Are the Saudis Really Deserving? 07/30/2007 09:55:56 pm by Dan Krohn

	It appears that the leadership of the U.S. wants to give an extensive arms deal to Saudi Arabia. One must wonder just what the U.S. is to get in return. It has been officially stated that there is no specific assistance to Iraq tied to this arms deal. And it has been publicly stated that the purpose is to help a traditional ally and hinted that it is aimed at empowering the Saudis to more effectively counter Iran. Well, maybe. But let’s remember that most of the 9-11 terrorists were Saudi. And let’s remember that Saudis are the primary supporters of the extremist Islamic schools which are said to be where young boys are trained/brainwashed to hate the West - especially the United States. If these facts are true, is this a nation we want to arm? Traditionally U.S. foreign policy has been dominated by short term economic interests. This has often backfired when dictators have ceased to be our friends or follow our lead. Need some examples? Iraq. Panama. How often must we be burned and lose American lives, so some can make big bucks? So now one cannot help but wonder how much of the Saudi military aid is really in return for somewhat favorable oil terms - some quiet unspoken deal that will benefit a select few. Or maybe a lucrative deal for a couple of arms manufacturers who support the administration. A better explanation than “we are just helping a traditional ally” would be nice. How about a crackdown on support of terrorist organizations with some transparency to confirm compliance? One cannot help but wonder how much this military assistance will someday cost in terms of the lives of young American men and women.

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Different Cultures - Different Morals 07/30/2007 09:35:57 pm by Dan Krohn

	A recent news story left this blogger totally bewildered and disgusted. In London three men were convicted of murdering a member of their family. A beautiful young woman had, in their eyes, committed the unpardonable offense of leaving her husband. Reportedly she had been forced to marry him at age 17, and he routinely beat her. But leaving her husband, and Iraqi Kurd, and falling in love with another man, an Iranian Kurd, was nothing the family could allow. So, together with a few close family friends, they caught her in her London apartment, raped her, beat her unmercifully, finally strangling her after two hours or so. Readers can easily understand my disgust. But my bewilderment is the tougher issue. The men who committed this horrific crime genuinely believed they were doing what they had to do. The believed they were doing the only right thing. As the world has shrunk dramatically over the last half century and continues to do so at an increasing rate, peoples with dramatically different cultures are bumping into each other. And sometimes these bumps hurt. This blogger believes in the sanctity of human life. With that deeply held belief, how can I interact with those who value find human life so lightly? No doubt they would answer that they value human life, too. But that capital punishment is appropriate for certain offenders. To us in the West, this woman committed no offense. To these Kurds, she had done the unforgivable. The longer this blogger lives, the less capital punishment appeals. There may be some extraordinary cases where I think .... maybe, but they are few and far between - really few. Yet, we approve capital punishment in many states in the U. S. though many of our western allies find that deplorable. Part of what makes this news story so incredibly awful is that the young woman was not just put to death, but tortured for quite a long time. It does not seem that anywhere in the U.S. people are treated to two hours of torture. Yet, many states use death by injection with a chemical cocktail which is believed by many to cause undue agony before the convicted dies. Where should one draw the line on such moral issues? Torture for no more than 5 minutes? An hour? What shade of grey must the pot be in order to call the kettle black? Is a clash of civilizations indeed inevitable when values differ so greatly? The previous paragraph aside, most Americans believe in the sanctity of human life. How should this country deal with countries whose cultures disagree? Traditionally it has been a matter of national interest - short term. But is this really the way to go? Should we support countries whose human rights records are deplorable for short term economic gain? These are tough issues. They are likely to be ignored by candidates for office who offer us only platitudes rather than thoughtful analysis. Let’s all remember that poor woman and keep the conversation of such issues alive.

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Viral Greeting Storm 07/27/2007 10:33:52 am by Dan Krohn

	During the last two weeks this blogger has received dozens of emails purporting to be electronic greeting cards sent by friends. Fortunately, this suspicious sole deleted them. Now it is becoming clear that the electric greeting cards are designed to lure users to an infecting website. Upon clicking on the link to read the card, the website installs a version of the dreaded Storm virus, which uses a rootkit to evade detection. It appears to be an effort to capture computers for use in a botnet at a later date. However, once opened to this infection, other dangers can be easily experienced - it's like an open wound waiting for infection. Readers are advised to update antivirus software very frequently, and watch for poor performance which could indicate an infection has escaped prevention tools.

