Monthly Archives: November 2013

View 800 Tuesday, November 26, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

Cogito ergo sum.

Descartes

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum. Cogito,

Ambrose Bierce

Dentist appointment today; all is on the proper track. The abscess removed when the old wisdom tooth came out was probably responsible for a lot of my energy losses last year, and it will take a while for the immune system to recover, but that will happen; maybe I’ll get back to some of the levels I used to have. Meanwhile my jaw doesn’t hurt as much as it did, Deo gratia.

My son Frank came in from Texas to spend Thanksgiving, and got in late this evening. Alex came over for a while. Sable was overjoyed. She misses the boys. She went to bed happy.

We have a lot of mail on the evolution discussion. Understand that my position is that I am prepared to accept something like Darwinian evolution and have been since high school; but given the complexity of life and what we have learned since Darwin wrote, I can’t believe that the blind workings of chance took us from the slime to Swan Lake. I have seen, for instance, the model by which light sensitive cells evolved into a socketed eye, and once you have an eye it’s credible that it kept improving by gradual steps, each step making the organism that has it a bit more ‘fit’ than its predecessors; but the early steps of the process don’t do that. If you know where you are going, you can watch for random developments that lead you in that direction, but that isn’t Darwin: Darwinian selection postulates that each step must be an ‘improvement’ over the last, not just a step toward an eye from a light sensitive cell, but a definite improvement over its predecessor causing the improved model to have more survivable offspring.

And overall I have to say with Fred, it’s easier to believe that a cloud of gas by chance turned into San Francisco and danced Swan Lake if you have been smoking Drano.

Hi Jerry,

I read with interest your posting on "Asking Questions about Darwin" (https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=16304). You used an example of evolution involving a bag of watch parts and the probability that shaking said bag would result in a fully functional watch. Or rather, the improbability of such a result without the involvement of an "Intelligent Designer".

I must say, were evolution as complex as you make it out to be, then the most parsimonious answer would be that an intelligent designer was probably involved. However, your analogy is… incorrect…

While you could use a "bag of stuff" as an analogy to describe evolution, the contents of said bag would have to be a lot different than watch parts, although a timekeeping device could reasonably be the outcome of this process.

Please allow me to repeat that. We could indeed get a functional watch out of a bag of parts through a stochastic process… But it requires lots of bags, and a process that sieves the successes of one bag into the next bag.

To bring the analogy in line with what is actually going on in evolution, you would have to start with something simple like the attached image of a child’s toy. Place that in a bag. Shake it around long enough and some of the shapes will make it through to the inside of the sphere. Most will not…

This is the "test", as it were, and it is no more complex than that. The steps are small, and the evaluation process is unambiguous. Nature shakes the bag, the parts change slightly, and we see what survives. Lather, rinse, repeat…

From such humble beginnings, endless levels of complexity can come about as long as it receives energy inputs from the sun.

..Ch:W..

Lots of bags is fine; but sieving the ‘successes’ implies that you know where you are going. That is what we haven’t settled.

Jerry,

The flaw in the evolution-as-watch-assembly analogy is the whole Newtonian dead-matter mistake. The components of a watch have no natural telos to come together (even when shaken vigorously in a box) and must be forced together artificially. The "components" of a natural thing come together naturally (i.e., by their essential natures). For example, shake ethanoyl chloride and ammonia together in a box (reactor) and they will self-assemble into ethanamide and ammonium chloride. And the parts (not "components) of a living thing are not even assembled — they grow out of one another.

The probability argument is bogus for this and other reasons. There is no probability simpliciter; there is only probability-given-a-model. Or as Einstein once told Heisenberg, "theory determines what can be observed." The probability argument typically makes model assumptions about component p’s and independence. So given n components, you get P=p1*p2*p3*…*pn, which can get tolerably small mighty fast as n increases. But the probabilities of the "components" are not independent and the usual STAT 101 methods don’t apply. What’s the probability of a finger? Now take that to the 10th power and see how unlikely your hands are.

It is also the case in nature that what a component does depends on what whole it is a part of. A free electron behaves differently from an electron in a valence orbit. What a gene does depends on what other genes are nearby — and on epigenetic and environmental factors. The helmeted water flea develops its helmet in the presence of chemical markers of a predator fish. Raised in a fish-free tank, cloned populations of the flea do no develop the "helmet." Same genes, different outcome. A Mediterranean wall lizard that lived a carnivorous life on a certain island became a vegetarian when it was transferred to another, plant-bearing island; and within twenty years had developed the organs for digesting the plant matter. What are the odds? Chance may not be at the heart of the matter.

