View 778 Tuesday, June 18, 2013

I had several possible leads today but this mail really got my interest.

I came across this blog today on math education, it is not behind a paywall:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/the-faulty-logic-of-the-math-wars/

I don’t any formal experience with evaluating ideas, but this makes sense to me. For instance, back in the 8 bit world when I was teaching myself programming, I could flounder around and figure out a routine for myself, that took a lot of lines, took a lot of processing time, and kind of did want I wanted, a friend of mine, who was from the magnetic drum era, knocked it out in 3 lines. He then gave me a book on algorithms which both saved me a huge amount of time and made me a much better programmer.

tonyb

The article by Alice Crary and W. Stephen Wilson is very much worth your attention. My children are long out of school, and while I have been following the repeated disasters in public education as education theory takes over from experience to produce teachers with credentials who can’t teach I hadn’t seen this one.

At stake in the math wars is the value of a “reform” strategy for teaching math that, over the past 25 years, has taken American schools by storm. Today the emphasis of most math instruction is on — to use the new lingo — numerical reasoning. This is in contrast with a more traditional focus on understanding and mastery of the most efficient mathematical algorithms.
A mathematical algorithm is a procedure for performing a computation. At the heart of the discipline of mathematics is a set of the most efficient — and most elegant and powerful — algorithms for specific operations. The most efficient algorithm for addition, for instance, involves stacking numbers to be added with their place values aligned, successively adding single digits beginning with the ones place column, and “carrying” any extra place values leftward.

What is striking about reform math is that the standard algorithms are either de-emphasized to students or withheld from them entirely. In one widely used and very representative math program — TERC Investigations — second grade students are repeatedly given specific addition problems and asked to explore a variety of procedures for arriving at a solution. The standard algorithm is absent from the procedures they are offered. Students in this program don’t encounter the standard algorithm until fourth grade, and even then they are not asked to regard it as a privileged method.

The battle over math education is often conceived as a referendum on progressive ideals, with those on the reform side as the clear winners. This is reflected, for instance, in the terms that reformists employ in defending their preferred programs. The staunchest supporters of reform math are math teachers and faculty at schools of education. While some of these individuals maintain that the standard algorithms are simply too hard for many students, most take the following, more plausible tack. They insist that the point of math classes should be to get children to reason independently, and in their own styles, about numbers and numerical concepts. The standard algorithms should be avoided because, reformists claim, mastering them is a merely mechanical exercise that threatens individual growth. The idea is that competence with algorithms can be substituted for by the use of calculators, and reformists often call for training students in the use of calculators as early as first or second grade.

Reform math has some serious detractors. It comes under fierce attack from college teachers of mathematics, for instance, who argue that it fails to prepare students for studies in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields. These professors maintain that college-level work requires ready and effortless competence with the standard algorithms and that the student who needs to ponder fractions — or is dependent on a calculator — is simply not prepared for college math. They express outrage and bafflement that so much American math education policy is set by people with no special knowledge of the discipline.

There is considerably more, and all worth your time.

The problem is that we no longer know what the public schools are for, and we no longer recognize that a good public school system would make high school the normal education for citizens, with junior colleges to teach skills not so easily learned in apprenticeships, colleges as the place for those who want more education or need some credentials to make a living (teachers, accountants) and universities for those who are seriously going into professions needing high levels of technical competence. Liberal arts colleges we will leave for another discussion – there are many publications on that.

But the essential point is that public education can’t give everyone the same education. I We need not go to the extremes they have in Japan and other places where early examination scores determine the course of your education and your life from then on; but we do need to recognize that not everyone needs to know algebra and calculus, and trying to bestow that as a right is to doom the ones who should know it to being forced to learn at the pace of those who never will learn them.

Jacques Barzun dealt with much of this a very long time ago in his Teacher in America, and anyone who hasn’t read that has both a treat and an epiphany in store. http://www.amazon.com/Teacher-America-Jacques-Barzun/dp/0913966797 alas not in Kindle, at least as yet.

I have errands but I recommend the Crary and Wilson essay to everyone and strongly urge it on all those with children in grade school.

