Monthly Archives: January 2012

View 710 Sunday, January 29, 2012

My son Richard and family have been visiting this weekend. My oldest son Alex came over today, so that we could have the traditional New Year’s dinner of blackeyed peas and rice with vegetables. It’s been a busy weekend.

Here are a few pictures. My granddaughter Ruthie with her father Richard, and our dog Sable who was very well behaved:

And me being a doting grandfather:

I look a bit like a sap, but Ruthie didn’t mind. Sable off in the background was watchful; she has decided that Sable needs protecting. Fortunately Ruthie has a dog of her own at her home in Washington, so she’s used to dogs and knows that pulling tails is something you don’t do.

I can’t resist one more shot, Ruthie, her father, and Alex doing a high five:

So that’s what I’ve been doing lately.

I note that when challenged about the cost of space development Newt Gingrich answered that it wouldn’t be done by spending public money in the usual way. He wasn’t talking about grand Apollo style projects – although I can say I am prepared to prove that Apollo made a net profit for the United States, and I don’t mean through the development of Tang – but about using prizes and X projects to develop technology and encourage private enterprise. I covered all that in my book A Step Farther Out, along with other reasons for the United States to become a spacefaring nation again, and while I said all this long ago I see no reason to change my views. Mankind has no choice but to go to space, and there are profits to be made there. At the moment we are not a spacefaring nation, but we can become one. We have the technical means to build systems that will allow commerce in space, with voyages taking less than a year between significant places in the solar system. This is quite comparable to the commerce times after the discovery of the Americas and continuing well into the 19^th Century. But I have said all this before. Space development proved to be more difficult and expensive than I thought, but much of the expense was due to bureaucratic inefficacies, and a lot of the technological developments were financed by and the military and focused on military uses.

I suppose I should do a modernization of A Step Farther Out one of these days. I understand that Peter Dimandis is saying many of the same things I said in Step in his new book Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think . I’ve been preaching this sermon for thirty years. It’s good to see that others agree.

I once told Bill Gates that those who take mankind permanently into space will be remembered long after Isabella the Great is long forgotten. That remains true.

 

a free public lecture Wednesday, February 8, presented by artist David Em and astrophysicist Julian Merten

in connection with the exhibition

THE SHAPE OF THE UNIVERSE: RECENT DEEP SPACE PHOTOGRAPHY at the Pasadena City College art gallery, curated by David Em.

LECTURE: Wednesday, February 8 at 7 PM, lecture hall R-122 (directly behind the art gallery).

I have yet to hear any of David’s presentations that were not exciting and thought provoking. Highly recommended.

Evidence continues to accumulate in the climate change discussions.

Solar Minima and Cooling Story

Jerry,

You’ve probably been sent this by others, but just in case. It seems that scientific support is emerging for the idea that Solar activity strongly affects Earth temperatures. I know, shocking, isn’t it? Seriously though, there’s news here that we may be entering a deeper than usual Solar minimum, as deep or deeper than the Dalton Minimum of the late 1700’s (cannon sledged across the Hudson ice, yes) and possibly as deep as the Maunder minimum of the second half of the 1600’s, when the canals of Holland were skatable and London held winter fairs on the Thames ice.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2093264/Forget-global-warming–Cycle-25-need-worry-NASA-scientists-right-Thames-freezing-again.html

Henry

From the article:

Forget global warming – it’s Cycle 25 we need to worry about (and if NASA scientists are right the Thames will be freezing over again)

Met Office releases new figures which show no warming in 15 years

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.

The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.

Observations and data are to be preferred to models in most sciences – indeed are the criteria for determining the usefulness of models. So far as I know, not one climate model including the ones that have cost tens of millions of dollars predicted any kind of hiatus in the steady climb of Earth temperature. At this point I would be far more inclined to rely on the data than the models.

I can recall the days of “The Japan That Can Say No”. These were the days of the “Japanese economic miracle”, and many of our financial pundits warned that Japan was going to eat our lunch. Then Japan faltered economically, and the ear from 1990 – to 2000 was known as “the lost decade.” Japan is recovering and they have done many things well; their ups and downs have been different from ours. Still, they are not in an era of rapid economic growth.

