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THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

View 222 September 9 - 15, 2002

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Monday  September 9, 2002

The column is off. Now for Burning Tower. I left out a lot of stuff in the column for lack of room. Things continue to happen in the computer world...

One thing I didn't talk about and should have is the passenger annoyance system we call airport security. How long will we put up with it?

I see the Iraq rhetoric is heating up. I thought we'd be in Baghdad by now; if it must be done, it were well that it be done quickly. The "allies" will all line up when the oil's under our control. Depend on it. If not, well most of "the Arab street" hates us to begin with, the Saudi's are not our friends, the Kuwaitis are not our clients although they ought to be, and do we care if the French denounce us? They will anyway.

The real problem is the Turks and the Kurds. If we stir up enough problems and make allies of the Kurds, the Turks will be understandably unhappy. That situation will require a level of diplomatic skills that I suspect we don't have.

But again, if we have Iraqi oil we can dump it on the world market, drive down the cost of crude, and have an economic boom over there... And I am with Condoleeza Rice when she says "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." If it were to be done, 'twere best it be done quickly.


Windows SP 3 is out. and so far the reports have been good. 

And Windows Media Player 9 is out IN BETA and we like it a lot. Go get it at

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmedia/    
and http://windowsmedia.com/  

The player is cool, the quality is good, so far we haven't had problems. The Media Player 9 series includes new codecs and a lot of production software; it may change things a lot. This could bring about a Media Revolution: that is the new quality/bit is good, and that will be the revolution, but Microsoft looks pretty good to be leading things and setting standards.


We were out in the front garden after dinner talking to neighbors walking by, and our playwright neighbor said he had to get home because they are installing DSL tonight. He lives farther from the switch than I do. He's getting it from Megapath. While we were talking, Jace, a TV scriptwriter neighbor who lives over on the Canyon heard us and asked. Everyone here wants DSL...

We went to the Megapath site and gave the information and they said it was possible. We can believe that when it happens, but it says it's possible.  Wow.

Thinking, well, if it works for Megapath could it work here for Earthlink, I went to their site. It takes a while to drill through it all, but eventually I got to a screen that says DSL has already been ordered for my phone. That's odd, because the phone number it thinks it is ordered for is the main phone line that we use as a phone line (no modems) and we never have tried to get DSL for that.

Now I don't understand what is going on... And the Earthlink site isn't useful because all it does is tell us we already ordered it, not whether it is available. Very silly way to do business. So we'll try Megapath...

 

 

 

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Tuesday, Septermber 10, 2002

Well, tomorrow it will be all 911 all the time. And watch out for stobor.

The DSL scene: Megapath finds what my readers in the phone company and elsewhere find, that there will be a fiber relay put in this neighborhood in January 2004 and until then there is no DSL here. However, Megapath does offer iDSL 144K both ways, for $90 a month. This is 3 times as fast as the dialup 56K and for about 3 times the price. It gives me a fixed IP address. 

I am thinking seriously of taking them up on it: it will let me install a mail server here that can run serious filtration on my and Roberta's mail. She really hates these offers of "triple incest" and other such stuff, and while I have configured her Rules to get rid of most of it, I can't have it read for content on her slow machine; her Rules have to operate on headers only.

I have mail from readers who have had a good experience with Megapath. We'll see. Oh -- and they offer me a T1 line at $589 a month. That, I fear, is a bit beyond the budget. I would need about 30 new subscribers a month. That's 360 on the year, and while getting 30 in the next few days may well happen, I won't get enough to justify a year's contract. Nor do I really expect that. A T1 line is really more than I need. Of course if I do get one, I'll put up a separate web site hosted from here for subscribers only.

I am seriously contemplating the iDSL. The 144K rate is about half the satellite rate. I'll wait for reader advice.


 

In my high level discussion group one economist said in effect that anyone who has anything good to say about protective tariff is anti-scientific and not interested in science. 

This of course assumes that economics is a science, and I wrote a fairly blistering bit of sarcasm:

 Now THAT is a reductionism, no? In other words, anyone who thinks protection of jobs for the citizens and some limits on globalism is of necessity anti-scientific, and probably a fool as well.

