| Friday,
April 27, 2001
SFWA meets in Los Angeles today, and I have dinner with my agent at
Larry Niven's house tonight, Larry being unable to get out to go to the
meetings and stuff.
Windows XP continues to do some weird things but most are fixable. I
have a problem with finding things. Like the printers. It's all there but
a search on HELP for "Install a network printer" produces
weirdness and not information, and a search on 'printer' trundles for five
minutes with no results. I presume all those "features" will be
reported. And having said that, I also have to say that I could and likely
will grow used to XP; I think I am going to like it. We will see.
I have given Alex's letter on
making movies a page in reports; it's worth keeping around.
I continue to experiment with FrontPage 2000 and its reports. One
problem is simple: anything linked only through Current View is not going
to show as linked at all! This is because current view can't be a
permanent internal link. It's instead an external link, http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/currentview.html
since all references to currentview.html get changed each week to the
appropriate numbered view file. If there is a way to refer to
currentview.html as an internal reference without that being changed
each time I do the weekly update I don't know it.
The funeral of the missionaries shot down by the Peruvian Air Force
with CIA assistance is today. The incident shows one of the prices of the
drug war. Hey. It's war. Get used to it. War is hell, and "drug
war" is precisely the right label. Whether the Constitution
contemplated such is a different story. It took the XVIII Article of Amendment
to make the Volstead Act, which made alcohol a federal matter,
Constitutional. That was repealed after such accomplishments as
establishing organized crime and a federal enforcement Bureaucracy the
BATF as a kind of internal constabulary.
Note that the BATF didn't go away or even lay off anyone when Repeal
came; it merely found other things to do. One presumes that regrettable
incidents , like shooting mothers and burning people alive, were not in
the intended charter, but once again, if you have a police force with no
political responsibilities to the people policed, such things are
inevitable. For all the defects of local sheriff and police chief they
have to take heat from local political authorities; imagine Waco if the
local sheriff were in charge.
When you federalize a crime you invite federal policing. That will
inevitably lead to events that would not happen if there were local
political responsibility. Perhaps sometimes you will like them and
sometimes not; but that is the nature of the beast. Get used to it.
Wednesday's International Herald Tribune carried a story: the US
Supreme Court ruled that while a local Texas officer, Bart Turek of Lago
Vista, arrested a young mother and handcuffed her on the charge of not
having seat belts fastened, he was within his discretion and there was no
federal violation. In the words of Mr. Justice Souter, "common sense
says that should almost certainly have buckled up as a condition of
driving off with a citation. In her case, the physical incidents of arrest
were merely gratuitous humiliations imposed by a police officer who was
exercising extremely poor judgment." In front of her children Ms.
Atwater was taken to jail in chains, booked, locked in a cell, and finally
released on $300 bond. The case was later disposed of with a $50 fine.
But if Lago Vista chooses to employ Officer Bart Turek, then that is
Lago Vista's business; my guess is that the political authorities of Lago
Vista have ways of sending Officer Bart Turek to duties more commensurate
with his skills. We can think of some. It should not have been a federal
matter and it should not have got to the Supreme Court, and by
federalizing this we have once again moved toward imperialism. But you all
knew that.
Anyone live in Lago Vista? I'd be curious as to what Officer Bart Turek
is doing now that the US Supreme Court has vindicated him as being only a
man with extremely poor judgment but not acting ultra vires....
Ideas and actions have consequences. Drug wars are federal. Shall we
have federal enforcement of seat belt laws also?
I solved the Strategy
of Technology mystery with the help of John Rice who did the various
indexes before we got a search engine going. The Strategy of Technology
main page got moved to a subweb called slowchange; but I did not move the
rest of the book there, and once something has been made into a subweb it
is difficult to move anything else to it and keep the links. Consequently
you get to the book by going to the subweb which brings you back to this
web. One day I will download it all and reorganize it. But it's not a high
importance item. You can still find the book with all its prefaces, and
it's still worth reading.
I have been thinking of putting A STEP FARTHER OUT up here since I
don't seem to be finding a publisher for it, and there's a lot in it that
was worth reading.
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