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Possible Security Flaw 07/26/2007 01:50:23 pm by Dan Krohn

	There has been a recent report of a security problem in the LinkedIn toolbar for Microsoft's Internet Explorer. This blogger is a user of LinkedIn but has never used its toolbar (or just about anyone elses) for security reasons. This blogger has not studied the issue enough to be sure that there is a vulnerability here, but perhaps it's better to be safe than sorry.

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Greed Creates Fraud Victims 07/24/2007 11:34:51 am by Dan Krohn

	Every con-artist will tell you that it is the greed of the mark that makes him/her susceptible to being scammed. Consequently the almost foolproof absolute defense against scams it to ignore opportunities to get something for nothing. Such opportunities have always been plentiful, but they are more prevalent now than ever. This blogger has lived in Texas for a long time and remembers when it was proposed that Texas have a state lottery. I opposed it and voted against it. To me it seemed utterly improper for the State to be encouraging its citizens to try to get something for nothing. By getting millions to spend a very small amount in the hope of gaining a fortune, Texas along with the other governments with lotteries began active encouragement of the concept that money need not be gained with effort. Subsequent research has shown that these lotteries are rather inefficient revenue sources for the states and that they tend to injure the poor who can least afford the few bucks for a ticket, but do so driven by desperation. It is hardly a surprise that the Internet has become the prime marketplace for scams. With the Internet has come the ability to send out millions of email messages with the scam of the month. First were the remarkable political/inheritance scams where someone in some country (Nigeria was an unfortunate leader but not alone) would offer millions to the mark for doing nothing except perhaps sharing bank account data or a bit of money with the con. One victim retained a lawyer friend of mine after losing $30,000 to such a scam. These still emerge from time to time, and the stories told continue to become refined and tear jerking. (HA!) The latest is a very old scam which the Internet has made better than ever. This one is the pumping up of a thinly traded stock’s price with publicity delivered right to you desk by email, with the cons selling their shares acquired for a song at the new higher price. Those suckers who buy the stock based on the “inside scoop” end up holding worthless paper. This one comes in by fax, too. And often the fax or email is made to look like it was sent in error to further encourage the mark in thinking that this is his lucky day. From the tech standpoint it’s like the old Mad Magazine cartoon “Spy vs Spy”. People install spam filters to keep these temptations away. Con-artists find a way to work around the filter and fleece the fool. Of late there has been a tremendous increase in email with virtually no language unless the recipient opens a pdf file attached. This blogger has received dozens if not hundreds of them. Rumor has it that people are getting wise to pdf’s so the latest is said to be Excel attachments. The reader is warned.

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Defective Products from Abroad 07/23/2007 03:53:27 pm by Dan Krohn

	Recently there have been several news stories concerning dangerously defective goods made in China. Some of these products have been imported into the United States and other countries making this more than a local issue. Apparently the Chinese government is trying to crack down on the manufacturer of inferior goods, at least where someone knew of the problem. One official was executed for permitting defective medicine to be made and distributed, and that’s certainly a classic deterrent. However, as with all communist or other economic systems which are totally or very largely managed by the government, the Chinese have a structural problem. In these systems the problems have to be handled at the government regulatory level, the bureaucracies, which however well meaning simply never receive the funding nor have the incentive to do a really complete job. It simply does not happen. Many, if not the overwhelming majority, of these problems arise because decision makers at the manufacturing companies are tempted to take actions which dramatically cut costs at risk to others. Greed is a powerful motivator. We have seen this here in the U.S. on a number of occasions where companies have sold dangerous products knowing of the risk. In many cases the risk might not have been known when the product was initially introduced to the market; but after learning of the risk, the temptation to continue distribution rather than absorb the financial hit of change was too much. But here in the U.S. we have a protection that is apparently lacking in China - a functional civil torts legal system. The government does not have to fund the cost of enforcement entirely itself. And motivation arises when the injured persons are pursuing a fix. There is no way to measure how many lives and limbs have been saved because the risk of lawsuits changed the arithmetic on the greed factor. So next time dear reader you find someone dumping on our legal system, ask them if they would prefer diluted medications, defective toys and crippled children. Though unfortunately there are those who motivated by greed will silently answer “yes”, others might just find our system has merits when compared to the others where tort lawsuits do not exist.