Oh, thou wise one! Thou who knowest all. Economics is of course such a wonderful exact science. That is why there are no longer any economic problems. If only politicians followed economic advice. And there are no political consequences to following good economic advice, or the political implications won't somehow come back to bite those who followed the good scientific economic advice.

Wow. I had not known how wonderful economics is: and if you don't believe in economics, and indeed in the brand of it that says protectionism is always and in all cases wrong, then you aren't fit to be a scientist ever, because economic is a science and its conclusions are universal.

Wow

Which produced the reply:

Jerry, your sarcasm was amusing ;)

I think most economists agree that protectionism is a suboptimal policy, when optimality is defined in terms of "maximum consumer satisfaction" or "maximum growth in mean GDP". It allows uncompetitive businesses to survive and sabotages the natural division of labor that would arise in the absence of tariffs (e.g. by the comparative advantage principle).

There may be cases in which protectionism has some theoretical justification, but I'm unaware of them. I'm not an economist, so if anyone knows of such cases I'd be interested in hearing about them. I'm thinking of an analog to externality theory's theoretical criterion for when regulation is justified.

So far none of this is important and I wouldn't normally include it, but it did cause me to write this reply:

Protectionism is sub optimal if your goal is maximum economic production. It is not if you need to factor in key industries for time of war, nor is it necessarily optimum if your goal is social stability or even, horrors, social justice.

National control of means of production - I don't mean ownership - may be important in the sense that overseas and international corporations do NOT have the same interests as any one country. What's good for General Motors may be good for the US but not if General Motors is owned by people in Brussels or Paris.

In operations research we used to worry a lot about solving for suboptimal goals, because sometimes a policy that maximized a particular criterion would in fact produce a disaster in the overall system. In economic trade the obvious one is making yourself dependent on some overseas supplier who is then the victim of a hostile takeover by someone who isn't economically rational. The assumptions under which full blown free trade is the optimal policy include the assumption that your competitors are economically rational. They may not be. They may just hate your guts.

I don't know what "theoretical justification" means in this context. I can jigger up a theory to justify anything. Whether that theory has any value is another story. Since most economic theory is testable only by other theories and through scenarios and supposes and thought experiments, I find it interesting that anyone who doesn't buy the conclusions of the sect of this economics cult that has won today is considered beyond the pale and unable to appreciate the benefits of science.

As to externalities, that was my point: economics is mostly governed by externalities. Not only immigration but the need to keep people employed and feeling useful may be far more important for the health of a republic than lowering the price of Jockey shorts, and raising the salary of the CEO. Indeed, I have repeatedly asked for economic models that take account of externalities. I never get them.

 Let me give you one: people are put out of work by economic adjustments. Welfare bureaucracies are created to take care of them. Public employee unions are formed. We have to live with the consequences. Is all that cheaper than it would have been to protect the jobs with tariff or even direct subsidy? Possibly, but possibly not; no one does that analysis. 

I can agree that high protective tariff leads to unacceptable inefficiency; but I am not at all convinced that zero tariff is the optimum point. Taxes on imports are a legitimate source of revenue for the government. Why shouldn't they be? They are easier to collect than sales taxes on everything.

But these questions are never asked. Instead the "experts" merely say that anyone who asks such questions is clearly some kind of ignorant clod unable to appreciate science.

 

There was one more exchange, and I wrote

My argument for some employment stability goes well beyond the demonstrable economic benefit of protection to get an industry started. Anyone who doesn't understand that particular argument just doesn't bother to read history, and I take it that even those who say that you are unscientific if you don't swallow economic theory whole will find some theoretical justification for that. The Framers did. (Theory always trumps evidence and data, of course. At least in economics.)

But my argument is that too much instability in the lives of the middle class will destroy a republic. Aristotle said that democracy is at bottom the rule of the middle class and the middle class are those who possess the goods of fortune in moderation. That's not bad as an observation, and it looks to have been tested and found true over a long period of time.

Cato the Elder, when arguing against the slave based plantation system that was destroying the old Roman peasantry said "no more peasants, no more Legions." Of course he was wrong: they hired their legions after a while. And soon enough the legions hired an emperor.