Furthermore, modern genetics is discovering that genetic change can be massive, sudden, and specific, putting the punct in punctuated equilibrium, so to speak. Shapiro at Chicago is big on this. This video shows why few actual working scientists become media stars: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06hUABCuXBw&t=37m17s Some of Shapiro’s papers can be found here: http://shapiro.bsd.uchicago.edu/

Now the idea that a mid-Victorian country squire hit on the Truth About Everything is remarkable, and biologists could learn a bit from the physicists, who have quite happily abandoned what they thought they knew ca. 1860. There could easily be multiple processes at work in evolution, just as there are in local motion (gravity, electromagnetism, etc. — and we have turned "gravity" inside out since the Widow of Windsor’s day). So the "striving to the utmost" to reproduce coupled with the "struggle for existence" that forms the Darwinian engine may not account for everything in sight — except in the tautological sense that "survivors survive."

Re: design. The idea that the unlikeliness of the outcome is evidence of design would have astonished Thomas Aquinas, whose Fifth Way proceeded from the dependable lawfulness of nature, not from the inexplicable or unlikely. He would have regarded gravitational attraction of a falling stone as every bit as much evidence of design as the intricacies of molecular biology. He even commented on the possibility of new species emerging: "Species, also, that are new, if any such appear, existed beforehand in various active powers; so that animals, and perhaps even new species of animals, are produced by putrefaction by the power which the stars and elements received at the beginning." IOW, new species would come about by some natural process on which he was as unclear as his contemporaries. Replace "putrefaction" with "mutation" and specify the "powers of the elements" as the various genetic processes, and we see that he was lacking in the details.

And Augustine once wrote that when God created, he created "what was to be in times to come."

Mike F

Biodiversity

Jerry,

I’ve never found evolution to be a satisfying explanation for the existence of biodiversity. Natural selection destroys biodiversity, and more importantly, the universe, as best we know it, resolves to a state of maximum uniformity (whatever that looks like). Think of it as entropy in action.

I find God a much more satisfying answer. More precisely, I believe that God is, in a sense, the opposite of entropy.

Instead of resolving to maximum uniformity, God resolves to maximum diversity. Instead of resolving to a state of minimum possible information, God resolves to maximum possible information, intelligence, sentience, and being. I can’t think of anything more worthy of being called God than such an alien entity.

At any rate, the point is diversity. I believe God created life to be infinitely diverse, based upon themes. Each beetle is intended to be a unique variation on a theme of beetles. So too, for canines, felines, bacteria, and all other life.

I think of it as Bach’s Art of the Fugue writ large. It’s not the evolution of the species; it’s the revelation of the species. God is fond of diversity.

With that in mind, I consider plants and animals to be highly-advanced technology. I recall seeing a TV show about a predator that has varying number of offspring based on food availability, and it occurred to me that the creature was deliberately altering the state of the next generation based upon the environment.

What if that were built in, to a much greater degree? I saw a recent proposal that bacteria are "evolving evolvability"

in regards to resistance to antibiotics, and that idea seemed to be dancing around an obvious conclusion: bacteria are deliberately changing themselves to resist antibiotics.

One thing I expect is that the universe will continue to surprise us. It declares a diversity we haven’t exhausted.

Wherever we look, we find something new, and that’s exciting. I’d hate to live in a universe that was bland and uniform.

Finally, I find it interesting that the inversion of the question of diversity is echoed across history:

In a universe of so much diversity, why is there entropy? Why is there pain?

In a universe of so much entropy, why is there diversity? Why is there life?

Good questions, both.

(Yeah, yeah, I know: mention evolution, and the crackpots come out. 🙂

-Philip

Sir Fred and Evolution

Dear Jerry, I hope you are feeling better and your tests reveal nothing serious. Regarding Sir Fred Hoyle’s views on creation, perhaps I do no understand them as well as I ought, but doesn’t he just push back the question rather than answer it? I mean for him, who created the creators. – Anyway have a happy Thanksgiving.

Jim Hickey

Yes, of course he did. But then everyone simply “pushes back” the question of why is there something rather than nothing. Aristotle wondered at all that.