I will also point out that many elementary schools no longer require learning the plus and times – addition and multiplication – tables by heart in first grade (an age at which it’s easy to learn such things by hear). Not known the plus and times tables by heart is a great handicap for the rest of one’s life. Like being able to read from an early age on, knowing those algorithms – I recommend learning them to 20 rather than the traditional 10, largely because if you know them to 20 you will inevitably notice some patterns that will make learning some other things about number easier – is a great gift. It saves time in everything from counting change to calculating the tip in a restaurant, and a hundred other things you do daily.

If you are involved with elementary education, either as a teacher or a parent, read the Crary and Wilson essay – and go read Barzun. And if you have read Barzun it won’t hurt to read him again.

"Playing balance of power games, subsidizing one enemy to fight another, is a game of high risk and high skill."

Does anyone really think the current administration possesses the talents to manage this?

s/f

Couv

David Couvillon

Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog Excellance; Avoider of Yard Work

I have no evidence to suggest that we have those skills at the cabinet level in the United States, nor have we politicians who understand their own limits at such matters of state.  This has always been a defect of a republic: it has to go to war to develop long term professionals in such matters.  We are at a war without such development, and the result is that it appears to be war without end.  We do not have a Richelieu or a Metternich, nor indeed a Pitt or a Palmerston. We have people capable of such finesse but they are not likely to be put in power, nor left there if they get there. 

It was not from lack of understanding of political history that many of our Framers concluded that America’s best course was to be the city on a hill, a shining example of the fruits of liberty.  We are the friends of liberty everywhere but we are guardians only of our own.

Thor

Hi,

A friend sent me a link. I’ve seen THOR referenced in a couple of science fiction books, sure, but in a comic about 20-somethings working in a coffee shop?

http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=2468

Ed

Ed Hahn

Complete with tungsten.  Well, my original papers were never classified.  The proposals that were generated by them were, but I suspect that even they have long been declassified.

Subject: Educating Educators Lost

A new study rates almost all U.S. college programs that try to prepare persons to be teachers at mediocre or below.

One quote, "We don’t know how to prepare teachers"

I guess, at one time, we did know how to prepare teachers. We must have forgotten along the way.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/university-programs-that-train-us-teachers-get-mediocre-marks-in-first-ever-ratings/2013/06/17/ab99d64a-d75b-11e2-a016-92547bf094cc_story.html?hpid=z2

–

Dwayne Phillips

Go to any college campus and ask the first 20 people you meet which department is toughest and which is easiest.  Ask the next 20 if they have any Mickey Mouse majors.

Teaching is part knowledge and part skill.  The knowledge should come from the same place that other students get it. To teach math one ought to know some math. Etc.  The Ed Dept. courses in math and science are generally taught by education theorists, so the result are expected.  Of course there are exceptions.  There are some good education schools.

When the Rev. Moon bought Bridgeport University they asked me as one of a list of consultants what they ought to do with it.  I suggested starting a University Grammar School that took in neighborhood kids – it is not in a university district so there would be plenty of diversity – and had the classes taught by teachers who actually could teach, and who were the advisory council for the department of education and had full control of it. A different picture.  I pointed out that we could get a number of people involved in this including Barzun and Annette Kirk who was one of the principal authors of the 1983 National Commission on Education “Seybold Report”.  We could probably get Seybold himself – he had just attended one of Moon’s International Society for the Unification of the Sciences meetings in Seoul and I had actually discusses this with him.  We could in other words get things started well and use the actual school results as the criteria, and perhaps change the world.

Alas it didn’t happen, in part due to opposition of the Bridgeport faculty who were afraid of Moon and his interference:  I tried to point out that not a single one of the consultants he had brought in to try to organize this was a member of the Unification Church.  Some were Catholic, some were Protestant, tsome were Jews, and at least one public atheist.  Ah well. It would have been a lot of work for me, and for my wife who would have had to organize the reading instruction program for first and second grade and probably would have worked directly with the first teacher class. 

