Monthly Archives: July 2012

View 731 Thursday, July 05, 2012

I hope you had a good Fourth. We stayed home, joined by my son Alex and his wife, and by Larry and Marilyn Niven. Then today Niven and I went up the hill.

For reflections on the Fourth see https://statelymcdanielmanor.wordpress.com/ 

In digging for something else I came across this:

Ortega y Gasset’s “Revolt”

and the Problem of Mass Rule

E. Robert Statham, Jr.

http://www.mmisi.org/ma/46_03/statham.pdf

It is not a substitute for reading Ortega’s Revolt of the Masses which is one of those books that every civilized person should read as part of his education, but it is a good exposition on Ortega’s thesis. It will seem quite alien to many. Ortega, after all, said in answer to the charge that he was in favor of aristocracy said that he was guilty of much more than that: he believed that societies were societies to the extent that they were aristocratic, and if they ceased to be aristocratic they ceased to be societies. The Revolt of the Masses is why he holds that view. This essay in Modern Age – a journal founded by my mentor Russell Kirk. One of his collaborators in the founding of Modern Age was Kenneth Cole who was my professor at the University of Washington. If you’re looking for some heavy reading, this essay is worth your time. And if you haven’t read Ortega, put him on your list. You should.

It’s late, and it was a strenuous trip up the hill. I went to the LASFS meeting after dinner, and it’s very much time for bed now. More another time. LASFS will have a memorial meeting in memory of member Ray Bradbury this Saturday at 2 PM. A number of people who knew Ray will be there. The Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society has a tradition: death will not release you, even if you die; which is why I say member rather than ‘former’ member. Ray would agree. I’ll tell a couple of my Bradbury stories. Others will tell even better ones.

Larry and Marilyn Niven, and alas my old shed needs painting worse than I thought. Sable is negotiating for anything Marilyn didn’t eat. Viking dogs don’t beg, they negotiate…

It got hot on the trail today. Sable sees a big handsome Husky Malamute coming up the hill.

I got this on another conference. Then a Pentagon contact told me his IT guy told him to check his computer

In case you haven’t heard, come Monday, the FBI is going to take down a DNS server safety net that could leave thousands (or more) U.S. internet users without internet access. This is not a hoax, it’s a real thing.
If you have not gotten your computers checked for the malware, please go to this link ASAP (http://www.dcwg.org) and do so. Otherwise, you risk being offline until you can get your computer fixed.

That got me asking my security experts about it, and Rick Hellewell has this to say:

True….somewhat overhyped, but true. See msnbc story here http://www.technolog.msnbc.msn.com/technology/technolog/malware-may-knock-thousands-internet-monday-864024

Facebook and Google users may have already gotten warnings. But that link is a good place to check; it’s run by the FBI.

..Rick…

Eric Pobirs expands:

From the descriptions I’ve read it’s very unlikely for an actively used machine to be infected and the user unaware. The malware was usually accompanied by other items that did obnoxious stuff like ad popups. I strongly suspect the estimated 350,000 infected systems are rarely used directly and things like monitoring systems checked by remote access or machines that have been left running and completely forgotten.

http://www.dns-ok.us/

This site, link provided by the DCWG.ORG site, appears to be a simple and painless test.

I wonder though, if instead of shutting everything down on the substitute DNS servers, if they should spend a day or so redirecting anything that talks to them from a web browser to a page saying YOU ARE INFECTED in big text and linking to the DCWG site. Perhaps they have and I just missed the mention.

Eric

View 731 Tuesday, July 03, 2012

Roberta has an appointment for an eye exam that includes dilation so I’ll have to drive her. This will be short.

The storm over Mr. Chief Justice Roberts decision continues. There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding, and much talk of “silver linings” and others denouncing those who see “silver linings.” I am not privy to Mr. Roberts’ thinking, but I think those looking for silver linings are mistaken: this was not Mr. Roberts being the conservative Chief Justice standing in the way of the political departments as they rush the nation toward the end of the Constitutional Republic as we know it; this is Mr. Roberts in a cry of despair proclaiming that conservatives can no longer rely on the Supreme Court to save the people from the consequences of their political decisions.

