Category: Uncategorized

Mark Steyn helpfully points out that Palestinian official Saeb Erekat is of course, “democratically elected”, being presently in the ninth year of a five-year term. And in like manner, if Yasser Arafat was elected President of the Palestinian Authority in 1996, shouldn’t there have been another election by now?

Or is this just the sort of complicated subject that we can’t expect the mainstream media to address? After all, it does have more pressing matters of interest to cover, such as the soda preferences of the Democratic presidential candidates.

RB writes:

America is dead. If it is, what a lively corpse it is! The old bad old Abraham is asserted again- The good Framers and the clear and understandable language of the Constituion is asserted again- Instead of rehashing all of this, let;s just remind you of one small thing, to set the assertions you made into the ground-as in six feet under!

Thomas Jefferson, who is held up by you and yours as the American philosopher of small republics and limited goernemt, went and did what he, Jefferson, called an illegal act, and destroyed the Constituion-his words, not mine. What was that act? Why the Louisiana Purchase! First off, the national government had no powers to purchase the land, and Jefferson himself pointed that out! Yet he defended the action saying that if left to the States, the opportunity to expand the nation, which was necessary, according to him, would have slipped away! Oh yes, you’ll want a source-see Jefferson’s letter to Beveridge, in late 1803. It’s in the collections of Jefferson’s papers, which you can read at any library- To continue-Who got the money from the purchase? Why Napoleon Bonaparte, who used the money to finance his military conquest of Europe! and you and the rest have accused Clinton of selling out to China, of Bush’s deals with the bin Laden family(see Moore’s film) or Reagan’s arms for hostages etc etc ad nauseum. Again, What was the effect of the Purchase? to increase the size of the nation by double, and that Purchase area was Federal terriroty, not States, not in 1803! So the national government had increased its own land size to be larger than the combuned States!

What does this prove, except that the founding fathers knew whereof they spoke with regards to the temptations of State power? The fact that Jefferson was tempted and gave into corruption says nothing about the fact that today’s government is neither small nor limited as it was conceived to be. And every act of illicit government expansion is defended as being necessary. The public is not generally known to welcome dictatorship, after all, unless they have been sufficiently alarmed by the presumed alternatives.

And here’s the next problem. the French thinker Montesque, argued that the bigger a nation becomes the more the power is centralized and the more tyrannical it becomes–gee, what if he was right? Then Jefferson went from the small republic limiited government man to the Hamiltonian tyrant in one fell swoop- According to Lew Rockwell, when I pointed this out, Jefferson was a good political thinker but a bad President-so what else is new? And Jefferons was one of the Framers, one of the Founders, indeed, he was at least the assistant head coash after Washington, he was the main architect, with Madison of the Founding documents-If he can go wrong, then it is all up! and was all up then- But what if he was right, and what if the Framers, ressurected today, would nod approvingly at what has happened? I am quite sure that Hamilton would!

So am I. So is L. Neil Smith, the libertarian, which is why his sci-fi villains are called “Hamiltonians”. But the rest would almost certainly not. The fact that it is difficult to keep a Republic is why Franklin famously said: “if you can keep it.” Any sober analysis will suffice to demonstrate that we have not.

Among Libertarians and libertarians, I have found, after all of the rhe rhetoric about the Constituion and Declaration has died down, they will admit that they prefer the Articles of Confederation, that the Articles have the provisions for that “voluntary association” which the Constituion doesn’t. that the Articles say that States are sovereign, which the Constituion doesn’t and that the many word and phrases, such as “absoltelu” in the Articles “elastic clause” do not appear in the Contituion-which gives the new independnent executive, judiciary and Vongress great latitutes for expansion of powers. recall that there was no independent executive in the Articles! So, in your column, you have again, failed American histroy, American Constitional law, and American politics. and America isn’t anywhere near dead-you sound like the Carter administration people when they campaigned against Reagan!

