Be Careful Selecting An Email Address

This post by Dan Gillmor contains a remark about spammers using non-existent return addresses that reminded me of something I learned from experience. Big-ISP email addresses that consist of short letter combinations are subject to use as phony return addresses on spam messages. (They are also subject to receiving spam generated by bots that spam all addresses from “aaa@xxx.com” to “zzz@xxx.com”.) One of my email addresses is “xxx@bigISP.com”, where “xxx” is a meaningless three-letter combination that I invented for reasons that don’t matter here. I rarely send mail from this address, yet it receive lots of spam. And from time to time I receive waves of bounced messages in which my address appears in the “reply to” field — IOW, a spammer forged my email address in his messages, and now, out of the thousands of unsolicited messages that he sent, the ones to bad addresses or full mailboxes get bounced to me. I’m sure that many of us have had similar experiences. Maybe the way to minimize this sort of thing is to use one’s own domain for one’s main email address. There may also be some value in making sure that the part of one’s email address that’s on the left of the “@” sign isn’t too short.

The Unknown War

Jonathan sent me this post from Jim Miller’s blog. Miller discusses a very good NYTimes article entitled “A Job for Rewrite: Stalin’s War.” Miller, and the NYTimes note the incredible fact that the military disaster known as Operation Mars is barely known in the West. The NYTimes gives particular credit to Col. David M. Glantz for bringing the murky history of the Soviet Side of World War II to light. I have read several of Col. Glantz’s books. (e.g. this one and this one and this one.) He is the master in English of the Soviet war effort. Mars was a colossal disaster — the Red Army lost more men in a few weeks than the USA lost in the entire war. The fact that the Mars defeat could be totally erased from history shows what type of regime Communist Russia really was: monolithic, Orwellian, a pyramid of corpses and lies.

Glantz’s main lesson is that the Red Army was not a blunt instrument — it got better and better as the war went on. It didn’t just bleed all over the Germans, it learned its lessons from them, then turned around and treated the Wehrmacht to fiercer blitzkriegs than it had ever dished out itself. My adolescent belief that “Patton could have pushed them back to Moscow” has been amply demonstrated in the ensuing years to be utter fancy. Glantz’s books prove the immense skill and quality attained by the Red Army by the end of the war. Again, I will ride my hobby horse and praise Franklin Roosevelt, our third greatest president. FDR was, as usual, right in how he handled the end of World War II: grab as much as you can, cut the best deal you can, bullshit the Russians, and lie low. Compared to the Red Army of 1945, what the Americans and British Commonwealth had on the ground was totally inadequate. FDR seemed to be better aware of that than some of his own generals. The idea of even the up-gunned Sherman and a handful of the new Pershings, with their 90mm guns, could have gone up against armadas of T-34-85s and Stalin IIs with their 122mm gun does not bear thinking about. And by the time the Allies and the Red Army had come into contact, the Soviets were just introducing the Stalin III, which to this day looks futuristic. Our people would have been eaten alive. The Red Army would have been on the English Channel. We got out of World War II very well indeed, with the best half of Europe in our hands, and virtually all of the fighting and dying having been done by the Russians. Anyway, that is all make believe stuff. The Japanese were still not beaten, they were fighting like tigers, no one knew if the atom bomb would work, and no rational person on the American side was seriously contemplating taking on the Russians.

Molotov thought FDR was a clever bastard who played his cards very well. He ought to know.

I’m Telling You, It’s Going to be Close

Dick Morris cites to a recent Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll which shows Dubya in seriously deep doo-doo. Bush’s job approval is at an all-time low of 45%. More importantly, as Morris points out, the public now ranks security concerns fourth in terms of priority, and Dubya is rated way lower than the Democrat on all non-national security issues. In other words, Jane Public trusts the Donks to spend the money on health care, education, etc. Voters are ambivalent about tax cuts. Morris suggests that Bush must talk up the dangers of terrorism, etc. But, that will backfire. Bush has to proclaim that his policies have succeeded, and by doing so, he makes himself less relevant and less desirable as a candidate.

A victorious war is instantly forgotten by the voting public. The American voter is a tough boss. She only wants to know, “what have you done for me lately.” Past good service counts for nothing. The good news is that Jane Voter has concluded that Iraq was a good idea and that we won. She has also concluded that the Democrats, whatever they say, will carry on following much the same course that Bush has followed. So, for Republicans, the bad news is she now considers the war on terrorism, Iraq, etc. to be essentially resolved as political issues. And with the war effectively over, or at least under control, peacetime issues will dominate. This leaves only bread and butter issues, and the voting public appears to be in a mood where it wants new middle-class entitlements that only the Democrats will provide — like subsidized day care so Mom can work all day. Ambivalence about tax cuts is no surprise. American middle class voters do not like anything which they perceive as benefiting the rich or the poor at their expense. George Stigler had an article about this years ago entitled ” Director’s Law of Public Income Redistribution”, (Journal of Law & Economics, 1970, vol. 13, issue 1, pp. 1-10; not available online) named after U of C economist Aaron Director. Director and Stigler demonstrated that American government policy consistently benefited the middle class at the expense of the rich and the poor. This is contrary to most political rhetoric, but there it is. This is also consistent with Walter Russell Mead’s finding that Jacksonian values have come to permeate the American suburban middle class — and that Jacksonians are “opposed to federal taxes but obstinately fond of federal programs seen as primarily helping the middle class (Social Security and Medicare, mortgage interest subsidies).” And suburban voters trust the Democrats on these issues more than the Republicans. Also, Jacksonians do not much like foreigners, and the immigration and outsourcing issues are going to hurt Bush. I even think calling the invasion of Iraq “Operation Iraqi Liberation” was a mistake. Social work for foreigners does not get you much popularity with the American voting public.

Dubya seems to be tracking his father, despite his attempts not to. Bush, Sr. won a war and thought that would matter to people months later. It didn’t. It was ancient history by election day ’92. So while it is a long way to election day ’04, I am not yet willing to bet that Dubya won’t get a one way ticket back to Crawford on the same basis — thanks for the war, there’s the door. I’ll only bet on this: Whatever happens, it is going to be close.

Quote of the Day

Here is one of the great paradoxes of modernity. The more the world changes, the more important history becomes. A few scholars like to say that the past is a foreign country, but they could not be more mistaken. The past is our country. Our own kin lived there. The memory of what they did is becoming ever more important as part of our lives.

— David Hackett Fischer (From Washington’s Crossing)