Daily Archives: February 11, 2009

The Most Dangerous Man in the World

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From Mark Anderson.

Now that we no longer have a chimpanzee in the cockpit of the F-16, some folks may be wondering, just who is the most dangerous man in the world?

The answer, I think, is simple: A. Q. Khan, “founder” (or perhaps chief thief) in charge of Pakistan’s first nuclear program, and, more importantly, of his own secret nuclear proliferation ring.

Dr. Khan, just released from house arrest this week, is now wandering around, free, no doubt wondering how to resurrect the absolute worst idea in the entire world today. Specifically: Goodness, how can I make sure that as many fundamentalist Islamic states (and, hey, crackballs like North Korea, too) as possible acquire nuclear weapons, as quickly as possible?

I suppose if one had to define insanity, Khan would be the walking definition.

One can hope that the real reason he was let out of the box was so that the FBI and CIA could track his every movement and unearth the rest of his still-extant client list. Or, even better, that he has been taken off the house arrest regime in hopes that he goes camping, and the tiger enters his tent and eats him, before Khan can destroy the Earth.

I never liked the idea that he only received house arrest. It was a bit like taking a Hitler wannabe and putting him on free-roaming probation in a Nordic country with blue-eyed teens.

Is there a worse crime against humanity than shipping nuclear weapons technology and knowhow to unstable regimes of indiscriminate pedigree and no obvious systems or sense of restraint? You might think there are today, but you would certainly not say it tomorrow, if Khan’s bombs had been used meanwhile.

This jerk belongs in jail, not in house arrest. Think of him like Napoleon, without the good parts…

Steve Ballmer’s Speech to the Democrats

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As some readers know (and others have probably guessed) there are lots of things about Microsoft that I dislike. But one thing I’ve always admired about the company is the fact that it’s never had any corporate debt. Bill Gates famously said once that he wanted Microsoft always to be able to run for an entire year without earning a cent in revenues. Until today, however, I didn’t know why he felt so strongly about that. Now, thanks to Mark Anderson, I do. He’s relayed the entire text of a speech Steve Ballmer gave the other day to the Democratic Caucus. Here’s the passage that made me sit up.

When I got to Microsoft and we were this tiny little company, we didn’t have the budget to put people up in hotels, so I lived with Bill. And every time I sat down, in every corner, nook and cranny of couches, tables, I’d find these little yellow pieces of paper with Bill’s writing that had a bunch of people’s names and companies’ names and numbers.

I think of myself as pretty good pattern matching… and I just couldn’t figure out what these numbers were.

So, finally I said to Bill, what is this? He says, Steve, I’m really always worried about whether we’re going to have enough cash to pay people. So, every night I write down everybody who works for us and how much we pay them, and every contract we have and how much it’s worth. I’ve got to count the pennies tightly and that’s why you’re here now.

It’s a great talk, which is essentially about how the US needs to reboot itself. And another interesting thing: he flew to the meeting on the red-eye scheduled flight, not in a corporate jet. A neat contrast to the automobile moguls, eh? And to the Citicorp execs.

On this day…

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… in 1945, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin signed the Yalta Agreement dividing the world up between them and effectively consigning the countries of Eastern Europe to their Soviet fate.