Adventures In Small Business - Business Relationships

I am currently working on delivering a product which is late. Very late. Yes, I know it is late. If I had forgotten, the daily phone calls from the customer would have sufficed to remind me. The daily faxes are also a helpful reminder. I have a stack of them in front of me now, waiting for the day when Al Gore's fantasy strikes, "The Day After Tomorrow" comes, and I have build a fire using faxes for kindling and my stapler for sparks. But I digress.

MBA school teaches you about communication, and that the customer is always right. While I have my doubts about the validity of those teachings, what they don't tell you is that what to do when your customer is a gold-plated [CENSORED].

And now, the latest daily fax has arrived, and accuses me of being a liar. For a contractor, that's a stretch. (Hello, pot? This is kettle - you're black!)

So today has been a day of delights unmentionable.

And the probability of me telling someone to do something anatomically impossible to himself and the horse he rode in on has gone up considerably.

Mt. Augustine Is Erupting

Location Map, from the AVO.
Ash plumes and pyroclastic flows are erupting from the summit of Mt. Augustine, 180 miles southwest of Anchorage.

The mountain has been in a constant state of eruption since last Saturday, with ash continually issuing from the summit with occasional major eruptions occurring every day of the last four days. The Seattle Times reports that pyroclastic flows, flows of gas and superheated rock, have been seen sliding down the mountain.

Although the ash plume has at times risen as high as 30,000 feet, no ash fall has been reported in populated areas. Eruptions in mid-January did dust some Kenai Peninsula towns with ash. All flights into the Kenai peninsula have been cancelled due to ash concerns.

The Alaska Volcano Observatory is maintaining a watch over the mountain and has proved to be the best source for the latest news and information.

Some Recommended Reading

Some good stuff over at NRO today...

Bryon York, "Off Course."

Michael Ledeen, "When People Freely Choose Tyranny."

Jack Dunphy, "Arresting a Crime Wave." (Actually, this is from yesterday. But it's still worth reading.) (It also regards illegal immigration - more on this from me later this week. Probably.)

But what I really wanted to point out to you is Jay Nordlinger's latest report from the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland. He's been reporting from there for a week now, but today he reports on a panel session featuring Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, FBI Director Mueller, EU counterterrorism coordinator Gijs de Vries, and the head of the German intelligence service August Hanning, among others. The entire discussion is interesting, but there are two parts I want to highlight:

And then comes maybe the most delicious moment of the entire Annual Meeting, my friends: A lady in the audience accosts Michael Chertoff. She says, "You're always focusing on the symptoms — what about the root causes?" (I'm abridging her question substantially. But she's a root-causes lady.) Chertoff says, "We focus on the symptoms, because the symptoms kill you. And our first obligation is to make sure people don't get killed. But we focus on the root causes as well, and . . ."

Chertoff speaks very well about the root causes. But that initial answer — "The symptoms kill you" — weighs heavily on the mind.

And this:

Have some more de Vries, who is absolutely commanding, both in language (English) and in argumentation. "I am uncomfortable," he says, "with this notion of 'root causes,' because it suggests a nice, lineal relationship between a cause and terror. The more we explore, the more we find that no such simple relationship exists." But there are problems that feed terror: lack of good governance, for one. Lack of freedom, really.

That seems almost too simple to state, but it's far from too simple for some. For a great many, actually.

And there is the rub.

For years, we have been preached to about the "root causes" of terrorism, especially poverty. That all of the September 11th attackers are affluent or upper-middle class is ignored. That many of the Islamic volunteers joining the battle in Iraq or Al Qaida and Taliban-allied groups in Afghanistan also come from similar well-to-do backgrounds is also ignored.

Go back to that phrase - "no such simple relationship exists."

There will be terrorists, just as there will be pirates, will be rapists, will be thieves. The question is what we willing to do about it.

Are we willing to do what it takes, to take the battle to the enemy, to commit to keeping weapons of mass destruction out of their hands, to smash them wherever we can find them? The current state of the American will implies the answer is no.

Hopefully, I'm reading the tea leaves wrongly. Because if I see things correctly, that means we will ultimately lose.

UPDATE: And there's this in The Corner:

HOW COME YOU MORONS CAN'T CRACK AL QAEDA'S COMMUNICATIONS? [Andy McCarthy]This is from the WPost's report this morning about yesterday's release of a tape Qaeda No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, "taunting" President Bush over our recent failure to vaporize him:

M.J. Gohel, a terrorism analyst and chief executive of the Asia-Pacific Foundation in London, said it appeared that Zawahiri and bin Laden had coordinated their recent messages. He said it was noteworthy that al Qaeda's leaders had fashioned an effective system of communication that Western intelligence agencies have been unable to penetrate.

Meanwhile, here in Oz, the U.S. Senate has decided to conduct a hearing Monday to grill high government officials about whether they have violated the law by trying to penetrate al Qaeda's communications. During wartime. While al Qaeda is trying to blow up American cities and kill American civilians. How hard must Zawahiri be laughing?

Freedom Of Movement

Iain Murray at The Corner, quoted here in his entirety:

William Blackstone considered personal freedom of movement one of the absolutes of English law (see Section II here):

This personal liberty consists in the power of locomotion, of changing situation, or removing one’s person to whatsoever place one’s own inclination may direct; without imprisonment or restraint, unless by due course of law.

Looks like global warming is changing all that. Here are some quotations from a story in The Independent today, where various types express disapproval at cheap air travel:

"What's happening with low-cost travel is that it's setting up unsustainable patterns of behaviour, so people are buying property in France that they wouldn't otherwise and flying to Prague rather than taking the train to Edinburgh for stag dos [bachelor parties]. Ending or changing these patterns of behaviour is all the harder to do once they are established."

"It's undeniably attractive to travel on a low-cost flight from England to the south of Spain. But as individuals we are all actors in the crisis of climate change, and we as individuals should be questioning whether our travel is necessary. I'm not suggesting people should stop all flying but getting onto a plane and causing vast amounts of pollution is a very serious action."

"I think there's a huge degree of ignorance about this. But it's the hardest of the climate change problems to solve because people really like leaving the country and they don't care that it's bad for the balance of payments or bad for the environment."

Two of those are from environmental campaigners. One is from the Conservative Party environment spokesman. Can you guess which one?

People are now seriously talking about "personal carbon allowances" that would mean you would not be able to travel if you don't have enough points left. The implications for liberty are staggering.

Or frightening. But remember - according to Gore, Dean, et al., George W. Bush is the scary one.