Get Involved in Clinton's Future

I've been a member of the Friends of the Library board since I moved to town, owing to the fact that our family are big library patrons and my last job was in library IT management. Anyhow, due to an aging board staff we are down two members and one of them is the President. So, meet the President Pro-Tem.

If anyone has any interest in doing some cool community involvement stuff and incidentally affecting the new library planning process, drop me an e-mail (via the main website. In the meantime, even more stuff to suck up my time. It's not that bad, really.

Not nearly as bad as Great Places which is now kicking into a higher gear of state (read bureaucratic) involvement and planning. It's cool to see things moving forward, though. I have to put together a steering committee for the South Bridge Project.

The South Bridge Project is a portion of the Great Places initiative that encompasses the following areas.

• 'Welcome to Clinton' on the Iowa side of the North and South Bridges. (The South Bridge will soon be closed for nearly a year for repairs and painting, BTW.)


• A combined exercise and public art park in the general area currently occupied by the Wiersema scrapyard located directly behind the Armstrong Building --conveniently located one block from the Library.


• Trailhead for extension of the current bike/hiking path south from it's current terminus at the South Bridge, west through Clinton roughly along 9th Ave S and then south to Camanche.

It is the park portion that will be the biggest challenge. Federal and State money is already mostly set-aside for the other parts of the project. If anyone is interested in building a really neat new public space dedicated to fitness and public art, give me a holler.

New Orleans is Unisurable, Part 1

The Bush Administration is doing the a right thing in the Gulf Coast in denying a $350 million aid request from energy firm, Entergy.

"We believe that transferring federal tax dollars to the bondholders and shareholders of a private firm is inappropriate," said Allan Hubbard,President George W. Bush's top economic adviser who also chairs a White House council on rebuilding the Gulf Coast following Hurricane Katrina

Do tell? Since when? As a puzzled Entergy P.R. flack plaintively pointed out, the U.S. has "made money available to ConEd (the New York utility) after (the attacks of September 11, 2001), the airlines and other private business." I doubt that this move is based upon any sound economic principles but rather the administration knows it would be political suicide to render a third of a billion dollars to an energy company. Especially an energy company that made $963 million in net profit last year.

What is certain is that whatever the administration's motives in snubbing one of its core constituencies and no doubt thereby dooming hundreds of thousands of Louisiana residents to several more months of darkness it is surely not a response to global climate change. But what the administration has done is something that environmental economists and Viridian Greens have been advocating for years.

The principle is essentially this: The world is becoming uninsurable. It is a profound waste of public (and private) money to continue to subsidize a very dense population infrastructure in a region that, even in the best of times, carries a high risk of catastrophic weather. But with the changes in the regional climate of the gulf region the risk index is very high.

Climate change means a more disturbed atmosphere and sea. This means more frequent and stronger storms. With 96 million of the United States' 288 citizens living along the coasts, a tremendous amount of capital is at risk from storms. This fall's hurricane season was merely a harbringer of years to come. While no one is saying that double-hits like Katrina-Wilma on the Gulf will be the norm, the consensus is that tropical storms will be more numerous and stronger such that the likelihood of major storms is much higher.

The insurance industry is taking note. Regional insurers took a big hit after Katrina-Wilma. In the aftermath, stories like this one of the Mississippi Farm Bureau transferring its Katrina claims and refusing to write new storm policies south of Highway 10 became more frequent. The assessment of coastal risk has made its way up the Atlantic coast toeven in Massachusetts, where local insurers are dropping policies on Cape Cod. Finally , this month the call has come from state and local officials to the insurance industry to do a drastic re-think of risk assessment along the coasts. They are worried about their state pension funds going broke in the wake of more huge storms forcing insurance companies into bankruptcy.

The bottom line is that old Mama Nature is going to re-assert her control over the coastlines. It will become economically impossible for people to maintain a presence along those coasts unless they fall into one of the following buckets: A) Individuals or companies wealthy enough to rebuild frequently. B) Performing work or conducting business that is profitable enough to place them in Bucket A. C) Performing work or conducting business that is unable to be done elsewhere and pass the costs of rebuilding on to customers. D) Building one's structures in the mode of Hitler's Atlantic Wall.

Cough, gag.

