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Monthly Archives: November 2012

The Law of Diminishing Returns

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Are We Reaching the Limits of E-Mail?

Every time a new technology comes into being, it gets vitiated by overuse as an advertising medium. I remember back to the early days of junk mail, when it was still a novelty, and I was more willing to consider it as having some value. That included those little voting guides put out by Citizens For … or Taxpayers Against ….The last Presidential election turned me into a person who wound up tossing most of his junk mail without so much as a glance. The same thing is now happening with all those mail order catalogs from various Indian Missions and yuppie techno-device vendors. It’s relatively rare for me now to salvage more tha n one tenth of what ends up choking my mailbox.

That goes double for e-mail. I have learned to distrust e-mail—even from friends—unless it shows some sign of knowing who I am. Several of my good friends have had their computers taken over by Malware that sends me e-mails that contain nothing but a URL. No thanks: That’s like inviting a vampire into your house.

Then, too, there are companies in my industry that think it’s a great idea to send me half a dozen e-mails a day. Unless they are announcing a new release of their software that has to be downloaded, it all goes into the Delete folder toute suite. I get invited to more webinars every day than any human being can reasonably be expected to take, so into the Biz Bag with them as well.

I suspect that smart phones will soon become the next garbage overload medium. Although my cell phone is a very dumb phone, it’s gotten to the point that I do not even try to answer it any more. I figure that if it’s important, people will leave a Voice Mail message—and those I eventually check.

Such a pity that the hucksters wind up killing all the new technologies.

 

Infamy as a Way of Life

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Israel’s Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu

Israel has a right to exist. The Palestinians have a right to exist—though no one but a few die-hard Arabs say that Palestine as a nation has a right to exist. I am not sure now that Bibi Netanyahu and his Likud Party, however, have a right to exist.

The path taken by Netanyahu’s Israel is a dangerous one. You could be hyper-aggressive and murderous to the maximum extent, but only insofar as the people are backing your every play. Eventually, you could cross a line where not only the world at large but your own people are tired of infamy as a way of life. What happens then? Can you continue to do the same sort of thing and continue to get away with it? Probably not.

Crusader States

The Arabs see Israel as just another “crusader state.” After the wildly successful First Crusade (1096-1099), much of the Holy Land was divided into a series of feudal states run by the Crusaders. These included the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the County of Tripoli, the Principality of Antioch, and the County of Edessa. Some of them lasted a surprisingly long time. And they might still be around today if the Arabs were not united under a powerful new leader like Saladin (from Kurdistan of all places), and the Crusaders became ever more disunited and fragmented over the next couple hundred years.

Who is to say that Israel’s continued aggression against the Palestinians and other Arabs will not result in a unified alliance to wipe it off the map? What will our attitude be in such a case? Will we have to send in our army to protect Israel’s right to exist? That would be good for another five hundred years of hatred in the Middle East.

I think the Western World had to keep a tight leash on Israel and do everything it can to stymie the right wing politicians who have been in the ascendant there since the days of Menachem Begin. (At the same, our own right wing will continue to support Israeli aggression and confuse the issue.)

 

 

 

Making Assumptions

Lemony Snicket

Assumptions are dangerous things to make, and like all dangerous things to make — bombs, for instance, or strawberry shortcake — if you make even the tiniest mistake you can find yourself in terrible trouble. Making assumptions simply means believing things are a certain way with little or no evidence that shows you are correct, and you can see at once how this can lead to terrible trouble. For instance, one morning you might wake up and make the assumption that your bed was in the same place that it always was, even though you would have no real evidence that this was so. But when you got out of your bed, you might discover that it had floated out to sea, and now you would be in terrible trouble all because of the incorrect assumption that you’d made. You can see that it is better not to make too many assumptions, particularly in the morning.—Lemony Snicket, The Austere Academy

About That Glacier

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Perito Moreno Glacier in Argentina

I have been asked by friends about that glacier shown atop my blog page. It is the Perito Moreno Glacier in the State of Santa Cruz in Argentina. Last year at this time, Martine and I were there on our vacation. In a country full of natural beauty, Perito Moreno is one of the top attractions. It is near the city of El Calafate, from where one can take bus tours that allow one to view the glacier from a number of viewpoints, including from a boat that travels close to its edge.