A republic needs a stable middle class. We want to co-opt into that middle class the skilled workers and even as many of the unskilled as we can. Economic policies that beggar those people have political consequences. Sometimes those political consequences will have effects on the economy. Most economists I know are so enamoured of their scientific theory that they pay no attention to all that.

 

By an odd coincidence, just as I wrote this, John Dvorak called about something else, and we had a discussion of the issue; and he agrees with me rather completely. Which doesn't mean everything but it does mean something.

Shortly after, as part of a much longer disquisition, John McCarthy said:

Economics is somewhat of a science, and it has well established that the highest average income occurs when there are no tariffs.

However, the highest average income is not the only consideration, and the economists know that and say it from time to time. ....

When a group faces loss of employment from technology or from imports, it seeks protection. Permanent protection is a bad idea, but mitigating the effects is reasonable. The amount and nature of the mitigation is subject to bargaining. ....

The solution to loss of jobs from competition, whether technological or foreign, is to make the transition slowly and to buy out the jobs that are lost. A generation is more than enough time.

I couldn't agree more, except that I don't agree that zero tariff is the best policy of a nation just starting industries; nor did the Framers. When you are trying to build an industry you need either subsidies or tariffs to allow the critical mass to develop. After that the tariff lowers highest average income.

Oh -- and I am not at all convinced that a nation with a higher average income but really gross differences between bottom, middle, and top, is better off than a nation with lower average income but also lower spread so that all the citizens feel useful. 

It may be true that huge discrepancies in incomes are a good thing, but I think it needs demonstrating. I am not sure I believe it. Obviously the average has to be high enough to support a decent standard of living in either case. But consider a country in which a small number make a lot of money owning diamond mines, and everyone else grubs in the dirt mining them at very low wages: the average may well be higher than a neighbor who has no diamonds but most of the population are self sufficient herders. Which is more stable?

 

 


And the quote of the day to be remembered tomorrow:

"Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended. Its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war . . . and in the degeneracy of manners and morals, engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." James Madison, April 20, 1795

"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." James Madison, while a United States Congressman

 

 

 

 

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Wednesday, September 11, 2002

Domine, ne in furore.

Put me not to rebuke, O Lord, in thine anger;
neither chasten me in thy heavy displeasure.

For thine arrows stick fast in me,
and thy hand presseth me sore.

There is no health in my flesh, because of thy displeasure;
neither is there any rest in my bones, by reason of my sin.

For my wickednesses are gone over my head,
and are like a sore burden, too heavy for me to bear.

My wounds stink, and are corrupt,
through my foolishness.

I am brought into so great trouble and misery,
that I go mourning all the day long.

For my loins are filled with a sore disease,
and there is no whole part in my body.

I am feeble and sore smitten:
I have roared for the very disquietness of my heart.

Lord thou knowest all my desire;
and my groaning is not hid from thee.

My heart panteth, my strength hath failed me;
and the light of mine eyes is gone from me.

My lovers and my neighbours did stand looking upon my trouble,
and my kinsmen stood afar off.

They also that sought after my life laid snares for me;
and they that went about to do me evil talked of wickedness, and imagined deceit all the day long.

As for me, I was like a deaf man, and heard not;
and as one that is dumb, who doth not open his mouth.

I became even as a man that heareth not,
and in whose mouth there are no reproofs.

For in thee, O Lord, have I put my trust;
thou shalt make answer for me, O Lord my God.

I have required that they, even mine enemies, should not triumph over me;
for when my foot slipt, they rejoiced greatly against me.

And I truly am set in the plague,
and my heaviness is ever in my sight.

For I will confess my wickedness,
and be sorry for my sin.

But mine enemies live, and are mighty;
and they that hate me wrongfully are many in number.

They also that reward evil for good are against me;
because I follow the thing that good is.

Forsake me not, O Lord my God;
be thou not far from me.

Haste thee to help me,
O Lord God of my salvation.


It's not the psalm appointed for the day, but it's what the book fell open to; and it seemed appropriate enough.


A year has gone by, and we have done more to ourselves than our enemies ever did to us on that day. We have gone far toward converting an unaware republic into an incompetent empire. 

