30 November 2006

How can tomorrow be December already? As I was shutting doors and windows last night I noticed quite a few Christmas lights were up and I think a friend is bringing us a tree this week which we aren’t quite sure where to put. Our front balcony would be nice, but that’s where the dogs spend the night and they’d trash it for sure, left to their own devices and bored. I have to get the Christmas boxes down from the garage rafters and string the lights…maybe Luis will come to work this weekend. Now it’s just a matter of struggling with all the lights that won’t work. I think the Chinese have us figured us out on that one…throw them all away and start over fresh every year. Bad for the balance of trade, of course…

Sounds like I had better plan on having extra quantities of liquid attitude-adjuster on hand this weekend…which reminds me, I have to lay it in ahead of time, no alcohol is sold Saturday through Monday this week because of an election of some kind.

Do they still not sell booze in the US on election day? If so, maybe they should consider starting back up again. I mean, look at what we’re getting the way we’ve been doing things now, as the New York Times reports it’s latest leak:

The bipartisan Iraq Study Group reached a consensus on Wednesday on a final report that will call for a gradual pullback of the 15 American combat brigades now in Iraq but stop short of setting a firm timetable for their withdrawal, according to people familiar with the panel’s deliberations.

The report, unanimously approved by the 10-member panel, led by James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, is to be delivered to President Bush next week. It is a compromise between distinct paths that the group has debated since March, avoiding a specific timetable, which has been opposed by Mr. Bush, but making it clear that the American troop commitment should not be open-ended. The recommendations of the group, formed at the request of members of Congress, are nonbinding.

I hope we didn’t spend any money in order to get these incredible earth-shaking conclusions. Unanimous, too. Is there actually any conclusion contained in that except for the word “gradual”? But did anyone really think, before this, they would all be leaving on the same day?

The report leaves unstated whether the 15 combat brigades that are the bulk of American fighting forces in Iraq would be brought home, or simply pulled back to bases in Iraq or in neighboring countries. (A brigade typically consists of 3,000 to 5,000 troops.) From those bases, they would still be responsible for protecting a substantial number of American troops who would remain in Iraq, including 70,000 or more American trainers, logistics experts and members of a rapid reaction force.

So we leave 70,000 troops and others unprotected by fighting forces. THEY will be safe somewhere else. Murtha has to be chortling, our fighters safe and our workers at risk. What’s that? They’ll be protected by Iraqi security forces? Oh. I wonder why nobody thought of that before?

Anybody got any other idea of what might have been expected? Bush to endorse al-Sadr? The two leaders to have agreed to slow down things?

Isn’t it kind of embarrassing to find yourself putting out a newspaper based on leaks of confidential material padded with stuff so obvious your 6-year-old neighbor kid could have put out his own edition without much of a staff.

When computer industry executives heard about a plan to build a $100 laptop for the developing world’s children, they generally ridiculed the idea. How could you build such a computer, they asked, when screens alone cost about $100?

Mary Lou Jepsen, the chief technologist for the project…(and)…a former Intel chip designer, found a way to modify conventional laptop displays, cutting the screen’s manufacturing cost to $40 while reducing its power consumption by more than 80 percent. As a bonus, the display is clearly visible in sunlight.

The project now has tentative commitments for three million computers and will begin large-scale manufacturing when it reaches five million with separate commitments from at least one country each in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Based on current negotiations, Mr. Negroponte says he expects that goal to be reached by mid-2007.

It got a significant boost on Nov. 15 when the Inter-American Development Bank signed an agreement to supply both loans and grants to buy the machines.

Mr. Negroponte said the manufacturing cost was now below $150 and that it would fall below $100 by the end of 2008.

One factor setting the project apart from earlier efforts to create inexpensive computers for education is the inclusion of a wireless network capability in each machine.

The project leaders say they will employ a variety of methods for connecting to the Internet, depending on local conditions. In some countries, like Libya, satellite downlinks will be used. In others, like Nigeria, the existing cellular data network will provide connections, and in some places specially designed long-range Wi-Fi antennas will extend the wireless Internet to rural areas.

