Monthly Archives: December 2013

View 801 Thursday, December 05, 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. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

Cogito ergo sum.

Descartes

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum. Cogito,

Ambrose Bierce

Quote of the day:

"Negotiating with Obama is like playing chess with a pigeon.The pigeon knocks over all the pieces, shits on the board and then struts around like it won the game." Vladimir Putin

The Pope has said that unrestricted capitalism is evil, or words to that effect. What His Holiness said is close enough to truth. I have said for many years that unrestricted capitalism leads to the sale of human flesh in the public markets, and I have seen no convincing refutation. It is not that capitalism is evil, or that all capitalists are evil, or that evil is intended.

It is also true that capitalism is the most powerful engine for generating wealth that we know of. That has been clear for a long time, but politicians and regulators must be reminded of that with some frequency. We have also long known that the greed for money is the root of most evil, and that we need reminding of that with some frequency as well.

The Pope also condemned the growing disparity in wealth between rich and poor. This is hardly a new message, nor is it confined to Christian apologists. Aristotle spoke of the merits of rule by the middle class, defined as those who possess the goods of fortune in moderation, and the deficits of rule by those of great wealth have been discussed from classical times to the present. The Pope said nothing particularly new, but then people seldom need educating but often need reminding. The obligations of the wealthy have been known from Biblical times, and for most of the time from then to now have been ignored.

Capitalism generates wealth, and inevitably aggravates the discrepancies between rich and poor. This is obvious to everyone. What is easy to overlook, or dismiss as trickle-down, is the absolute rise in wealth of the poor. When I was born no one had a right to sulfa drugs or penicillin; now these are an entitlement of nearly everyone in what we call the First World, and thanks to Bill Gates and those like him are becoming available to those in what we are pleased to call the developing counties; indeed the only reason we have for using the term developing countries is that the wealthy nations have generated so much wealth – generally through the engines of capitalism – have exported technology to them. Meanwhile, in the United States, the poorest in the land have access to wonders that did not exist when I was young, and few starve. The Christian world has always been under the command to respond if anyone asks for charity (“If anyone ask of thee, give generously”) although many need reminding of that. But that, says the Pope, is not quite enough: to spend one’s life accumulating wealth without attention to one’s responsibilities s to lose one’s reason for being. All may not agree with that, but it is hardly astonishing that a Christian bishop would say it.

To sustain a lifestyle which excludes others, or to sustain enthusiasm for that selfish ideal, a globalization of indifference has developed. Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own. The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase. In the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us.

* * *

Money must serve, not rule! The Pope loves everyone, rich and poor alike, but he is obliged in the name of Christ to remind all that the rich must help, respect, and promote the poor. I exhort you to a generous solidarity and to the return of economics and finance to an ethical approach which favors human beings.

Francis Bishop of Rome

I don’t find that an astonishing thing for a Pope to say.

RIP: Nelson Mandela, former President of the Republic of South Africa. The transition from apartheid to integration has not been entirely peaceful, but it never rose to civil war, and if South Africa still has a chance of emerging as a civilized society and nation it is due to him. He could have been a dictator. Instead he was a President.

RIP Lt. Col. T. R. Fehrenbach, AUS Ret. Author of This Kind of War, the best book on the Korean War I know of. I had a sporadic correspondence with him for years, and I count myself one of his admirers. http://www.mysanantonio.com/obituaries/article/T-R-Fehrenbach-made-history-read-like-the-news-5026139.php

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

View 801 Tuesday, December 03, 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. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

Cogito ergo sum.

Descartes

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum. Cogito,

Ambrose Bierce

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article by a Ph.D. candidate named Adrienne Rose Johnson “For the Starving, ‘Eat Local’ Isn’t an Option,’ which points out the day of the local self sufficient community is over, and the way the world feeds itself is through shipping food from vast plantations and feeding ranches all over the world. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303670804579233921148739770

The ‘developed’ world pretty well feeds itself and doesn’t have famines. Local pasturage isn’t particularly green, either: the transportation energy is less than the energy savings from mass production, or so she says and my back of the envelope calculations don’t contradict that. Toward the end of this she says

Hunger is an issue that requires a mature social conscience and political will to look beyond the garden into the global. According to the United Nations World Food Program, 842 million people in the world don’t have enough to eat. Nearly all of these people—827 million—live in developing countries, where 14.3% of the population is undernourished. Some 66 million primary school-age children "attend classes hungry across the developing world, with 23 million in Africa alone," according to the U.N. organization. It calculates that $3.2 billion is needed per year to reach all 66 million of these hungry school-age children.

