View 268 July 28 - August 2, 2003 (original) (raw)
Monday July 28, 2003
Begin with the weekend, which had a good bit of mail, then view and particularly a comment and proposal on Iraq.
And a sad announcement:
Bob Hope. RIP
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/ A56590-2003Jul28?language=printer
Anarcho-Tyranny
In the current issue of Chronicles, the rather uneven magazine that seeks to be the spokesvehicle for "paleo-conservatism", Samuel Francis has an essay on The Patriot Act and what it will bring: roundup of the Kookie Right, raids and busts without much reason for them against gun nuts and anti-Semites, and darned little interference with real terrorists.
The problem is, he's pretty well correct. The FBI has time to go interview some book store worker who was spotted with anti-capitalists tracts in a coffee shop, but it hasn't made much progress in finding the source of the anthrax that killed several and shut down part of the government. Remember anthrax? But the FBI seems obsessed with Hatfill and ponds in Maryland, and terrified of profiling, even though all the evidence I have seen points to the al Qaeda operatives.
But we don't seem to be making much progress against other real terrorists, even if they can bust some guy in Virginia because he has guns, and retroactively charge him with defacing a Nike T shirt. (The story is nearly incredible, but to read about it you'll have to visit some odd places, many of them places I don't much want to go to. But The Washington Post carried the story.) "You prosecute what you can prosecute," one law enforcement source said.
Exactly.
Some years ago Samuel Francis proposed the term "Anarcho-Tyranny" for that form of government. Anarchy in that crime abounds, and terrorists, and not much can be done about either. There were 16,000 murders in the US, and a young black man is probably safer in the Army in Iraq than he is as a civilian in South LA; and the main reason the murder rate is down is that our emergency hospitals are pretty good: factor in Attempted Murder as well as murder and see what you get.
Now I don't mean the nation is seething in crime. But we certainly have a lot of it -- and not much is done. "You prosecute what you can prosecute," one law enforcement source said. And of course you do because the Prison Guard unions demand the work. So we have the War On Drugs. We have regulations. And we have a Federal Bureaucracy that can't find many terrorists or discover who put the anthrax in the mail, but which is pretty good at interfering with local law enforcement. It's also pretty good at interfering with any attempt of local districts to do much about improving education. At collecting taxes in order to keep us from putting mangers up in the public squares at Christmas. Don't you feel safer, now that the manger is gone and the Los Angeles City Hall lights aren't displayed in the form of a cross on Christmas Eve?
It can't enforce immigration laws -- imagine if those had been enforced, if someone had actually investigated those Saudis taking pilot lessons. In fact it can't do much about Saudi Arabia at all because every top official in government knows that after leaving government he can have have a stint at consulting for the Saudis and make a lot of money, provided only that he doesn't get labeled an enemy of the Saudis while in office.
That's the anarchy. The tyranny comes when "You prosecute what you can prosecute," one law enforcement source said. Go after the "hate groups", interview those book store clerks carrying printouts of anti-capitalist tracts, but be sure you don't do any profiling, or serious investigations of Saudi connections. Bust that crack smoker. War to the knife against cocaine. You won't much hurt Colombia: they have been killing each other at about the same rate since before the Spanish Conquest; and you can make some US types rich, and keep the prisons full. "You prosecute what you can prosecute."
[http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/28/national/ 28PRIS.html?ex=1060418764&ei=1&en=6eba273a27fa6ebb
Study Finds 2.6Increase in U.S. Prison Population
July 28, 2003 By FOX BUTTERFIELD
The nation's prison population grew 2.6 percent last year, the largest increase since 1999, according to a study by the Justice Department.]
Well, it's not as bad as all that. But the trend is there.
No one would want anarcho-tyranny; but it's easier to drift into than many suppose, and once there it's hard to get out of.
One of my readers is fond of quoting something I said a while ago:
-- "We do not live by rule of law, because no one can possibly go a day without breaking one or another of the goofy laws that have been imposed on us over the years. No one even KNOWS all the laws that apply to almost anything we do now. We live in a time of selective enforcement of law." --Dr. J. E. Pournelle
I wish that were not true, but it is, and that way lies Anarcho-Tyranny. We have the DMCA, and Patriot Act I, and soon we will have Patriot Act II. Welcome to the future.
Ape Diet vs. Lovastatin. From a friend:
I emailed Jenkins saying that I was much encouraged by his study which informed me that 20mg of Lovastatin per day was just as effective as a vegetarian diet in keeping down cholesterol. I have never managed to keep to anyone's diet, but I'm quite good at taking prescribed pills.
I got no reply.
Heh.
I need a file management utility. For years I have used and recommended Canyon Software's Drag 'N File, but it seems not to have kept up with XP and I get some serious glitches using it (files copied to unexpected places, duplicated directories, etc. )
What I need is something like the original File Manager, or Norton Commander for Windows, but it needs this feature: I should be able to specify that I want to copy all and only those files in this directory and these subdirectories that are LATER than the ones being copied to.
It should then do that, without stopping to ask me, without blowing up and stopping entirely when it finds an open file, and preferably it should report on what it has done when it is finished.
There must be such file utilities. I've been spoiled by Drag 'N File and Commander, and I haven't kept up. Commander alas doesn't work automatically. I sure wish Symantec had kept Commander up to date. AND SEE BELOW.
===
I am reminded by many readers that xcopy with various command line parameters will do all that. All true, and I suppose I should adopt it. My only problem is that I have some long name directories, and the target directory for most of what I want to do is called "FULL MONTY"; and xcopy will not accept directory names with spaces in them. Canyon Drag 'N Soft used to although I now wonder if some of my problems with that utility might have been caused by that. COMMANDER was "Point and Shoot" and didn't care.
I've solved the problem somewhat by renaming FULL MONTY to FULLMONTY which seems to work, so clearly xcopy hasn't kept the 8 letter Directory name limitation even though it can't accept spaces in Directory Names. Odd how quickly one forgets command line methods, given that I used to be a champion of command lines and insisted (I think with some success; at least one of them blames me anyway) that Microsoft's product managers retain the capabilities...
Anyway it sure works, once I get the limits taken care of. Thanks to about 6 readers who sent nearly identical suggestions...
The FULLMONTY is of course a directory of everything I ever wrote, including the editor programs. It hasn't been kept up to date recently. Now to burn a CD and mail it off to Thompson and another to Niven just in case...
[And how quickly we forget: "put it in quotes" of course...]
And now see below.