That article, alone, was about the transformation of the third world, something which is going to have at least as much influence on the world’s future as what’s going on in the Middle East right now.

It’s croggling to me to see so many of the things I read about as a kid, back when they were only science-fiction ideas, are coming to pass almost daily. Imagine anyone in the world being connected to the web, to anyone else in the world, cheaply and easily…it’s an incredible idea!

I was walking around one of the local stationery stores yesterday while Carol shopped for a kids’ birthday present (we’re doing books, not toys, for the future string of children’s birthday parties we expect Tony will be attending) when I saw something that looked like a laptop for $50 or so. I didn’t have time to investigate further, but it looked like something that would play games and do simple arithmetic computations, I’ll have to go back and find out more. It’s a bit too much for Tony yet, but I was thinking in another six months to a year…

…and now, heck, for $100 I’ll be able to put him on the internet by that time! And the beat goes on!

Each machine will come with a simple mechanism for recharging itself when a standard power outlet is not available. … consumes just 2 watts of power, compared with the 25 to 45 watts consumed by a conventional laptop…possible because of the lack of a hard drive (the laptop uses solid-state memory, which has no moving parts and has fallen sharply in cost) and because the Advanced Micro Devices microprocessor shuts down whenever the computer is not processing information. … the laptop’s software, which is based on the freely available Linux operating system…eispensing with a traditional desktop display, the software substitutes an iconic interface intended to give students a simpler view of their programs and documents and a maplike view of other connected users nearby.

Even more incredibly, these laptops aren’t really intended to be a commercial “for sale” project for profit!

He said a program would be created to enable those in the developed world to underwrite a laptop for a child in a designated country and to correspond with the recipient by e-mail as a sort of “glorified pen-pal program.” But however attractive the idea of a $100 or $150 laptop, he said there were no plans to make it generally available to consumers.

“They should buy Dell’s $499 laptop for now,” he said. “Ours is really designed for developing nations — dusty, dirty, no or unreliable power and so on.”

I have to admit that this item puzzles me almost more than it does anything else, the poisoning of the former KGB spy:

Why the high-tech stuff? In Lebanon, the Syrian president simply sends gunmen with ordinary bullets.

Oh, my, is the Associated Press now getting caught publishing doctored bad news about Iraq? I read the story the other day about the poor Sunnis who were hauled out of their mosque, doused with kerosene and set on fire while the Iraqi police just stood around, and I almost said something here. But then I sometimes wonder if I’m not really being too dismissive of the MSM, I have a couple of friends who get upset any time I voice any doubts about the bad press reports coming out of Iraq because THEY KNOW the place is going to hell in a handbasket. I’m afraid that I have more Mark Twain’s reported attitude:

Anyhow, I’m more likely to trust the bloggers who jumped on the story and are now busy tracking down the phony source behind this and maybe a number of other stories coming out of Iraq, all uniformly bad news, but all I’m going to do now is point you at a place to start, the story looks like it’s going to be long and complicated.

The AP sounds like it is getting really defensive about this, as well they might, because deeper digging by the bloggers finds:

Not only is Capt. Hussein bogus, but another source the AP has used extensively is bogus.

The insurgency knows what they are doing here. They understand the ONLY way they are going to win against us is to borrow a page out of the North Vietnamese playbook. Namely, forcing the morale of this country down to the point where funding is withdrawn and we leave.

So they employ fake Police Captains and other assorted informants to contact the MSM and create a picture of utter chaos.

Will it work tho? Sure seems to be working so far….

Patterico has an excellent update to this new information:

“In short, the AP has been relying on a bogus source for much of its reporting on Shia violence against Sunnis since at least April.

For those who continue to suggest that the mainstream press has a negligible impact on elections, consider that the majority of Americans who bothered to pay any attention whatsoever to this story will be left with an account of horrific sectarian violence against women and children—and the belief that sectarian strife in Iraq is not only inexorable and savage, but pandemic.

