European fears about Jews confirmed

by philg

Now that I’m back in provincial Boston, one conversation from Bryce Canyon still resonates.  I got into a conversation with a political science professor who was originally from France.  How could he have foresaken a thousand years of culture and moved to the land of fast food and the strip mall?  He said, “I didn’t want my children to end up living in a Muslim dictatorship.”  How was that possible, I inquired?  “If you look at the demographic trends, the Muslims in France will grow to 30 percent of the population within 50 to 100 years.  An average French couple has less than two children.  An average North African Muslim family or Palestinian couple will have 7 or 8 children.  Through immigration and the high birth rate of Muslims already in France, it won’t be long before Muslims are the largest voting bloc.  Most citizens don’t know what they want from the government and many don’t vote at all.  A relatively small but well-organized and coherent group of voters can easily take control of a democracy.”  (See “Muslims remaking old France” from the April 10, 2003 International Herald Tribune/New York Times for more on Islamic France.)


I was reminded of some conversations from my May trip to Wales, Scotland, and northern England.  The British middle class folks with whom I’d talked were concerned about the extent to which their country is being transformed by immigrants.  “I’m not saying that I agree with them completely,” one Welshman said of the far-right anti-immigration parties in the UK, “but I can understand where they’re coming from.  I hate going to London.  All of the signs are in Arabic.  Women walk around wearing veils.  It feels like a foreign country.”


What particularly irked the British, whose standard of living is just about the lowest in the EU (the UK is slightly ahead of Spain and Portugal but almost all of its wealth is concentrated near London), is paying taxes to support “asylum seekers”, which is the EU term for illegal immigrant.  If an Afghani, for example, manages to set foot on English soil the EU law gives him a fundamental human right to remain in England at taxpayer expense: apartment in London, food, health care, etc.  In the U.S. to get political asylum he’d have to have been the head of a banned opposition party but in England he can simply claim that the local police don’t like him.  If his claim for asylum is denied he loses his rights to live at English taxpayer expense but he doesn’t get deported; he can melt away into the suburbs.  Sometimes the legal arguments that the asylum seekers use are creative.  The latest batch of Afghanis, for example, claim that they were Taliban fighters trying to kill British and American soldiers and therefore if they returned they’d face arrest by the current British and American-backed government in Afghanistan.  (see the February 16, 2003 Telegraph article “Taliban refugee still sees the UK as his enemy” for example)


Europeans seem to be suffering from an ironic turn of events:  the fears about Jews that the Europeans manufactured around the turn of the 20th century have become real, 60 years after the Europeans breathed a big sigh of relief.


As soon as Napoleon began the process of letting Jews out of their ghettos, the Europeans began to quake in fear.  Jews would have lots of kids and overwhelm the native population.  Jews would be clannish and keep to themselves rather than assimilating.  Jews would wield control over their politics.  Jews wouldn’t be patriotic.  The reality was quite different, as it transpired.  The Jews had a very low birthrate and a tendency to assimilate (German Jews were the most assimilated).  The Jews had so little influence on foreign policy that they couldn’t persuade any government to act against the pre-WWII Nazis or to bomb the death camps during WWII.  Jews served with such distinction in the German army during WWI that the Nazis had a tough time justifying the dispossession, deportation, and murder of so many decorated veterans.  The manufactured fears dominated thinking, however, to a sufficient extent that nearly every European country was happy to assist the Nazis in the extermination of all of their Jewish citizens.


Fast forward to 2003.  Each traditional European ethnic group ought to be happy, each in its own homogeneous country where everyone shares common values dating back to Roman times.  But much to their consternation the cities seem to be filling up with Muslims.  Statistical birthrate data show that European ethnic groups face a real prospect of becoming demographically irrelevant within their traditional nations. Assimilation is presumably happening but more visible and striking are the thousands of streets that have taken on a purely foreign character with signs in Arabic, Islamic schools, and big mosques.  The threat of local Islamic terrorism is sufficiently frightening that Muslims effectively control many aspects of European foreign policy (see this article on France and Iraq). Europeans don’t even hope for patriotism among their Muslim immigrants, many of whom express an open hatred of the values and structure of their host societies.  How soon, they wonder, will their guests begin to demand a traditional Islamic government and a full implementation of sharia?


So there it is.  Just as they feared, the traditional Europeans do finally appear to be threatened by a fast-growing religious and ethnic minority that constrains their foreign policy and who can’t be relied upon to support their secular governments.  It just happened later than they feared and with a different ethnic group.