In this global sense, the often-heard eat-local slogan of "vote with a fork" is well-intentioned but naïve. It doesn’t satisfy our moral obligations as global citizens. If you want to cast a food-related vote, find a candidate talking about global hunger and do it at the ballot box.

What struck me in reading this was the use of the term “developing countries” and “developing world.” I can recall in my graduate political science classes that while the newspapers used terms like “underdeveloped” and “impoverished” and “primitive” and “Unproductive” for such places, it was considered more polite to call them “developing” countries.

I went along with this, but I don’t think it’s a good idea. It may make people in primitive countries feel better to be called ‘developing’ but it doesn’t do much for development. I recall many years ago being interested when the Old Regime of Tubman and his True Whig Party offered a huge chunk of 5°N latitude land to be developed into a space port. His only requirement was that companies that came in to exploit the area build schools for the children of all the workers, and establish some other basic government services and law and order. Liberia at the time was governed by the descendents of freed slaves who had been sent back to Africa to a colony established by the US and was, if slowly, definitely a “developing” country. In 1980 an army sergeant overthrew the government and the country descended into civil war that has only recently ended, and much of the previous development was gone.

At the time – the 1970’s – I studied some of the governments of Africa, most of which were kleptocracies which liked to be called ‘developing’ but all too often the only things developed were overseas bank accounts for the ruling classes. Needless to say it was considered racist to refer to these places as primitive, uncivilized, or even under-developed. ‘Developing’ was the satisfactory word even if there were no visible signs of development.

Development seems largely to consist of transfers of food from productive countries to the ‘developing’ countries. In the old colonial days the theory at least was that tribal societies would become civilized through law and order and education; compulsory education was tried in some places but generally could not be afforded, but there were schools for those who wanted to go to school. As I said earlier, under the True Whig government in Liberia, a condition of foreign investment was that the children of anyone employed in Liberia be given an education and at least nominal – sometimes quite good – medical care. There were often medical technician apprenticeship education facilities as part of the health care program. All that is gone, but the Liberian officials I talked to were well educated and referred to their country as primitive but developing – and they had a definition of developing. They hoped in a few generations to have 75% literacy in the country…

I did manage to interest some investors in a venture to exploit Liberian resources as part of a construction of a space port – there are considerable advantages to a near equatorial launch site, and the region was suitable as a test station for a receiver for space solar power – but all that was wasted when a tribal revolt insisting on one man one vote (which turned out to be once) brought all that to an end, and Liberia went from ‘developing’ to ‘war torn”. At least there hadn’t been a lot of investment yet.

Unlike Ms. Johnson, I am very much in favor of local truck gardens and food production, but that’s really a topic for another time. I had a hydroponics greenhouse in the back yard at Chaos Manor until Hammer made us enough money to afford a swimming pool.

My friend Ron Unz has an odd theory: that raising the minimum wage would allow cutting welfare benefits. http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/03/the-minimum-wage-cure-for-illegal-immigration/ My own view is that minimum wages destroy employment opportunities for the unskilled and inexperienced, and it won’t matter if you raise minimum wages because you’ll never be able to cut entitlements to suit, but Ron is a very intelligent guy and worth listening to. I’ll try to work up an analysis, but I can’t believe Unz will convert me to his view.

caps lock key tone

You said: I was able to go into the accessibility settings and set the tone for CAPS LOCK .

How did you do that, where are the ‘accessibility settings’ ?

thanks

JG

John Galt

Control Panel > Ease of Access Center > Make The Keyboard Easier to Use > Turn on Toggle Keys

It used to be under Accessibility which had a wheelchair icon but that route is gone. Turn on the toggle. Do NOT DO ANYHING ELSE or if you do, write down what you did. The toggle to tone ought to work as soon as applied and needs no reset. When you hit the Caps Lock key a tone sounds. Hit it again and a tone sounds when you turn it off. There are other settings in there, some useful, but beware. There is a way to make the keyboard invisible to the computer after the password is typed in; I don’t know how I did it or how I turned it off, and I am not going to experiment to find out how to do it again.

FYI, obviously not something to post.

You quote Obama as making his transparency statement on January 31, 2009.

