This is really, really, funny. Really, really mean, too, but still, incredibly funny. It's a chronological description of Michael Jackson's transformation into one of the five weirdest human beings on the planet.
I just saw Melissa Gilbert on television claiming that she's 35.
I remember watching Little House on the Prairie when I was eight, and Laura had already been married for several years. I am now 29. Conceivably she might have been 16 when they married her off, but she wasn't 12. By my count she pretty much has to be at least 40. It's physically impossible for her to be 35.
What I don't understand is how she can lie about it. The entire country watched her grow up on camera.
It's one of those things that makes you smack your eyes repeatedly because you can't believe what you just read: President Clinton is a better person than President Bush because. . . he cheats at golf.
Some might prefer that to the Clinton approach of dispensing presidential pardons to many an errant shot, the better to claim scores in the middle 80s. "If you're the president," one aide memorably observed, "you can hit as many balls as you like." (You can also take as many clubs as you like, and Clinton, a man who preferred options to hard choices, liked to carry more than the regulation 14.)
Certainly there is much to be said for presidents playing by the rules, especially off the course. But there is also something to admire in Clinton's undisciplined enthusiasm for what is, after all, a game -- and for his placing top priority on making sure everyone on the course, including himself, was having fun for a full five hours or so. By the same token there is cause for concern in his successor's seeming regard for golf as a chore to be crossed off the list as quickly as possible.
Golf is a game especially suited to loosening up, calming down and enjoying the company of friends in a leisurely landscape. Played this way, it can't help but offer relaxation -- and surely this president, like all presidents, could use more of that.
Oh, I see. He wasn't trying to lower his score, just trying to make sure everyone else enjoyed themselves. Because there's nothing for having fun on the golf course like playing with someone who cheats.
Now I know you've all been waiting for me to weigh in on the Tipper Gore/concert ticket thing. Yes, that's right, I can read your minds, and Brian Sullivan of Seattle, Washington, you are going straight to hell if you don't get your mind out of the gutter.
At any rate, here goes: who cares? Are we really wasting neurons on this? So what if she did ask for free tickets? She's the wife of an ex-presidential candidate. It's a long way from that to the commisars showing up at the door demanding to re-write Bruce's songs to more properly reflect the proletarian spirit. I have half a dozen friends who, if they could get anyone on Bruce Springstein's staff to pick up the phone, would have the number on speedial badgering 'em to get Bruce come play their nephew's bar mitzvah, okay? And now I'm going to go pound myself in the head with a small hammer until I forget I ever heard about this stupid scandal.
So lately it seems that every morning I go over to Steven Den Beste’s page, get an idea, and blog about it, and then – spit-spot! -- I’m done for the day. Steven, if you’re ever in New York, I owe you a beer.
This morning our topic is international law. I’m suspicious of international law for several reasons. For one thing, its proponents are awfully selective about the agreements they consider binding. For example, every internationalist I’ve ever met is against our involvement in Vietnam. Yet we had a treaty with Vietnam saying that if they were attacked, we’d defend them. Perhaps we should never have made the treaty, but that’s a different question: once we had made the treaty, how come internationalists don’t think we should have gone in there and pushed the North Vietnamese back to the sea.
[Of course, this may not be a good example, since the vast well of ignorance on the subject of Vietnam means that most of the internationalists I’ve met are unaware that we had a treaty with Vietnam. They are also usually unaware that North Vietnam and South Vietnam were never one nation. The few I met who had gleaned that fact somewhere argued that North Vietnam attacking South Vietnam wasn’t like a real war of aggression because they were ethnically the same. Which means, I think, that Hitler was right about the Sudetanland, and also, that we can feel free to invade Canada at any time. But I digress.]
For another thing, there is a presumption that international law will generally produce the right answer. But let’s imagine that the structure that many internationalists imagine enforces this international law – the UN and by implication, the security council, had been in place to deal with the conflicts it was the supposed answer to – the two World Wars. Would there have been a World War II? No, because America would have vetoed it; we were not, in 1939, prepared to commit troops to halt the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Most of Europe would now be part of Greater Germany.
I think that what most internationalists like about the idea of “International Law” is that it is essentially stasis. Internationalists like the idea because they think it means that we’ll only get into conflicts where right and wrong is obvious and a clear majority of the world favors action. Well, first of all, the current enforcement mechanism is the UN. Many of the countries in the UN are dictatorships. Yet they also get a seat. [And Taiwan, a democracy, does not. How’s that for “Fair”?] A tiny dictatorship gets the same vote as a huge democracy like us. You think the senate arrangements in the US are unfair? How about “Mali, Albania, and Cuba think we’re being unduly harsh by calling what’s happening in Rwanda “Genocide” and refuse to ratify any intervention.” Of course, that’s not how the security council works. But the way the security council works with all those vetoes is that the more serious a conflict is, the less likely we are to do anything about it, because action would mean someone’s ox getting gored.
