| Saturday,
Dr. Pournelle,
After reading this article:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/dhenninger/?id=110004958
describing the Marine Corps desire to build alternative news sources for the
Iraqi people I checked out the web page
http://www.spiritofamerica.net/req_12/request.html which describes
in more detail what the project is about. What convinced me to make a
donation was the tag line at the end of the WSJ article referring to “the
Marines' now-famous saying: "No better friend, no worse enemy."
After the fact, I decided to look at efforts that
Spirit of America had funded earlier, and I came up with this page:
http://www.spiritofamerica.net/req_2/request.htm describing the
response to a request by Lt. Col. David Couvillon, a name I remembered from
his postings on your web site.
It is a testament to what makes our nation great that
we can still produce soldiers who after signing up to risk and suffer life
and limb to defend our country decide to ask for money not for themselves,
but to make a better life for the civilians in Iraq.
Ken Jancaitis
Agreed. I would not have sent them, but we did send
them; and we owe them whatever we can do to make their mission a success.
===========================
Subject: FW: British School of User Interface
http://www.relisoft.com/science/UI/index.htm
Tracy Walters
Heh.
===================
Spam report
Jerry
In the week ending at 8:45 EDT this morning, I
received 5499 pieces of spam and 106 pieces of legitimate e-mail. That's a
rate of 1.9% legit. Last fall I received 105 pieces of legit e-mail in one
week, but only 2829 pieces of spam, for a rate of 3.6% legit. Clearly, it's
getting worse.
Ed Hume
I continue to hold the view first put forth by Eric
Pobirs: nothing will be done about spam until something very physical, very
painful, and very public happens to a significant number of spammers.
Nothing else will deter them.
==========================
A letter from an enlisted man
in Iraq:
First word from Sgt. T in Iraq:
I am alive and well in Baghdad, Iraq. We have been
here since the 9th and are just getting used to our new surroundings right
now. We will be busy soon, but I don't know exactly what kind of information
I can discuss over e-mail, so I will be very limited in details. We drove up
from Kuwait on the 7th and got to see a lot of both countries. Though the
majority of it was open desert and rolling wadis [streambed in southwest
Asia that remains dry except during the rainy season], the sights were
fairly impressive none the less. The capital is like no city I have ever
encountered in my life. Filthy beyond belief. Riyadh [he spent an overseas
tour in Saudi Arabia] looked like Toronto in comparison.
I don't have a lot of e-mail use right now and mail is
somewhat slow, but I will try to write when I can. They shut down the e-mail
and phones whenever there is a KIA until the families are notified. We are
still at war and there is a lot of work to do, however I am not worried,
though sometimes I know that I should be.
I know what I am doing and I believe in what we are
doing, and I have other lives to think of than my own--I'm also loaded for
bear. You name the weapon and I probably have at least one kicking around so
we are at least ready for anything.
So far the enemy is a lousy shot and not much of an
engineer either. I have to get going but let everyone know that I am doing
fine.
I don't know what is being reported in the news about
this place but most of the people seem to like us being here. There are a
lot of countries involved in this coalition and there seems to be only a
small minority of people who think that they have a chance of fighting us.
Please ask any questions as I don't really know what people want to hear
about. Anyway, take care--
= And a letter from an officer to his father, a
retired Marine officer:
Dad,
Things have been busy here. You know I can't say much
about it.
However, I do know two things. One, POTUS (President
of the United States) has given us the green light to do whatever we needed
to do to win this thing so we have that going for us. Two, and my opinion
only, this battle is going to have far reaching effects on not only the war
here in Iraq but in the overall war on terrorism. We have to be very precise
in our application of combat power. We cannot kill a lot of innocent folks
(though they are few and far between in Fallujah).
There will be no shock and awe. There will be plenty
of bloodshed at the lowest levels. This battle is the Marine Corps' Belleau
Wood for this war. 2/1 and 1/5 will be leading the way. We have to find a
way to kill the bad guys only. The Fallujahans are fired up and ready for a
fight (or so they think). A lot of terrorists and foreign fighters are holed
up in Fallujah. It has been a sanctuary for them. If they have not left town
they are going to die. I'm hoping they stay and fight.
This way we won't have to track them down one by one.