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People are the weak link 07/09/2007 12:15:05 pm by Dan Krohn

	A Computerworld story today reports that a database administrator at a large company to which financial institutions and others outsource data processing, sold information on more than two million consumers to information brokers. The breach included banking and credit card information. Increasingly computer security professionals are finding that the threat from inside is greater than that of being hacked from outside. It seems there is often someone with too much greed who can be bought. And with little memory sticks capable of holding tremendous amounts of data, it's not very hard for a crooked employee to leave with the goods. There is no perfect protection against this threat, but companies should do a thorough background check on any new hire. (Some may need to do it on old hires.) And legislators should start paying attention to what it costs consumers to have their data misused - even if it's only increased spam - and look to protect their consituents by shifting costs to companies with sloppy practices that fail to adequately protect personal data.

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Iraq in Election Season 07/06/2007 04:54:38 pm by Dan Krohn

	Last night this blogger spent a while watching one of the leading presidential candidates speak on C-SPAN. The name of the candidate need not be stated because the position of the candidate was the generic one taken by many candidates this year. The writer of this blog found it very frustrating. The candidate’s position could be stated thusly: Radical Islamic terrorists are a real threat to the U.S., and we should be concerned about that. If we pull out of Iraq there will be a civil war which will likely overflow into other nations in the Mideast, which will be bad. Now since this blogger has no real dispute with those statements, why is the position so frustrating? Simple - the position stops there. The candidate went on at great length to discuss why pulling out of Iraq with a timetable is a bad idea. And it is a bad idea - if the decision is to pull out, there should be no announcing of a timetable and it might as well be done as quickly as possible consistent with safety for our people. But what if the decision is to stay, which is what this candidate wants to do? This candidate, like many others, offered no insight as to how he would approach the challenges in Iraq. Will there be some increased taxes to pay for the war effort? Will he increase troop strength so as to better assure victory? Will military resources be moved to Iraq from Korea or other places? Will the draft be reinstated? Is he happy with the current approach and planning to continue the way the war is being pursued now? No clues were offered. For that matter, how does this candidate define victory? That alone is a critical question few will answer. It used to be that the definition of victory was pretty clear in such situations: the putting in place of a government friendly to the U.S. in a strong enough position to remain in power for the foreseeable future. If not that, the goal was usually to stop a genocide from taking place and then get out. But if this last is the goal here, the job was largely completed when Saddam Hussein and his family was removed. So one presumes the goal is something else. But what? The people of the U. S. deserve candidates who will state a clear goal for a war. It is awfully hard to gain support for a war without a clear goal. Indeed, that’s probably why the support for this war has dwindled in the U. S. Interestingly the original goal of the war in Iraq was to eliminate weapons of mass destruction. Now Iran is developing a nuclear industry, and many fear that it really is planning to develop the capability of making nuclear bombs. Certainly the president of Iran has made scary statements, which one is foolish to ignore. This same candidate talked about how the U. S. cannot let Iran become a nuclear power. But he did not state whether or not the U. S. ought to prevent it militarily if necessary. And it appears there will be no other choice. Alas, as usual, we have candidates who are criticizing each other and those who have gone before. And candidates who talk loudly in generalities which are easy to agree with. But the devil is in the details, so one wishes the candidates would say just how they would do things. But as long as we have a population which elects its leaders on sound bites and is more interested in the adventures of Paris Hilton than the quality of its leadership - we will get no better.