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Saddam Hussein: Mr. (Reasonably) Nice Guy?

by philg

Afghanistan and Iraq are in the U.S. news these days, partly because the locals are killing each other and partly because the locals are killing occupation forces (see “G.I.’s in Iraqi City Are Stalked by Faceless Enemies at Night” from today’s New York Times).  The problems in both countries seem to center around the inability of a central government to control the population.  In Afghanistan the Kabul government governs Kabul and the rest of the country is essentially independent (my summer 2002 trip report advocates splitting the place up into regions where everyone has something in common).  In Iraq there are so many problems that, in Europe at least, people were openly saying that the average Iraqi was better off under Saddam’s government.


If you flip on European TV you find that the post-invasion Iraqis have joined the Palestinians as the officially designated “most miserable people on the planet” in the media and their plight is an ever-present top story.  The British are donating money and sending care packages to help out Iraqis who are without reliable clean water and electricity.  .


Iraqis complain on TV: their neighbors are breaking into water mains, thus wrecking the water system; their neighbors are looting; Iraqis with guns who don’t like certain other Iraqis are shooting them; Iraqis love Allah and want an Islamic state; Iraqis love Allah but in a slightly different way and want a slightly different kind of Islamic state, which will necessitate the death and/or suppression of anyone who doesn’t love Allah their way; Iraqis hate Americans and Jews and want U.S. troops out of Iraq and the Jews out of Israel; etc., etc.


The executive summary seems to be the following: (1) Iraqis hate each other, they have lots of guns, and aren’t afraid to use them; (2) the U.S. and its allies deposed Saddam because he was unsuccessful in creating a quiet Swiss or Belgian-style bourgeois democracy; (3) the U.S. and its allies so far have failed to make any headway in getting Iraqis to adopt a Western bourgeois lifestyle and political outlook; (4) Saddam was able to restrict looting and killing to a handful of friends and family; (5) under U.S. occupation every Iraqi is free to get in touch with his Inner Looter and Inner Murderer.


By the standards of wealthy Western countries Saddam’s regime was harsh.  They tortured and/or killed political opponents.  They controlled the press, the mosques, and the schools.  If a town were restive they might kill its entire population or at least many hundreds of people from that town.  This would seem like gratuitous cruelty if done by the governments of Vermont, Dijon, or Bavaria.  But in the Arab world more or less every government employs the same tactics as Saddam’s Iraq.


In fairness to the defeated dare we ask whether Saddam’s regime wasn’t employing the minimum amount of violence necessary to maintain public order in Iraq?  It seems quite possible that Saddam did not enjoy terrorizing his subjects but did it because he understood the divisions within his arbitrarily drawn borders and thought keeping his subjects in fear was necessary.


It really seems to be tough to coerce people into doing following something other than their inclinations.  Death from AIDS is pretty terrifying and yet people still have sex.  Despite massive fines, automated ticket-issuing cameras, and license revocations, I didn’t see anyone in Britain obeying the 70 mph speed limit on the Motorway (I was so happy to get my Ford Mondeo out of Wales, whose principal highways bear an uncanny resemblance to a North Carolina plastic surgeon’s driveway (narrow and lined with stone walls), that I zipped along at 77 mph and was passed every minute by someone doing 90 in the fast lane).  If you’re caught with a small amount of drugs the U.S. government can take your house and your car, and put you in jail for the rest of your life, yet people still sell, buy, and use drugs (just ask George W. Bush, former coke-head).


We haven’t figured out what level of governmental coercion will result in an Iraqi society that is both orderly and submissive to a U.S. occupation or whatever American-friendly government follows. Saddam may yet go down in history as the kindest and gentlest 21st century leader of a unified and stable Iraq.


[Given the depths of poverty and lack of industry in Wales and the Northern UK it seemed odd at first that these folks would want to help out their defeated enemies before assisting unfortunates closer to home.  Or that they wouldn’t instead prefer to help the hundreds of millions of Indians who have never in their lives had clean water or electricity.  Berlin, The Downfall 1945 describes a similar phenomenon: “[German civilians] queued at Red Army field kitchens, which began to feed them on Berzarin’s orders.  The fact that there was a famine in Soviet Central Asia at that time, with families reduced to cannibalism, did not influence the new policy of attempting to win over the German people.”]

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Flying in Israel

by philg

Spending a few days on Martha’s Vineyard listening to birds chirp, waves break, golfers golf, and … airplanes flying overhead at all altitudes and in all directions.  Quite a contrast from general aviation in Israel, where I did two flights last week in Cessnas.  [Snapshots at http://www.photo.net/philg/digiphotos/20030606-g3-israel/.]