China appears to be in a recession, although they are keeping that a state secret. I may be misinterpreting the information I am getting, but I don’t think I am. China is faltering in its headlong growth. So are the other Asian Tigers.

Europe is certainly not in a period of rapid growth, and much of Europe appears to be in deep trouble, kept afloat largely by German determination, even as Greece and some of the faltering countries refuse to cut back on consumption and deficit financing.

All of which is to say that we’ve seen this kind of thing before. The Crash of 1929 didn’t have to lead to the Great Depression. There are reasons why it did. I don’t think those who control US economic policies understand how it happened.

There are some economic fundamentals that cannot be ignored. One of them is that some of the jobs exported cannot be recovered, and some long term unemployment will never be remedied by people returning to jobs that will never return. Something else must be done. At the same time, paying people for not working will produce more people applying for the job of not working. Thus has it ever been and I see no reason to believe it won’t be that way in future. If you want more of something, subsidize it. If you want more unemployment, subsidize that. And if you want to predict global economies, look at global employment.

All of which is to say that we need to do some fundamental rethinking about this, but perhaps when we do so, we need to remember that we haven’t been smart enough to command our way out of our problems – are we smarter now?

I do know some fundamental economic truths – at least they are ‘true’ in the sense that they come from observation, not theory. I have stated them before. Energy and freedom lead to prosperity. Restricting energy and adding not freedom but commands and regulation lead to downward economic pathways. Thus has it been, and thus will it be.

Civilization trends toward converting more and more of its output to structure. Infrastructure or superstructure isn’t important: output is seized and converted to structure, and the largest beneficiaries of that are bureaucracies. Bureaucracies are devoted to the preservation and expansion of the bureaucracy and its members, and only secondarily to the purposes for which they were founded. Thus has it been, and thus will it be.

I suppose I merely state the obvious. I will plead that, as Samuel Johnson observed, people seldom need educating, but they often need reminding.

View 710 Friday, January 27, 2012

I confess to feeling a great wave of relief. I was deeply disturbed by the Elliot Abrams diatribe against Newt Gingrich which circulated yesterday, but much more so by the included quotes which supposedly showed Newt being disrespectful and downright condemnatory of Ronald Reagan and his cold war policies.

I had been reasonably close to Newt in those days, and after, and in the decades that I have known him I have never heard him say anything derogatory about Reagan, even when he was in disagreement over some of Reagan’s tactics; and in fact I could not really remember that happening, although it must have; after all, I also disagreed with some of Reagan’s tactics in his final years as President, and said so; but tactical disagreements are not denunciations nor are they disrespectful.

Abrams said

Mr. Gingrich voted with the president regularly, but equally often spewed insulting rhetoric at Reagan, his top aides, and his policies to defeat Communism. Gingrich was voluble and certain in predicting that Reagan’s policies would fail, and in all of this he was dead wrong.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/289159/gingrich-and-reagan-elliott-abrams

He buttressed that with what looked like quotes from a Gingrich speech made in the House. I probably met Elliot Abrams before I met Newt Gingrich: it was at an American Conservative Union event at the Mayfair Hotel in Washington DC. Dr. Stefan Possony was on the ACU Board and I was in DC essentially to carry his briefcase, although I think I had a press assignment, probably from the National Catholic Press. This would have been early in the Reagan Administration, possibly just after the Inauguration (to which I had an invitation but didn’t go). At the ACU meeting Possony and I had lunch with Mr. Abrams, and I had no reason to have anything but respect for him. Subsequent encounters and incidents have not changed that view until the NRO article yesterday. Thus my dismay: here were two people, one an old friend, another a fellow Cold Warrior, and the warrior was at my friend’s throat. I had never heard Newt say anything like what Abrams was quoting. I never heard Newt “spew insulting rhetoric” at Reagan or his top aides, and I am quite certain that if he ever had, he would have lost the regard of Nancy Reagan – who has said that Newt inherited the torch of liberty from her Ronnie. Anyone who knows Mrs. Reagan would know that if Newt had been “spewing insulting rhetoric at Reagan,” Mrs. Reagan would never have spoken to or about him again. They remain friends.