Underlying this reportage, then, is an unseemly subtext: that Arabs in Iraq—and perhaps even Arabs in general—are incapable of working toward a free society, one that, through a series of ratified political documents and elections, has merely pretended to be taking its first tentative steps toward the acceptance of a baby pluralism.”

This has been my main point all along. The average American picks up a paper or watches 10 minutes of the evening news and believes they are well informed. The MSM prints stories that show all this chaos and mayhem and the average American swallows it all.

But as I’ve shown here, a lot of it is not to be trusted.

My average American friends won’t like any of this, assuming they’ve managed to get this far.

I must admit that my new venture into the world of blogging, done very tentatively so far, leaves me awed and humbled. As I followed the above story, for instance, going from link to link, I’m simply overwhelmed by the volume and also the quality of what is out there.

Where do they find the time? I can barely manage to read and write what I do, and I’m a fast reader and a decent typist. And they have so MANY good links, so many interesting people…frankly, I’m more than a little intimidated at the moment.

This from Power Line, another great blog site, about Mark Steyn, one of the world’s best writers:

Most of our readers are aware of Mark Steyn's "Demography is Destiny" theme, which he has elaborated in much of his recent writing. Steyn thinks that low birth rates among Europeans, in particular, will inevitably lead to their replacement on the European continent by Muslims who are reproducing at a far faster rate. Steyn pursues the theme in today's article in the Chicago Sun-Times, Quartet of Ladies Shows Where We're Headed. He contrasts Fatma An-Najar, the 64-year-old Palestinian grandmother who became a suicide bomber, with Katharine Jefferts Schori, the new Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church:

“An-Najar gave birth to her first child at the age of 12. She had eight others. She had 41 grandchildren. Keep that family tree in mind. By contrast, in Spain, a 64-year old woman will have maybe one grandchild. That's four grandparents, one grandchild: a family tree with no branches.”

I trust my own readers will remember that I joked that she should have been a great-grandmother by her age, I really was sort of making a sick joke, but if each of her children followed in her, ah, er, footsteps, that would be 12, 24, 36, 48, 60, and she’d be up to great-great-great-grandchildren by age 64…and counting.

Bishop Kate gave an interview to the New York Times revealing what passes for orthodoxy in this most flexible of faiths. She was asked a simple enough question: "How many members of the Episcopal Church are there?"

"About 2.2 million," replied the presiding bishop. "It used to be larger percentage-wise, but Episcopalians tend to be better educated and tend to reproduce at lower rates than other denominations. … We encourage people to pay attention to the stewardship of the earth and not use more than their portion."

In some ways I can see how that might be considered an admirable position, except how does one determine exactly what constitutes one’s fair portion? The Bishop would appear to be saying that the Palestinian grandmother (sic) was exceeding her portion, wouldn’t she? Well, probably she would find a good many takers for that argument, but what does it really mean?

Every time I’ve read Steyn on the Muslim population bomb vs the fact that European countries are now falling below replacement rate, I flash back to a book I read so many ages ago that I no longer have a copy (sob!, a first edition goes for $650 now), John Brunner’s Stand On Zanzibar. I’ll trust Wikipedia far enough to summarize it for me:

The novel's main driver is overpopulation and its projected consequences. Its title refers to an early twentieth century claim that the world's population could fit onto the Isle of Wight (area 381 km²) if they were all standing upright. Brunner remarked that the growing world population now required a larger island—the 3.5 billion people living in 1968 could stand together on the Isle of Man (area 572 km²), while the 7 billion people whom he projected would be alive in 2010 would need to stand on Zanzibar (area 1554 km²). Throughout the book, the image of the entire human race standing shoulder-to-shoulder on a small island is a metaphor for a crowded world where each person feels hemmed in by a prison made not of metal bars, but of other human beings. By the end of the book, some of that crowd is (metaphorically) getting its feet wet in the Indian Ocean surrounding the island.

