Chaos Manor Home Page > View Home Page > Current Mail Page > Chaos Manor Reviews Home Page THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR View 550 December 22 - 28, 2008
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This is a Day Book. Pages are in chronological, not blogological order.
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This week: | Monday,
December 22, 2008 I thought I had a lunch appointment, but it seems to have been put off until tomorrow, so we got out morning walk. Sable was frantic, so it's just as well. It rained last night and it will rain again shortly, but we managed to get out in between showers. It will be a wet Christmas here. I've been trying to get back into Eve online (not that I really have time for it) but I discover that (1) I have forgotten the basics, and (2) I can't take the tutorials any more. Most of what I knew about operations vanished under radiation therapy. I suppose that's a blessing in that it keeps me from spending much time at this, but I now have a well fitted battleship, lots of "training" in the game sense, and not the foggiest notion of where to go to get some easy experience at killing rats so I can learn to use what I have without getting killed. Oh. Well. I'm trying to stay hopeful, and I am cheered by references to Space Solar Power Satellites, but it's pretty hard to do. SSPS will be a long time before there's any power beamed down. The quickest way to get that would be to put up a $10 billion prize for the first outfit to send down 10 megawatts continuously over a year (say 85% on line), another $5 billion for the second, and $5 billion for the first outfit to send down 100 megawatts 90% of the time for a year. I have made up those numbers but they're in the right ball park, and they'd do; the point is to provide a sure and certain return for building the infrastructure to put up SSPS and the ground receivers. Once that is done, there will be investment both public and private. I also doubt that will happen, but we can hope. Meanwhile everywhere I look its Green, which sounds good, but Costs Money. Lots of money. Expensive energy will not get us out of our economic downspiral. Cheap energy does, but there don't seem to be many in our government who act as if they know that. So it's time to tell stories. Storytellers do reasonably well in a bad economy. Look at how the pulps thrived in the Depression. Let the escapist literature flow... And be sure to see mail on the future of the piracy business.
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This week: | Tuesday, December
23, 2008
Richard drove me down to Huntington Beach for lunch with Congressman Rohrabacher. We met Dana at his house, and went out to a local deli where I enjoyed a Reuben sandwich made as a Panini. I never had one of those before. Pretty good, but Art's in Studio City remains the best deli in California. Dana and the triplets -- Christian, Annika, and Tristen -- wish you all a Merry Christmas, especially to the View readers who supported him in what turned out not to be as close an election as people thought it would be, but it was close enough. My son Richard shows Dana a video of his ride in the XCOR rocket. We're at the Congressman's dining room table. Christian watches avidly. The girls are helping their mother in the kitchen. Lest that be taken as some kind of sexist setup, no one told the girls what to do; when we came in from lunch all three of the triplets were helping their aunt in the living room. While we are doing pictures, here are a couple more: The Thanksgiving activities of the Little Church, and Sable meets a distant cousin... ==============
Thanks! We all need reminding...
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This week: |
Wednesday,
December 24, 2008 Merry Christmas. God rest ye merry, gentlemen. And ladies... My Mac (iMac 20) is stuck. It shows on the screen saver clock 11:31 PM, and it's just sitting there. Nothing I can do will revive it so I will have to turn it off, there being no cursor to move with the mouse, and clicking does nothing. It's an odd affliction. So it's the power button or nothing... A five second power button did nothing. Fifteen seconds holding it turned it off. It's coming back up now... And it works. All the network connections seem to be working. All is well. Now I have to go off to the post office. Back in a bit. ======================
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This week: |
Thursday,
December 25, 2008 Merry Christmas We drove out to the desert through rains and then snow and ice. Over the desert and into the hills to granddaughter's house we go... Roberta, Herrin, and Ruthie have a Merry Christmas. The show outside is pretty, but not much fun to drive through with 50 mph winds.