Squaring entropy and evolution —

Dr. Pournelle:

Your [and Fred’s] thoughts on evolution reminded me of a conundrum I’ve been pondering for several years. Perhaps it is my own faulting understanding of the issues, but I’ve been given to understand that entropy always increases.

Now take a step back in evolution to the organic soup ocean way back when. If entropy always increases, how did self-replicating molecules organize themselves and keep evolving? To use your analogy, that random set of watch parts had to shake together just right against the "rules" of the universe as we understand them. There’s a flaw somewhere in our [my] understanding.

Pete Nofel

Here, you haven’t been smoking enough Drano…

Hi Jerry,

I’m sorry to hear you’re under the weather. Get better, please. We need your insights now more than ever and, of course, more Janissaries books, a follow up to The Burning Tower, a sequel to Escape from Hell, and maybe a new Motie book?

I’m writing in response to the Fred on Everything article

(http://fredoneverything.net/BotFly.shtml) you mentioned on 23 November. I really enjoy reading Fred. His comments are almost always interesting and bring up points I hadn’t considered. He doesn’t have the insight you have, but he does make for an interesting read – usually.

I have to take him to task for this article, however. He starts off well – a smart hamster is still a hamster. Humans believe themselves intelligent when, in fact, the universe is more strange than we can begin to imagine. He then devolves into the fallacy of irreducible complexity. In short, humans are not as smart as we think we are yet we are so smart we recognize complexity when we see it. It’s a bit like saying a circle is complex because of that odd number we call pi. Is that really a sign of complexity or is it a sign of our lack of understanding? We start with an assumption – a circle with diameter 1

– and work from there to pi. Anyone who has taken calculus has probably done the infinite series math to produce pi. I’m pretty sure, however, that the sun, as it formed a sphere, did not pull out a calculator and hit the button marked π. Humans need pi to understand circles. Circles don’t need pi to exist. The eye is complex only because even the smartest human is still human. Our inability to explain how things work or came into being says much more about us than it does about whether they are truly complex or just a result of natural processes.

Braxton Cook

I have never said I have a better theory of evolution, only that Darwinian selection by survival of the fittest offspring doesn’t work; or at best needs enormous faith to believe in it. Some things have to happen all at once, yet many of them have no obvious advantage to the offspring, and a few look to be thoroughly disadvantageous. Of course I neither can nor want to forbid you from believing in Darwinian selection as the mechanism that produced Swan Lake, but I don’t and can’t.

Which is probably enough since I have no argument to win; I simply can’t believe that ‘standard’ arguments of the evolutionists. I can accept that Darwinian selection can happen, and perhaps happen often; but I can’t buy the proposition that that’s all there is.

One more topic, and it’s bed time:

Dorothy Sayers on education

I’m a fan of Dorothy Sayers, both as a mystery writer and as an essayist, and I found the essay you pointed at interesting. But I think she may have gotten the medieval curriculum slightly wrong on one point: her description of the quadrivium as focused on content rather than method.

Years ago I encountered a discussion of medieval thought as making a threefold distinction between rhetoric, dialectic, and demonstration. Much more recently, with access to Internet searches, I looked into it further—and found that, like so much medieval, it went back to Aristotle. As Aristotle described it, rhetoric is discourse for people who do not engage in systematic reasoning, or for occasions that don’t readily allow it, such as political campaigns; for deductive reasoning it substitutes enthymeme, and for inductive reasoning it substitutes striking examples. (The unstated premises of enthymeme often amount to "common sense.") Dialectic is systematic reasoning, often in the Socratic mode, about matters of opinion or probability, where more than one thing might be true, and the proper approach is to say, "If A, B, and if B, C; but if A’, B’, and if B’, C’." But demonstration is also systematic reasoning, about things that are definitely known.

We need not, here, worry about philosophical arguments such as Descartes’s evil genius or Hume’s skepticism about causality; "definitely known" can include things like most immediate sensory observation, or well established scientific findings. To Aristotle, demonstration would have been well exemplified by geometry.

Now, in the medieval curriculum, rhetoric appeared under its own name, and dialectic likewise. But demonstration appeared in the form of geometry, and the other subjects of the quadrivium, arithmetic, astronomy, and music (which was mostly the arithmetic of fractions). The quadrivium was taught partly for content, but partly to teach the art of demonstration, the third Aristotelian form of discourse, and thus as training in a method of thinking. Indeed, I’ll bet that when you took plane geometry one of the reasons offered for learning it was that it trained your mind to think logically, which is exactly what the medievals thought it would do.