Sure, many libertarians would prefer the Articles to the Constitution. But they would also prefer Constitutional government to what we have now. The Constitution certainly allows some latitude, but nowhere near so much as is being claimed by the three branches of the federal government. RB may have failed to understand the difference between America the nation-state and America the concept, he has clearly failed to disprove my assertions, as well, one is forced to assume, fifth-grade spelling, but at least he has succeeded in proving that one can read American history without being burdened by the heavy weight of understanding it.

DVH writes:

America is very different now than it was in the days of the founding fathers; such has to be taken into account when thinking about what is ideal government in the US today. In the old days you had lots of small independent farmers; nowadays you have huge numbers of people all working for corporations owned by a few people. Need I list all the technological changes since the days of the founding fathers?

I think Count Tolstoy already addressed this argument: “- mentioning “our days” as people of limited intelligence are fond of doing, imagining that they have discovered and appraised the peculiarities of “our days” and that human characteristics change with the times -”

Apparently DVH doesn’t see that most of the significant changes have nothing to do with technological change. What technology was involved in the creation of the corporation and granting it legal personhood? What technological imperative required a shift from Congressionally-issued metal money to privately-issued paper notes? The founding fathers understood that while the world will change, human nature doesn’t. Their vision was conceived to limit the depredations of the latter, and is every bit as relevant today as it was 230 years ago.

Ridge’s department last week asked the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to analyze what legal steps would be needed to permit the postponement of the election were an attack to take place. Justice was specifically asked to review a recent letter to Ridge from DeForest B. Soaries Jr., chairman of the newly created U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Soaries noted that, while a primary election in New York on September 11, 2001, was quickly suspended by that state’s Board of Elections after the attacks that morning, “the federal government has no agency that has the statutory authority to cancel and reschedule a federal election.” Soaries, a Bush appointee who two years ago was an unsuccessful GOP candidate for Congress, wants Ridge to seek emergency legislation from Congress empowering his agency to make such a call.

There haven’t been any major terrorist attacks in the USA since 9/11. That cynical voice inside my head says that providing this “statutory authority” to the federal government will all but assure that we’ll have one soon after it is provided.

Adam Gopnik writes in Paris to the Moon

The performance of Les Trois Petits Cochons, for instance, uses, with slight variations, many of the devices, not to mention the music of the Disney version of the story from the thirties. There are French touches, though. The catastrophe, or climax, comes when the wolf pretends to be a minor official comes to read the water meter. The pigs have to let him into the one remaining house; the French little pigs have to open the door to administration, even when it has an immense jaw and sixty white paper-mache teeth.

This is why there will never be a European Waco or Ruby Ridge. Perhaps in Switzerland, or New Europe, where decades of totalitarian rule have hardened the population’s attitudes about government. But certainly not in France.

America is rather different. We have no long tradition of obedience. We are born rebellious, with the unruly expectation that individual liberty is our natural birthright. We must be educated, confused, fooled and propagandized non-stop in order to even become manageable. Rage Against the Machine is a good example of this significant cultural difference; despite being left-wing pop icons, ideologically pledged to the expansion of central government power, they once notably preached: “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me,” and, just in case one happened to somehow escape the message, repeated it 26 times before punctuating it with one last exclamatory “motherfucker!”

This is not exactly the ideal open-the-door-to-the-government-wolf spirit.

America the idea may be dead, for now. But the recalcitrant individuality that gave her birth still lives, and we can hope that as long as this stubborn fire still burns in American hearts, we may find her again.

Imagine my surprise when I find it is Bill Buckler calling me! And he tells me that my wife says that I would love it, just love it, if he would call me up and finish talking about the increase in debt. I look at the doctor. I think about what he said. I look at the phone. And then I say to Bill, “Sure! I’d love to hear about it!” And so he goes on to say, “Since the beginning of 1998, total US borrowings have climbed from about 255% of US GDP to 302%!”