My question would be something like to ask whether the, um, stewardship was appropriate back in the Isle of Wight times but had become in appropriate by Zanzibar time? I can look at the teeming hordes in the slums of India and clearly see that these people have abused their stewardship simply by taking up more physical space than “they should”, by my standards.

Of course, I live (with my wife and 3-year-old son) in a two-story home that would be homey and comfortable for about three or even four ‘typical’ Costa Rican families, so they might well decide that I am the one taking up too much space.

Then there are the people who say that I (or, typically, “Americans”) are using more than “their share” of the planet’s physical resources, typically beginning with oil and gasoline. What the heck does that mean? I have a car and I use 40 gallons of gasoline a month. So does this mean that Luis, who has no car, should nevertheless have to consume 40 gallons of gasoline for something in order for us to share equally in the gasoline resources?

How about all of the northern Chinese burning coal, etc, to keep from freezing in the winter? Where’s my coal?

One side-effect that the Afghanistan/Iraq wars have produced in me is an appreciation of where and how I live. I look at those tv pictures, not of mayhem but simply of their houses, cities, villages, fields, countryside…holy smokes, you guys, if this is what Allah figures out you deserve to maintain stewardship over, no wonder you practice jihad and volunteer to become suicide bombers.

If the original Garden of Eden was in Iraq then it had to be appreciated in comparison with the surroundings, I guess. Hey, look, Eve…isn’t that a fig leaf I see? Yeah, over here another ten feet is another one! Wow, let’s settle down here and raise a little cain while we’re still able…

MANKIND will need to leave planet Earth using rockets fuelled by the same technology made famous in Star Trek to ensure the long-term survival of the species, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has warned.

Professor Hawking said rockets propelled by the kind of matter/anti-matter annihilation technology used by the Star Ship Enterprise would be needed to colonise hospitable planets orbiting other stars.

Professor Hawking was speaking ahead of the presentation to him of Britain's highest scientific award, the Royal Society's Copley Medal, previously granted to Charles Darwin, Michael Faraday and Captain James Cook.

He told the BBC that scientists may be within 20 years of reaching his prediction in A Brief History of Time that mankind would one day "know the mind of God" by understanding all the laws which govern the universe.

"The long-term survival of the human race is at risk as long as it is confined to a single planet," he said. "Sooner or later, disasters such as an asteroid collision or nuclear war could wipe us all out. But once we spread into space and establish independent colonies, our future should be safe.

"There isn't anywhere like the Earth in the solar system, so we would have to go to another star.”

Hawking would not appear to have any problems with trying to know the mind of God through scientific discovery, it would appear.

I have no argument with that concept, but what I do think is rather egocentric is to believe that we humans on this particular planet are the only ones who will have to leave earth in order to ensure the long-term survival of the human race…what if we are already one of the race’s far-flung survival colonies?

Somewhere around here I have, or will have, a post on the subject of evolution, with my arguments for and against, but either way you go I think the argument for Homo sapiens to be unique in the universe is pretty difficult to defend.

Either the “God” or the “intelligent design” theories are the simplest to argue, since both postulate the existence of a creative force with absolutely unknown and unknowable qualities, so therefore it makes no sense to argue either for or against any particular scenario which is incapable of determination.

Nor can religionists argue otherwise, because the central condition that determines the existence of FAITH is the fact that it constitutes belief in something which by definition cannot be known.

(Unless, of course, Hawking is right about God’s mind eventually becoming knowable.)

But if you are a believer in evolution, in a series of events during which physical and chemical things simply happen naturally and inevitably, given sufficient time, such that all things have a scientific explanation absent any type of mystical creative force, or designer, proceeding from point a to point b to point c and so on, then the simple scientific laws of probability guarantee that another planet with characteristics identical to earth, or more likely millions of planets like it, have existed, do exist, will exist.