At the same time, we have done little to teach our enemies the lessons they should have learned. The architect of that disaster is very likely dead, the kidnappers in the Philippines are likely dead. The Battle Hymn has been sung. But we don't know who to fight or what to do with victory.

At the time I proposed monuments: areas of desolation in the midst of the places that rejoiced. Build the monuments with bulldozers, not bombs; we are not after the lives of the innocents. But we will place the monuments where their leaders' palaces once stood.

And after those monuments are built, put antennas on them, and built Space Solar Power Satellites, and beam down power and give it to the people who hated us. Let the monuments be both our gift and our reminder. The lightning of a terrible swift sword.

On reflection I still don't know anything better to do.

Humans are time binders. We are much influenced by symbols. More another time.



A WARNING:

Windows XP contains a massive security hole. This bug allows an attacker to delete files contained in any specified directory (including root) on your system, simply by getting you to click on a malicious URL. That URL can be anywhere: in email, a chat room, a newsgroup article, or of course on a web page. It's even possible for the malicious URL to be accessed automatically if you simply visit a web page.

The Inquirer has specifics (http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=5354), as do many other on-line news sources. There is a workaround, mentioned in that article, but the real answer unfortuantely is to install SP1 or, better yet, to upgrade your system from Windows XP to Windows 2000.

-- Robert Bruce Thompson thompson@ttgnet.com http://www.ttgnet.com <http://www.ttgnet.com>

We also have this:

Subject: seen this one yet?

> http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q328691  > > "As of August 2002, the PSS Security Team has not been able to determine > the technique that is being used to gain access to the computer." >

Which may be of interest.

See Discussion in MAIL, including an illustration of the exploit.

 


OK. I have ordered the Megapath 144K fixed IP address iDSL service. We will get it in about 2 weeks. It is upgradable to DSL when the Telco gets a relay out here in January 2004.

So we will see. With luck it will be in before the next column is due.

Our Imperial Chariots tend to be made by Ford or General Motors, and drawn by horsepower but not horses. Others had different traditions...

 

Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant: Where they create desolation, they call it peace

 

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Thursday, September 12, 2002

For some reason I woke up remembering Jim Bludso of the Prairie Belle. I don't suppose anyone much younger than me has ever heard of this poem. So it goes. Sic transit gloria mundi

We have got past the anniversary. We haven't figured out what to do yet. Let us hope we will get past the urge to Do Something no matter what and dismantle the passenger annoyance system in favor of something more worthy of either Empire or Republic. At the moment we continue to lurch toward incompetent empire.

My guess is that we will end up with national identity cards that identify a privileged class exempt from the annoyances; and the annoyances will stay in place. I can hope I have that wrong.


I had a minor ethical dilemma this morning. It didn't take long to resolve. I woke up remembering a poem we all memorized in high school, Jim Bludso of the Prairie Belle. I went looking for it. It wasn't as easy to find as I thought it would be and took about 4 searches, but I did find it on a web site that consists mostly of poetry from the public domain.

Then the dilemma. I would have given the link and credit to this site, except that it bombarded me. Doubleclick and Gator and advertisements and four attempts at popups, and -- well, enough, thought I. I don't want to send my readers into that. So I copied the poem and put it here, sans web watching software.

I do wonder. Do they make any money out of putting all those ads into their site? Not that I am in any way tempted: there can't be enough money to get me to do that. But the curiosity remains, how much am I turning down?


There is another interesting dilemma here. Jim Bludso contains the line

"With a nigger squat on her safety-valve,"

and that is about as politically incorrect an image as you can imagine. Moreover, the author didn't mean it as it will be taken today. He meant "with a stoker squat on her safety-valve" most of the stokers of that time being Negroes and often the engine room crew were known as "the black gang" although given the coal dust everyone emerged from that duty looking the same color -- a phenomenon not neglected by social writers of the time.

So the question is, should we today change the line" "With a stoker squat on her safety valve" scans the same; but it hasn't quite the same connotation either.  You will note that the last galoot got ashore. That includes the stokers.

 

 


  I sent this to subscribers:

Reader Douglas Colbary sends a copy of a vicious attack. It purports to be a warning of viruses, with an EXE attachment that supposedly will install patches and protections. It is A VIRUS ITSELF, and if you run it you WILL BE INFECTED. This one is faked better than many and looks like it is coming from an authoritative source.