It didn’t happen but it still could, somewhere.  We used to do that sort of thing. Look what I learned in Capleville with 2 grades to the classroom in the Depression.  It can be done but we have to want to do it, and the progressives  — well, we’ve been through all this before.;

View 777 Saturday, June 15, 2013

Russell Seitz has been thinking again:

THE END OF OBSCURITY

Dear Jerry :

As we have both experienced the often-frustrating reality of ‘original archival research’ in the great libraries of the world, I want to report that change is in the dusty air. It used to be the case that the more distant events were in time, the less the likelihood of retrieving novel information about them. The problem was not the lack of ancient records, but their sheer abundance.

There is nothing novel about the latest NSA privacy scandal- the tendency of state bureaucracies and courts to gather and hoard information about citizens is as old as time, and it is from the court’s own realization of the horrors of information retrieval in bottomless archival pits that modern statutes of limitation have arisen.

The consequence of manuscript hoarding was to sink most of the historical record in oceans of trivia deep enough to drown all but the most persevering scholars. You could easily spent a month in the archives or the stacks retrieving just one new kilobyte to add to the sum of history, and far more of that time would be spent flipping through thousands of cards in a paper catalogue than reading the few documents you elected to retrieve.

Nowhere was this problem more evident than in the dozens of Staatsbibliotek holding the gathered sum of paper once held in the archives of the 300-odd principalities and city-states that preceded the unification of Germany under Bismarck. This archival opacity did not pass un-noticed, and a few decades ago many foundations, like Volkswagen, committed future cash flows to synoptic efforts to map both archives and archaeology with equally Teutonic thoroughness. In short, they decided to upload the middle Ages,

But as the foundation subsidized scanning began, something unexpected happened. Computer search software got smarter at a pace eclipsing Moore’s Law, and the project began to run ahead of schedule, as software fixes reduced the redundancy of uploading the same documents from many different archives, creating a positive feedback that eliminated multiple record entries that wasted scholarly reading time. So while a generation ago, it could take a lifetime of scholarly stack time to find enough new material to extend history by a handful of pages, the intellectual productivity of the paper chase has soared.

Today anybody can go online and find material that holds new meaning in a matter of hours rather than months

Forget the fast forwarding of history by technological change – we are experiencing the acceleration of historiography, and just as personalized medicine is rapidly arising from the now completed sequencing of the human genome, the nearly completed indexing of deep historical time has begun to personalize history in an unanticipated way. Our ancestors’ distant lives are swimming into three-dimensional focus in the newly illuminated archival depths.

Once all the curious could hope for was dry genealogy, filtered through imperfect recall, and linear parish records decimated by everything from the Thirty Years War to the Blitz. But as the new search algorithms chew on the whole surviving record, they keep spitting out startling vignettes of cases, events and conflicts that though centuries old, come with names attached, names that until now, were, for lack of automate indexing, for all practical purposes permanently forgotten. The old rule of thumb was to expect the average ancestral trail to fade and go cold in the ten generations or so it took for mice, bookworms or lightening to strike out parochial records.

No longer- we are witnessing a sort of historiographical phase transition, as opaque archives melt down into pools of data clear enough to see the bottom, inviting even amateurs to dive in to look for and surprisingly often find pieces of history with their family’s names on them, or even spot familiar faces in the long dead crowds, for the Great Uploading does not stop at all the words the archivists can scan. It aspires to include every image of the last millennium. Here’s a splendid book length example of what one worthy amateur medievalist, Jeffrey Hull ,has done with such a freshly scanned manuscript

http://www.thearma.org/pdf/Fight-Earnestly.pdf <http://www.thearma.org/pdf/Fight-Earnestly.pdf>

Overlawyered modernity may owe much to defendant’s strong desire not to have to defend themselves by having plaintiffs hack at them unarmored to let God sort out the torts, but we owe even more to the archival software hackers who have so abruptly brought transparency to the not-so-recent past.