There are people all over the place, Out There. Some no more look like us than an amoeba looks like an elephant, perhaps, or maybe a pygmy looks like a Masai, but we’re talking only about what we’ve discovered here on earth, so far, and we haven’t even begin to discover it all yet.

Back on this world, I do enjoy Patterico. For those of you who may have noticed that he is the only blog listed, that doesn’t mean he is the only guy I read as much as it does that he happened to have some very pertinent things to say at the time I was trying to get up and running…the right guy at the right place at the right time.

I have two little guys, one sitting on each shoulder, when I blog. On one shoulder is the little guy in the devil outfit. He’s the one who is forever imploring me to snark at people and get into fights with them. He’s entertaining, and I give in to him sometimes — but he often gets me into trouble.

On the other shoulder, I have the little guy in the angel outfit. He warns me to be polite and understated in my observations, claims, and inquiries. This guy is a little boring sometimes, but he’s probably the right one to listen to in most cases.

Oh, yes, how well I know them. My problem with the angel guy is that he is just plain too nice and well-behaved, so when my blood-alcohol level climbs and my tolerance for fools declines, he too-easily sits down and shuts up when I tell him to be quiet.

The devil guy, of course, thinks this is just great. And, maybe I shouldn’t admit it, but I have a sneaking suspicion that I like the devil guy better.

They used to have a radio program (and tv, also, I guess) called Truth Or Consequences”…but much of the time that has seemed to me to be something more like Truth AND Consequences. My little devil guy is particularly fond of truths that are, um, politically uncorrect to utter these days, plus “in vino veritas” was considered already old enough to be a proverb in Plato’s time.

Some people have foolishly interpreted this to mean that everything you say when in your cups is true, or that perhaps you speak the truth only when free of restraint, but of course neither one of those broad assumptions quite covers the truth.

I remember when I was being taught, as a child, that it was wrong to lie, ever, and then the subject of “white lies” came up…technical untruths that served the good desired by the angel better than the actual truths the devil found more pleasant. I could see at an early age that this was not going to be an easy subject for me to master, and time hasn’t improved my abilities all that much.

I had to laugh the other day when reading an “advice to novice bloggers” column which very seriously advised you never to post after you had been drinking. Ah, yes, very sage advice.

I’d add a few, based on the same principle. Don’t write or say things that will be out in the universe permanently when you are angry, frustrated, tired…well, like in vino, any temporary emotional situation not truly representative of who you are the majority of the time.

I think the truth is that we are all, each and every one of us, an incredibly complicated mixture of ideas and emotions and thoughts and desires, such that there is no simple and single definition which fits who you are all of the time. Much, of the time, in fact, I think we attempt to keep that “real us” hidden.

Remember all of the stories you’ve read, about people who never let their “real” name be known to anyone, because knowing it would give them power over you?

I think this desire to keep things hidden is innate. As a Scorpio, I can guarantee you for damn certain (as a host of former wives and partners will agree) that it is absolutely instinctive in me not to tell everything that I know. I did not acquire this trait after I learned I was a Scorpio, I learned to understand myself better after I read about Scorpio.

Part of my reason for blogging now, and for writing St Ives earlier to close friends and family, is to make an attempt to break free, at least to what extent that I can, of this inherent need to remain hidden.

The problem is that sometimes when I feel like I am finally succeeding better than other times I notice the little guy in red has a big grin and the little guy in white has his head buried in his hands.

I never really did all that much of it before, I now realize. I read the MSM and a few of the bigger blogs, I only dabbled a bit with the others.

I’m overwhelmed to learn how many literate and intelligent writers there are out there, I know only a few of them so far, I cannot even imagine how I’ll ever find time to read all of them, let alone comment on what they have to say.

I feel like Harry Warner trying to loc every fanzine in the world. Or Rotsler trying to have an illo in all of them.

