| Tuesday, December
31, 2002
Happy New Year
I have been told how to deal with Mozilla and it more or
less works. IE and Mozilla do not like each other. I used Mozilla a
couple of times because Norton found viruses and I wanted to look at the
mail safely; Mozilla isn't as vulnerable at Internet Explorer.
But when you install Mozilla it REALLY wants to take over.
Everything. And banish Internet Explorer. And frankly, I am used to
Internet Explorer. It works OK for me, and with my firewalls that Roland set
up, plus Norton frequently updated and on the job, I don't have any problems
(that I am aware of anyway). IE has become a kind of standard. Now
one day I may go to a full Linux system, but the incentives are getting
smaller: XP with IE and Outlook have been doing very well for me since I
went to a faster machine (my old Regina box was a dual Compaq 750 Pro
Workstation I had used for many years, and it was doing OK, but with all
the mail filters I have on plus Norton it was getting bogged down; the new
2.54 GHz Pentium 4 works just fine with even more filters and sorting
rules). I was called today to go out to see the heart
specialist. They keep telling me there is nothing to worry about, but they
keep wanting to see me. Maybe today I'll find out. Since I can walk 5
miles including about 1500 foot up and down altitude change without being
winded and without any pains, and my only "chest sensations" are
that every time I think about this I know I have a heart and imagine it
almost hurts or something only it doesn't -- amazing what you can imagine
-- anyway, since I have no problems I don't think I have problems, but
I'll let the specialists be sure. But that shoots my day's work. There
is a LOT to do including getting a New Year letter out to subscribers.
I'll probably send that tomorrow, and maybe I'll have some pictures of
Niven's party. The Inspectors in Iraq
have bupkis, which is about what you'd expect. Saddam has had years to
hide everything. One of my sons (not the Navy officer) says it's public
knowledge that there is evidence connecting al Queda to Saddam Hussein.
If so I have been pretty absent of mind, since I don't know what it is.
Iraq is Baathist, which is a secular fascism, not Islamic Jihad, and has
fairly regional and predictable ambitions. It's not a
nice government, and I am sure that a liberal democracy would not choose
it. It's a boss-ridden tyranny, but then almost all Arab countries are
boss-ridden tyrannies. Turkey has a democracy, sort of, but only because
the Army rigidly enforces secularism: an honest election in Turkey might
well put the mullahs in charge. It might not, but the struggle would be
horrible: the Turkish Army really does protect the Constitution, and that
sort of reigning without ruling, but reign with actual supreme power, is
unusual. Spain's monarchy seems to function in somewhat the same way. Aristotle
would have called Turkey a "timocracy", meaning "rule of
honor"; most attempts at that sort of thing degenerate into
corruption and rule by military junta of the sort we are familiar with in
this hemisphere. The US meanwhile wants to set up liberal
democracy in Iraq, and seems to be headed that way in the Kurdish part.
The success or failure of that will depend in part on how well they can
convince Turkey they aren't going to foment problems in Turkish Kurdistan.
The Kurds, an Aryan people (Iran = Land of the Aryans, after all), have
their own agenda. I know it isn't fashionable to use terms like
"Aryan" now, but Iran speaks an Aryan language, and those people
are descended from Aryan invaders, just as Turks are descended from
Turkish invaders, and neither are the same peoples as the Arabs. For that
matter the Arabs aren't all the same people. Palestinians have a lot of Philistine
roots, and those were Mediterranean peoples, not Arabs even if most
Palestinians now call themselves Arabs. Ethnically and culturally the Near
East has been a melting pot for a long time, but some ingredients remained
"lumpy" and didn't melt. And the Kurds did, after
all, liberate Jerusalem and overthrow the Latin Kingdom, under Saladdin,
back in the days of Richard Lionheart. They were important in the old days
of the Persian Empire, and they haven't forgotten it. But
all that is for another essay on another day. If the United
States hopes to make Iraq a showcase of Western Democracy -- and that
surely is the intent of many of Bush's advisors -- we had better learn
some of that history. And we had better make some gestures of friendship
to the Turks. Harry Truman sent the USS Missouri, then the most
powerful warship in the world and famous in the Surrender of Japan, as the
hearse for the Turkish Ambassador; a gesture of friendship that saved a
lot of American troops in Korea, because the Turks saved our bacon more
than once in the long retreat from the Yalu. If Harry Truman
could think of something like that, can't someone in Colin Powell's
office? Or does no one read history, even of recent times? Ah. Well. Now
I need to clean up some stuff. And I note that Norton
has just updated itself. I do like Norton Anti-Virus even if sometimes it
goes a bit mad and becomes too aggressive. Happy New
Year. I may be back after my medical appointment.
Was just doing the mail, and came
across this sent by Roland under the subject "Department of
Pre-Crime."
http://www.cjonline.com/stories/122902/kan_rape.shtml
Go read it and tell me what you think. This may be
important. (See mail.)
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