BAGHDAD MEMES
One of the most provocative, brilliant, fascinating, erudite, yet ultimately silliest books of recent times is Jared Diamond’s best-selling Guns, Germs, and Steel. The book is Diamond’s long attempt to answer a question put to him by a primitive tribesman in New Guinea, essentially, “Why do you guys in the West have such prosperity why we are still knee deep in pig poop?”As a learned and persuasive hard-core environmental determinist, Diamond’s answer is: The West (whose inhabitants are two-digit IQ morons compared to the natural brain power of New Guinea natives) is the most culturally and technologically successful civilization in history because Mesopotamia (where Western Civilization originated) had wild animals and grasses conducive to domestication 9,000 years ago.See what I mean by silly? For a determinist like Diamond, thought processes are irrelevant to the fate of human societies. He has no appreciation nor understanding of how cultural values and practices drive the success or failure of civilizations. Proof of this is that the word “meme” does not appear once in the book’s 480 pages.
SYNCBACKSE
There are many backup programs to choose from. I did not test dozens of contenders against one another. I took the advice of the computer magazines. Most rated SyncBackSE at or near the top. That’s the one I bought and it’s the one I’ll review.
BACK TO AFRICA
It’s very easy to get bitten by the African bug, the one that compels you to keep coming back to the most primeval place on our planet. I took this picture in the Serengeti in 1971, I’ve been going back to Africa every chance I got ever since, and by the time you read this I’ll be there again. Africa has been a lot in the news this week. The G8 forgiving billions in debt by African countries; Little Bobby Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s depraved dictator, bulldozing thousands of poor people’s homes into rubble for not supporting him; President Bush hosting his counterparts from five African countries in the White House. One of them was Festus Mogae of Botswana. Bush hailed Botswana as an African model of democracy, and you have to give Mogae credit for this. What comes up for me, however, is the war the Botswana government has been waging against the last remaining cultural link humanity has with its original lifestyle, with our ancestors who birthed the human race, the Bushmen.
THE FIVE-STEP JET LAG SOLUTION
It’s summer, which means summer vacation, which means for some of you buzzing off to a distant time zone and getting wigged out on jet lag. For business travelers, jet lag can translate loss of mental acuity into loss of an important deal. For government folk, it can translate into failed negotiations or embarrassing misstatements to a foreign press. I’ve used a five-step jet lag avoidance method for some years now. I’ve given it to a number of corporate CEOs, diplomats, Capitol Hill staffers, Congressmen and Senators. They tell me it works. It works for me. Here it is and I trust it will work for you.
BOLIVIA’S ROAD TO NOWHERE
Remember this map in Bye-Bye Bolivia last April? A favorite protest tactic of Evo Morales’ socialist mobs is to block roads leading to Bolivia’s capital, La Paz. This may backfire big time. Serious candidates for the world’s scariest roads are the thin ribbons of asphalt that plunge off the Bolivian highlands to the lowlands. There are only two, and since the lowlands produce most of Bolivia’s wealth, they are the lifelines to all those protesting folk way up there in the Andes. So don’t be surprised if the guys in the lowlands, the targets of Morales’ demands to nationalize and expropriate their wealth, blow the roads and destroy those two thin lifelines. They won’t do it themselves. Brazilian Intelligence - ABIN (Agencia Brasileira de Inteligencia Nacional) - will do it for them.
GENERIC TROJAN / ADWARE REMOVAL PROCEDURE
So many people have been having vicious malware attacks recently, attacks which have brought their computers down, that I am addressing the problem this week. I’ve discussed many of these items in earlier columns in bits and pieces. Apparently people don’t pay attention, don’t protect their computers, and go to dangerous sites. In case you’ve caught a particularly wicked infection that is wreaking havoc with your computing, do the following. Download the following items.
SEND SWAYR TO THE WHITE HOUSE
I received this terrific idea from TTPer Chris Landrum from Kennewick, Washington. It was in response to the No Apology article last week, describing how a number of folks at State and the Pentagon are sick and tired of our kowtowing groveling constant apologies to Moslems. Inspired by John Wayne’s famous line as Captain Nathan Brittles in She Wore A Yellow Ribbon - “Never apologize, son, it’s a sign of weakness” - these folks even sent a DVD of SWAYR to the White House. Chris Landrum’s idea is to have a SWAYR to the White House campaign - hundreds, hopefully thousands, of Americans ordering the movie at Amazon and having it sent to President Bush at the White House, together with a letter demanding No More Apologies to Moslems. Want to participate? It’s easy:
FIGHTING THE COOKIE MONSTER
I’ve begun protecting my files with a great application I’ve discovered, one that will enable you to keep any secret exactly that - a secret, one that no prying eyes will be able to get at. Keeping my notes, charts, databases, development projects and contacts to myself is essential. You never know who is watching - whether on a network or over the Internet. With all the sophisticated search tools today, it’s a simple task for a programmer to write a script to search for data, whether text or otherwise. There is one sure way to keep prying eyes off your files, and that’s to encrypt them, with the strongest most invulnerable encryption possible. You can do it for free. Here's how.
EUROPE NEEDS AMERICA’S FOUNDING FATHERS
As demonstrated by the French and Dutch "no" votes, Europeans are increasingly frustrated living under a bureaucratic (as contrasted with a democratic) state where national sovereignty (and democratic control) continues ebbing. What should be done? Europe needs for a couple of leaders not directly tainted by the recent "constitutional" fiasco to call for a new convention to write a real constitution, which would protect the democratic and most of the sovereign rights and personal liberties of the European peoples. To succeed, the new constitution would need to allow for social and economic differences among the European states, unlike the just defeated "constitution." Delegates to the new constitutional convention would be well advised to look at the U.S. Constitution and the Federalist Papers for guidance. Most of the basic arguments about the proper role and structure of governmental units and the protection of individual liberties and national identities and rights can be found in these documents. The U.S. has evolved into a much more centralized state than our Founding Fathers envisioned, but their original vision is much closer to the type of Federal Republic with sovereign states that Europe needs today.
WESTERN COWARDICE AND THE TORTURE MASTERS
The cheerless creatures who rule the Islamic republic of Iran have developed a particularly wicked use of torture. Not only do they use the full panoply of physical and psychological horrors on their captives, but they then send the victims back into their homes and neighborhoods for brief periods of “parole” or “medical leave,” so that their friends and families can see with their own eyes the brutal effects of the torture. You will not have read about this in your daily newspaper, or seen his face on your evening news broadcast, nor will you have heard about it from the Department of State — which has a considerable bureaucracy devoted to the advancement of human rights — nor from the White House, nor from the self-promoting entrepreneurs of the likes of Human Rights Watch or the intellectuals and elected representatives who call for President Bush to “talk to” the mullahs in order to “resolve our disagreements.”Instead, our government maintains a pious silence on the matter, evidently more afraid of being accused of undermining the efforts of the French, German, and British governments to arrive at a satisfactory agreement with Iran on the matter of the mullahs’ impending atomic bomb.