–

Russell Seitz

Fellow of the Department of Physics Harvard University

And a note

Jerry, the scanned Ms that got me stated on this subject, because it contained the startling images of the 1370 Seitz-Theobald Munich fight is the Bayerische Staats Bibliothek onlone facsimile of De Arte Athletica , by Paul Hector Mair, a printed and illustrated 1542 book based on 14th and 15th century illuminated manuscripts and incunabuli , in his case including Sigismund Mesisterlin’s 1457 Augsberg Chronik. http://www.thearma.org/essays/Theobald-versus-Seitz.pdf

It may intrigue you to know that the judge of the 1370 trial, Stephan II, Duke of Bavaria and vogt of Swabia and Alsace married Elisabeth of Sicily, a daughter of Frederick III of Sicily <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_III_of_Sicily> and Eleanor of Anjou <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_of_Anjou> , also known as Isabel of Aragon. As if to prove my very brief essay’s point, I didn’t even have to ask- the Teutonically Thorough hyperlinks just up and told me.

SO the equivalent of the NSA has recorded much of the  High Middle Ages, and it is being made available to the world – and we can conclude that similar sources will be available to historians of our era.  Just when did this begin, I wonder?

What did you search on that started you thinking on this? I am formatting now, but I want to be thorough

Jerry Pournelle

Chaos Manor

It began with the report in a Harvard hard copy of Gaines’ New York Gazette that in 1778 a Major Seitz was stationed in the city at the head of a regiment from his native Hesse-Cassell.

Intrigued by the fratricidal possibility of his running in to Lt. Charles Seitz of the Continental Army, I began a Googling and soon discovered that

1. the major had made colonel and ended up heading the Regiment von Seitz , and briefly commanding the British garrison in Halifax Nova Scotia, where he has been safely buried in the crypt of St. Pauls Church. <http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=pv&GRid=70849504&PIpi=43433355> , beneath an explanatory hatchment, since expiring in 1782 Wanting to know if he was a for real Freiherr, or bumped up from Ritter like von Steuben when he achieved field rank,

2. There was a second Hanoverian Major named Seitz, this one from Wurttemburg, who died of his war wounds aboard the ship returning him to England and was buried at sea off the Scilly Isles.

I entered the late ‘Colonel de Seitz’ s full name, and shazam , in chronological order their appeared every one of the name in uploaded history, commencing with the Seitz von Altheim acquitted in the 1370 trial by combat– I had no idea there were so many.

I think the cutest thing about the scanning software that’s been deployed is that it tells all the librarians to stop if they try to scan a second copy of something already uploaded elsewhere– , which enormously speeds the process, since on average, I’d guess that ten or more of the hundreds of institutions involved may hold surviving copies of the same work. This assures that for the first time in archival history , _most _ of what they are putting up is of some historical novelty– they are literally making the past new.

Russell

I wonder how far back the records in Normandy go…

Formats.

The projects for uploading the various historiographically-significant records and images are, at least within the demense of each individual project, utilizing self-consistent file formats, thus making it relatively easy to search and correlate the data.

However, the records of our computerized era, starting from the 1960s, are quite the opposite – a veritable Cloud of Babel.

The irony is that thanks to the efforts of these scholars and the corporate donors who made their work possible, we can perform combinatorial analysis of data from centuries past, we have problems reading storage devices and parsing file formats from a mere 20 years ago.

Progress?

Roland Dobbins

climate

Nice to see that you agree with so many others that climate warming is all just a product of grant favoritism.

I guess those rising sea levels aren’t going to be a problem for you. You’ll be dead before Florida and Louisiana is washed away.

Henry Stipple

Every now and again I post an example of why I do not allow unedited contributions to my site.  I am certain Mr. Stipple believed he was contributing to rational discussion.

Of course sea levels have been rising for millennia, due to the melting of glacial ice and the rise of land that had been under the ice.  How much the sea levels are rising and more to the point why they rise is a complex matter.  I agree that I will be dead well before Florida and Louisiana have been washed away but I don’t see how that is relevant to discussing rational industrial policies on energy generation.  We know that the climate has been warming since 1776 when the guns of Ticonderoga were brought across the frozen Hudson to General Washington in Haarlem Heights. We also know that a good bit of the warming since that time took place before 1880.  Beyond that we aren’t dealing with observations but models and beliefs.  But that is too complex a concept to be expressed in one snarky sentence.