The man after whom the glacier is named was a 19th century Argentinean naturalist who was the South American equivalent of John Muir. Francisco Pascasio Moreno (nicknamed Perito, or “expert”) was born in Buenos Aires in 1852 and died in 1919. He was largely responsible for the creation of several Patagonian national parks and is memorialized in the La Plata Museum of Natural History.

One of the interesting facts about the Perito Moreno Glacier, other than its massive size, is that it is one of three Andean glaciers that are still growing in size—at a time when glaciers all over the world are retreating or even disappearing. The lake that the glacier melt drains into is Lago Argentino, which is flanked on its western boundary by a number of glaciers, including the massive Upsala and the Spegazzini glaciers.

I will change the image up top eventually, but Martine and I have happy memories of our Argentina trip, and I wanted to be reminded of it every time I looked at Tarnmoor.Com.

The General Who Came Back from the Dead

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Field Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky of the Soviet Union

Stalin was one of the great paranoids of history. Beginning in 1937, he purged a large percentage of the top officers in his military—just before Hitler invaded Russia and caught the army and Stalin flat-footed. Gone were three of the five marshals of the Red Army, including Mikhail Tukhachevsky (a brilliant strategist who has influenced warfare to this day), Vasily Blyukher, and Aleksandr Yegorov; thirteen out of the fifteen army commanders; eight out of nine of the admirals; fifty of fifty-seven army corps commanders; 154 out of 186 division commanders, 16 of 16 army commissars; and 25 of 28 army corps commissars.

Did he not think he would be needing his military commanders to fight off the coming Nazi onslaught? It’s hard to tell, but when Operation Barbarossa kicked off in 1941, the Russians had 3.3 million men under arms, 2.1 million of whom were dead or missing in the third quarter of 1941 alone!

Somehow Stalin had to find generals to replace those whom he had shot or imprisoned. In fact, he had to release about 30% of the purged generals and admirals who were festering in various of his Gulags.

One of them was General Konstantin Rokossovsky, who was half-Polish and half-Russian. Under interrogation by Stalin’s NKVD (the predecessor of the KGB), the General had eight was his teeth knocked out (which is why you don’t find too many pictures of him smiling). Yet, Rokossovsky was the go-to guy for such operations as the victory at Stalingrad, where he all but wiped out a whole German army. For this, he was promoted to Field Marshal and, later, promoted to command one of the three Russian armies converging on Berlin.

After the war, he was made one of the leaders of the Polish Peoples’ Republic and returned to Russia to serve in several key defense posts under Khrushchev. He died in 1968 at the age of seventy-one and is buried in Red Square.

Apparently, once he returned to active service after being tortured and accused of false crimes—mostly for being an adherent of the brilliant Marshal Tukhachevsky—there was no longer any question of his loyalty, which he proved time and time again by clipping the wings of the Nazi war machine.

Here in the United States, we don’t know much about the men who had more to do with Hitler’s defeat than anyone on the Western Allies’ side, including Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, and Montgomery. Rokossovsky was just one of those immortal heroes, along with others such as Zhukov, Konev, Vasilevsky, Cherniakhovsky, and other men whose names we can’t pronounce but who helped change the course of history.

The Time magazine cover shown above was for the issue of August 23, 1943.

 

The Life After Death

Samuel Butler

That there is such a life is as palpable as that there is a life before death. See the influence that the dead have over us. But this life is no more eternal than our present life. Shakespeare and Homer may live long, but they will die, that is to say, become unknown as direct and efficient causes—some day.

Even so God himself dies, for to die is to change and to change is to die to what has gone before. If the units change the total must do so also.

As no one can say which egg or seed shall come to visible life and in its turn leave issue, so no one can say which of the millions of now visible lives shall enter into the afterlife on death, and which have but so little lifeas practically not to count. For most seeds end as seeds or as food for some alien being, and so with lives, by far the greater number are sterile, except in so far as they can be devoured as the food of some stronger life. The Handels and Shakespeares are the few seeds that grow—and even these die.