And second of all, there’s no particular reason to believe that a clear majority will respond even to an egregious outrage. Germany and Russia slaughtered tens of millions of their own people between 1930 and 1950, and you couldn’t have gotten a majority of the nations in the world to vote to intervene. Both of them conquered large swathes of external territory and weren’t too nice to the natives, and you couldn’t have found a majority of nations who would vote to fight them on it. Exactly how serious a conflict do we need? Because as far as I can tell the only thing a majority of the nations in the UN agree on is that Israel needs a good ass-whuppin’, and I’m sorry, no one who’s seriously studied the region can argue that that’s because it’s a clear-cut case of right and wrong. Especially since the "wrong" in question was ratified, indeed initiated, by the UN itself.
This speaks to another point, which is that we don’t have any kind of enforcement mechanism for this sort of binding international law. Den Beste points to the complete inability to find an even modestly disinterested jury (except in remote places no one cares about, at which point it’s not even an issue, because no one cares.) This is a very important point. Another important point is that we cede to law enforcement a monopoly on certain kinds of force; without it, the system would be vulnerable to the first bad actor who didn’t make nice-nice and play by the rules. This kind of monopoly is obviously very attractive if you are a nation that doesn’t have any force to speak of anyway, but Sadaam and his ilk aren’t going to hand their armies over without a fight, and the US isn’t going to disarm while there are still people who would like very much to see us brought low.
And even if we did cede such a monopoly, to whom would we give it? To the UN, where a nation that still engages in the slave trade sits on the Security Council? The only body we could trust with such power is one that is elected democratically. A world government, in other words. But hand over the power to vote on the world to people who are desperately poor, completely uneducated, and have no more experience of democracy or the civil institutions that support it than their caveman ancestors? Can the US live with a billion souls in India voting on, say, how we run our economy? I mean, they’ve done such a fabulous job with their own. It’s a very nice idea, but it will be a hundred years or more before the majority of the world’s peoples who are not living in stable democracies would be ready to join such an organization without regarding it as an easy opportunity to enrich themselves by looting the developed nations. I mean, if I were a migrant worker in Pakistan, and I got to vote for politicians who promised to redistribute all of the US’s wealth my way, I would. After all, it’s not fair that we’re so poor and they’re so rich – and how am I to know that shipping all their stuff here would be a one time stunt that leaves us all poorer in the long run? They didn’t give courses in political economy at the school I didn’t attend because I was too busy knotting rugs.
In short, international law has never existed the way the internationalists posit, and can’t without a host of massive institutional changes that are not possible in the foreseeable future. And even if it did, it’s no guarantee against tyranny. In fact, it’s a better guarantee that if a really nasty tyranny arises, we’ll all be sitting around with a dumb look on our faces when the huns pour over the wall.
Or we’ll find that in order to allay the outsized power of the US, we’ve created an even bigger power that is even less accountable for its actions.
I'm watching a profile of kids trying to gain admission to the UC system under the new scheme where "life challenges" get extra points. Now kids who have 4.5 GPAs and good extracurriculars, but who have had the misfortune not to have had any misfortunes, can't get in. Not only is the system wildly unobjective -- the kids are totally confused about what counts as a "challenge" -- but the program is encouraging kids to forget about this achievement crap and get busy feeling sorry for themselves.
Question of the day: is Europe's peace and unification a result of a philosophical evolution, or the fact that we have essentially made Europe an occupied protectorate of the United States for the last 50 years? By which I mean, not only do they get to cut their armies and spend on social policy; but also, that they cannot engage in aggression against each other, because anyone who even made noises about aggression would get spanked with a Tomahawk. The conventional wisdom is that WWII made European war unthinkable, but was it WWII or the American occupation? This is a serious question, not a troll for anti-European or anti-American screeds.
There was a time when I tried to take this blog anonymous. It's not that I'm ashamed of what I think. But I was looking for a job, and feared offending a potential employer, and some of my family are somewhat involved in the Democratic Party, and clearly I'm not an asset to them. So I thought that it would be nice to take it pseudononymous, and the email address I generated during my first foray into the New York Times Forum in 1995 seemed like as good a choice as any, though I seem to have accidentally convinced both Objectivists and Rand haters that I am a devotee of Ayn Rand. For the record, I'm not; I do read her work (Atlas Shrugged is perfect for the beach), and I think she makes some good points, but I also think there are some serious problems with trying to force an ultra-rationalist ethos onto creatures that evolved in the jungle, rather than a logic class. But I digress. Anyway, now you know why my nickname is "Jane Galt".
Ultimately, my effort failed; my real name is too widely linked. I will not now be able to erase it from Google. But I'm not willing to give up the blog, and my pseudonym amuses me sufficiently that I continue to use it, even though its purpose of concealment has failed. There's a good chance it would have anyway; after all, how many 6'2 female Chicago MBA's from the Class of 2001 are living in New York? That's a rhetorical question.
It's not an insurmountable obstacle. I link Dr. Weevil, Mindles Dreck, and Asparagirl, and all of them have a high degree of credibility with me. Of course, I've met all of them face to face, but even for those who haven't, they should carry a fair amount of credibility. Dr. Weevil and Mindles Dreck are both experts on a topic they cover extensibly; their links and posts are well written, well researched, and erudite. Both of them are anonymous not because they are afraid, but because they hold jobs where they are discouraged from publishing any opinion publicly.