This battle is going to be talked about for a long
time. The Marine Corps will either reaffirm its place in history as one of
the greatest fighting organizations in the world or we will die trying. The
Marines are fired up. I'm nervous for them though because I know how much is
riding on this fight (the war in Iraq, the view of the war at home, the
length of the war on terror and the reputation of the Marine Corps to name a
few). However, every time I've been nervous during my career about the
outcome of events when young Marines were involved they have ALWAYS exceeded
my expectations. I'm praying this is one of those times.
I am reminded of Pat Frank's account of the Marine
at Chosun. "They would fight, and they were dangerous."
========================
Subject: Post-Traumatic Slave Disorder
The latest theory from a Professor of Social Work at
Portland State University.
S.
http://www.gazetteextra.com/raceconference030504.asp
Ain't social "science" wonderful?
Subj: Racial stress / Post-Traumatic Slave Disorder
The original link your correspondent sent -- http://www.gazetteextra.com/raceconference030504.asp
-- throws a "404 Not Found".
Looks like gazetteextra.com flushes articles after
about a month.
Fortunately (or unfortunately), Google cached a copy
at
http://216.239.41.104/custom?
q=cache:UtOCdQmyovkJ:www.gazetteextra.com/
raceconference030504.asp+race&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
Scholar examines racial stress in America | The
Janesville Gazette | Janesville, Wisconsin, USA
I don't know whether the cached copy is volatile; I
found it by using the "search" box at the upper left of gazetteextra.com on
"racial stress", which invoked Google.
The implications of the combination of (a) flushing by
the original publisher and (b) caching by Google are at least as interesting
as the content of the article, I think.
How long will it be, before someone combines this "a
black person inescapably has a low quality of life" with Professor Peter
Singer's "a baby with predictably low quality of life is a candidate for
infanticide" and concludes ... ?
"Abolition of Man" indeed! 8-(
Rod Montgomery==monty@sprintmail.com
We do live in interesting times.
=====================
And I missed this one when it first came:
Dr. Jerry,
This is very nice summary of Conrad Black's...career,
which matches what I've seen and read from the Telegraph and the National
Post for the last coupla years.
ash ['Whacked.']
http://www.iht.com/articles/510312.html
Conrad Black: A crusading neocon among English
Tories
Geoffrey Wheatcroft IHT
Monday, March 15, 2004 BATH, England With every
day, the career of Conrad Black seems more like something from a lurid
Victorian novel. An adventurer arrives from the colonies, buys London
newspapers, becomes a peer, cuts a dash. His colorful wife flaunts her
$1,000 shoes and $75,000 dresses, while telling interviewers, superfluously
(and hubristically, as it proves), "I have an extravagance that knows no
bounds."
Investors in New York start wondering just how
that extravagance was paid for, and turn nasty. With his financial position
crumbling, Lord Black of Crossharbour tries to sell his papers behind the
backs of that "bunch of self-righteous hypocrites and ingrates," while
adding, in words a novelist might have hesitated to attribute even to the
most eccentric character, "I'm not prepared to re-enact the French
Revolutionary renunciation of the rights of nobility."
But a judge in Delaware rules against him,
calling him "cunning and calculated ... evasive and unreliable." In the
latest and cruelest blow, Black is unceremoniously kicked off the board of
his Telegraph papers in London. As the novelist might say, our hero's
fortunes have sunk very low.
At such a moment, it is worth recording that
Conrad Black was not a bad newspaper proprietor. He may have harangued his
editors with midnight calls, and written weird letters denouncing
journalists in his own papers, but he didn't censor those writers, and the
editorial policy of his papers was not simply tailored to his corporate
financial interests.
And yet there is a fascinating and important
political sub-plot to this story. Black's ambition was to become the
godfather of neoconservatism. Anyone who wants to know the names of the
neocon elite has only to look at the masthead of his Washington magazine The
National Interest. Luminaries such as Henry Kissinger and Richard Perle were
recruited onto his boards and handsomely rewarded, even if they seem to have
taken their fiduciary duties somewhat lightly.
In his London papers, Black promoted a group of
writers whose devotion to American power was all the stronger because they
belong to that curious category, self-hating Canadians. Black himself, his
wife Barbara Amiel, David Frum, and Mark Steyn all loathe their native
country, evidently under the impression that Canada is on the brink of
Bolshevism because it has a national health service.