Every American pilot ought to fly in Israel, if only to see just how
bad it is likely to get as the U.S. suffers from more terrorist
attacks.  Getting into a general aviation airport is very difficult.
You have to explain who you are and why you need to fly.  In 2000 and
1992 Israeli security officials lost interest as soon as they figured
out that I was a native-born U.S. citizen.  Attacks from Muslims born
in European countries, however, have turned the Israelis into
xenophobes.  If my host/pilot hadn’t been friends with the chief of security
for all airports in Israel, I wouldn’t have gotten into the parking
lot much less an airplane.


Once you’re seated in the plane the security remains just as tight.
You make a radio call to request permission to start up the engine.
You make a radio call to activate your previously filed flight plan.  Unless you’re coming in on an instrument flight plan from a foreign country, everything happens in Hebrew.  It is basically illegal for anyone without an Israeli license to operate an airplane, or even touch the flight controls without an instructor on board, under VFR within Israel.  This is partly due to the fact that the controllers aren’t accustomed to working in English but perhaps more due to the complexities of navigation.


Once in the air the entire airspace of Israel is forbidden except for
a handful of designated VFR routes and altitudes, which are not in a
standard GPS’s database.  Even though the controllers have very good
radar coverage of the entire country you make regular position
reports.  If you deviate more than one mile horizontally from any of
these routes the controllers will chastise you; keep in mind that the
State of Israel is only about 10 miles wide in the middle–if you get
off course you will be straying over the West Bank and the government
is afraid that Arabs will shoot at you.  In the good old days you
could fly down the valley of the River Jordan, land at the Jerusalem
airport, fly over Jerusalem, etc.  In 2003 all of that is closed off.
With virtually nowhere to go it will presumably be time to land soon.
If an airport closes at 5:00 pm, it is forbidden to land after that
time.  There is nothing like the pilot-controlled runway lighting that
is standard in the U.S.


Safety ought to be better in Israel than in the U.S.  The weather is
almost always clear.  In the U.S. you may depart from New Jersey in a
small airplane and arrive several hours later in Maine to completely
weather that is completely different from what it was in NJ, from what
it was in Maine when you took off and got a weather briefing, and from
what was forecast.  By contrast, the whole country of Israel is no
larger than New Jersey and the weather tends to be very similar across
the whole landscape.  In any case you take off and land at the same
airport most of the time, usually flying for less than one hour.


Mid-air collisions only constitute a few percent of the accidents in
the U.S.  Nonetheless they seem even less likely in Israel because all
airplanes are on designated routes at designated altitudes in radio
contact with and under the control of air traffic controllers.


In the U.S. an airplane operated privately has to be inspected and
recertified airworthy by a merchanic every year.  An airplane operated
commercially, either by an airline or a flight school, needs a
mechanic’s inspection every 100 hours.  In Israel an airplane has to
be inspected and certified airworthy every morning.  A mechanic walks
out onto the flight line and signs off all the machines that are going
to fly that day.


One thing that is very odd about Israeli pilots is that they are not
trained to lean (adjust the fuel-air mixture to compensate for air that is thinner due to heat or high altitude; your car does this automatically but little airplanes generally run on 1930s technology). 


They taxi full rich.  They take off full rich, even
when it is 40 degrees C (over 100 F) outside.  They cruise full rich,
unless they are over 3000′ MSL.  They really ought to all have died
from either fuel exhaustion or failure to climb when fully loaded on
very hot days.  The performance and range figures in a Pilot’s
Operating Handbook (“P.O.H.”, the owner’s manual that comes with the
airplane) are calculated by American pilots using American procedures,
which include leaning very nearly to peak exhaust gas temperatures.
Most Israeli airplanes are ancient Cessnas that don’t have fuel flow
gauges but it seems safe to estimate that Israelis are using 50
percent more fuel than would be predicted by the P.O.H.  Probably what
saves them is that the distances are so tiny; you could fly almost
anywhere in Israel from Tel Aviv using only what an American pilot
would keep as a fuel reserve.  For climb-out at a high density
altitude Americans who fly in the West learn to find a peak power
mixture setting on the ground and then richen just a bit for cooling.
Perhaps what keeps Israelis alive is the near sea level elevations of
all the airports here and the fact that the terrain isn’t very
dramatic, i.e., you never have to climb very steeply to clear a hill.