Here is what Newt actually said in the speech that Abrams quotes to justify his “Spewing insults” remark:

"The fact is that George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Irving Kristol, and Jeane Kirkpatrick are right in pointing out the enormous gap between President Reagan’s strong rhetoric, which is adequate, and his administration’s weak policies, which are inadequate and will ultimately fail." http://spectator.org/blog/2012/01/27/elliott-abrams-caught-misleadi

There’s more. See “Elliot Abrams Caught Misleading on Newt” by Geoffrey Lord

In fact, I’m sorry to say, what appears to be going on here is that Elliott Abrams, a considerably admirable public servant and a very smart guy, has been swept up in the GOP Establishment’s Romney frothings over the rise of Newt Gingrich in the Republican primaries. …

. . .

Due to the diligence of one Chris Scheve of a group called Aqua Terra Strategies in Washington, Mr. Abrams has been caught red-handed in lending himself to this attempted Romney hit job. [clip]

I put in that last line to make sure that Chris Scheve, one of Newt’s staffers when he was Speaker, gets the credit he deserves. The entire piece by Lord is well worth your time. http://spectator.org/blog/2012/01/27/elliott-abrams-caught-misleadi

What Newt was saying was true when he said it: the President had the right ideas, but his administration was not implementing them strenuously enough. This is a disagreement on tactics, not fundamentals. In those days Newt was in the minority, and very much frustrated by the slow progress of the Strategic Defense Initiative. I could understand that disappointment. So was I. But that’s another story for another time; what wasn’t happening was any denunciation of Reagan by Newt Gingrich. Those were the times when General Graham and I were partners in trying to make America a Spacefaring nation again, and if Newt had alienated the President we would have had a choice to make. That never happened. Newt was on the SDI team from the time he was elected to the House, through his long time in near isolation as he made those conservative speeches, through his selection as Minority Whip, and through the end of the Cold War. He supported SDI, DC/X, space exploration, commercial space development, X Projects and Prizes.

Abrams is dead wrong, and was persuaded to believe nonsense.

All right, so why? Well, during the Cold War there was an alliance between the neo-conservatives and the paleo-conservatives. We old time conservatives were reluctantly willing to expand government power to meet the threat of an enemy armed with 26,000 deliverable nuclear warheads, even when the liberals made a number of demands as a price of letting us get on with fighting the Cold War. Perhaps that was a proper thing to do and perhaps not. Possibly the world was not doomed to a CoDominium, but President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger certainly thought we were, and that the best the United States could do in the Cold War was détente. Kissinger famously compared himself to Metternich, trying to preserve what he could of the free world in the face of rising communism. Containment, the west’s governing strategy of the Cold War, required that the USSR be contained; that required a long term commitment to doing it; and with the fall of Viet Nam and the planting of pro communist regimes in Latin America, the US determination appeared to be inadequate.

Neocons and paleocons worked together, and the neocon Commentary Magazine was as intellectually important as National Review. Both were committed to Frank Meyer’s fusionism. If all this is babble to you, don’t worry about it. At one time it was very important. What you need to know is that neocons and paleocons were fundamentally agreed only on defeating the USSR; we were not agreed on social issues nor on the nature of government. Irving Kristol, a man I much admired then and now, began his intellectual career as a Trotskyite and some of the Marxist intellectual propositions stayed with him. Many of the neocons were less than enthusiastic about fundamental conservative principles like limited government and the belief that government cannot and should not  “solve” all the “problems” of life; nor should it attempt it. To many neocons government can do nearly anything: it’s not so much a problem of limiting government but of putting the right people in charge of it. Give us the sword of state and we will create a more beautiful world.

