| Thursday,
October 5, 2000 I woke up feeling much worse, and I am not
sure why. But I think it's temporary. It has that 'this will pass' feel to
it. Sure don't have a lot of energy. Roberta is off being a grandmother so
I am batching it. Niven is due shortly for a hike. I will go with him: it
will either cure me or put me to bed and have done with it.
Playing with gamma for Everquest isn't easy. On the Voodoo 5 board any
gamma change can be applied but when I open Everquest immediately the
screen looks like an old TV with horizontal bars running across it that
can't be got rid of without hardware reset of the system. I need to
examine ways to manipulate that board I think. Slow it down perhaps.
Fooling with gamma is the key to seeing in the dark in Everquest but it
isn't easy, and Everquest goes to prodigious lengths to keep you from
getting to the desktop and settings while the game is up. I suppose that
has to do with hacking prevention, and it will work for casual users;
dedicated hacker types laugh at that kind of thing since there are so many
ways around it. I haven't bothered. But it would be nice if there were
some gamma settings that worked within the silly game. I fear I am
becoming bored with Everquest, which is a pity; there are just too many
annoying little details to keep track of.
Column continues, and with luck I'll finish it tonight. Painting on the
house is finished. Paint fumes haven't helped I think.
I am not sure what all this is in aid of, but I do seem to have won the
right to display those logos. To be one of the Seven Wonders (when there
is one a day) isn't quite up there with building a pyramid. Or at least
not with building a BIG pyramid.
My thanks for the CoDominium emblem. Perhaps it needs dusting off
again.
These United States of America seem to mind everyone's business but our
own. We are intervening in the Israeli conflict, the Serbian elections --
one hopes our efforts there will have a better outcome than out
intervention in Haiti, but pardon my skepticism. Haiti is closer to home
and our interventions there have done little: by now we'd probably welcome
a strong man who could keep order. Meanwhile we have impoverished not only
Serbia but the whole Lower Danube, converted a bunch of combat soldiers
into cynics who deploy an entire combat battalion in a vain effort to
protect a Serbian wedding from Albanian insurgents, and now intend to
unseat the government in Belgrade although in aid of what no one has told
me. The DC school system is the worst in the nation and probably in the
hemisphere so that gives Washington a clear mandate to fix everyone else's
schools, presumably so the DC system will look better in comparison?
Whatever happened to the "|shining example", the beacon, the
city on a hill, the exemplar? We no longer practice self government at
home, and we are certain we can help everyone else all over the world.
And while we expand our commitments we reduce the means to fulfill
them. Walter Lippman a very long time ago pointed out that foreign policy
commitments were like checks on the bank account of our military power. If
you are going to act like an Empire you must arm like an Empire. An
administration that drains the armed forces training budgets to meet
operations commitments all over the world -- we do that, and many troops
fire their weapons in training once a year only if they are very lucky
-- and refuses to deploy any kind of ballistic missile defenses
should be very careful about making new enemies. I fear we make enemies,
and raise commitments, without any real understanding that the costs may
come due any time now.
If you want to run the world you had better have a strategy for doing
so. Rome for a while managed to do it through client states: Roman Legions
could defeat any of the clients, and the clients were sent to do that
actual work of intervention and expansion. That works only for so long:
eventually the Empire depended on the Huns, and the Huns were more than a
match for the Legions. That meant bringing in others, Goths and Franks, to
keep the Huns in check. Aetius defeated the Huns, but his Emperor became
jealous of him and had him assassinated: it was said that the Emperor had
cut off his right hand with his left. And Aetius's old bodyguard
eventually got close enough to the Emperor to avenge his dead master. But
nothing of that sort can ever happen in this modern world. And I do ramble
instead of working on the column.
In the "See, I told you so" department:
"Since the Department of Justice
investigation began, Microsoft has jumped feet first into the Washington
big-money game, purchasing influence and access, and bringing into this
arena the same zeal it brought to its software business," Common
Cause President Scott Harshbarger said. "The software giant has
become a soft-money giant." http://www.commoncause.org/publications/sept00/092500.htm
Clark E. Myers e-mail at: ClarkEMyers@msn.com
I wouldn't Spam filter you!
Dr. Pournelle:
"I Told You So" indeed!
The Common Cause article is yet another
confirmation of your earlier thesis that the Microsoft anti-trust case was
not about anti-trust at all, but about the government asserting its power
over a company that was not playing the "game." Bill Gates is in
the same position as the man who has been mugged once too often, and is
now buying the biggest gun he can carry. If Common Cause or some other
organization eventually complains about the financial weight that Gates
throws around Washington, I hope they remember that he did it in
self-defense.
Tom Brosz
And that I think says it all.
TOP
|
CLICK HERE for
a Special Request. 
