| Thursday,
February 15, 2007 I have a note from a subscriber saying that
Mail is far too repetitious. Perhaps he is right. At the same time, we have
new people coming here every month. I am not quite sure how to deal with
that. It's a legitimate complaint.
Of course I don't suppose that everyone reads everything in Mail, and
that it's easy enough to skip over redundancies. I also try not to be too
redundant, although I admit to posting examples of trends demonstrating the
destruction of western civilization and drawing the appropriate conclusion
more often than may be optimum. And perhaps I refer to my Iron Law of
Bureaucracy too often. I can only plead with Samuel Johnson that people
seldom need educating but they often need reminding -- and that the choir
needs sermons too. I am not sure what to do about that.
For instance: on the Global Warming front, I seldom have anything new to
say: I haven't radically changed my views in some time. From time to time
some new data appear; this must be considered. From time to time more
headline arguments appear. Those could be ignored if one had been paying
attention, but the "consensus" picks up more and more political supporters
to the point that we have people proposing to make "Global Warming Denial" a
horror on the same scale as Holocaust Denial, and in Europe Holocaust Denial
is a criminal offense punishable by years in prison; apparently there is a
serious movement to do the same with Global Warming Denial.
As to anarcho tyranny, I hate seeing more examples of this, but the best
weapon against the trend is exposure and ridicule. At the risk of yet
another repetition, Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
But thanks for the warning; I'll try to keep things more interesting. And
of course one need not read everything... (One of my objections to RSS Feeds
is that it's harder to ignore, meaning that if I am stuffing things down
people's throats I have to be a lot more selective; but selective means
passing up items that won't be interesting to most readers, but some readers
will really like a lot.)
And on reflection, it's easy enough to skip past that which isn't
interesting; and while some people may not want to see more instances of the
Iron Law, others do. And I do tend to be a bit proud of developing that
hypothesis. It's not as important as
Parkinson's Law,
but it ain't trivial.
======
Niven is off to a convention in Pasco, Washington. I was invited as one
of the guests of honor, but I am way short of time. I told them a couple of
months ago I couldn't make it, and I'll be working on Inferno 2 all weekend.
We're at the stage where I am actually eager to work on the book.
====
I suppose it had to happen. Dame Edna now wants to adopt Anna Nicole
Smith's daughter. We have an ersatz prince, a show business lawyer, a drag
queen, and a grandmother whom Mrs. Smith actively detested. Plus an old boy
friend. And possibly half the male population of Hollywood. Anna Nicole
Smith lived here in Studio City for years, including the time when the baby
was conceived, and I have a confession. I never met her. Not even at the
local Trader Joe's where everyone meets everyone.
Control of that infant is good for tens of millions of dollars, and I
suppose all this is predictable. I could think up a good Travis McGee story
about all this. I don't suppose anyone is actually concerned about the
inevitable mess this will make of the little girl's life.
============
Much of America is a disaster area. Where is Global Warming when we need
it?
I have done some updating of the Global Warming
page, and I'll try to put most of the new stuff over there. The page
started a couple of years ago, was neglected for a year, and without going
back over the old stuff I have put up some of the new there.
And there are more developments in the
German Home Schooling story
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