Ah ... long day. Long year-and-a-half, as a matter of fact, and long story.
Short version: I am now running a 100% Linux box and happier than ever with the decision to abandon Micro$haft.
Long version: About a year-and-a-half ago, my Windows 98 machine caught a nasty boot sector virus (despite the fact that I was running an anti-virus utility and updating the definitions regularly), which I was unable to get rid of (although I used several reputable tools in the attempt). Every time I started up, the thing started eating files. This happened late one afternoon ... and I had to be online and able to get Rational Review News Digest out overnight.
Fortunately, a friend had sent me the install disks for Mandrake (now Mandriva) Linux 9.0. In a matter of about four hours, I had installed Mandrake on a new partition and was up, running and ready to go. It was the first friendly Linux experience I'd had (I'd tried Red Hat 7.xx awhile back and found it an unuseable pain). As a matter of fact, it was easier and more painless than an install of, say, Windows 95 or 98.
I resolved at some unspecified point in the not-too-distant future, to erase my virus-eaten Windows partition and go all the way with Linux. I only had a few gigs off of my 20Gb hard drive in the Mandrake installation -- that old Windows partition was sitting there hogging better than 60% of my disk space. But I put it off, and put it off, and had problems (probably not Mandrake's fault, but new RPMs didn't want to install -- I was using Mozilla 1.1 instead of Firefox and such for lack of ability to update), and put it off some more.
Anyway, Brad Spangler to the rescue with a CARE package in the mail. My enjoyable Linux experience just got even more enjoyable. Yesterday afternoon, I wiped the whole drive and installed VectorLinux SOHO 5. The install wasn't quite as easy as Mandrake, but it was eminently doable -- if you're a novice, don't let that stop you from going Linux. The bad old days of 800-page manuals just to get up and running are in the past. And it runs like a striped-ass ape, especially now that I've switched to the IceWM GUI instead of KDE (a fine GUI, but I'm running 128Mb of RAM, and apparently it uses about 120Mb ... no wonder my resources were strained!).
Very, very nice to finally have my whole hard drive back, a modern browser (I'll probably install Opera for additional coolness), and a lot of new tools and updated versions of old tools that have been released since Mandrake 9.0. I'm not really a command prompt guy anymore (as a matter of fact, I really haven't been since, say, TRS-DOS), these days you don't have to be to get good performance out of Linux.
Thanks, Brad. And Bill? G'bye. You are the weakest link.
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Technorati Tag: Linux
IceRocket Tag: Linux
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Monday, September 26, 2005
Cruisin' for a bruisin'?
[Note: This piece was intended for publication at Free Market News Network. However, they're doing a big-time -- and very nice -- remodel, including email address changes, and I haven't been able to reach my editor via email or the site contact form ... and the longer an article of mine sits around unpublished, the less I like it and the more I want to tinker with it. So, y'all get it first ... and Earth to Mark, drop me a line! - TLK]
My first piece for FMNN was an entry in the "Is China growing freer than the West?" contest. I held then -- as I hold now -- that the answer is "no" -- that the Chinese Communist Party retains an iron authoritarian grip on the country and that it has no intention of loosening that grip.
One issue I ignored in the piece (as not relevant to its main thrust) was the bearing China's increasingly powerful "private sector" economy has on world affairs and on the prospects of future conflict. However, this is a factor which the US ignores at its peril.
One of the most important facts on the table is that the "free market" economy in China is no such thing. It's not even as mixed a bag as in the US, where "public-private partnerships" and other market-state entanglements increasingly prevail. The "private sector" in China is a fairy tale based on force and fraud. It consists of leveraging Western innovation and venture capital into slave labor enterprises, then using the Chinese share of the resulting profits to modernize the Chinese military and prop up a command economy with the equivalent of a perpetual blood transfusion.
When American consumers buy cheap Chinese goods from American retailers, they insert a vital link into the long chain of transactions by which Western capital is converted into Chinese military might and Chinese Communist Party political dominance.
With the profits generated by its laogai forced labor camp system, the Chinese government is modernizing the People's Liberation Army, building a blue water navy, and even reaching for the stars.