When the Cold War ended, many of them became “Big Government Conservatives”, as if such a thing were possible (in the view of paleocons like me, government must be limited in its scope else it will attempt to involve itself in every aspect of life, such as licensing stage magicians who use rabbits in their acts). Neocons and paleocons became estranged, and sometimes became outright enemies. There remain some common interests, particularly American/Israeli relations, so the enmity is often masked, but it is there.

Elliot Abrams was a friend and political ally during the Cold War (I hasten to add he is unlikely to remember me); and I had not followed his intellectual career since other than to express my concern over his persecution over the Iran/Contra affair. I was astonished to see his denunciation of Newt and devastated by the “quotes”. I remain astonished that he would let himself be deceived by the phony quotes , and I am greatly relieved that they were in fact false. As I said, I was around during those times, I had ties to both Reagan and Gingrich, and I did not remember any such quotes or attitudes.

When I mentioned all this to my wife she said “How old is Abrams?” I had to say I last met him a long time ago, and I didn’t know; I assumed we were about the same age. To which she just nodded. But I find that Abrams is 15 years younger than me, so his memory may be better than mine. On the other hand, if he believes that Newt Gingrich could have said the nonsense that Abrams was persuaded that Newt had said, perhaps his biography has his day of birth wrong by twenty or so years.

Obama’s State of the Union reminded me, I am sad to say, of some of the speeches of Huey Long, and of the man Huey got some of his ideas from, an Italian Socialist called Benito Mussolini. The State can do all, and any real problems are caused because the State is not doing enough to enforce fair play and steer things in the right direction. All we need is more State effort to solve social problems. Rich and poor can all get along, and the State is there to make sure they do. Mussolini went to his death affirming his devotion to Socialism.

Everything for the state. Nothing against the state. Nothing outside the state. Duce! Duce!

For those who want to understand the internecine battles within Socialism, I recommend Ignazio Silone’s novel Bread and Wine. Silone was an anti-Stalinist anti-Mussolini Socialist, exiled by Mussolini at the time he wrote the book. Of course he denounces Mussolini as not a Socialist at all. Mussolini disagreed.

View 710 Thursday, January 26, 2012

Apollo 1 1/27/67

Jerry,

On a more somber note: Apollo 1, 1/27/67. I still remember the announcement and it still haunts to this day. I suppose we are visual creatures and will remember Challenger and Columbia more viscerally. But don’t forget those that did not leave the surly bonds of the Earth.

I cannot say it any better than Heinlein in the poem he wrote that Mr. Thompson quoted in the email of 2/1/03 with Columbia down.

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_2160.html

From Mail Saturday, February 1, 2003 (On Columbia)

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2view/view242.html#Saturday

O Spirit, whom the Father sent
To spread abroad the firmament;
O Wind of heaven, by thy might,
Save all who dare the eagle’s flight.
       And keep them by the watchful care
       From every peril in the air. (Modern version, the Mariner’s Hymn)

….Dr. Pournelle:

Mr. Heinlein wrote a verse in one of his short stories, of the Prayer for Travelers:

Almighty Ruler of the all,

Whose Power extends to great and small,

Who guides the stars with steadfast law,

Whose least creation fills with awe,

O grant thy mercy and thy grace,

To those who venture into space.

Amen.

Mark Thompson…."

Amen indeed, Regards, Charles Adams, Bellevue, NE

Agreed. I once had to listen to the tapes of the Apollo 1 fire. I do not think I will ever forget them. “Fire in the spacecraft.” It is worth your while to listen to this tribute by Julia Ecklar. There is also this one. Warning. These are pretty strong stuff.

Full View of Earth from VIIRS instrument aboard Suomi NPP

Jerry

The picture was taken on 1/4/12. Look at the highest re, the atmosphere along the limb is spectacular.

<http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_2159.html>

Regards, Charles Adams

Some reflections.

In 1985 it was not obvious to anyone that the Cold War would end without battle and bloodshed. It is possible that President Reagan thought he saw that end coming; if so he was alone. None of his supporters did. In 1985 it looked as if the Cold War would continue, possibly forever. Igt was easy to panic in those days. Few remember them.