It was Frum who, as President George W. Bush's
speechwriter, coined the phrase "axis of evil," which Europeans thought a
dangerous and absurd way to describe Iraq, Iran and North Korea (evil, yes;
axis, no). Having tried, at the time of President Bill Clinton's travails,
to get into the Guinness Book of Records for the number of dirty jokes any
journalist could print, Steyn insisted that Bush would win a landslide
victory in the presidential election, and now insists that "George Bush is
winning at home and abroad." Undaunted by earlier unhappy predictions, he
also said last December that Osama bin Laden "will continue to be dead
throughout 2004."
But the most fascinating of the group is Lady
Black of Crossharbour, otherwise known as Barbara Amiel. With her privileged
position at the Daily Telegraph, she has been able to say the unsayable, and
thus give us a glimpse of the ideology in raw form. Even the headlines of
her columns make a kind of neocon prose poem:
"The UN is fast becoming a threat to world
peace"; "Why protecting the peace will make a mockery of justice"; "No more
Mr Nice Guy: the lesson America has learnt"; "The BBC has become an open
opponent of America's policies"; "Islamists overplay their hands but London
salons don't see it"; "British journalists just don't understand the
American way."
Where the standard neoconservative line is
aggressively optimistic - Israel is here to stay, and don't forget it -
Amiel is revealingly different. While lamenting that "it is too late to kill
Arafat," she suggests that "this conflict in the Middle East is not amenable
to a peaceful solution and can only be solved by the total victory of one
side."
"This means the Arabs annihilating the Israelis
or the Israelis being forced to use every means, not excluding nuclear
power, to defend themselves." Or, still more bleakly: "Sharon or the next
Israeli leader might conclude that the dream of an Israeli homeland is
finished and the Israelis will not get out alive."
"If so," she continued, "he might further
conclude that if we Jews cannot have the sliver of land for which we never
wished to hurt anyone, if we must be pushed into the sea either literally or
by demographics and attrition, we owe it to the memory of our forefathers to
extract the highest price and not to go alone. After all, some ancient Asian
cultures believed that whomever they killed would be their servant in the
next world."
Apart from anyone else, Israelis might raise
their eyebrows at such arcane urgings to massacre and self-immolation, all
delivered from the front line of Palm Beach.
Whether or not she realizes it, her strange
worldview is simply not shared by most readers of The Daily Telegraph, an
old-fashioned Conservative (rather than neoconservative) paper. Most British
people broadly support the United Nations, and the recent campaign against
the BBC by Prime Minister Tony Blair's former press aide Alastair Campbell
was followed by opinion polls in which, on the question of the government's
dossier on arms of mass destruction, three times as many voters said that
they believed the BBC as believed the government.
Although England is not, as Amiel says in her
scolding way, awash with hatred of all things American, it is true that Bush
arouses mixed feelings here, and not only on the left. When he paid his
state visit to London last year, the visit was more unpopular with Tories
than with Labor voters.
While the Conservative leadership supported the
Iraq war, many ordinary Tories did not. Boris Johnson, a Tory member of
Parliament who is also editor of Black's weekly magazine The Spectator, has
said that a majority of members of the party committee in his constituency
were opposed to the war, and another Tory legislator says privately that his
party members were two-to-one against.
The truth is that the zealous brand of North
American neoconservatism is quite at odds with traditional English Toryism,
which is stolid, pragmatic, skeptical and profoundly nonideological. That
could explain why the British indeed don't understand "the American way" as
interpreted by Washington - and why they increasingly resent Blair's policy
of following the American lead at all times. Along with the nostrums of Lord
Black's coterie, this may yet prove to be a transient episode in British
political and journalistic history.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft's books include "The
Controversy of Zion" and "Le Tour: A History of the Tour de France."
Roland points out that Mark Steyn is not David Frum.
I can think of a few good things to say about Steyn.
And of course the above piece is polemical. Still,
it is worth noting. Wheatcroft is much closer to the pulse of the Old Tories
than many; and of course Frum has read all of the old American Conservatives
out of the conservative movement entirely.