BE WARNED. DO NOT OPEN UNEXPECTED MAIL ATTACHMENTS, no matter whom the seem to come from. Note that I WILL NEVER send you a mail attachment without unambiguous explanation in another message, not the one with the attachment (and the likelihood that I will even mail an executable as opposed to putting it up and giving you a link is almost nil.)

DO NOT OPEN UNEXPECTED MAIL ATTACHMENTS NO MATTER FROM WHOM.

DO NOT OPEN UNEXPECTED MAIL ATTACHMENTS. What I tell you three times is true.


On poetry. When in high school we memorized portions of Longfellow's Hiawatha, and of course we learned

By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon them;
Bright before it beat the water,
Beat the clear and sunny water,
Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.

but interestingly, I find, that's nowhere near the beginning of the poem. It's not even the beginning of a major section. I think now I never read the entire poem from preface to end. I don't know why that would interest anyone else, but this is my day book, and...

Anyway, the whole poem is at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/LonHiaw.html 


  And we have:

This is a heads up to anyone who runs into it. Sometime yesterday I got hit by a hijacking program from xupiter.com. First warning was a popup--full screen of the xupiter page which is a sort of yahoo! wannabe. From then on the page reappeared at regular intervals, and today I discovered that it had reset my browser's home page to xupiter.com (don't go there!)

My husband did a search on google and discovered that it's a vicious little hijacker that not only routes you to it's page everytime you try to go anywhere on the internet, but puts about a ton and a half of spyware on your system. It is capable of by-passing your java-blocker as well. It also seems to keep you from getting to the Lavasoft page to download Adaware (which doesn't detect it yet).

Anyway, if this little piece of nastiness infects you (and I regard it as a virus myself) there's an uninstall on the xupiter.com page. However, it doesn't seem to work at times and there are reports that problems persist even after the uninstall has been successfully run. Also there's no confirmation that the spyware is actually removed, only the more obvious browser changes.

For more information, and methods for removing all xupiter components go here: http://www.spywareinfo.com/yabbse/index.php?board=3 

It's apparently much worse than lop.com was.

Wonderful. Thanks.

 

 

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Friday, September 13, 2002

Friday the 13th falls on a Friday this month.

There Will Be War

Bush has made that clear. I am of two minds on this. First, I have no regard for Saddam Hussein, and we have some unsettled scores with him regarding his treatment of American women captives in the Gulf War. That alone is casus belli, and has been for more than a decade. You may recall I wasn't in favor of the Gulf War absent a Declaration of War by Congress, but once we were in it, we should have made it clear that mistreatment of American captives will result in death by hanging of everyone involved. 

We are about to go in again. Given that we will, what should we do? The options are interesting.

First, there's this: who fights? Who are our local allies?  We have some choices. 

One is Jordan and its Royal Family. It's not generally remembered that the Hashemites had two branches, and one got Iraq (and the oil) while the other got Trans-Jordan (sans oil so far as we know). The Hashemites are the hereditary Protectors of Mecca and can trace their ancestry to The Prophet (actually to Adam, but the lineage is questionable prior to Mohammed). They were removed by the Brits who had obligations made by St. John Philby to the Saudis; Trans-Jordan and Iraq were created by the Brits for the Hashemites, who brought a Bedouin following that was the mainstay of the Jordanians, and for a while of the Iraqi monarchy. I admit that the restoration of the United Arab Kingdoms is unlikely but it's not impossible, and might be a move toward stability.

A second is the Kurds, at one time known as the Saracens. (The term Saracen is generic, meaning "Easterner" and many races were subsumed under that title; but Saladin was Kurdish and appointed Kurds to the major positions in his Sultanate; these were the glory days of the Kurds and have not been forgotten, and modern Kurds pretty well identify the deeds of the Saracens under Saladin as Kurdish.) The Saracens under Saladin defeated the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem at the Horns of Hattin (1187) and united the area under Mohammedan rule. It was the Saracens under Kurdish leadership who figured in the Third Crusade that included Richard Cour De Lion and inspired Scott's novel The Talisman. 