Oh yes, and the hourly rates for all of this are about double that of what it costs in the U.S.

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Hitler speaks from beyond the grave

by philg

Today’s New York Times notes that a new translation of Hitler’s sequel to Mein Kampf is available (story).  The West’s conflict with the Arab nations has made Nazi-era writings and history much more relevant.  For example, one reads in the newspaper that opinion polls are showing that many Arabs regard George W. Bush as the world’s leading war criminal.  A parallel can be found in Berlin, The Downfall 1945 (Antony Beevor).  On April 14, 1945, Adolf Hitler commented on the death of Roosevelt: “At the moment when Fate has removed the greatest war criminal of all time from this earth, the turn of events in this war will be decisive.”


Hitler’s spirit is alive in 2003 in the USA as well.  Pick up some marketing literature from Mercedes for example.  Hitler named his underground command bunkers at Zossen (20 km south of Berlin) “Maybach I” and “Maybach II”.  The latest luxury car from Mercedes is called the “Maybach” (see http://www.maybachusa.com/).  It costs around $360,000 (not a problem for former American Airlines CEO Don Carty; the board of directors finally had to fire him for nearly running the company into bankruptcy and for looting the last bits of cash for himself and a few other top execs but he can console himself with a $13.5 million “supplemental pension”).  Hitler probably would have loved this car.  Although the Fuhrer is best known for his work with Porsche to bring the Volkswagen Beetle to the German people, for himself he preferred the most luxurious Mercedes cars of the day.

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The Chinese car

by philg

The June 14 issue of The Economist has “Extinction of the Car Giants — Why America’s car industry is an endangered species” on its cover. The magazine predicts the death of GM, Ford, and Chrysler at the hands of Honda, Nissan, and Toyota. The Economist cites statistics such as the $1000 per car cost to GM of pension benefits. Perhaps if they were to look 10 years out they would see a lot more turmoil.

 

Home Depot sells window air conditioners for $80. They are made in China. When it breaks you throw it out. Twenty years ago a window air conditioner cost $1000 in today’s money. When it broke you called the repairman.

 

You can buy a 27″ TV for less than $200. It is made in China. If someone asks you what brand of TV you have, unless you’re a geek with no life, you won’t have a clue. You don’t see ads for Daewoo or Apex TVs. When it breaks you throw it out. Forty years ago the TV industry employed at least one million Americans. TVs were made here. They cost so much that they needed to be financed, thus creating jobs in banks. If they broke every neighborhood had a TV repairman to come out and service the machine. Some of the most expensive advertising campaigns of the day were for cars. Consequently, consumers were intensely brand-loyal and proud to own an RCA, a Philco or whatever.

 

Once something can be assembled in China out of 100% Chinese-made components it can sell for approximately 1/10th the previous price.

 

Let’s look at cars. According to http://www.autoalliance.org/ecofacts.htm the auto industry employs at least 5 percent of Americans. People have jobs making cars. Because cars are so expensive people have jobs financing them, repairing them, and insuring them against collision and theft. Because cars are so expensive, people have jobs marketing and advertising them (more than $1000 of the price of a normal car has gone into advertising, probably closer to $5000 for a Mercedes or BMW).

 

Within 10 to 20 years the Chinese will be able to sell a car that is very similar to today’s rental car: 4 doors, 4 seats, air conditioner, radio, new but not fancy. It will cost between $2000 and $3000 in today’s dollars. With cars that cheap it will be unthinkable to manufacture in the U.S. Consumers won’t bother to finance a $2000 purchase separately (maybe they’ll add it to their credit card debt). Drivers will still carry liability insurance but won’t bother with collision or theft coverage. With cars that cheap it won’t make sense to advertise. If Ford or Toyota tried to sell the average person a $25,000 car they would simply laugh, much as a Walmart shopper would think you’re crazy if you tried to persuade him to spend $2,000 on a TV.

 

People react with disbelief to this idea. Americans love their cars and identify with them. Consumers will pay for prestige and image. All true, of course, but think of how liberating it is to drive a rental Camry or Taurus with the Collision Damage Waiver. You don’t lock it. You don’t worry about it. You’re care-free. You don’t say “this is the greatest driving experience of my life” but the car is more than fine for sitting in traffic, which is mostly what urbanites do. After three years when it begins to require service you re-export it to Latin America and buy yourself a new one.