I believed then that the only hope for the survival of freedom was drastic change in America’s military; the adoption of a strategy of technology, including the implementation of the Strategic Defense Initiative – Star Wars – and this would require that America become a Spacefaring Nation again; indeed, that was the title of the last formal report of the Citizen’s Advisory Council on National Space Policy that I chaired, a policy endorsed and vigorously pursued by the late General Graham’s High Frontier organization. The Spacefaring Nation report was hand delivered to President Reagan, who personally read it, as he had read all the Council reports. The first of our reports was influential in the formation of the Strategic Defense Initiative, as had been our Strategy of Technoloy.

In the mid 1980’s it was obvious to me that the computer revolution was going to change the world in fundamental ways, but that view was not universally held or agreed to. One of those who had looked at ways that technology would change the world was Alvin Toffler, whose Future Shock (1970) and The Third Wave (1980) were influential with many, including Newt Gingrich who had read them carefully. In 1980 I said that by the year 2000 everyone in the Free World would be able to get the answer to any question that had an answer. This would have profound effects on the Cold War.

Then, after the Falkland War of 1982, I drew another conclusion. Arthur Koestler had famously said that a sufficient condition for the elimination of totalitarianism was the free discussion of ideas within the totalitarian state. In 1982 a Moscow citizen was sentenced to 10 years in prison for possession and use of an unlicensed copy machine. In those samizdat days intellectual ideas were circulated at great risk in the Soviet Union. Stories and ideas were hand typed using carbon paper, and the price of loaning someone a copy was usually that the borrower return two of them (and of course keep a copy for himself). This was not the free discussion Koestler said would be sufficient to end a totalitarian regime; but the Falkland War demonstrated that a nation that did not have small computers and people accustomed to using them was not going to have an effective military. I did some more thinking on the subject and concluded that without the widespread distribution and use of small computers, a nation could not keep up in the technological war.

We opened The Strategy of Technology with the following:

"A gigantic technological race is in progress between interception and penetration and each time capacity for interception makes progress it is answered by a new advance in capacity for penetration. Thus a new form of strategy is developing in peacetime, a strategy of which the phrase ‘arms race’ used prior to the old great conflicts is hardly more than a faint reflection.

There are no battles in this strategy; each side is merely trying to outdo in performance the equipment of the other. It has been termed ‘logistic strategy’. Its tactics are industrial, technical, and financial. It is a form of indirect attrition; instead of destroying enemy resources, its object is to make them obsolete, thereby forcing on him an enormous expenditure….

A silent and apparently peaceful war is therefore in progress, but it could well be a war which of itself could be decisive."
–General d’Armee Andre Beaufre

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/slowchange/Strat.html

The conclusion seemed obvious: ideological totalitarianism was doomed. The Soviet Union could not continue as an ideological state. It would need something else to hold it together. The Soviet Union was a world power only because of its military power; its ideological appeals were fading. It would need economic strength to maintain its military power – to be the Second World nation rather than just another Third World nation. It was already Bulgaria with missiles.

The conclusion from that again seemed obvious. Make the missiles too expensive, and the USSR becomes a Third World power. What was needed was pressure on the Administration to continue a strategy of technology against the USSR; if you could not destroy the Soviet Union you could reduce its threat to the world. But to do that you could not be soft.

This wasn’t popular among the Democrats who held power in Congress, and who had held power in Congress for thirty years, causing a number of Republicans to assume postures of a permanent opposition. The Republicans, most of them, were no more firm. They were a permanent minority, and they knew it. The notion that the Republicans might again take the House was considered odd. Newt Gingrich and his small contingent did believe it was possible. They also understood that George H. W. Bush did not believe it, nor did the Republican establishment.

The Soviet Union fell. George H W Bush managed to get long time Republicans and Reagan enthusiasts like Larry Niven to tell his fans that he couldn’t wait for November to turn George H W Bush out. And Clinton came in, with a Democratic majority, but it was a vulnerable majority.

Then came 1994, when the only leader in America who thought that it was time for a real change took out a Contract with America. The Republicans took both houses of Congress.