What Mr. Roberts has seen is that a law so badly framed that it has internal contradictions and which mandates colossal new taxes while handing over nearly 20% of the national economy to federal bureaucrats has passed the House and Senate and has been signed by a President who purports to be an expert on Constitutional Law by dint of having been a lecturer on the subject at the University of Chicago as well as the President of the Harvard Law Review; and despite the obvious defects of this law, four Justices were eager to approve it. The whole course of the United States turns on the survival of five men. If one of them goes, so does the Constitution.

The old model of Congress messing with the Constitution and the Court trying to save it no longer works. We have gone too far down the road to serfdom, and if we continue there will be no turning back. The Courts cannot perpetually resist the political departments. If the Constitutionalists among us cannot regain control of the political branches, what we know as the Constitution of 1789 will be gone, irretrievably gone; it takes only one more liberal Justice.

Whereupon Mr. Roberts has thrown this question to the people. Is this the way you want to go? If so, confirm those who posed it. If not, turn them out. You have one more election to accomplish this. If Mr. Obama has four more years, the chances are good that he will be able to add one more to the Court, and there will be no turning back.

One can argue that this is a political strategic decision and it is not his to make. He would argue that it is his task to save the Constitution and this is the only way he knows that will accomplish that. Turn out the makers of this act which would march the United States down the path to federal control of everything, and do it while there is yet time to do so; or face the fact that the Court can no longer protect you from political consequences of your actions. If you want an entitlement state, here is your chance; if you want to reverse this course and move away from entitlements, here is your chance. And, incidentally, what we have is 2700 pages of bad law, passed by ideologues who had not read it and could not have known how bad it is, and approved by four Justices who haven’t read it either. If they’ll approve this they’ll approve anything. If you give Mr. Obama the chance he will add yet another to their number.

Mr. Roberts has proclaimed a reality. He might have gone with the conservative block and thrown the law out, thus making this election one of populism vs. the courts – something the liberals were preparing for. Now the issue is clear. This is a referendum on the entitlement state march down the Road to Serfdom. He may well have been wrong to do this, but it is what he has done.

If Mr. Obama wins this election he will have won and Obamacare will be implemented.

Ms. Pelosi told us that we had to pass the Bill so that we could find out what’s in it. We have done so. Now we know. And now that we know, we have a chance to reject it.

I have mail from readers who say that since Romney is unsatisfactory, they will vote Libertarian. TRhat is certainly an option.

I note that on the 1912 election President William Howard Taft, who took office as the designated successor to Theodore Roosevelt, failed of reelection because Roosevelt found him unsatisfactory and ran against him as the Progressive (“Bull Moose”) candidate. The result was predictable, the election of Woodrow Wilson. Wilson won a second term on the platform of “he kept us out of the War”, meaning The Great War, which after American entry under Wilson was called the World War.

I can well understand the frustrations of those who find Romney unsatisfactory. He was not my candidate. On the other hand, most of the people I know including myself find it a lot easier to gain influence and even power within the Republican Party rather than the Democrat party.  We do not live in a perfect world. In this real world, either Romney or Obama will become President and will appoint at least one Justice of the Supreme Court. Neither of those potential winners would be my first or even tenth choice to be President; but there is a lot more than a dime’s worth of difference between them.

You wrote:

"Ms. Pelosi told us that we had to pass the Bill so that w could find out what’s in it."

Perhaps you should read her complete remarks, so that you understand the context of the statement. It’s obvious to anyone who isn’t vested in taking her comments out of context that she was referring to the fact that given all the manufactured controversy, the only way The American People will find out what’s in the bill is when it’s implemented.

Of course, those with their own agendas won’t bother to actually review her remarks in their totality, because when it’s out of context and intentionally misconstrued, it makes a hell of a soundbite.

Which, of course, shows the validity of her point regarding the manufactured controversy and the reality.

M

But in fact we did have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it. And one of the things we find is that it fails to authorize funding of some of its own key elements: it was rushed into law defects and all. And I suspect that neither you nor anyone else believes that Ms. Pelosi actually read the bill that she conducted through the House. Indeed I would wager that not one of those who voted for that bill had actually read it. Twenty seven hundred pages is a lot of reading, and this was done by a lame duck Congress and even then has to use arcane parliamentary maneuvers to get it passed before that Congress was no more.  Yes: we had to pass the bill in order to find out what is in it. And what we are finding is not at all pleasant.