Perhaps Sayers focused on the content of the quadrivium because its subjects came less easily to her mind than those of the trivium, and thus required her to focus on what was being said more than on how it was arrived at. Or perhaps the method of the quadrivium seemed to her the same as that of the trivium; both after all rely on logic.

I’ve thought that it would be interesting to see a scheme of education that reflected this division, and so I found Sayers’s suggestions quite interesting, even when I didn’t fully agree. Thanks for calling this to my attention.

William H. Stoddard

I will let you and Mike Flynn discuss the finer points of the Trivium and Quadrivium; you both know more about that than I ever will. I’m the classic generalist, who learns a little about everything and tries to put it all together. I can tool up and specialize if I have to – I was once the world’s foremost expert on certain (now obsolete) military hardware because I was the only one with a certified need to know everything on the subject – but mostly I learn less and less about more and more….

“As a result, we did not see the large numbers of hurricanes that typically accompany these climate patterns.”

<http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2013/20131125_endofhurricaneseason.html>

Roland Dobbins

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 800 Monday, November 25, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

Cogito ergo sum.

Descartes

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum. Cogito,

Ambrose Bierce

Another day devoured by locusts, but I did clear up a number of obligations and get a few steps closer to back on track. I see the dentist tomorrow, but my jaw hurt enough that I called him this morning. As I suspected there’s nothing unusual going on and nothing to be concerned about. People who take aspirin routinely do have some clotting difficulties and that prolongs the kinds of wounds you get when wisdom teeth are removed. I am not likely to get much done this week anyway.

The news continues to be gloomy. The US has just made about the same deal with Iran that we once made with North Korea, relieving the economic war just as it was really beginning to hurt, and thus buying the regime some more time. In North Korea’s case they used the hard currency to complete their missile program and some new nuclear production stuff. One supposes Iran will do the same.

Of course we have no idea what Israel will do. The Prime Minister has taken pains to make it clear that Israel does not consider herself bound by the Kerry proposition. A very long time ago (1956) Israel, France, and Britain decided that the United States under President Eisenhower were insufficiently militant against Arab aggression against European interests, and a joint Israeli-French-British military operation to recover the Suez Canal from Nasser was begun. Eisenhower put enough pressure on our allies to get them to withdraw; President Eisenhower later said that it was his greatest foreign policy mistake. (My father did not live to see the collapse of the Soviet Union, and he thought the 1956 Suez War was the turning point, and would lead eventually to a Soviet victory, not in his lifetime, and possibly not in mine. He would be pleased to know that he was wrong, but I believe the Seventy Years War was a closer thing that many imagine.)

We cannot predict what the Israelis will do. We can imagine the future of US policy.

And this disturbing development:

Re-organization

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htarm/articles/20131122.aspx#startofcomments

This is pretty significant. The loss of the direct support light infantry, replaced by the mortar and recon/scout units, probably means a more coordinated supporting arms (artillery & air [drone?]) doctrine. This will result in significant manpower savings but surely outstripped by technological costs for missile/aircraft/drone/communication costs.

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

It does appear to be a significant development. Israel, of course, measures exactly that threat it must respond to, having a shortage of both troops and funds; Israel can never maintain all the military forces she needs, nor standing armies as large as those of her enemies.

Polls show that for the first time a majority of the American people no longer believe that President Obama is competent to manage government. This is a startling fall from his original status in the days of “Yes we can!” and “Hope and Change!” Details do tend to get in the way when you have great plans. On the other hand without a great plan the details might not be important.

And we have a great deal of mail on many subjects. This one is a bit different:

Dorothy Sayers on despair/tolerance/sloth

Jerry:

You often remind us that despair is a sin, which I now say frequently to others.

In 1941, Dorothy Sayers spoke about despair/tolerance/sloth as one of the Other Six Deadly Sins.

–begin Sayers quote

The sixth Deadly Sin is named by the Church Acedia or Sloth. In the world it calls itself Tolerance; but in hell it is called Despair. It is the accomplice of the other sins and their worst punishment. It is the sin which believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, loves nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing.[sic] lives for nothing, and only remains alive because there is nothing it would die for. We have known it far too well for many years. The only thing perhaps that we have not known about it is that it is mortal sin.

http://www.lectionarycentral.com/trinity07/Sayers.html

–end Sayers quote

She said this long before Tolerance was enshrined as the cardinal virtue by our inept masters in Washington and academe.