             Kurdish officials restored Orthodox Sunni Islamic rule to Egypt and most of Iraq, and Kurdish officials enforced religious law in the glory days of Saladin and his Ayyubid Dynasty. Kurdish warriors formed the elite of Saladin's army. He also brought in the Mamluks, slave soldiers responsible to the Sultan, and the consequences of that are another story.

             The Kurds were given short shrift by the Turks, and in the break up of the Turkish Empire after World War I they got the worst of the deal: part of Kurdistan is in Iraq, part in Iran, and part in Turkey. Where others got a homeland of their own, The Kurds got very little from the Anglo-French carve up of the Turkish Middle East.  

            The Kurds want a united Kurdistan. The Turks want no part of that. This will make for fairly interesting diplomacy. It's possible that the Kurds will settle for a Kurdistan without the Turkish portion, but nothing will keep them from trying to liberate Iranian Kurdistan, and few Kurds would run for office on a platform of leaving Turkish Kurdistan to Turkey. Presumably Colin Powell and his people know all this. The US Special Forces are already operating in the Iraqi part of Kurdistan, and the Kurds have a pretty good army. A few US main battle tanks and a lot of air support would probably be enough to win all of Northern Iraq in a rather short campaign. It would make life complicated but not impossible if the Turks refused to cooperate with permission for over flight and use of Turkish bases.

A third possible ally is Turkey itself. The Turks have a very good army. It hasn't fought a major war in a long time but contingents have acquitted themselves well; I recall Turkish units in Korea rescuing Americans from fairly hopeless positions. The Army reigns in Turkey but doesn't rule: that it, the Army defends the secular constitution, to the extent that it will come out of barracks and hang politicians who try to impose some kind of Islamic state on Turkey. Then they go back to barracks and encourage free elections so long as the Islamic fundamentalists don't win. The Army also sees itself as the defender of the unity of the Republic, and that very much includes Turkish Kurdistan and Turkish Armenia. Armenian Americans don't want us to have anything to do with Turkey (except perhaps to nuke Ankara) and that may make for some domestic problems. If you send Turkey into Iraq they won't be leaving any time soon; and what that does to and with the Kurds is yet another question. Adding Iraqi oil to the Turkish equation is an interesting formula for unpredictable change in the region.

Finally, we can try to do it ourselves, which is really a variation on the Kurdish option, since we don't really want to fight our way in and establish bases and the rest without local allies and airfields. The Kurds have little choice but to help us, even if we have to promise the Turks that there will be no independent Kurdistan.

Whatever happens, there is all that oil. The good and competent Imperial way would be to use the Kurdish client state to help us, giving them northern Iraq, while we occupy the rest under a puppet regime. We are not yet much in favor of kings (else we would have restored the monarchy in Afghanistan with the current president as Prime Minister) so we are unlikely to make the current Hashemite pretender the puppet ruler. Monarchies have the capability of uniting disparate peoples through loyalty to the throne when there is no nation. In Iraq the disparities are such that we may have to dismember the place and have multiple puppets, possibly in a loose federation. Whatever we do, the Imperial way would be to pump hell out of the oil, get the price of crude on the world market down to $20 or lower, and watch the Dow Jones head for 12,000 and north.

I presume that someone in the Bush Administration has thought of that. 

A really cynical Empire would then discover that Kuwait really is the 19th Province of Iraq and take that over too, lowering the world price of oil even more. Understand, the oil revenues could (mostly) go to the people of Iraq and Kuwait. What's important to us is that oil prices be low to stimulate the market.

But that's the interest of the American Empire. It is not necessarily the interest of the present imperial government, although it wouldn't be very hard for them to prepare for low oil prices and a general economic boom. On the other hand, the Republican Party has usually been The Stupid Party, and has often allowed narrow interests to dominate its policies.

As to what a republic would do about the situation in the Middle East, I have said it before: make certain that every ruler over there knows that participation in attacks on the United States will result in a change of regime, and we don't care if the result is anarchy; meanwhile we develop our own resources and work to energy independence; build solar power satellites and nuclear power plants, and space defenses; and mind our own business. But we won't do that. If we did, what would the unionized federal passenger harassment bureaucracy do? That "service" is here to stay, you know.  