And note that in 1996 the Republican Establishment, which had failed to take the House and had no choice but to accept Newt’s leadership after he took the House for the first time in forty years – forty years of wandering in the wilderness – the same Establishment ran Bob Dole, the only man Clinton could beat, for President. Dole is now denouncing Newt Gingrich.

In the 1980’s some of us could see that the world was changing in fundamental ways. It wasn’t clear what the implications of those changes would be – certainly not all of them. The Internet hadn’t happened yet. The USSR had 26,000 warheads aimed at the United States. Reagan was mashed between hawks like Abrams and the Iran Contra people and appeasers from the Carter wing of the Democratic Party. One needs to understand those times to understand what was being said.

Newt on the Space Program

Dr Pournelle,

Very little of what Newt says in this Cocoa, Florida (south of Cape

Canaveral) town hall discussion will be new to readers of your site, but it’s a nice summary of the way forward.

<http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/SpacePolic>

—Joel

Whatever his faults and strengths, Newt is unquestionably the best friend space exploration has in the upcoming election, and he has endorsed the notion of Prizes and X-Projects as a low cost way to support the program without stifling it with government and bureaucracy. For my views on X programs see: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/gettospace.html For a summary of my views on prizes, see http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2mail/mail242.html#prizes 

Government believes that the answer to our problems is to raise revenue, which is to say, raise taxes. The President believes that this is fair play. They raise the taxes on the successful in order to raise the salaries and benefits of, if not themselves, then those who work for them. This is known as Fair Play.

Warren Buffet’s secretary makes enough money as wages to be in the 30% income tax bracket. Buffet pays himself a salary of a dollar a year, but has money on which he has already paid taxes invested in enterprises that pay in capital gains. Is Fair Play a capital gains tax of 30%? The effect of that on both revenue and the economy would be severe. But we all know that.

I will say again, crime is not rebellion, and sin is not a denial that sin exists; and the distinction is real.

If you want something else to worry about I offer you:

Super-powered ‘frankenmalware’ strains have been detected in the wild:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/25/frankenmalware/print.html

“Viruses are accidentally infecting worms on victims’ computers, creating super-powered strains of hybrid software nasties. The monster malware spreads quicker than before, screws up systems worse than ever, and exposes private data in a way not even envisioned by the original virus writers.”

Sounds an awful lot like . . . biology.

Evolution. Brrrr.

Ed

Of course we have seen this coming since the Game of Life, Sugarscape the Brookings institute simulations (http://www.brookings.edu/press/Books/1996/artifsoc.aspx ) . I did a column on Sugarscape in BYTE July 1997. http://groups.engin.umd.umich.edu/CIS/course.des/cis479/projects/*sugarscape/sugarspace5.htm

Does biology sound like a self-modifying computer program?

There used to be meetings of people interested in artificial life and its evolution, but I haven’t heard of many recently, possibly because I just lost track. I haven’t heard anything about Sugarscape or the Game of Life in some years. Not sure why. In any event it ought not be surprising that someone could write a self-evolving program that would pick the best it could find in malware – or malware that will infect any worms it can find. And it’s just beginning.

While we are thinking about self-modifying programs, think also about intelligent design assisted evolution: that is, Lamarkian evolution rather than Mendelian.

The story line in Freefall http://freefall.purrsia.com/default.htm is very relevant to this topic; but do go to the beginning of the story, because there is a lot of backstory that you need in order to understand why a talking artificially intelligent wolf is discussing Three Law Robotics. You can catch up in a few days, and I have found it more than worth the time it takes.

And that ought to be enough to think about for the day. LASFS tonight for me. Don’t forget to subscribe.

Norman Edmund RIP

Norman Edmund, Founder of scientific supply catalog company Edmund Scientific. The Edmund Scientific catalog was my dream book in high school And I got my first computer, which was mechanical and ran with marbles and mechanical switches, from Edmund. The company is still run by his children and grandchildren. http://www.scientificsonline.com/ RIP

http://www.scientificsonline.com/