I recall during the 70’s and well into the 80’s the concern at the annual meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science was the coming Ice Age.  I recall Gus Spaeth one of Carter’s environmental advisors and on the White House Staff telling a AAAS meeting that the reason we had to store nuclear wastes so carefully was that he feared a return of the Ice Age and he would not want the return of the glaciers to spread nuclear waste across the land.  When it was pointed out to him that if your house were under a kilometer of ice you might have a larger problem than contamination by the4 actinides left in the nuclear waste he really had little to say in answer.

I welcome rational debate but I do not accept proof by repeated assertion as evidence.

U.S. Agencies Said to Swap Data With Thousands of Firms:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-14/u-s-agencies-said-to-swap-data-with-thousands-of-firms.html

Companies are “trusted partners” of our spy agencies? What does this mean?

Our corporate and governmental overlords are collaborating. Where will this lead? With such collaboration there is no counterbalancing force. I fear Lord Acton’s observation about power – something our Constitution was designed to prevent.

The Constitution. Sic transit Gloria mundi.

Ed

I happened to think of this tonight and realized that a good half of my readers will never have read it nor had it read to them; and that’s a pity.  General Wolfe, being rowed up the river the night before the Battle of Quebec settled whether North America would be French or English, recited this to those in his boat, and said he would rather have written those lines than take Quebec on the morrow.  It is not likely to be required in today’s schools, which is a shame.

"ELEGY WRITTEN IN
A COUNTRY CHURCH-YARD"

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds:

Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower
The moping owl does to the moon complain
Of such as, wandering near her secret bower,
Molest her ancient solitary reign.

 

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

The breezy call of incense-breathing morn,
The swallow twittering from the straw-built shed,
The cock’s shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,
No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.

For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,
Or busy housewife ply her evening care:
No children run to lisp their sire’s return,
Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share,

Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,
Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke;
How jocund did they drive their team afield!
How bow’d the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the Poor.

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour:-
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Nor you, ye Proud, impute to these the fault
If Memory o’er their tomb no trophies raise,
Where through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault
The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.

Can storied urn or animated bust
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Can Honour’s voice provoke the silent dust,
Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of Death?

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway’d,
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre:

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page,
Rich with the spoils of time, did ne’er unroll;
Chill Penury repress’d their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood,
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell, guiltless of his country’s blood.

Th’ applause of list’ning senates to command,
The threats of pain and ruin to despise,
To scatter plenty o’er a smiling land,
And read their history in a nation’s eyes,

Their lot forbad: nor circumscribed alone
Their growing virtues, but their crimes confined;
Forbad to wade through slaughter to a throne,
And shut the gates of mercy on mankind,

The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide,
To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame,
Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride
With incense kindled at the Muse’s flame.

Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray;
Along the cool sequester’d vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenour of their way.

Yet e’en these bones from insult to protect
Some frail memorial still erected nigh,
With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck’d,
Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.

Their name, their years, spelt by th’ unletter’d Muse,
The place of fame and elegy supply:
And many a holy text around she strews,
That teach the rustic moralist to die.

For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey,
This pleasing anxious being e’er resign’d,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast one longing lingering look behind?

On some fond breast the parting soul relies,
Some pious drops the closing eye requires;
E’en from the tomb the voice of Nature cries,
E’en in our ashes live their wonted fires.

For thee, who, mindful of th’ unhonour’d dead,
Dost in these lines their artless tale relate;
If chance, by lonely contemplation led,
Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate, –

Haply some hoary-headed swain may say,
Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn
Brushing with hasty steps the dews away,
To meet the sun upon the upland lawn;

‘There at the foot of yonder nodding beech
That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high.
His listless length at noontide would he stretch,
And pore upon the brook that babbles by.

‘Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn,
Muttering his wayward fancies he would rove;
Now drooping, woeful wan, like one forlorn,
Or crazed with care, or cross’d in hopeless love.

‘One morn I miss’d him on the custom’d hill,
Along the heath, and near his favourite tree;
Another came; nor yet beside the rill,
Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he;

‘The next with dirges due in sad array
Slow through the church-way path we saw him borne,-
Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay
Graved on the stone beneath yon aged thorn.’

The Epitaph

Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth
A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.
Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth,
And Melacholy marked him for her own.

Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,
Heaven did a recompense as largely send:
He gave to Misery all he had, a tear,
He gained from Heaven (’twas all he wish’d) a friend.

No farther seek his merits to disclose,
Or draw his frailties from their dread abode
(There they alike in trembling hope repose),
The bosom of his Father and his God.

By Thomas Gray (1716-71).

View 777 Wednesday, June 12, 2013

I have been caught up in other matters. In searching for something else, I found this. It was originally written in 1983 and it is still relevant.

Mercenaries and Military Virtue

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/virtue.html

Subj: Elon Musk interview – Dragon thruster glitch and recovery details

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sumVEEAZ_w

Why did three of the four thruster pods fail? The three that failed had check valves of an improved design. 8-\

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

The greens could not be happier about the closure of the San Onofre nuclear power plant, which has never exposed anyone off site to any danger.

From Access to Energy

“Government energy suppression has cost the American people the greatest windfall of prosperity ever offered to any civilization in human history.

“Had the government not suppressed the development of nuclear power, our national gross domestic product would be more than double its current value and the standard of living of our people – especially the poor and the middle classes – would would be twice as high as it is today.

“Instead, we find our country with very serious economic problems, with a large part of our productive industries lost abroad, and with our landscape increasingly littered with windmills, which are little more than false advertising propaganda for an economically useless technology”

Alas it is all true. The worst of it is that we didn’t need to put tax money into nuclear power. We needed only to end useless regulation and endless hearing and rehearing and reregulation. Note that China has more than 50 nuclear plants under construction. The low cost energy from those will drive a thriving economy. The United States will have windmills, and some rooftop solar panels.

Home rooftop solar power for home consumption in daytime can even make economic sense for the user, so long as they are willing to adjust to being without much power on cloudy days, and don’t run the air conditioner at night.  Batteries are of course out of the question: at night you use the power grid.  But none of this will get the United States out of economic doldrums.  Solar panels are now cheap enough that in some places individual home owners may find them a good investment. Look at Access to Energy, or so some on line homework; and understand that you will never have power at night from solar panels without very expensive batteries.

Industrial power comes from large central plants, and that will continue for decades absent a really astounding breakthrough in low temperature fusion technology. although low cost natural gas can help decentralize a bit.

As I have said for many years, low cost energy is the solution to nearly all US economic and pollution problems.  Do not think that those who run the Department of Energy do not know this. They have a different agenda. If you have not read A Step Farther Out, I think you will like it.  It has held up well.

Low cost energy freely available and freedom are the sure keys to a wealthy society.  Wealthy societies can afford to be generous with all including the least productive.

View 776 Saturday, June 08, 2013

[Original title said 2012.  In a sense that is true: the 2012 election which was lost because the Tea Party did not get out enough votes, in part because their voter organizations were crippled by the IRS – that was a crucial election.  And now here we are.  I put 2012 inadvertently but I could defend using that date as critical.]

It has been a depressing week, full of nightmare.

Nightmare Number One.

Southern California Edison has given in to the regulators and the anti-Nuke demonstrator, and will permanently close the San Onofre nuclear power plant, leaving the regulators free to pounce on the rest of the nuclear power industry. The result will be more CO2 added to the atmosphere,

At the California Independent System Operator, the company that runs the power grid in most of the state, Steve Berberich, the chief executive, said that most of the replacement power had come from natural gas, and that if California’s goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions per kilowatt-hour, “you’re moving in the wrong direction.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/business/san-onofre-nuclear-plant-in-california-to-close.html?_r=0