I found only a few references to Sayers in your View and Mail, so if this is useful then you might also want to look at her other remarks on the Other Deadlies.

Search Google using the following argument Sayers six sins site:http://www.lectionarycentral.com/

You should get 8 results, the first 6 of which are about the other deadly sins.

I’ve read that the speech is the final entry in a book of her works titled "Creed or Chaos? Why Christians Must Choose Either Dogma or Disaster (Or, Why It Really Does Matter What You Believe)". It appears to be out of print as I can’t find it on my usual book sites.

Amazon has a lot of used copies through its marketplace. At least there are a few academic libraries within a few miles of you that have copies according to WorldCat.Org.

I also found what claims to be the article "Creed or Chaos? at http://douglassocialcredit.com/Sayers%20Dorothy%20L%20Creed%20or%20Chaos.pdf

and

http://www.generalfiles.biz/download/gse6a36efh32i0/Sayers%20Dorothy%20L%20Creed%20or%20Chaos.pdf.html

Best regards,

–Harry M.

I used to write a lot about Dorothy Sayers. I regret that I never met her, although I do know people who were her friends. I much regret that for some reason I overlooked her poetic translation of Dante when Niven and I did our first Inferno, which relied on the Ciardi translation, with occasional excursions into Longfellow.

By the time we did Escape from Hell I had become familiar with Dorothy Sayers’ translation of the Inferno, which I think comes closer to producing the effect Dante was after. On the other hand we understand that the success of our original Inferno – it sold very well in the years after it was published, and still sells to this day – was responsible for the reissue of the Ciardi translation, and that’s not a bad thing.

She also has a famous essay on education, The Lost Tools of Learning, that is well worth the attention of anyone interested in the goals of education. And of course those not familiar with her detective series and Lord Peter Death Bredon Wimsey are in for a treat.

The President is in town, raising money and support for his immigration reforms.

“Congressional leaders must forcefully reject the notion, evidently accepted by the President, that a small cadre of CEOs can tailor the nation’s entire immigration policy to suit their narrow interests.”

<http://dailycaller.com/2013/11/25/sen-sessions-slams-obama-ceos-on-immigration/>

–

Roland Dobbins

Immigration is a complex subject, but a nation that does not control its borders is not sovereign. The United States as we know it – or as some of us knew it – was built on assimilation. E Pluribus Unum. We did not seek “diversity” as such, we sought a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to  — well you get the idea.  We built a melting pot, and it worked splendidly. But a melting pot can be overloaded; and a cultural diversity that accepts too much diversity explodes. We will not be the first nation to learn that.  And see Spain under the Visigoths for an interesting lesson in diversity.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 799 Saturday, November 23, 2013

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

Cogito ergo sum.

Descartes

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum. Cogito.

Ambrose Bierce

It hasn’t been a great week. Starting with the ache from the wisdom tooth and the residual pain after its removal, which is bad enough that I suspect there’s more wrong in there than I thought. I’ll find that out next Tuesday.

The result is that I haven’t got much done. I’ve read a couple of books, and Peter has been turning my office suite into a place I can actually have visitors, and I got most of my errands done although some resulted in only temporary removal of a problem. We did get some good discussion of the health care dilemma and I made a start at summarizing what we actually know about climate, so it wasn’t all a waste. I’ll try to do better.

Tomorrow, Sunday 23 November, I’ll be on TWIT (This Week in Technology) at 1500 i.e. 3 PM Pacific Standard Time. I don’t know who is on with me, other than Leo of course., but you can find us at TWIT.TV tomorrow at 1500.

I don’t agree with Fred on everything, but he raises a number of really interesting questions, he’s right a lot of the time, and he doesn’t swallow fads.

His latest essay on evolution reads like something I might have written a few years ago, or yesterday for that matter if I had as much energy as he has. The latest essay is The Bugs In Darwin, (http://fredoneverything.net/BotFly.shtml) and he does a great job of summing them up. Doubting the sufficiency of Evolution as an explanation of everything will get you in more trouble than being a Climate Change Denier, but there are a number of “bugs in Darwin” – things that it is very difficult to see any possible explanation for in Darwinian evolution. We know that there is “evolution”; we can see it, and we can breed animals to our specifications; but the problem is that cellular biology is far more complicated than Darwin dreamed of, and indeed that anyone thought until fairly recently.