I've been pretty sick with a chest cold that I caught from Jo. Laid me low over the weekend although I've been walking wounded at work all week. I was on the road to Des Moines all day Monday and have had a steady stream of project management and Great Places-related meetings through this morning. The last thing my throat needs. I thought I was going to lose my voice completely about 4 PM yesterday. So, all that plus a pretty crushing work schedule have prevented much in the way of any writing of my own.

I will point you to a couple of pretty interesting and entertaining reads. The first is a post from Charlie Stross' blog. Stross is one of the up and coming giants of the science fiction world. But don't let that fool you. He has a very strong technology and science background and is incredibly well read on history as well. Anyway, he spins a fascinating little conspiracy theory here with more than a dab of truth in it.

While on the subject of SF authors thinking Deep Thoughts, everyone should read David Brin's ongoing series The Political Battle over Modernity which takes some of George Lakoff's work and threads it together with a theory that our current political debate isn't one of right vs. left but of Despotism vs. Age of Enlightenment Modern values. Which is also what Stross is trying to get at.

Overall I think that there is quite a bit of wisdom in both of these guys' arguments that the entire "left" vs. "right" also defined as the socialism vs. free market meta definition of political conflict in the 20th Century was really a very recent and transient development that has pretty much lost all relevance since 1989. What both Stross and Brin are trying to tell us is that the left-right/socialism-capitalism paradigm only temporarily masked the centuries-old core struggle between authoritarianism and liberalism.

Bill Gates Will Burn In Hell

Sorry for so few posts, it has been a busy and productive week. In addition, the recent drop to seasonal temperatures has made our bed extra cozy and I've been pretty slow out of the blocks every morning this week.

As I said, a busy but productive week and I was pretty glad to see Friday come around. But not so glad to home to a family PC that's been having problems. At some point last week one of the kids had downloaded a perfectly innocent looking screensaver program, D3 Christmas. I must say, the graphics were pretty cool. But 'lo, the pop-up ads soon began to appear and MS Anti-Spyware was throwing up an alert about the startup program izoo.exe every time anyone logged in. MS Anti Spyware continued to identify Adware-Webnexus as an offending bit of software running on the system. But cleaning efforts were all in vain. Every time we restarted izoo.exe and Webnexus were respawned from the depths of the registry. Ordinarily, I might have let this go a while. However, iTunes would not launch. And I've promised to make a couple of Christmas CD mixes for some folks for their holiday parties next week.

Three or four hours of digging around in the registry and online would not fix the problem and about 10 PM last night I finally resigned myself to backing up the system and completely reinstalling the OS. As the home PC is a custom-built hot-rod, this is not as simple as inserting the restore disks. I finally got things up and running sufficiently with the core OS, all the security patches, Firefox, Thunderbird and MS Office at about 3:30 AM

All this is unnecessary. It is possible to make an operating system that is very secure. Linux and Mac OS X are very secure systems. Yes, they do have the odd flaw but very few and even fewer are of the sort that end-users really need to worry about; ones that would allow an attacker to access the system at an administrative level and execute code. Microsoft had many opportunities to do as Apple did in 2000. Apple then said, "We know you love the Apple OS, but the code base is ten years old, it is not secure, it is not a modern operating system. We owe it to our company, our customers and to the larger computing community to start from scratch and build a modern and secure OS. We will continue to support the old OS for a number of years, but the new OS will not completely run the old software. When you switch your are really going to have to switch."

Apple took those steps at a time of weakness, when the company's entire future was at stake. Microsoft had several opportunities to do this from a position of strength, nay market dominance both in 1998 when they were working on Windows 2000 and again in 2002 when XP was in development. Instead, they have continued to rely on the core structures introduced in 1994, which were an unstable kludge then and continue to be now.

If anyone could ever succinctly and eloquently explain to the American public and especially the American corporate class, exactly how much of their lives and treasure have been needlessly squandered by the short-sighted and visionless leadership of Microsoft, there would be no place on Earth safe for Bill Gates to hide. It would be torches and pitchforks in Redmond. I'm really grateful to Microsoft for providing me with damn fine living for the past eight years or so. But I'd trade it all in New York minute to have back all the days, hell weeks of my life spent fucking with computers that have been terminally hosed because Gates and his company never had the courage and vision to do the right thing.