If the connection seems tenuous, it isn't: Until the mid-1990s, the People's Liberation Army directly owned most industrial enterprises in the People's Republic. Since then, a faux "transition to the private sector" has taken place as direct PLA ownership has been replaced with "ownership" and management by "retired" PLA senior officers. The revenue stream has had a link added to it, as the PLA now receives increased "direct" state funding instead of taking profits directly, but it's not too difficult to figure out from whence that state funding is derived. The "privatization" of enterprise in China is mostly smoke and mirrors.
Why is China working so hard to bulk up its military capabilities? "National defense" is an explanation, but not a very good one. The country's vastness and huge population make it virtually invasion-proof; a large basic infantry force could hold any would-be conqueror at bay indefinitely.
Of China's three conceivable competitors for regional "Big Man on the Block" status, one (North Korea) is its client state and subsists almost solely on Chinese aid; another (Russia) is in no shape, nor likely to get in shape any time soon, to contest the Siberian border; and the third (India) seems more concerned with Pakistan and the Bay of Bengal than about conducting war back and forth across the world's most formidable mountain barriers.
"Defense" does not explain China's intense focus on military modernization, especially when one looks into the details, such as the acquisition of nuclear ballistic missile submarines and a surface warfare fleet. It is the Pacific Rim, not Asia's interior, which interests Beijing. To be more specific, in the short term China is interested in settling territorial disputes with Japan in its favor, and in bringing Taiwan under its rule. In the long term, the Communists intend to exercise the primary influence, and preferably political hegemony, over the Rim.
Across the Pacific, of course, lies the primary obstacle to such ambitions -- and it's no accident that China is working hard to field weapons which can threaten that obstacle: The United States. In 1941, the Japanese acted preemptively to remove the US threat to their flank as they conquered the Pacific. China is acting no less directly, although certainly more slowly and less violently -- for now -- toward the same end.
Barring some (literal) sea change, China has the US over a barrel: It's using our economic power to modernize its military, and developing our dependence on Chinese trade as an extreme disincentive to contesting any use it may make of its military power. Every day, the US becomes more vulnerable to Chinese nuclear attack and to economic collapse should trade ties be broken; every day the cost of changing that trend climbs higher.
At some point in the next twenty to fifty years, the US faces the choice of a long -- and ruinous, even to the victor -- war with China, or of abandoning its allies on the Pacific Rim.
As a non-interventionist, of course, I prefer that the US begin disengaging from its expensive alliances with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Taiwan anyway ... and the sooner the better, as the disengagement will have fewer ill effects if undertaken freely and on our own timetable rather than under duress and on China's schedule.
Alternatively or additionally, the US should stop funding Chinese military modernization and propping up the Beijing regime with fake "free trade." Chinese products are not the products of free enterprise. They are the products of slave labor, and American consumers who buy them -- myself included, as it's damn near impossible not to right now -- are receiving stolen property, to the slaves' detriment and our own.
--
Technorati Tags: China, Politics, Current Affairs, Current Events, War
IceRocket Tags: China, Politics, Current Affairs, Current Events, War
My first piece for FMNN was an entry in the "Is China growing freer than the West?" contest. I held then -- as I hold now -- that the answer is "no" -- that the Chinese Communist Party retains an iron authoritarian grip on the country and that it has no intention of loosening that grip.
One issue I ignored in the piece (as not relevant to its main thrust) was the bearing China's increasingly powerful "private sector" economy has on world affairs and on the prospects of future conflict. However, this is a factor which the US ignores at its peril.
One of the most important facts on the table is that the "free market" economy in China is no such thing. It's not even as mixed a bag as in the US, where "public-private partnerships" and other market-state entanglements increasingly prevail. The "private sector" in China is a fairy tale based on force and fraud. It consists of leveraging Western innovation and venture capital into slave labor enterprises, then using the Chinese share of the resulting profits to modernize the Chinese military and prop up a command economy with the equivalent of a perpetual blood transfusion.
When American consumers buy cheap Chinese goods from American retailers, they insert a vital link into the long chain of transactions by which Western capital is converted into Chinese military might and Chinese Communist Party political dominance.