But since that's irritating, we can have national identity cards and allow true loyalists exemption to the subject harassment system at airport...

And I am beginning to ramble, and need to get to work on Burning Tower.


Back in 2000 I had some problems with an outfit called TCCOMPUTING. I have gone back and pasted this paragraph into those archived (mail 124 and view 124) files. Web stuff has a way of being not only around, but found when you do searches...

(September 2002: Apparently www.tccomputing.com is now under new ownership and new management. Maybe sometimes we do things right. I have no views whatever about the new TCCOMPUTING).

 

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Saturday, September 14, 2002

    I may pretend to know everything for a living, but I do know I am not infallible. I have for years said "causus belli" and I ought to have known better, but apparently that corruption crept in since my high school Latin days. It's casus belli, and I have corrected it where I used it above, and my thanks to Bob Thompson who pointed it out.

While I am at it, Peter Lawrence points out that  the term "Saracen" is older and more generic than the Kurdish led Saracens of the time of Richard Lion Heart. The term was applied from at least 800 AD by the Byzantine Empire to the "easterners" of the Moslem Empire (as he notes, the word moor comes from the Byzantine  term for the "westerners"). Thus all Kurds were Saracens but not all Saracens were Kurds. I suppose I had known that but neglected to make it clear, and I should have been more precise. I have corrected the text in yesterday's disquisition to avoid misleading readers, but it doesn't change my point: the Kurds under Saladin once unified all of the Moslem east, and recall having done that, and pretty well appropriate to themselves all the deeds of Saladin's Ayubbid Dynasaty .

Incidentally, it was no mean feat. Robert of Normandy (son of the Conqueror) after the successful conclusion of the First Crusade led some 60 knights (perhaps 500 warriors and another 500 grooms and servants and other support personnel) on a ride through the length of the Saracen holdings, challenging all and sundry to fight.  The Moslem lands lay pretty well prostrate, and only the conflicts among the various Christian groups prevented the reconquest and subjugation of the entire area (excluding Persia). At that time the Moslems were deeply divided by religious differences. The Christians failed to unify, and the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was defeated by a Saracen army -- mostly Kurds -- under Saladin in 1187, ending the Christian control of that city. The Latin Kingdom was an elective monarchy set up by the Normans and Franks to exclude Byzantium from control of the area.

Perhaps this suggests that unity of its masters is the key to domination of that region...

While we are at it, there is another correction to my history of the Middle East in mail. I apparently have been mistaken in the identity of one of the political actors of the time of the fall of the Turkish Empire. (I thought Lawrence of Arabia, but it turns out to have been St. John Philby.) Fortunately it doesn't change the conclusions.

 

Work on Burning Tower continues albeit slowly.

And my country continues to lurch toward empire, and alas, shows few signs of understanding what it is doing, or of reaping the benefits of empire for the citizens. 

===========

This from a discussion list I am on:

I'd love to know just what personality and behavioral characteristics will turn out to have genetic variations and to separately vary from each other.

Decades of social science work is gong to get flushed down the toilet when genetic sequencing gets really cheap. All these studies that proclaim to discover causes and effects will be obsolesced to quickly the social scientists won't know what hit them.

If these people conducting this study had any brains they'd collect tissue samples from all their study subjects so that they can be sequence later on. What is really needed are large longitudinal studies for which all study participants will eventually be able to have their DNA sequenced. All the people who have been in longitudinal studies who are still alive should have tissue samples taken and frozen for use 10-15 years hence when those samples can be cheaply sequenced.

It is an important and splendid suggestion. I wish I could think of someone to make it to. The old Longitudinal Study would benefit from this.


On the war front: how many Iraqis will fight? I would think not all that many. Few of the conscripts, and how deeply into atrocities is the Republican Guard? If the Guards think they will be hauled off to be tried for crimes against humanity or some such, they will fight a lot longer and harder than if they think it's Saddam we're at war with...


And did we all see this:

http://www.w2knews.com/rd/rd.cfm?id=020916RN-New_Admin 

Ouch

 

 

 

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Sunday, September 15, 2002

I woke up with a sore throat and no energy, and have spent the day in bed. Not thinking too well...

 

 

 

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