San Onofre never endangered anyone. There was never an off-site radiation leak, and what little leakage there was – all in the steam generating side of the plant, not anywhere near the nuclear reactors – was trivial and easily fixed. It resulted from some poor decisions on the part of SCE management, who bought new steam generation equipment from the wrong source. It was a silly decision. SCE was once about the best managed company I ever had close knowledge of, but after the California Grand Theft Power “Deregulation” which separated power generation and distribution and created the “Independent System Operator” things worsened. The California legislature had goodies for everyone as they created an atmosphere that let Enron manipulate energy prices and create bubbles, and the result were predictable: transfer of a lot of wealth from the power companies to legislature cronies, creation of a number of lucrative regulatory positions, and wild manipulation of electric power prices. SCE which had quietly operated as a regulated public utility which consistently delivered electric power and made reasonable but steady returns on investments to the stock holders – in other words operated as what used to be known as a Blue Chip company – got pulled into the growth madness bubble. More legislators and political consultants got rich, and power industry management was forced into participating in the bubbles. The result was predictable and I predicted it, but no one paid much attention. And meanwhile the No Nukes! crowd headed by people of the sort who like to tell the press that “The only physics I ever took was Ex-Lax, yuk, yuk” kept the pressure on, the regulators multiplied as Parkinson’s Law and my Iron Law predict, and the terror propaganda escalated. After Fukushima it reached a crescendo, and a tiny minor leak in the steam generation side of San Onofre put a just measurable quantity of Tritium into the building. Tritium has been used to make fishing lures glow, as well as for gun sights, and the amount released was in the order of the amount in those devices, but the media immediately feigned fear of a new Fukushima disaster right there near Mission San Juan Capistrano (actually it is many miles away from Capistrano) and the plant was shut down, the regulators held public hearing after public hearing, and since it costs about as much to run a nuclear plan when shut down as it does when it is generating power and earning revenue, the announcement of yet more public hearings did the trick. SCE is getting out of the nuclear power business. There will be losses to the stockholders, but even more losses to the rate payers. And of course more CO2 in the atmosphere.

I do not say that democracy has been more pernicious on the whole, and in the long run, than monarchy or aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy; but while it lasts, it is more bloody than either. … Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty. When clear prospects are opened before vanity, pride, avarice, or ambition, for their easy gratification, it is hard for the most considerate philosophers and the most conscientious moralists to resist the temptation. Individuals have conquered themselves. Nations and large bodies of men, never.

• John Adams, letter to John Taylor (15 April 1814).

The remedy, of course, was to form a Republic, and for over two hundred years the Republic endured. Now it is to be converted into a democracy, and the result is predictable and predicted. There are many good studies of what happens when a democracy commits suicide. If it is fortunate it gets a Claudius Caesar, but more often it must first endure a Caligula so that Claudius seems a blessed relief. And after Claudius as likely as not comes Nero. But I digress. For the moment we do not yet have Marius.

Then connection between the fall of the Republic and San Onofre is not direct or that strong, but the connection between the price of energy and the health of the economy is obvious; and the demand for ‘democracy’ rises to a flood in ‘bad’ economic times, even in a nation that sets its poverty level above the median earnings of most of the world, and keeps increasing those entitlements to the point of enormous debt.

Low cost energy can save the Republic. Perhaps fracking and natural gas will do that. Perhaps. Because the tide is running hard against nuclear power, which is over time the cheapest and safest reliable energy source we know of; and low cost power plus economic freedom remains the best way to produce the goods needed to satisfy the voters in a democracy.

Of course wealthy democracies have their historic problems. They are a great temptation. And without a sound economy they find they can no longer buy peace with silver bullets. Paying the Danegeld is not usually a good idea, but if you are indebt up to your eyeballs it isn’t even an option.

End of digression.

The nuclear industry has had a difficult year as it tries to compete with cheaper, abundant natural gas. San Onofre’s two reactors are the third and fourth reactors to be retired so far this year in the United States.

“It’s no secret that power markets have been radically changed by the development of shale gas,” said John Reed, an investment banker who specializes in nuclear reactors. “That changes the economics of any other power supply option, including nuclear.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/business/san-onofre-nuclear-plant-in-california-to-close.html

San Onofre has been handed over to the jackals. The regulators now regroup. You have not seen the last of this.

Nightmare Number Two

The evidence piles up: the IRS really and truly has become the arrogant highly-competent instrument of political terror out of the nightmares of conspiracy theorists.

The IRS Can’t Plead Incompetence

If the agency didn’t know what it was doing, it wouldn’t have done it so well.