302% of GDP! My puny little brain is kicked into action, as I think to myself “This is a new record!” Amazingly, I think I know why he ended the sentence with an exclamation point! And look! I’m doing it, too!

And since there must be some reason why those exclamation points are suddenly everywhere, I will remark that this is higher than the 260% of GDP recorded at the height of the market in 1929, and we all know how well THAT turned out!

It’s probably worth pointing out that cumulative US mortgage debt is now $9.618 trillion, which represents 99.298 percent of cumulative US personal income, at $9.686 trillion. I don’t know if the banks can manage to push this number up beyond 100 percent, but considering that the government is deeply underwater itself, it’s pretty clear that the nation is essentially bankrupt.

“But we owe it to ourselves!” some might protest. Except that we don’t. We owe it to China, Japan, and the private bank that is the Federal Reserve. The question is this: who is worse off when the debt gets can no longer be sustained by continued borrowing or quiet inflation, the foreign investors, the bank or the indebted public?

It’s hard to disagree with Buckler’s conclusion:

As I am too busy wailing and cramming boxes of ammunition into a backpack to continue right now, I will leave it to the clever Mr. Buckley to come up with a simile to beautifully sum it all up. Rising to the challenge, he writes, “There is no ‘solution’ to this dilemma, just as there is no ‘solution’ for a man who finds himself in a barrel on the lip of Niagara Falls.”

Enjoy the silence….

Percent change at seasonally adjusted annual rates

03 Months from Feb 2004 TO May 2004: 11.3

06 Months from Nov 2003 TO May 2004: 08.2

12 Months from May 2003 TO May 2004: 05.4

Considering that the stock market is basically flat for the year with this sort of monetary stimulus, the picture is not a pretty one.

UPDATE – had two copy and paste errors in the original post. We apologize to anyone alarmed at the thought that perhaps Mr. Stross’s transdimensional mathematics had seized control of this blog. M3’s pace continues to further increase, by the way, according to the latest reports:

M-3 was up a whopping 31.7 billion for the latest reporting week on a seasonally adjusted basis. It is now up 61.2 billion over the past 3 weeks, and $204 billion over the past ten weeks, rising at an annualized clip of 11.7 percent.

Look, I don’t mind if a thread is hijacked by what turns out to be a more interesting conversation for those involved. But please do not intrude on other threads because you think something unrelated is particularly exciting or important – barring a stock market collapse or another 9/11, in either of those cases, please interrupt away. There’s enough nonsense and spam floating around via email; we don’t need to add to it here, at least not unfiltered.

Had the latest offender, (who shall go unnamed since it was done in innocence), bothered to email me first, I could have told him that he was getting worked up about an old Internet hoax. This was quite obvious in the early versions as they cited bills that did not exist.

Bill writes of the so-called “smart” missiles:

Yeah, what we should have done was say “Hey Saddam, we have a few hundred special ops folks hiding in Baghdad and other major cities, hide-and-seek starts…. Now!”

It seems to escape Bill that this is an admission on his part that a) the government does lie; and b) uses the mainstream media to disseminate its propaganda. The point is not that the government should have endangered its troops by telling the truth about how it was bombing Baghdad – of course they shouldn’t have, although I don’t see why any explanation was required in the first place – but that the US government is perfectly willing to lie and use the media to propagate its lies when it sees fit to do so.

This logically should logically lead Bill to the next two questions: (1) What else are they lying about? (2) What is their justification for doing so?

Finally, I find it hard to believe that anyone would believe that Saddam didn’t know perfectly well that our special ops were crawling all over Iraq both the first and second time around, smart missiles or no smart missiles. The frightening thing about special ops is that the target knows they’re out there, he just doesn’t know where, or how to find them.

The Atrocity Archives

Charles Stross

Golden Gryphon Press

Rating: 8 of 10

There are those books where the cleverness of the author is irksome, where one cannot escape the vague impression that the reader is expected to stop and applaud the literary gymnastics at the end of every chapter. In The Atrocity Archives, Charles Stross does not engage in pyrotechnic wordsmithery, but his cleverness is unmistakable.