The paradox, of course, is that in order to establish the facts that provide them credibility, they provide biographical details that compromise that anonymity -- as the scurrilous publication of Dr. Weevil's name and address by the ill-mannered troglodytes over at WarbloggerWatch demonstrates. Demosthenes is highly anonymous -- but the corollary to that is that because we have no context for his opinions, we discount them for the possibility of self-interest, just as bankers discount a bond for the possibility of default. The less information, the greater the discount.
Information is, of course, a double-edged sword. The fact that I have an MBA from Chicago does not make me an expert on anything except the muffins in the business school cafeteria, but it does indicate that I have at least a basic familiarity with financial transactions, accounting, and the principles of economics. On the other hand, to many on the left it means that I have been indoctrinated with an ultra-right-wing free market ideology espoused by the kind of people who, when the revolution comes, will be the first ones with their backs against the wall. So while I gain credibility with some, I lose it with others, and undoubtedly pick up a couple of detractors who are actively planning the day when I am executed for spreading Imperialist Dogma or some such. Though those people should also take cognizance of another biographical detail -- my 130 pound, fiercely protective, canine companion.
At any rate. My interaction with Demosthenes has demonstrated that he possesses a modicum of intellectual curiousity and honesty, and has a penchant for asking interesting questions, even if we usually disagree on the answers. For that reason, he is in my permalinks. I hope that this lends him some credibility in your eyes as well. But I think that anyone who blogs anonymously has to accept that to a certain degree, they have a higher burden of proof than those of us who are stuck with the names our parents gave us.
I'm tired. Tired, tired, tired. And the reason that I am tired is that in the course of installing a network in a client's office, I discovered that the place is infested with viruses. (Virii? Vira? Dr. Weevil, where are you?)
Despite the fact that the client had previously had no network on which to spread them, the computers had apparently accumulated a truly impressive collection of viruses and worms. There were four or five different ones resident on the network, and there were several machines that were "hot zones" containing every one. You small business owners out there: this is why even small offices need networks. Your employees swear that they are backing up their machines, updating their virus files, and all the rest of it. This is a vicious lie which you will only discover when their machine fails and they look at you with wide, sorrowful eyes and say "But I forgot" and you have to figure out how to reconstruct 10 years worth of accounting data from your dead tree files. Plus, for those of you who live in the New York/New Jersey/Pennsylvania/Connecticut area, I'm available at reasonable rates. How jealous would your friends be if you could tell them that your network was installed by the operator of the nation's premiere political-economy-and-bullmastiff weblog?
Anyway, they had a couple of clever little worms. In machines based on the Windows 95 architecture, they move into the auto-recovery files; Windows will not let you delete, modify, fold, spindle or mutilate these. The solution, of course, is to boot up in safe mode, disable auto-recovery, and delete 'em yourself. At least, it would be if the fiendishly clever designers of the particular variant we had did not have access to the same anti-virus web sites we did. The dang thing had managed to rig it so that the "disable auto-recovery" option was already checked in the system manager, even though it was clearly still on because the virus software couldn't clean the files. On machines with NT-based architecture, it colonized "Explorer.exe", which of course couldn't be cleaned either. It had also created a FixKlez.com file to interfere with the virus fix, FixKlez.exe, that I downloaded from Norton. Even more diabolically, it kept finding and disabling or corrupting my anti-virus software, although it took me a little while to figure this out. Yet the command line scanner McAfee gave us was too big to fit on a floppy. Eventually I had to copy the command line files locally and rename scan.exe to "fred.exe" (The anti-virus sites recommend renaming it to "clean.exe". Yet the people who make these worms also read the sites. Guess what happens if you try to execute "clean.exe" with one of the newer worms we had?). Cleaning the computers manually seemed to work, although some of the users lost data. Which then had to be reconstructed. Virus scanners had to be reinstalled. The wall had to be kicked, repeatedly, while I intoned, in a loud voice, words not suitable for a family website.
All of this took hours. What was supposed to be a simple little job ended with me getting home around midnight. Which wouldn't be so bad, really, if I didn't have to get up at 5:00 am to go to work. Sigh. There's nothing like hours spent battling a virus to make you want to find any 14-year old boy who can type faster than 30 WPM and just pound the snot out of 'em.
I agree. I thought the same thing when all those news articles came out. What the evidence seemed to add up to is that he's a smart guy who could conceivably have made some anthrax, and he's a little odd and his co-workers don't like him much. How'd you like to get investigated by the FBI and have your name splashed all over the media on the basis of your popularity around the office? Remember the time you were having a little trouble at home and you'd been up all night fighting with the spouse and you screamed at the guy in the cube next to yours for playing his music too loud? How would that sound on an investigation report? "Subject displays megalomaniacal tendencies, and often makes inappropriately volatile reactions to trivial problems". Hello, Sing-Sing.
Thankfully, most of us don't work in an industry where the FBI desperately needs to make a case against someone. Yet. Of course, we don't know what form the next terror attack will take. Be a shame if it were a virus attack that put the nation's technology workers under suspicion.
Makes it hard to say "Thank God it's not my ox being gored" and walk away.