I am not one who says there was no good to come of
the invasion of Iraq. I would not have advised it. Entanglements in the
Middle East are less productive than investments in energy. I would rather
have 40 new nuclear power plants than control of Baghdad. But this much
remains: a tyrant is deposed, and the lesson should be plain to every
country contemplating harboring our enemies.
I'll comment on the WMD another time. Suffice it to
say that every member of the Clinton government establishment believed in
2000 that Saddam had them, and that he was hell bent on obtaining a nuclear
capability; and everyone seems agreed that given fissionables he could had
had a nuclear weapon in 6 months to a year. Fissionables aren't as common on
the international market as they were in the days just after the collapse of
the USSR, and the Company hasn't bought any for a couple of years to the
best of my knowledge; but with the Oil for Food program putting money in
Saddam's pockets, he could afford to bid a lot, and we know that at least
some components of nukes were for sale to the highest bidders from people
who have nuclear weapons...
Subject: Death of a true Roman.
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=427742004
-- Roland Dobbins
===========
Global Warming, Cooling, and Ice
Ages:
Subject: iron - global iceage?
http://www.mlml.calstate.edu/news/newsdetail.php?id=34
-- Chris C
"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside
of a dog it's too dark to read." Groucho Marx
Shades of Fallen Angels. It was our thesis in
that book that we are due for an ice age and the trick will be to prevent
it...
==========================
In 1981 the Reagan Administration sought to "unleash"
the CIA from Church/Pike/FISA/Turner. E.O. 12333 (December 1981) codified
this new approach.
And as Casey learned, the dog did not hunt.
Bureaucracies and org charts are people. Once an
organization's culture and elan are destroyed rebuilding from within is
often impossible. (Absent a real and non-American style purge). Hence the
Enterprise.
People view Casey differently. To me he is an American
hero. Regardless, the overall lesson remains for today.
_____
Angelo and others wanted to green field it all in 1980
during the transition and start over. He was ideological. Was he perhaps
right for the wrong reasons? What has America really learned in 24 years?
David
They should have made Possony DCI in 1980. That
would have accomplished something. And see
next week about NASA
Dear Dr. Pournelle;
Thank you for a cogent and insightful commentary on
one of the questions facing us concerning our 'adventure' in Iraq.
Your consistency in trying to remind us that there is
more at stake than the simplistic statements made by either the press, the
current administration or their opponents is refreshing. It's unfortunate
that few in positions of authority are listening.
I also appreciate your efforts to remind us that our
country was constituted as a republic. Thank you, though it may seem you are
shouting into the wind, some still hear.
Sincerely,
Dennis C. O'Neil Earth is too fragile a basket in
which to put all our eggs. -- Robert A. Heinlein
Thank you. I know some listen, particularly in the
Pentagon. And the stakes are very high.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/military/20040416-9999-7m16zinni.html
Warnings ignored, says retired Marine By Rick
Rogers UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER April 16, 2004
Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni wondered aloud
yesterday how Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld could be caught off guard by
the chaos in Iraq that has killed nearly 100 Americans in recent weeks and
led to his announcement that 20,000 U.S. troops would be staying there
instead of returning home as planned.
"I'm surprised that he is surprised because there was
a lot of us who were telling him that it was going to be thus," said Zinni,
a Marine for 39 years and the former commander of the U.S. Central Command.
"Anyone could know the problems they were going to see. How could they not?"
At a Pentagon news briefing yesterday, Rumsfeld said
he could not have estimated how many troops would be killed in the past
week.
Zinni made his comments during an interview with The
San Diego Union-Tribune before giving a speech last night at the University
of San Diego's Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice as part of its
distinguished lecturer series.
For years Zinni said he cautioned U.S. officials that
an Iraq without Saddam Hussein would likely be more dangerous to U.S.
interests than one with him because of the ethnic and religious clashes that
would be unleashed.
"I think that some heads should roll over Iraq," Zinni
said. "I think the president got some bad advice."
Known as the "Warrior Diplomat," Zinni is not a peace
activist by nature or training, having led troops in Vietnam, commanded
rescue operations in Somalia and directed strikes against Iraq and al Qaeda.
He once commanded the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force
at Camp Pendleton.
===================
Subject: A cautionary tale.
http://www.cio.com/archive/041504/wireless.html
--- Roland Dobbins
It's more than that, actually. Thanks.
====
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