Stross, (we dearly hope), has conjured up The Laundry from the bowels of his imagination, an esoteric department devoted to cleaning up those nasty messes that result when dimensions collide. The occultic Laundry is one part NSA, one part MI5 and two parts bureaucratic nightmare, as even the most awe-inspiring eldritch horrors are somehow reduced to matters of paperwork and departmental infighting. It is as if 007 was fired for sexual harassment and replaced by 013, a Dilbert in uneasy possession of Lord Voldemort’s powers. The complex synthesis is a most unlikely one, and yet Stross pulls it off with effortless expertise.

A longtime technology columnist for Computer Shopper, Stross presents a world in which modern science and mathematical theory have been used to harness occult power from… elsewhere. The Cold War, it seems, was even more grim and cold than anyone imagined, as the arms race involved far more than the comparatively prosaic threat of nuclear weapons. An insignificant pawn for a minor player in the Great Game, Bob Howard has recently traded the boredom of a desk job for what he hopes will prove a more exciting position in the field. But in this environment, one can never tell when things squamous and rugose will unexpectedly liven up a tedious day at the office with a moment of sheer horror.

Story: 4 of 5. Surely one of the strangest thrillers ever written, the fantastic and science fiction elements only add to the tension. Yes, there are girls that must be rescued and worlds that must be saved, but the unique nature of the threats involved, both wordly and otherwordly, keep the pages ever-turning. There are actually several stories contained within one meta-story, as a related novella, The Concrete Jungle, follows the Archives proper.

Style: 4 of 5. The text is gripping and entertaining throughout, as the juxtaposition of everyman’s office life with the omnipresent possibility of sudden and horrible death is quite amusing. Stross uses his jargon judiciously, piling it on for maximum effect at times, but never allowing it to slow the story down. Like Umberto Eco and Dan Brown, he manages the neat trick of making the reader feel smarter for having immersed himself in his book.

Characters: 3 of 5. Stross’s Howard – an homage to a genre legend – is an amusing protagonist. He is not at all the cliched reluctant hero, but his self-deprecating nature makes his occasional self-doubt all the more real. Stross, for all that he is manifestly an vision writer, still manages to draw his characters with precision and more than a little wry humor.

Creativity: 4.5 of 5. Yes, this is a synthetic creation. His influences – Lovecraft, Stephenson, Fleming, Adams – are obvious, and yet the wizard’s melting pot prduces something new, different and even stylish in a technocratic manner. Stross is perhaps the best “new” writer the science fiction genre has produced since Neal Stephenson; he is certainly the most interesting.

Text Sample:

The fact of the matter is that most traditional magic doesn’t work. In fact, it would all be irrelevant, were it not for the Turing theorem – named after Alan Turing, who you’ll have heard of if you know anything about computers.

That kind of magic works. Unfortunately….

The theorem is a hack on discrete number theory that simultaneously disproves the Church-Turing hypothesis (wave if you understand that) and worse, permits NP-complete problems to be converted into P-complete ones. This has several consequences, starting with screwing over most cryptography algorithms – translation: all your bank account are belong to us – and ending with the ability to computationally generate a Dho-Nha geometry curve in real time.

This latter item is just slightly less dangerous than allowing nerds with laptops to wave a magic wand and turn them into hydrogen bombs at will. Because, you see, everything you know about the way this universe works is correct – except for the little problem that this isn’t the only universe we have to worry about. Information can leak between one universe and another. And in a vanishingly small number of the other universes there are things that listen, and talk back – see Al-Hazred, Nietszche, Lovecraft, Poe, etcetera. The many-angled ones, as they say, live at the bottom of the Mandlebrot mathematics, except when a suitable incantation in the platonic realm of mathematics – computerised or otherwise – draws them forth.

(And you thought running that fractal screensaver was good for your computer?)