About thirty years ago I wrote an essay on evolution and origins using the analogy of a watch: you can take all the components of a watch, but them in a bag, and shake them forever and the probability that they will fall into place still remains vanishingly small with relation to the age of the universe. You can make the probability a bit larger by adding multiple copies of some of the components, but a bit larger still leaves you a vanishing probability. You can shape the parts such that there’s only one way they will fit together, and the probability they they’ll become a watch rises again, but it’s still small; and now of course you have to explain how the parts got made. If you find a watch in the woods, that’s pretty overwhelming evidence for the existence of a watchmaker. Now what do you look for if you find a watchmaker?

Fred looks at a number of highly complex processes and asks how they might have ‘evolved”; and his conclusion is the same as mine has been since I was in high school: We don’t know, but it sure isn’t Darwinian survival of the fittest, and it looks a lot more like design than chance. I came to that conclusion before I knew just how complex the universe it, and I have never been shown any reason to change it.

Now by design I don’t mean that there are no elements of chance in the evolution: it’s more complicated than that. I can think of a number of random steps that if made in the correct order will take you from a light sensitive  cluster of cells to an eye as that exists in nature; but not all of those steps have any obvious utility or advantage to the organism. Something that isn’t on that path could and more probably would have happened. By design I mean that somewhere in there is a glimmer of what you’re after.  It was something of this sort that Augustine had in mind when he postulated that creation was in causes, not in completion. When I was in high school I wasn’t converted to the Church by any refutation of Evolution, because I learned Evolution from Brother Fidelis despite the fact that it was still illegal to teach Evolution in the state of Tennessee in 1949. Indeed I didn’t start to question the standard theory until I learned just how complex cellular biology appears to be.

Interestingly enough another friend named Fred, Sir Fred Hoyle, came to much the same conclusion. It is presented in his Evolution From Space http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Space-Sir-Fred-Hoyle/dp/0671492632 and it is a lot more plausible than Darwin. Fred presents the case for design, although I caution you that his notion of both design and a designer will horrify priests, mullahs, imams, ministers, mambas, but possibly not witch doctors.

I have to get a haircut for tomorrow’s appearance on TWIT – since I’ll be on a couple of panels at LASCON next Friday it was time anyway – so it’s lunch time. I’ll try to come up with something else later, but if you read Fred’s essay you’ll have plenty to think about. Fred asks a lot of the right questions. I wish there were more writers, particularly in the scientific community, who dared ask them.

And of course if you haven’t read it yet, you can read http://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2013-05/rise-missile-carriers, by Commander Phillip Pournelle. You will also like http://www.informationdissemination.net/2013/11/we-need-balanced-fleet-for-naval.html

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 799 Wednesday, November 20, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan.

Barrack Obama, famously.

One thing I am learning about getting old is that while I can still think clearly, and still write some good sentences, everything not only takes longer, but often with all the good intentions in the world I just don’t have the energy to do what I have set out to do. Today was an example, but fortunately not typical. It isn’t typical because I am still fighting a bit of pain in my jaw which I hope is the effect of having a wisdom tooth removed yesterday, and not a sign that there are other teeth badly needed attention.

I had intended to post a couple of letters with replies relevant to the health care mess, and continue with a short exposition on facts about the difference between insurance and institutionalized medicine. Both have good points but they lead to entirely different systems. Or I think they do. And I doubt we can ever say enough about deserving and undeserving poor and how government – as opposed to Associations – might choose to deal with each.

Unfortunately I had errands to attend to, the main one being to go to Petco and get another large sack of dog food. Sable was weaned on the Max brand of dry dog food and although she is great at begging – Huskies are pack dogs and expect the leader of the pack to share with them – most of her diet comes out of a sack. This brand doesn’t bring about doggy breath, and she has thrived on it. Of course with her leg cancer ‘thrive’ is not the word many would use, but on the gripping hand she was supposed to be dead six months ago and she doesn’t know that. And she very much likes going to Petco. I mean, what’s not to like? Everyone she meets thinks she’s beautiful and the place has all those great smells, and a big tank of mice who don’t at all seem to mind having a wolf watch them play.

But somewhere in my errands I ran out of energy. That happens to me more often than it should, and it particularly happens when I’m recovering from something like this tooth extraction.