The simplest procedure is to repeal it, every bit of it, and then start over – assuming that there is any sentiment for a new national health bill at all.  The Clintons lost their Congressional majority on this issue, but Mr. Clinton was clever enough to disassociate himself from it in the election of 1996; and the Republicans were kind enough to run Bob Dole, probably the only man Clinton could beat. Romney is not Dole. Romney is more Mormon than Establishment.

But it is hardly unfair to say that the bill had to be passed in order to find out what was in it. No one knew what was in it when it was passed, and many are just finding out some of it now.

View 631 Monday, July 02, 2012

I continue to work on a new column, so this will be brief.

The controversy over the Roberts decision continues, with everyone speculating on what Roberts intended. There is speculation from someone who has in the past had sources inside the Supreme Court building that Mr. Roberts originally intended to vote to throw out Obamacare, but changed his mind; and that Mr. Justice Kennedy pleaded with Mr. Roberts to bring him back; and much other such. Much of the speculation is contradictory, so some of it must be wrong. Perhaps all of it is wrong. Mr. Roberts has been called an evil genius, Machiavellian,  a superb scholar, a damned fool, and almost everything else, and there is much speculation on his motives, his reasoning, his intentions, and his sanity.

None of that matters.

What matters is that Mr. Roberts has handed the question back to the political branches of the government.

For years the adherents of self government and political liberty have lost at the polls, and relied on the US Supreme Court to halt or at least slow the march of the nation toward nationalization of all significant issues. Over time this came down to a series of close decisions by the Court, and a slow – alternated by sudden lurches as with the Warren Court and its emanations and penumbras – march to the left toward nationalization of most significant social and economic issues.

We are left with control of nearly 20% of the economy to be decided by one man. One mortal man. We are left with the most fundamental issues of our time to be decided by thin margins, and even that condition depends on continuing to hold the Presidency whenever a conservative justice dies or decides to retire – and even then on finding potential Justices who will endure the barbarity of the Senate as expressed in the Bork and Clarence Thomas hearings. And that will continue.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/marc-a-thiessen-why-are-republicans-so-awful-at-picking-supreme-court-justices/2012/07/02/gJQAHFJAIW_story.html

http://blog.chron.com/texassparkle/2012/07/chief-justice-roberts-coward-or-evil-genius/

Whatever the motives of Mr. Roberts, he has sent the message that the Court cannot continue to be the only barrier toward the march of the nation toward national socialism. In my judgment it was clear to him – it certainly is to me – that handing the Federal Government direct responsibility for the 15 to 20% of the economy encompassed by health care, adding that to what the government already controls, is a fundamental change in the nature of the Republic. It is a fundamental change in the Constitution made without any Amendment. Ruling Obamacaret unconstitutional would make the Court the key issue of November 2012, when the key issue really ought to be, do you want the Federal Government running that much of the economy? Do you want to go where the country has been heading for the past decades?

Thus his decision: this is a political decision. Make it the key issue of the November 2012 campaign. You cannot rely on the Supreme Court to stand in the path of history and shout Stop! Perhaps at one time you could, but you are down to one man. You have bet the future course of the Republic on the life and integrity of five men; if any one of them dies or is disabled you will no longer have anyone standing in the way of this march to national socialism.

Mr. Roberts is one man, one vulnerable man, who sees the future clearly.

Now I have no sources inside the Court. I have never met Mr. Roberts. I have no idea what he is thinking, but I would be astonished if the above reasoning had never occurred to him. It seems obvious to me.

In any event the effect of what he has done is to make ObamaCare the key issue of the 2012 election as it was of the 2010 election. The 2010 election that sent a Republican to Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat. The election that reduced the Democratic power in the Senate, and gave the Republicans a majority in the House. The election that showed that raising taxes is not a popular platform to run on. And he has said that ObamaCare is a tax.

So now the pundits are castigating Romney over – what? Not being clear? He has said, very clearly, that he will act to repeal ObamaCare if there is any chance of doing so.

It seems clear to me. The November 2012 election is a referendum on whether the US continues on the road to national socialism – what about half the country calls the Road to Serfdom http://www.christiannewswire.com/news/6202320092.html — or not. It couldn’t be more stark.

The conservatives have for decades pinned their hopes on the US Supreme Court to save the country from the consequences of its political decisions. Mr. Roberts has said that will no longer work. Like Obama or hate him, like Romney or despise him, the issue is far bigger than either man.

I will try to deal with mail, much on this issue, tonight.

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