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Texas Likes Jungle law 07/05/2007 11:10:27 am by Dan Krohn

	Blame it, if you will, on the fact that this blogger has been reading a book by a Buddhist leader advocating loving-kindness and compassion as ultimate values. The fact is the Texas Supreme Court has consistently over the last several years favored its brand of social Darwinism over compassion. Though generally disguised in procedural legalese, the court has almost always ruled against injured individuals and in favor of larger business interests which either contributed to the injury or insured against it. (Rulings by this court against insurance companies are about as common as visits from Haley’s Comet.) Now in the recent opinion in the case of F.F.P. Operating Partners, L.P. v. Duenez, the Texas Supreme Court has handed a gift to the state’s bars and taverns. Sometime back the Texas Legislature adopted a law commonly referred to as the Dram Shop Act, which made taverns and bars which continue to serve alcoholic beverages to customers after they are inebriated liable for injuries caused by those drunks. This sort of law has been around a while and similar statutes can be found in many states. Well, with a little hocus pocus of procedural statutory construction, the Texas Supreme Court has now made it very difficult to sue the server of alcoholic beverages successfully. This blogger doubts that this is the position on this issue of most Texans - but then it might be. In a couple years Texans will have the opportunity to vote on some of these court seats, and there will be the chance to teach that court what the people want. (In fairness, it should be noted that two of the justices dissented, so give fair credit to Jefferson and O’Neill.) Now ultimately the question underlying the tort reform hubbub (of which this recent case is a small part) is this: if someone gets hurt, do we care? The answer in Texas, as indicated by the positions taken by its elected leaders, is - NO. In this day when huge numbers of people have no health insurance, there are plenty of people experiencing the law of the jungle’s rough side. With the exception of a mild nod to children, the Texas of recent years has been quite hostile to the sick and injured who are not wealthy. Most Texans will say that they don’t want to see money going to “social programs” in a blanket way, which means that they could care less about the less fortunate. Eventually we might see enough widespread suffering to change this a bit – but it will be a very slow long process. To anyone injured by a drunk driver in Texas, we Texans proudly declare that we will put the sorry drunk in prison for a long time. But in terms of helping the victims, forget it - when an animal is injured in the jungle it usually dies. And that’s how Texans seem to like it.

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Whither the Economy? 07/06/2007 04:14:28 pm by Dan Krohn

	In a new BusinessWeek article, the writer muses as to why the common people in America seem pessimistic about the economy when the wealthy and financial experts aren’t very worried. Economics can be difficult to understand, but this time the question might be answered with a resounding “Duh”. For starters, there has been no slacking of the wealth/income disparity trend in the United States of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer - with the middle fading. If a person is living in a world that seems to be getting tougher and tougher, it’s rather difficult to be optimistic. Having just filled the tank of the old Buick earlier today, this blogger saw vivid evidence of that toughening. And there is more brewing that portends economic gloom on the horizon (unless you are quite well to do). For one, productivity in the United States is not growing at the same breakneck speed that it grew in recent years. For another, while everyone enjoys buying cheap goods made in poor nations abroad, the news has consistently hammered on the prospect that American jobs are being exported - which is rather disheartening whether true or not. There is one whopping economic movement in place that has not received sufficient news coverage, but people may somehow be starting to sense it. The United States government is running at one humongous deficit. Given all indications that the country will be involved in expensive military and foreign rebuilding projects for years - there is little reason to expect the deficit to shrink. Indeed, any news listener hears repeatedly that the president wants to make the last round of tax cuts permanent. Spend more, take in less, what a great recipe for deficit reduction. (Anyone remember all the talk of how Iraqi oil would reimburse the United States for the cost of the war?) Big deficits always mean one thing - higher interest rates. Now economic matters always lag, so it may be that the next president takes the heat for the current president’s heartless extravagance. But you can bet it’s coming. Why heartless? Well, ponder a moment: who pays interest and who collects interest? You’re right! The middle class and the poor pay, and the wealthy few get paid. One cannot help but wonder how much of the determination to run huge deficits is part of an ongoing program to pander to the wealthy by current U.S. leaders. Less the reader think this blogger entirely too partisan, a tidbit will be added on the other side. Research the situation and you will find that at the head of the line of puppets in Washington anxious to please the credit card issuers is none other than Democratic Senator Joe Biden of Delaware. When it comes to financial compassion for the average American, Biden is ready to pop an apple in his mouth and pop him on a spit. And forget all that nice talk you might hear about helping entrepreneurs and small business people - they are often borrowers - they just haven’t figured out who is on which side. Lastly, if readers think higher interest rates are not on the way, note that the Federal Reserve has expressed concern that inflation may be returning as a result of recent increases in producer prices. And to the Fed, inflation means higher interest. It’s just a matter of when.

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