
that?
=========================
Dr. Pournelle,
Since none of your other correspondents seem have
deemed it worthy of comment, I will just say that this is the first time I
have heard of Carbon Dioxide being blamed as a cause of Ozone Layer
depletion.
Perhaps Mr. Sirota could
enlighten us as to the chemistry behind his assertion? As a chemist
myself, I suspect there isn't any.
Also, last I checked, the ozone "hole" was reducing,
not increasing, but then - what do observations have to do with any of this?
Best regards,
Andrew Duffin
===========================
I have seen a number of e-mails lately confirming
shipment or offering to sell things that are obviously illegal (childporn,
heroin, stolen credit card numbers). Its my understanding that there are
rival groups of spammers who are in league with the virus-writers that are
turning unprotected PCs in to spam relays.
Such scum send out such illegal offers with addresses
or links pointing to websites controlled by somebody they don't like to get
them in trouble. And there may be retaliation resulting in another round of
this garbage. Look for the term "Joe job" on Google.
--Jim
Aha. Thanks.
======================
Subject: Stem cells as baldness
cure?
I suspect this will make some of the furor over stem
cell research die down.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4526985/
--Gary
I bet!
==================
Subject: The Official Scorecard
for Expensive Hardware Lobbing
http://www.bio.aps.anl.gov/~dgore/fun/scorecards.html
An interesting view of the history of space probes.
--Gary Pavek
Thanks!
==============================
Subject: Contradictions of Empire.
After hearing the constant refrain about how it was
such a Good Thing that we were using Iraq as a honeypot to draw in foreign
terrorists, allowing us to fight them in the streets of Baghdad rather than
the streets of New York, this news about tightening up Iraq's
border-controls doesn't seem to make much sense:
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040314-121102-3803r.htm
I mean, wouldn't it be ideal if the borders of Iraq
were completely unpoliced, the better to allow in the foreign terrorists in
so that we can kill them?
Or is the oft-cited 'honeypot' scenario merely an
after-the-fact attempt to turn lemons into lemonade?
------------------------- Roland Dobbins
Well I certainly have my theories on
the subject. Thanks
=======================
Dr Pournelle,
Crusading
“Why is [expelling all Muslims from Christian territories] not a
possibility?”
It’s got nothing to do with free speech. Here’s three reasons why: -
(1) Because it’s an excellent way to make sure you freeze in the dark for a
few decades while sufficient alternative sources of energy that are not
Middle East dependent are brought on-stream.
(2) Their suicide bombers, far more numerous and far more determined, will
get through anyway.
(3) Something like this has already been tried by Israel. Observe the
result.
Jim Mangles
Well, I said it wasn't a possibility
because I thought that obvious. But your specific points are not on target.
(1) If we had a war that closed the sea lanes would would not freeze in the
dark and we would not all die. We would lose a lot of luxuries, and have to
go back to acting as if we were at war. "Use it up. Wear it out. Make it do,
or do without." Some of us remember World War II. And lived.
(2) Not proven, and not likely. The
number of non-Muslim suicide bombers who would get past serious efforts to
control the borders is not so large as all that.
(3) Israel has NOT tried it. They have
not expelled their internal Arab population, nor have they really sealed
their borders, and the placement of the fence shows they are not serious
about that since including all the screwy settlements isn't the way to
protect the bulk of the population.
Understand, I am not advocating a
policy of expelling all Muslims from the US. I do wonder if it will not
ultimately be a cost of Empire.
=============================
Subject: Next war - North Korea?
I sort of wish we'd finish Iraq, first:
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2
&cid=1521&u=/afp/20040312/pl_afp
/us_nkorea_nuclear_040312181932&printer=1
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/
2004/03/13/MNG905K1BC1.DTL
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/
national/164693_draft13.html
---------------------------- Roland Dobbins
Where's the sport in that?
=============================
Subject: Overclocking the brain
Pre-natal doses of choline may improve brain function.
Literal overclocking?
http://www.scienceblog.com/community/article2464.html
I wonder what the in utero proportions of choline are
across various subgroups (e.g. do Ashkenazi and Asian mothers have more than
other subgroups?)?
Steve Setzer
No idea. But it is all intriguing...
=================
jerry, somthing a bit more
entertaining,
http://www.merzo.net/index.html
its a site that compares the relative sizes of SF
ships to each other, and to contemorary objects...
usless, but fun.....
(according to this site, the startrek Enterprise, is
only about as long as the Eiffel tower is tall....)
moose hunter
Cool!
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