 

So it is true that there will probably still be a market for $50,000+ cars that say “I’m a rich bastard and can afford to squander money”, just as there are still $4000 plasma TVs in an era where most people spend $200 at Walmart. But the market share will be negligible. It is one thing to step up from a $27,000 Honda Accord to a $45,000 BMW. It is another to say “I think I’ll give up the vacation cottage and restaurant meals so that I can upgrade from my Crawling Tiger car to an American or European car of roughly the same function”.

 

Aside from vast job losses the implications of the $2,000 car are profound for the U.S. Parking and traffic jams, already hellish, will get far worse. If the U.S. ever develops an appetite for information technology again we’ll charge people for using the roads during periods of congestion (using Fast Lane/EZ-Pass style sensors). If not, the government will force people to buy a $3000 annual “right to drive” disk like they have in many European countries. The alternative will be most U.S. urban areas descending into a Bangkok-like snarl.

 

[If George W. had only declared war on urban traffic congestion instead of Iraq! We’d have sensors in the roads talking to navigation systems in the cars telling drivers which streets to avoid (London is doing this right now). We’d have computer-organized ride-sharing systems. Instead of handing out cash to people who hate the U.S. we’d hand it out to people like http://www.zipcar.com/ (I’d be a user of the service myself if not for the fact that you’re not allowed to bring a dog). We might have ended up saving enough gasoline that we wouldn’t have needed to add Iraq to our collection of overseas possessions.]

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An armed society is a polite society… (Israel and guns)

by philg

Something I learned here in Israel…  it is virtually impossible for most Israelis to own a gun.  Aside from air rifles and .22 target guns you must be either an active duty soldier in the army or meet some very stringent requirements in order to pack heat.  The average Israeli household cannot own a shotgun or hunting rifle (there is nowhere to hunt in the maze of concrete high-rises that dominates the landscape of the Mediterranean’s most densely populated country).  A fully automatic weapon is completely out of the question for civilians.


[Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza can and do own weapons, of course, and in fact most of them were supplied by the Israeli government.  Yes, that’s right.  The Labor government supplied the Palestinians with thousands of rifles and pistols so that they could set up a police force.  These weapons have now found their way into the hands of Palestinian civilians.  Thus when a Palestinian shoots an Israeli civilian or soldier it is very likely done with a gun paid for by that Israeli’s taxes.]


I used to be amazed that Israelis showed such restraint.  They are crammed in like sardines.  They have world-class traffic jams and a disregard for traffic laws (more Israelis are killed in car accidents than by terrorism or war).  Just walking around on the street you hear a lot of people shouting at each other.  I figured “it is amazing that more people don’t pull the M-16 off the top of the fridge and fill the air with lead”.  It turns out that they don’t have M-16s or any of the other toys that give meaning to life as an American.


An Israeli asked me whether it was true that Americans could own serious guns privately and expressed amazement that this was indeed possible.  He said “We read about this in the newspaper but the Americans that I’ve met seem quiet and non-aggressive.”  My reply:  “An armed society is a polite society” 🙂

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Brits want to know where are the Weapons of Mass Destruction

by philg

Folks in the UK are upset that no weapons of mass destruction have
been found in Iraq, calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Tony
Blair on the theory that he lied to Parliament about Iraqi
capabilities.  People have a difficult time believing that
intelligence reports could have been so wrong.  This is ironic because
Berlin, The Downfall 1945 is currently on the UK
bestseller charts, an authoritative work by the British historian
Antony Beevor.  Page 171 discusses the Soviet belief that the Germans
would use nerve gas to defend against the Red Army’s attack across the
river Oder.  Russian soldiers were ordered to drill and sleep with gas
masks on based on reports from multiple sources in multiple countries.
Top German leaders made grand claims about their Wunderwaffen (“Wonder Weapons”) and appeared unconcerned about the fact that their
forces were outnumbered by more than 10:1.  In the end it turned out
that the Germans hadn’t ever had a very large nerve gas supply and
apparently destroyed nearly all of their chemical weapons as the
Russians advanced.


[The historical analogy only goes so far.  Nobody back in Russia ever
called for Comrade Stalin’s resignation over his misestimation of the
German capabilities.  Nor were there mass protests against Russian
occupation following the victory.  At first a few Russian soldiers
were picked off by German die-hards (“partisans” then but today we’d
call them “illegal combatants”).  The Russians presumed that the
partisans could not operate without some support from local villagers
so they simply killed everyone in any village where one of their
soldiers had been shot.  The German resistance evaporated.]


Here’s a snapshot from York, England:


People in York, England angry that weapons of mass destruction were promised but not found in Iraq.