Peggy Noonan

Quickly: Everyone agrees the Internal Revenue Service is, under current governmental structures, the proper agency to determine the legitimacy of applications for tax-exempt status. Everyone agrees the IRS has the duty to scrutinize each request, making sure that the organization meets relevant criteria. Everyone agrees groups requesting tax-exempt status must back up their requests with truthful answers and honest information.

Some ask, "Don’t conservatives know they have to be questioned like anyone else?" Yes, they do. Their grievance centers on the fact they have not been. They were targeted, and their rights violated.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323844804578529713576219412.html

Ms. Noonan gives details. As for example the now proved IRS leak of all the names and addresses of their contributors to their progressive liberal enemies. Hard fact. Definite proof of leak. Result so far, no one punished or dismissed and no felony charges filed. In another scandal a couple of people have been put on paid leave, which is to say free vacation. This is not likely to discourage anyone.

The task of the IRS was to put a primary hamper on all the conservative get out the vote civic organizations, and it sure did that, in Spades with Big Casino. Not one liberal or progressive get out the vote organization had similar problems; hundreds of conservative ones not only did, but continue to do so, as the IRS grinding machine continues to influence the 2014 Congressional election. That election is critical: if Ms. Pelosi becomes Speaker of the House, the final conversion of the US from a federal republic to a unified democracy will jump ahead probably beyond the recovery point. It is still possible for the US to turn back and forsake its foolish ways, although that will be difficult. If Ms. Pelosi becomes Speaker, it is unlikely ever to happen, world without end, amen. The Nanny State will become a reality, in which everything is regulated for your protection and safety. Of course California is attempting that now, but the results have not so far shown many of the benefits, as children continue to die at the hands of their mother’s latest boyfriend despite warning after warning from grandparents and teachers to the Child Welfare departments. And a teacher who fed his own semen to his pupils remains on the school system payroll. No one is ever fired. The Unions see to that. And under Speaker Pelosi expect more of the same, but with the exceptional ritual throwing to the wolves of some particularly egregious public worker chosen as an example. Depend upon it.

And the nightmares continue. The story is still developing, but apparently the government knows much more about each of us than we suspected, and has access to as much more as it likes. Of course government agencies like IRS would never leak that data to progressive allies – oops. The IRS has your tax return data. It doesn’t yet have access to your telephone and email and browsing search records – but colleagues in other agencies do. Of course no one would want to do favors to an IRS investigator.

From The Washington Post:

Documents: U.S. mining data from 9 leading Internet firms; companies deny knowledge

By Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras, Thursday, June 6, 2:43 PM

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.

The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley.

Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document: “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”

PRISM was launched from the ashes of President George W. Bush’s secret program of warrantless domestic surveillance in 2007, after news media disclosures, lawsuits and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court forced the president to look for new authority.

Congress obliged with the Protect America Act in 2007 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which immunized private companies that cooperated voluntarily with U.S. intelligence collection. PRISM recruited its first partner, Microsoft, and began six years of rapidly growing data collection beneath the surface of a roiling national debate on surveillance and privacy. Late last year, when critics in Congress sought changes in the FISA Amendments Act, the only lawmakers who knew about PRISM were bound by oaths of office to hold their tongues.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_print.html

Of course we can trust the reliable civil servants never to abuse this knowledge.

There were more nightmares last week, but surely those are enough for one dose.

Despair is a sin. It is also futile. The remedy to all this is more action. We know to a certainty what the battle ground will be. We know we have the resources to win it. There Is no reduction in the people sympathetic to the Tea Party. The President’s personal approval remains high but there is no longer much confidence in his ability to manage the affairs of the nation and even less conviction that Hope and Change was anything but a campaign promise. The realization that Barrack Hussein Obama was only a politician is sinking in.

The IRS will continue to harass conservative organizations but all the money they collect is tax paid money. The donor can’t claim a tax deduction but few ever thought they could. The people of the United States do not need the IRS permission to assemble and that includes on election day.

Winning the upcoming election will not be a final win for the friends of the Republic; but losing it could be a decisive event. All the markers indicate a conservative win – and the enemies of the Republic can read those indicators as well as we. That includes the IRS agents whose jobs and pensions are on the line.

It will not be an easy job.