With the profits generated by its laogai forced labor camp system, the Chinese government is modernizing the People's Liberation Army, building a blue water navy, and even reaching for the stars.
If the connection seems tenuous, it isn't: Until the mid-1990s, the People's Liberation Army directly owned most industrial enterprises in the People's Republic. Since then, a faux "transition to the private sector" has taken place as direct PLA ownership has been replaced with "ownership" and management by "retired" PLA senior officers. The revenue stream has had a link added to it, as the PLA now receives increased "direct" state funding instead of taking profits directly, but it's not too difficult to figure out from whence that state funding is derived. The "privatization" of enterprise in China is mostly smoke and mirrors.
Why is China working so hard to bulk up its military capabilities? "National defense" is an explanation, but not a very good one. The country's vastness and huge population make it virtually invasion-proof; a large basic infantry force could hold any would-be conqueror at bay indefinitely.
Of China's three conceivable competitors for regional "Big Man on the Block" status, one (North Korea) is its client state and subsists almost solely on Chinese aid; another (Russia) is in no shape, nor likely to get in shape any time soon, to contest the Siberian border; and the third (India) seems more concerned with Pakistan and the Bay of Bengal than about conducting war back and forth across the world's most formidable mountain barriers.
"Defense" does not explain China's intense focus on military modernization, especially when one looks into the details, such as the acquisition of nuclear ballistic missile submarines and a surface warfare fleet. It is the Pacific Rim, not Asia's interior, which interests Beijing. To be more specific, in the short term China is interested in settling territorial disputes with Japan in its favor, and in bringing Taiwan under its rule. In the long term, the Communists intend to exercise the primary influence, and preferably political hegemony, over the Rim.
Across the Pacific, of course, lies the primary obstacle to such ambitions -- and it's no accident that China is working hard to field weapons which can threaten that obstacle: The United States. In 1941, the Japanese acted preemptively to remove the US threat to their flank as they conquered the Pacific. China is acting no less directly, although certainly more slowly and less violently -- for now -- toward the same end.
Barring some (literal) sea change, China has the US over a barrel: It's using our economic power to modernize its military, and developing our dependence on Chinese trade as an extreme disincentive to contesting any use it may make of its military power. Every day, the US becomes more vulnerable to Chinese nuclear attack and to economic collapse should trade ties be broken; every day the cost of changing that trend climbs higher.
At some point in the next twenty to fifty years, the US faces the choice of a long -- and ruinous, even to the victor -- war with China, or of abandoning its allies on the Pacific Rim.
As a non-interventionist, of course, I prefer that the US begin disengaging from its expensive alliances with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Taiwan anyway ... and the sooner the better, as the disengagement will have fewer ill effects if undertaken freely and on our own timetable rather than under duress and on China's schedule.
Alternatively or additionally, the US should stop funding Chinese military modernization and propping up the Beijing regime with fake "free trade." Chinese products are not the products of free enterprise. They are the products of slave labor, and American consumers who buy them -- myself included, as it's damn near impossible not to right now -- are receiving stolen property, to the slaves' detriment and our own.
--
Technorati Tags: China, Politics, Current Affairs, Current Events, War
IceRocket Tags: China, Politics, Current Affairs, Current Events, War
Saturday, September 24, 2005
Things that bug me, but not too badly ...
"Traditional Red Chili is defined by the International Chili Society as any kind of meat or combination of meats, cooked with red chili peppers, various spices and other ingredients, with the exception of BEANS and PASTA which are strictly forbidden."
This is sort of like saying "Gravity is defined by the Royal Society as a force which repels."
Chili is ... BEANS, cooked with red chili peppers, various spices and other ingredients. Meat is optional. Beans are not. If it doesn't have beans, it's not chili (although it may be a very nice meat stew).
This is sort of like saying "Gravity is defined by the Royal Society as a force which repels."
Chili is ... BEANS, cooked with red chili peppers, various spices and other ingredients. Meat is optional. Beans are not. If it doesn't have beans, it's not chili (although it may be a very nice meat stew).
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