Hume's Pages

I've put something up, at last. I've long thought, semi-privately, that the US was the one true threat to survival in the world. But I'd marked it down as a blundering, near-sighted elephant, throwing its weight around with no consideration for the long term. Since 9/11, I've been reviewing the historical record—a record largely suppressed, by the simple expedient of omitting it from, or fabricating substitues for, the government-run schools—and found I was half right and half wrong. The US is, unquestionably, the threat to `peace on earth,' whatever that may mean—say, human rights and democracy, as generally understood; but they are a cunning, sabre-tusked elephant, not a bumbling one. They threaten these ideals deliberately, with malice aforethought; not as unintended consequences.

Unless you understand our struggles against our industrial rivals and the Third World, US foreign policy appears to be a series of random errors, inconsistencies, and confusions. Actually, our leaders have succeeded rather well at their assigned chores, within the limits of feasibility. NC

See the chronology, by no means exhaustive (and not always strictly on-topic), which I'm accumulating.

Something I'll put up here right now is my NetBSD pkgsrc for building rosegarden-2.1p3 (for others see my friend Kwantus).

Apply standard warnings about running as root scripts from strangers. Look 'em over carefully that I'm not trying to Trojan you. (This is where the simplest, smallest pkgs are the best. `Complexity is the worst enemy of security, and systems that are loaded with features, capabilities, and options are much less secure than simple systems that do a few things reliably.' [Bruce Schneier & Adam Shostack])

If you can tart these up so they pass, go ahead; I got bigger worries :) X X

created 2001 Mar 2
modified 2002 Jan 19