So it goes. I keep trying. I read the papers every morning, and try to follow what’s going on in the world. That’s not always cheerful.

From a long time friend and advisor who has long had familiarity with administration including medical:

"Part 1) Jerry Pournelle asks "…why I am expected to pay for someone else’s misfortunes."

Part of the answer is that you already pay. You directly pay for Medicaid and state, county, and municipal medical care."

Northwestern Physician didn’t even attempt to answer the question here. Why indeed am I expected to pay for Medicaid, state/county/municipal medical care? We shouldn’t be, unless we voluntarily enter in to pools to cover health costs (i.e. products insurance companies offer).

Then there is:

"Jerry and many others have suggested that this increase of insured will increase the use of health care and thus drive up spending. This is valid and the ACA attempts to slow the growth of health care costs. This, to me, is where we need to focus a lot of attention."

"So we spend more privately and more in public funds. By one measure, you are paying more now just in public funds than some countries pay for all of their public care."

So, has Medicare, Medicaid, state/county/municipal medical care reduced the cost of health care? Couldn’t prove it by the good Doctor’s references. Insurance companies have been the leaders in attempting to reduce the cost of health care (good ole profit motive). Yet, despite the innovations in health insurance (PPOs, HMOs, PMOs, Managed Care, Utilization Studies, anti-Fraud initiatives, Catastrophic Coverage, etc.), health care costs continue to rise? You’ll look closely and see that every insurance initiative (including Medicare/Medicaid payment limits on procedures) ends up with continued rising health care costs. Certainly, technology advancements are part of this, as well as medical malpractice nuisance suits. Still, continue to investigate and you’ll notice that provider/clinic (good Doctor?) billed amounts and procedure counts rise in relation to each cost saving measure! Chicken and egg… maybe. But most providers are actually complicit in this cycle! Providers are not required to accept insurance patients (though they may be lawfully required to treat emergency cases with or without guarantee of payment by the patient). They willingly participate in insurance plans in order to receive the bulk of their billings (~80%) and leave the collection of payment (premiums) and risk to the insurance companies.

What’s the answer to lower health care costs? First is the realization and acceptance of the fact that EVERYONE DIES regardless of state of health. Next, I’d trust the free market (providers & insurance companies) – of course with some public assistance: Medicare works well enough for the aged; and state support in each county for the indigent, afflicted, infirm, and hospice could be done for cheaper that the ACA is being set up. To facilitate that, I’d expand the Public Health Service to include a Medical Corps of providers (physicians of all specialties, nurses, NPs, PAs, and other providers) with attendant logistics to support localized health care services.

Of course there is a difference between necessary and sufficient conditions. Also necessary would be tort reform. There are others.

Health care reform

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=226151

Karl Denninger says that the main problem in health care is that all the anti-trust laws don’t apply. he gives the example of a clinic in Oklahoma which accepts only cash and publishes their rates – they charge about 20% of what others charge. So cancel Obamacare and apply anti-trust.

I would add keep the county health care system alive, forbid employment related health care, wait a year (maybe an election cycle) and then see what the problems are at that point.

One could also decide that all pension plans, as such, are immoral since they involve one person promising that someone else will pay for something. Purchasing an annuity is different since that is strongly regulated.

God’s blessings.

Arthur Bolstad

Karl Marx predicted that capitalism had within it the seeds of its own destruction, namely the competitive drive to increased concentration. Adam Smith warned that capitalists would work together to use government to restrict competition, and to make entering business increasingly difficult, with the result that there were be fewer and fewer businesses which would become increasingly larger.

The economist David McCord Wright more than once speculated that one reason why America seemed not to have gone the way of Europe into increased cartelization was trust busting activity by state and federal government. I encountered Wright when Pepperdine asked me to take over a beginning economics class after the professor had a stroke; he had been using Wright’s economics text as the textbook for the class. It was early in the semester, and I had to add that large lecture class to my already large teaching schedule in political science. I took on the challenge, but I wasn’t going to start with a new textbook: the students already had David McCord Wright, whoever he was, and that was the book I would use.

I had never read it, but I was impressed and thought it more rigorous on fundamentals than the more popular Samuelson text, but I also took a crash course in both economics and David McCord Wright since I had managed to get a Ph.D. in political science without ever having taken freshman economics. Fortunately we all survived, and I am pleased to say that at least one of my students went on to graduate school in economics so I must have had at least partial success in my one semester as an economics teacher…

But it is also clear that in the forty years since that time the United States has stopped taking anti-trust very seriously. The aerospace industry, the publishing industry, oil and energy, automobiles, and just about any other economic field you can name have become more and more concentrated, and the necessity of competition among many large but not dominating firms is no longer recognized.

