|
|
|
For PayPal payments, use editor@frontiersman.my3website.net.
|
Fire
an Ant, Kill a Bee
Sam Aurelius Milam III In December of 2008, I came across an old recording of In Search Of. The copyright date is in Roman numerals so I don't know how old the recording is. However, Leonard Nimoy was as skinny as a snake and was wearing bellbottom blue jeans, a wide belt, and a pink long-sleeved shirt. So, the recording must be pretty old. The program was about killer bees and deadly ants, mostly fire ants. According to the program, the insects are advancing inexorably. Large amounts of funds have been spent on eliminating them, to no avail. They can't be stopped. I couldn't help but to think of overcreatures. I've been pondering the idea of overcreatures since sometime in the 1980s. During the ten years between 1998 and 2008, I went from thinking of overcreatures as "a strange notion"1 to making the statement that "a corporation is alive".2 Be that as it may, it's a fact that the people who work within corporations don't have much freedom of choice with regard to any behavior that affects their corporations. Rather, they must behave according to the incentives and restrictions that are brought to bear upon them by their corporations. That fact has serious implications for such things as the eradication of insect pests.3 That is, so long as killer bees, fire ants, and other such pests continue to be a threat, the agencies charged with eradicating them will continue to have a secure future. On the other hand, if the insect problem is ever solved, then the agencies won't be needed any more. They might be disbanded. Thus, the incentives within the agencies are to study the problem but not to solve it. The best possible result to be expected is that the agencies might cause the number of people who are benefiting from the problem to be greater than the number of people who are suffering from it.4 Here's a better idea. Disband the agencies and set aside their previous annual budgets as a reward for whoever first finds a satisfactory solution to the problem. The research will still be done by agencies of one sort or another but the incentives and the restrictions will have been transformed. Instead of making a living from the continued existence of the problems, the new research agencies will benefit only from their satisfactory solutions. Thus, the problems will be solved.
Cause and Effect, Fiction and Fact Sam Aurelius Milam III In January of this year, I watched part of a movie called Hook. It's a story of Peter Pan, grown up and played by Robin Williams. I didn't watch the entire movie but I did see one sequence that nicely illustrated my observation that women have a genetic mandate to control men.5 It was the typical situation where a woman complains that her husband is concentrating too hard on his job and isn't paying enough attention to the kids. Of course, if he didn't concentrate on his job, then she'd complain that he was a slob and wasn't supporting the family. Either way, she manufactures an opportunity to control him by condemning his behavior. Anyway, in this movie, Peter was engaged in a critical cell phone conversation, trying to resolve an emergency that was threatening to ruin the company for which he worked. His wife was interfering with his conversation, nagging him that he ought to be paying attention to the kids, instead. When he insisted on continuing the conversation, trying to deal with the situation at work, she grabbed the cell phone out of his hand and threw it out the window. The dog picked it up and buried it in a hole in the ground. (I think that scene was intended to be funny.) The woman continued to nag about the kids until Peter relented. Of course, after the dog had buried his cell phone, he didn't have much of a choice anyway. The movie was fiction but women really behave that way. In the movie, it didn't have any consequences. In real life, it's an example of the kind of thing that causes domestic violence.
Please use the enclosed envelope to send a contribution. I prefer cash. For checks or money orders, please inquire.
|
Letter to the Editor
Hi Sam, Is it my suspicious nature or am I actually getting the real idea here: With the new government mandatory shift to DTV next month, the broadcasting networks and the government now will receive a signal back from each receiver. This signal will carry what is being viewed. What else will it carry? I can understand how it is a broadcasting network's dream come true to instantly know not only their own ratings but all others also. No more expensive fees to agencies to call around to find out what people are watching. But the real question remains: What else is the signal feeding back, to whom and for what purposes??? Appreciatively, Millie; Baltimore, Maryland
Whenever the government makes anything mandatory, we should all be suspicious of the motives. In this particular case, I'm embarrassed to admit that the possibility that you're suggesting hadn't occurred to me. You're suggesting that every digital television might become a telescreen, as in Orwell's 1984. It's a scary thought, particularly because of its plausibility. However, now that you've got me to thinking about it, how about computers? Consider Echelon, that was such a big deal a few years ago.1 Maybe they don't use their word-recognition software just to conduct surveillance of faxes and email messages any more. Do you really know for sure that your computer doesn't have some kind of little hidden webcam that makes available to Echelon everything that you do within the view of your computer? I don't know. Maybe some of the readers of this newsletter might be better informed. If so, then I'd like to hear from them. I recall that, some years ago, my good friend Sir John the Generous told me an FBI joke. The FBI will give anybody who wants it a free document shredder. The shredder will include a built-in scanner and microwave uplink that will scan all documents as they're being shredded and send the images to the FBI computer. It was amusing but Sir John also suggested that I should open and inspect any electronic device that had been repaired by any licensed repair service. I'm not sure if he was joking about that. Who knows what they put inside? editor
Free Return Sam Aurelius Milam III Shortly after I mailed the January 2009 newsletters, I received two of the donation envelopes back in the mail. They weren't sealed. They were empty. They didn't have any return addresses. They were postmarked "NORTH METRO GA 300 30 DEC 2008 PM 7 L". They didn't have any postage stamps. Would anybody like to speculate about how they got out of the newsletters, which were sealed at each end, and why the Post Office sent them back to me, even though they didn't have any postage? Stray Thoughts
Please use the enclosed envelope to send a contribution. I prefer cash. For checks or money orders, please inquire. For PayPal payments, use editor@frontiersman.my3website.net.
|
|
|