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Internet connectivity in the UK

by philg

After driving more than 1000 miles around the UK (supposed to be an EU country but they still use miles there, they pay with Pounds instead of Euros, they drive on the left, etc.), I figured out how to get Internet connectivity.  My 802.11 card never found any wireless networks.  Brand-new $300/night Hilton and Sheraton hotels did not have connections in their rooms.  Most Brits that I spoke with had never used the Internet and of those who had, most had done so only from work.  There are Internet cafes in the big cities but you can’t connect your own laptop.


How to connect then when in the UK?  It is as simple as getting on a plane at Heathrow Airport…  I’m in Tel Aviv now.  Expect some leftover postings about life in England, Wales, and Scotland to appear in the next few days…

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Wireless Internet in the US = Neo-Feudalism?

by philg

After two days of touring Wales, a country that apparently has yet to discover the mixing faucet, it has become apparent that there is better mobile phone coverage in the remotest sheep pasture or coastal outcrop than in downtown Boston. How can such an otherwise backward place be so far ahead of the U.S. technologically?

Most folks are familiar with the story: in Europe the governments mandated that all cell phone systems be built using the GSM standard. Thus you can make or receive a call any time that you’re within range of any antenna from any provider In practice this means nearly 100 percent coverage of the land area of Europe.

One of the advantages that the U.S. had over Europe in the days prior to European Union was an absence of trade barriers. In feudal times every local duke or prince was able to levy tariffs on goods traveling through his town. Thus it became cheaper to undertake the hazardous sea voyage round the horn of Africa rather than pay all the toll collectors on the land route. Pre-Union Europe retained some of the vestiges of that feudalism and her economic growth was inhibited.

The U.S. by contrast was a model of efficiency. The government built roads from coast to coast and you could drive a truckload of goods from Virginia to California without paying a toll. True free marketeers will argue that it is better to charge road users every time they set their tires on pavement and this may indeed be the case in our congested cities. But most of the time the cost to society of an additional car on the road is too small to bother collecting and the road generates economic growth for all, thus justifying the role of government in paying for it.

Let’s look at wireless Internet for a moment. The ability to send a few packets of information from Point A to Point B without laying expensive cables can spawn a tremendous variety of new computer applications. Using computers intelligently saves energy, cuts pollution, increases security, and generates wealth. What do we see when we open the newspaper? Our politicians trying to figure out how to ameliorate the pernicious effects of feudalism in the Arab world. Occasionally there will be an article about T-Mobile or some other company building an 802.11 network in the U.S. There are going to be lots of competing networks apparently. For any given network you’ll pay $30/month for spotty coverage. While our politicians fret about old-style feudalism in the Muslim world they ignore neo-feudalism springing up in their midst.

Per capita, American citizens pay some of the highest taxes on the planet. 802.11 infrastructure is ridiculously cheap (e.g., $50 base stations). The public is allegedly the owner of the electromagnetic spectrum. Why can’t we combine these facts to conclude that every U.S. citizen ought to be entitled to transmit and receive a certain number of bits per year? Perhaps one’s free entitlement wouldn’t be enough to watch streaming video 24/7. But it would certainly be enough that your car could receive a text message from your wife while you were halfway to the grocery store: “The smoke alarm needs a 9V battery; add it to the list.” It would be enough that your car could notify your apartment that you were on your way home and to turn the heat up. It would be enough that your car could notify your palmtop or wristtop that it was being attacked by thieves. It would be enough that a medical monitor attached to your grandparent at home could transmit measurements and alerts to a doctor.

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My cousin seems to have a blog as well (with ads)

by philg

Surfing the New York Times before departing on a trip (don’t expect too many updates until my return on June 7), this article on blogs mentioned my 2nd cousin Eric Alterman, who appears to have his own blog on MSNBC (kind of ironic because he styles himself a figure of the official counterculture yet his writings are surrounded by constant flashing ads that remind us that one can never escape the corporate voice in American media).  I haven’t seen Eric for at least 10 years but thanks to his blog I’m learning some things about him.  He seems to be an expert on contemporary music (our side of the family typically concentrates on the Bach to Bartok/Stravinsky period, which requires a lot less effort to maintain because you don’t run the risk of some punk laughing at you for having BeeGees albums; classical music nerds today listen to the same stuff that I listened to in the 1970s).  I’ve never heard of most of the people mentioned in Eric’s blog, though the implication is that they’re somehow important, which can make it tough to read for someone as ignorant as myself.  Still it is worthwhile because he finds fun links such as this BBC story.

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