That needs to be considered when looking at the health care business; but then I think it needs to be considered when looking at just about everything. I don’t think there should be Big Banks that are Too Big To Fail, and instead of the Big Five or Big Ten, I think there ought to be the Big But Not Dominating Fifty in most major industries. That would leave room for firms that just want to make profits on a business model of supplying excellence and make no pretense at efforts for Big Growth. But of course we are a long way off from applying that sort of principle to education and medicine; we are so certain that the people need protection from grafters and snake oil salesmen that –

But that is for another time.

: Insuring people against their self-destructive behavior

Jerry:

You discussed issues of American health care and the Affordable Care Act in your November 19 View. The Northwestern Physician claims the US ranks worst in pregnancies in adolescents, among other measures he says put the U. S. far below the standards set by other nations. You asked why you should be billed for a heart transplant for a 55-year-old massively obese man who smoked all his life. Both of you moved beyond the prevention and treatment of communicable and infectious diseases, the traditional concerns of medicine, and discussed instead conditions resulting from the behavioral choices made by rational human beings.

Your considerations emphasize that medicine is a moral profession rather than a technical profession.

For example, when faced with a 14-year-old girl with an unwanted pregnancy the physician must first ask "What OUGHT we to do?"

Recognize that the answer to that moral question can have consequences that endure for a lifetime, if not for eternity.

Dr. John Patrick, retired professor of pediatrics from the University of Ottawa and founder and president of Augustine College has been lecturing on these questions for many years. When speaking to medical students at the University of Minnesota (I believe in 2004) he said:

But a very profound change has occurred in the nature of etiology.

If I asked physicians with more than 30 years of experience, "What proportion of patients that you saw when you began in medicine came to your office or to see you because of an act of God or nature, and what proportion came because of their own behavior?" the answer will usually be, "Oh, 70% God and nature, 30% behavior."

"And what about now?"

"Oh the ratio is completely reversed."

And if you’re in a city clinic they’ll laugh and say all of them come because of behavior.

[Starting at 47 minutes 10 seconds into the lecture "Hope for the Unborn" at

http://www.cmf.org.uk/media/?context=entity&id=300

<http://www.cmf.org.uk/media/?context=entity&id=300>

Let us recognize that turning our health care over to the federal government leads inevitably to the bureaucratic regulation of the minutest and most intimate aspects of the life of every individual. Already our use of toilets is regulated, though perhaps not yet policed. Many would approve of criminalizing the eating habits of the morbidly obese, and then controlling the food available to each and every one of us. Eventually the regulators will deal with the sexual behavior of teenagers in the name of reducing the cost of health care. Ultimately the government will coerce abortions for many reasons decided on by the bureaucracy. (As I described previously and you posted on October 9, 2013 at

https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?m=20131009 <https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?m=20131009> )

Unfortunately, what we the people OUGHT to do about criminalizing the dietary and lifestyle preferences of free men and women is not even being discussed.

The federal government seems to believe that men and women, far from being volitional creatures made in the image of God and thereby charged with getting wisdom, are instead no more than mice, slaves to their desires and appetites. The government imagines we can be "cured" through the application of bureaucratically-enforced techniques rather than through the development of moral behavior among the citizenry.

Best regards,

–Harry M.

But surely the people must not be free to make bad choices? Do not they deserve the protection of the smart and educated, as mankind has always enjoyed the protection of the smart and educated?

Measuring the temperature of the Earth

Dr. Pournelle –

We are very good at measuring the temperature of planets. It strikes me that we should use the same techniques to establish an integrated temperature for the Earth. Why not place an infrared telescope on Luna and use it to measure the temperature of the nite side of the entire Earth? I would think that with judicious choice of wavelength, the temperature of the surface, integrated as a whole, could be measured. This would eliminate all discussions about sensor locations, weighting, and unmeasured areas. Of course, readings would need to be taken each nite, since the portion of the Earth visible would be different every nite, and there would be seasonal variations as well. Sounds like a good project for NASA.

I suppose that this is such an obvious idea that it has been considered and discarded for a reason that has escaped me.

Bob

Bob Salnick

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.