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This week: |
Friday,
December 26, 2008 It is cold in Los Angeles. I will probably run this again Monday, but if you are looking for something to read,
There are often insightful articles in The American Conservative, but for me there's too much glee when liberals and neocons make disastrous errors. Russell Kirk taught us that we ought to approach defects in our nations as we would the wounds of a father. The neocons were useful allies during the Cold War, but the term "neo-conservative" always was a contradiction in terms. American Conservatives have some common interests with neocons, but we should not forget theit Trotskyite origins. It's a bit odd: some of the former Communists, like Whitaker Chambers, came to their senses and became actual conservatives; but they were almost all actual Communists, members of CPUSA and under Party Discipline. Most of the neo-cons were Trotskyites or came from Trotskyite families (many being too young to have any notion of what things were like back in the Glory Days of the Trotskyites) and when they left their affiliations they didn't give up the notion that the world could be remade by dedicated revolutionaries and social engineering; that if they got control of the government they could do something wonderful. Give me the sword of state and I will make a more beautiful world. Real conservatives understand that control of government isn't the key to making a wonderful world. At best we can get rid of some obstacles and give people opportunities to improve their lives. One would think that a study of history would show that, but apparently a lot of smart people continue to believe that they can remake not just their city, or county, or state, or nation, but the whole world, and all they need is control of the army and the tax collectors. Actually they don't think that way: they think about the wonderful things they can do, and forget that to do them they need tax collectors, and to support the tax collectors they need police, and behind the police stands the Army, prison, and the hangman. (Of course we don't have hangmen any more. We're more humane now. Progress.) Government can protect some people from bad guys. It doesn't always do that and never does it perfectly, but it can, sometimes, do that. It can, sometimes, as Adam Smith notes, undertake projects that have great benefit to all with little benefit to any one person -- he had in mind roads and canals and fire departments, not the over-all direction of the economy. Alas, it doesn't take a lot of bad thinking to expand that list, and everyone does. After all, if we can put a man on the moon, surely we can give every child a world class university prep education, can't we? Not just in the United States, but everywhere. And guess what: all the university professors, both tenured and wannabe, agree completely, and rub their hands in anticipation -- since of course they won't be paid by those who will benefit from universal university education, but by the taxpayers who won't be asked what they think about having everyone go to university and get a degree if they want to become a manager at Jack In The Box. The largest joke is that even the taxpayers can't pony up enough, and everyone who goes to these overpaid institutions will get to pony up a grand a month for the rest of their lives; this in exchange for the pretended education they get in order to get the credentials that prove they are educated and worthy of having a job. Of course that credential can lead to one of the coveted positions among the governing class. Now if we just had some means for certification of expertise that didn't require credentials, things might change. I don't look for that to happen soon. The purpose of government is to pay government workers and their allies; which means the real purpose of government is to collect the money to pay government workers and their allies. Just as the purpose of the school system is to pay members of the teachers unions. I started this as a way to distinguish myself from The American Conservative magazine; I didn't intend it to be an essay in gloom. I'll cheer up sometime. Alas, the analysis of foreign policy under the neoClintons has a scary logic that I haven't yet untangled, which means they may be correct. And that really is scary: Wilsonian policies during a Depression with China and India growing and growing. Despair is a sin. And Happy New Year. ================== A warning: (From another conference)
The obvious advice: If you hit a web site that warns you that you have viruses, don't download anything from there. Get out of there and scan your system with something you have reason to trust. I don't know anything about Malwarebytes.org Note that if you try to get of the scam it will scream at you that you're about to ruin your computer. The safest way to get out of there is ctl-alt-delete and use taskmaster to close down the browser. Or pull the Ethernet plug. Or use the big red switch and turn off the machine; as Ed Hume says, viruses need electricity... Several SFWA members seem to have been infected from the LOCUS web site. Be careful out there!
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This week: | Saturday,
December 27, 2008 I am starting the year end/New Year column. Nominations for Orchids and Onions are now in order. Please send a separate nomination for each item nominated, and put the word Orchid or Onion in the subject heading. Sign the nomination as you want your name to appear (meaning that if you leave off a signature no name will be published, but if you put up your name and email address both will be published: that is, if I publish the nomination I will copy the whole message, signature and all.) In some cases I publish the nomination with a comment. In others I merely announce the Orchid or Onion without reference to nominations. I didn't experiment with as much this year as I usually do, so my own list is considerably shorter.
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This week: | Sunday,
December 28, 2008
Holy Innocents Happy Birthday Phillip
Repeating from yesterday: I am starting the year end/New Year column. Nominations for Orchids and Onions are now in order. Please send a separate nomination for each item nominated, and put the word Orchid or Onion in the subject heading. Sign the nomination as you want your name to appear (meaning that if you leave off a signature no name will be published, but if you put up your name and email address both will be published: that is, if I publish the nomination I will copy the whole message, signature and all.) In some cases I publish the nomination with a comment. In others I merely announce the Orchid or Onion without reference to nominations. I didn't experiment with as much this year as I usually do, so my own list is considerably shorter. There is some interesting mail including on global warming. Samuel Huntington, RIP
No mention of "Who Are We?" One of the great minds of the century is gone. RIP
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