| Saturday,
January 15, 2000 Alex was over last night, and in between
fooling with DVD players we did some more with Jagged Alliance 2. This is
a game that is addictive, no question about it: but it is GOOFY. The
computer cheats at lot. Computer players with a .38 pistol can shoot the
heck out of my people from ranges we can't touch with rifles. Other
computer players have rifles, but if you manage to sneak up on one of them
and blow him away, the giant sarcophagus beetles will steal the rifle. I
guess that's what happens, because there is none on his body. Your crack
shot expensive mercenaries can't shoot for anything.
When it is working, it's really a lot of fun. I used extreme overwatch
tactics with my snipers deployed and hidden to take advantage of any
exposed enemies, and when that works -- which is to say that a sniper with
a good rifle (I managed to get one from a dead enemy; I can't even order
more from a gun store. Insane! What kind of expensive mercenaries can't
manage to buy a decent rifle?) -- when it works, which is to say a sniper
at a reasonable range is able to hit an exposed man, it's a fun game, even
if critically injured conscript soldiers fight on until they die rather
than run away. (That's pretty goofy too.) In any event, either the people
at SirTech have no clues about small unit tactics, or they don't care. A
pity because there are a lot of good elements in this game, and much of it
is well conceived.
Niven just called, and I'll go out to his place for a hike. Back
tonight.
I have a lot of mail about Global Warming, much of it good, and I will
open an alt.mail page for that discussion along with comments about the
recent reports which actually pay some attention to data rather than
politics. The problem is that there's not enough science, and far too much
regulatory science. There are fortunes to be made in "fixing"
things, Y2K and Global Warming and Coming Ice Age and you name it; and
while some problems are very real, it does no great good to spend a lot of
money on the wrong fix.
I have been directed to look at a snide comment -- I won't dignify it
as a review -- of The Crossing at a place called www.mrc.org
which turns out to be the "media research center" and affiliated
with TownHall and the Heritage Foundataion. Now I have been out of active
conservative politics for a long time, essentially since the end of the
Seventy Years War with a brief excursion as an advisor to Mr. Gingrich
whom I met when he was first elected to Congress. It's hardly a secret
that I am not a sympathizer with the view that the best solution to all
problems is to hire bureaucrats to throw money at them, and I think most
liberal policies boil down to hiring lots of people to transfer resources
from the productive to the unproductive; and anyone who reads my
Intellectual Capital bits will know I have some concerns with social
trends. That hardly makes me a raging right winger. Since I believe
government does some things very well, and like fire is certainly
necessary if (in Franklin's words) "a dangerous friend and fearful
master" that lets me out as a straight libertarian, too despite my
being friends for many years with Ed Clarke and Emil Franzi and such like.
I have no love for either The Stupid Party or the Democrats, and mostly my
proclivity is to take as much power from government as possible so it
doesn't much matter who wins the elections. Democracies fall when the
stakes get too high. So long as your local mayor is more important to your
life than your President, and the local banker is as important as either,
the republic is safe in peace time. But that's for another essay.
I knew Ed Fuelner before he founded Heritage, and I thought of him as
much like me. Still do. He thinks a lot more about this stuff than me, and
has to go raise money to support his think tank, a thankless task I would
rather contribute to than be part of.
But I had always supposed Media Research and Heritage to be fairly
reasonable outfits, more obsessed with matters political than me; until
having a look at the current page.
In any event, they blow one line, supposedly said by Greene, plus the
undoubted fact that Howard Fast is an old leftie, into a denunciation of
THE CROSSING.
Their analysis of global warming misses the point, and I'll get to that
another time. Anyway I just sent them a message:
Look: sometimes the devil is on the right side.
And sometimes things are not what they seem.
Howard Fast was certainly an old leftie, but The
Crossing was very realistic, showing 2000 men who had not deserted, had no
shoes or equipment, had never won a victory, following a man to hell; and
a very realistic portrayal of Washington. To trash it because of some
intemperate remarks by one character (and not a sympathetic one at that)
is inane, and the kind of thing that one expects of deranged fever swamp
rightists, not thoughtful conservatives.
As to global warming, there is a lot of hype and
damned little data, but like Y2K there may be a real problem, and having
our side ignore the facts is no saner than having the left ignore the
facts. Everyone knows that there has been warming: in 1776 Alexander
Hamilton brought the cannons from Ticonderoga to the aid of Washington in
Haarlem Heights - by dragging them across the frozen Hudson. That river
don't hardly freeze hard enough to hike across now, much less to drag
cannon across. Now most of the warming happened before 1900 or so, and
clearly wasn't industrial, but it did happen, and continues. Whether it is
manmade or due to solar variability is a matter for science to determine.
Denying that there is any warming at all is insane in that it ignores
reality. Just because the left is getting rich off the Kyoto accords and
uses global warming panic is a way to expand government don't mean nothing
is happening and we ought therefore to act like damned fools who can't
look at data. The data are a bit ambiguous for the last 20 years because
we haven't been watching the right things. But we should. Bayes theory
says that in the case of incompatible alternatives both expensive
information to determine what really will happen is worth a very great
deal. We can quantify that. Information on global warming is worth
billions and we would be smart to ADVOCATE SPENDING THE MONEY ON
INFORMATION not blindly denouncing everyone who gets worried.
Ye gods.
Anyway I thought THE CROSSING was wonderful.
Jerry E. Pournelle, Ph.D.
Which will probably get me denounced. After all, M. Stanton Evans once
called me a member of the communist conspiracy, and by implication one of
the secret masters of Communism (although I doubt he actually read the
report I wrote that he based that on; I had done a scenario for USAF on
what changes would have to happen in the world before "general
disarmament" would be a sensible policy for the United States.
Clearly what I wrote was a fantasy: I had Mao commit suicide, the USSR
dismember itself, North Korea lay down its arms and voluntarily integrate
with South Korea -- in other words the end of the Cold War. All this in
1966. Had all that happened then disarmament treaties made sense. After
all the US could rearm faster than anyone else. But M. Stanton Evans
pretended to believe I was advocating disarmament and this was all a
Communist conspiratorial plot. This is probably one reason I have never
been much associated with institutional conservatism. Possony did have me
speak on Cold War policy to the American Conservative Union a couple of
times. Boy that was all long ago.
There are times when I think politics has driven everyone in the nation
mad except for me and thee and sometimes thee are a bit queer...
And I thought THE CROSSING was wonderful. If that makes me some kind of
left wing conspirator it won't be the first time people have thought so.
I got spam addressed to:
www@com.com.com.domain
How can that work? Surely there are ways the Internet can defend itself
from that?
A note from A Clue:
In time, a spark will ignite causing this
Internet Underground to rise up, and if the Corporate Web finds itself
without friends when that happens, we'll all suffer for it.
Where might this spark come from? There are
plenty of firebugs out there. Here's one -- Jay
Fenello. Jay lost his attempt to become a domain registrar when ICANN
refused to recognize him, and he's now on the warpath against the WTO
. He represents a large, growing trend, the "have-nots" of
the Internet Revolution. And these people, combined with those who have no
stake or interest, represent a majority. Majorities, if you haven't
noticed, have the power to change governments, and governments can change
rules.
Dear Jerry,
On your "Current View" page you have a
link to Jay Fenello's web page - sort of. It's misspelled, and directs the
browser to www.funello.com (which doesn't exist), rather than
www.fenello.com.
Calvin
Ah. I pasted things in direct from A Clue...
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