James S. Robbins in NRO writes a great article about defining what a ‘civil war’ means, and why, with some excellent examples. I can’t begin to cut and paste from it, go read it. Except for his conclusion, below:

This points to the most important objection to the use of “civil war” with respect to Iraq — this is not a purely internal conflict between Iraqis. The Coalition forces obviously play a large role, as do the Islamist foreign fighters and al Qaeda. Syria and Iran, our putative future partners in dialogue have for years been supplying men, money, and material leading to the deaths of hundreds of Americans. (There’s a topic of conversation.) No, this is not merely a civil war; it is an international conflict with significant regional impact. Reducing the conflict in Iraq to a civil war does not clarify our options. Maybe the people who are so committed to the expression can explain what difference it makes in policy terms, that is if this is anything more than a semantic game. If it is a civil war, what then? How does that affect our over all strategy? What changes need to be made? How can we win it? Unless this word play leads to concrete policy recommendations, it is a great waste of time.

But that would be missing the point, Mr Robbins. You see, if it gets called an Iraqi civil war then WE don’t have to win it, they have to settle it between themselves. This fact alone lets us bug out while claiming honor, a sickening hypocrisy right there.

And we had a rollicking session with Mark Steyn about music, on which he is expert, as he is on virtually everything else. (I could have done without that “virtually,” I believe.) I asked him which team was better: Rodgers & Hart or Rodgers & Hammerstein. He said — I am summarizing succinctly — “The first team wrote better songs, the second better musicals.”

I asked him to name the best of the following musicals: Oklahoma! The King and I, South Pacific, Carousel, or The Sound of Music. Unhesitatingly, he said Carousel.

That struck me as an unconventional choice, and it won some healthy applause from our audience. Personally, I’m not sure I’d put anything over Oklahoma!

I had a hard time enjoying Carousel because the story was all about a dad who had lost his little boy, and vice versa. Nothing ever fixed that for me, I still associate the name with sadness.

I like happy endings in fiction, whether books or movies or stage plays, the earth, the poem goes, has need of its mirth and has troubles enough on its own. I probably liked The King And I the best, but prejudice enters in here because I also wrote my own adaptation to this one plus I thought Yul Brynner was incomparable in his role. I played my version of it, on stage, and seldom have felt to have been so incomparable…on the low end.

(On the other hand, I was and still am quite pleased with my performance as Broker Higgins in My Fair Agent, another one of my productions. You win some and you lose some, I guess.)

Oklahoma always seemed too much like a joke, somehow, I don’t really remember any strong feelings associated with South Pacific, and…

Alas I cannot excerpt this properly, either, but if you want to read a really funny satire about the hypocrisy in racial slurs then go to this Larry Elder post about his holiday wish list, it’s hilarious. My favorite:

Dear Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and other minority members of the Bush administration:

Please accept my apology for, while co-hosting a radio show in 2001, calling Bush's minority appointees "Uncle Tom types." I made a mistake of the head, not of the heart.

Sincerely yours, Gloria Allred, attorney at law

(currently representing the black "victims" of Michael Richards' racist rant)

…doing business with the Saudis is not just a matter of buying and selling or beating someone else's price. … As former British Secretary of State for Defense, Lord Gilmour, told the BBC a few weeks ago, "You either got the business and bribed or you didn't bribe and didn't get the business." How the British answer the Saudis' ultimatum may have a significant effect on the future of the Middle East. If they stop the investigation, the brakes will be off on Saudi intransigence. Cooperation in tracing terrorists and their funding, only grudgingly given, will probably stop altogether. If they don't stop the investigation, the Saudis may cancel the Typhoon contract and buy Rafale jets from the ever-eager-to-please French. … Saudi Arabia is bluffing, in part. They may disrupt relations with the British, for a time, if the investigation goes on to a public trial. But in diplomacy, nothing is permanent and what is broken today can be mended tomorrow. If the Brits forge ahead, they will lose the billions the Typhoon sale would have meant to them, and France (which has no qualms about bribery) will gain what the British lose.

Business and principle are often incompatible in the Middle East.

That hurts me. What a great opportunity to write: “Principal and principle are often incompatible in the Middle East.”