And the same uncertainty attaches to posthumous life as to pre-lethal. As no one can say how long another shall live, so no one can say how long or how short a reputation shall live. The most unpromising weakly-looking creatures sometimes live to ninety while strong robust men are carried off in their prime. And no one can say what a man shall enter into life for having done. Roughly, there is a sort of moral government whereby those who have done the best work live most enduringly, but it is subject to such exceptions that no one can say whether or no there shall not be an exception in his own case either in his favour or against him.—Samuel Butler, Notebooks

Welcome to Loserland

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Cage ’em up and let ’em ride outside the minivan—on top!

A scant two weeks ago, I still had some qualms about the outcome of the 2012 Presidential Election. Now that all is over but the shouting—and that primarily from the losers and their diehard followers—it’s interesting to see how Obama’s two victims, McCain and Romney, have fared since then.

Romney showed us that he was not about to give “gifts” to anyone but members of his rarefied socio-economic class. He blamed Obama for promising gifts to Hurricane victims, students loaded down with debt, and Hispanic families. In other words, he blamed the President for trying to help out Americans who did not own a string of polo ponies, enjoy firing people or sending their jobs to China, or installing car elevators in their La Jolla McMansions.

McCain, on the other hand, has continued to show himself to be a mercurial old sod in trying to turn the Benghazi affair into a major Democratic liability. Now this Libya fracas occurred on the first day of my vacation this year; so Martine and I didn’t follow the media frenzy that usually accompanies this sort of thing. Two things are pretty clear, however: First, it was a terrorist act; and second, the Republicans had previously cut the budget for the protection of our embassies abroad. (That second thing was the real scandal, if there can be said to be one.)

If McCain or Romney were elected President, that would indeed have been a scandal. Thankfully, even if only by the skinniest of margins, the American voters are still better than that.

A New Kind of Spam

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A New Kind of Spam That Caught Me Off Guard

In the last three months since I started posting at WordPress, I’ve discovered a new kind of Spam. At least WordPress labels it as Spam, and I go along with it. For every two legitimate comments I get, there are three generally favorable but wildly nonspecific comments that seem to be associated with commercial ventures on the Internet. My  guess is that it’s a plot to get a more favorable ranking for their own websites with Google.

Some few are “helpful,” such as those offering to help me get more visitors to my own little website here at Tarnmoor.Com. Curiously, my anti-malware program usually blocks their websites, so I can only assume they are helpful only in the sense that a pickpocket will attempt to lull you into a false sense of security.

So if you have some general comment of praise without mentioning any specifics to show that you’ve actually read what I’ve written, your comment may well be deleted by me as possible Spam.

It’s such a complicated world in which I have to be so ruthless with so many (over 160 to date) favorable comments completely out of the blue.

You see, I don’t really want thousands of visitors a day to my website. I have nothing to sell. I do, however, have some sort of compulsion to express myself. That’s why I posted for over a year on Blog.Com, a Portuguese blog host whose total membership could probably fit into a telephone booth. (You remember those, don’t you?)

 

“A Sickly Moment of Dark Surprise”

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Unexpected

It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.—Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t Avoid

Secesh

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Now These Self-Proclaimed Patriots Want To Secede?

I find all this talk of Right Wing Conservatives wanting to secede from the United States rather funny. What would a country of pasty-faced, beer-bellied angry white males in their fifties and sixties be like? For one thing, the GNP would be zero, unless spluttering outrage can be assume a monetary value. There would be no services to speak of. Let’s go down the list:

  • Military: These guys are just too old, sorry.
  • Healthcare: None. Ain’t that socialistic?
  • Fire and Police: Maybe some old-time police kinda like Andy Griffith. Firefighting is too strenuous for these gomers.
  • Foreign Policy: “We don’t hold with no furriners!”
  • Immigration: “Meet ’em at the border with a hail of bullets!”
  • Postal Service: “Nope, too much walking hurts my corns.”
  • Taxes: “We ain’t no Communists! So, nossir!”
  • Elections: “Whatever Rush, Sean, and Glenn say is jake with us.”

And so it goes. Maybe instead of seceding, they should just find another country that is more amenable to their way of life. Possibly North Korea or Somalia.