View 550 December 22 - 28, 2008 (original) (raw)
This week:
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
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,
Just in case you haven't seen it: The American Conservative -- Where Have All the Neocons Gone?
Hmmmmm, think that maybe you're not as alone as you'd feared on this topic? (I'm happy to say...)
http://www.amconmag.com/article/2009/jan/12/00006//
Doug Hayden
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.
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A warning:
(From another conference)
XP Antivirus 2008/2009, the nastiest piece of spyware I've seen in a long time. I'm starting to get several infections of it a week at work -- and these include computers with up-to-date antivirus where people don't have admin rights.
If you hit an infected web page, it will warn you of having thousands of viruses and insist you download the software to scan for it. The software "scans" and tells you that you need to buy their cleaner. They then have your credit card number and you still have the virus. The New York Times estimated that they make about $5 million a year through these tactics.
I've seen these warnings on thin clients (which are so locked down no virus could be on them), and they wouldn't go away until you restarted. I've seen it turn off automatic updates and hide from antivirus software. I've seen it put icons on your desktop even if you don't actually download the software (click on them and you will). It puts rootkits on your computer.
Nasty stuff. The best cleaner is Malwarebytes fromhttp://malwarebytes.org. So far, that's always cleaned it up.
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!