I had occasion to quote this today, and I (almost) never quote without attribution. I found the statement explicitly near the end of Obama’s January 21 (twenty-first), 2009 welcoming address to staff. I cannot find it documented as being said on January 31.

Here’s the source:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-welcoming-senior-staff-and-cabinet-secretaries-white-house

Today’s Frank & Ernest cartoon addresses the issue at

http://www.gocomics.com/frankandernest/2013/12/03

Best regards,

Well, I don’t have the location of my source, but there was one, with date, that I considered satisfactory. He has famously said this more than once, and it is not an atypical promise from Mr. Obama. It hasn’t worked out that way. Thanks for the information, but on consideration I do not consider it unfair to leave it up there.

Lamarck and Lysenko

experience modifies genes

hi Jerry,

This article about passing an aversion to smell onto offspring shows some of the first evidence that evolution is not completely random.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-25156510

Jeff Marshall

This may be the most important genetic data since the discovery of DNA. It is nothing less than evidence for some of the Lamarckian hypothesis of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The last important advocate of that was Lysenko. If acquired characteristics can be inherited, then the mechanism of evolution changes dramatically.

We know that social characteristics can be “inherited” in villages – my cocktail party theory of the role dogs played in the evolution of human intelligence is an example, and I only call it a cocktail party theory because I haven’t the time to make a formal investigation and defense of the theory – but that only explains why there have been such rapid developments in humans.

We have certainly not heard the last of this discovery.

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

View 801 Monday, December 02, 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. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

Cogito ergo sum.

Descartes

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum. Cogito,

Ambrose Bierce

It was a nice Thanksgiving Day at Chaos Manor. Two of the boys, Alex and Frank, were here and we were able with SKYPE to talk to Phillip and two of the grandchildren in Virginia. Friday Alex and I went down to LASCON, and I got to see a lot of old friends. Big panel in the afternoon with me, and Niven, and Greg Benford, and Harry Turtledove, and Betsey Mitchell and I can’t imagine how with that many people anyone had a chance to say much, but I had fun.

Of course I didn’t hear much of what was going on, and I ran into an xcorps rocket mechanic friend who showed me his COSTCO hearing aid. Two thousand dollars and about 17 frequency channels with notching and selective tuning. I am thinking of checking that out. I cannot use broad band hearing aids. It may be that Kaiser and Medicare Advantage have some kind of deal on something similar so I need to look into that, but I am weary of annoying people by making them repeat everything they say, and of not understand three consecutive words of most of what is said to me.

But I had a good time.

Then Saturday I managed the oddest computer glitch I have ever had. In essence my computer would start up, accept the password, and that password was the last information from the keyboard that the machine ever reacted to. Control-Alt-Delete did nothing. The Alt key did not bring up the Firefox tool bar. Windows 7 64 bit worked just fine so long as commands were given with the mouse, but nothing, nothing from the keyboard, except that it had reacted to the typed in password, so it was clearly a Windows setting, not hardware.

Now I had been trying to turn on the tone that sounds when you inevitably hit the Caps Lock key by accident – I’d as soon that key was on a foot pedal, or a key lock switch – and even finding that switch in the Windows 7 control panel requires dedication. It’s somewhere in the accessibility settings, and those aren’t as easy to find as they used to be. But I never got that features turned on. I had it turned on until recently when I did some kind of update possibly to Explorer, which seems to have reset it, and my attempts to reinstate it somehow resulted in the machine deciding not to listen to the keyboard again.

I spent Saturday trying to fix that. I then decided I had better back up my Outlook files while the system was still responding to the mouse. Then I kept fooling around with it all. And kept resetting. And trying again. I brought up Outlook on another machine so I could check my mail. Went back to this machine and – well, somewhere in there I managed to restore the defaults. I had brought up a keyboard that you can use with the mouse (there’s one in there) and that worked and with that on screen I tried other stuff and suddenly when I hit an actual key on the keyboard the on-screen mouse activated keyboard would show the key pressed, and I figured by golly it’s at least listening, so I reset the system and this time when it came up all the problems were solved. Better, I was able to go into the accessibility settings and set the tone for CAPS LOCK and this time that worked without any reset or anything.

Of course I then had Outlook in two places and found I had lost a month of mail and other information, but that was just a question of getting my head in order and finding a backup copy of OUTLOOK.PST, while saving all the mail that had come in on the other machine into a file I could export to, then moving everything back over here, bring up Outlook with an Outlook.pst good to Friday evening, bring in the stuff that had come in on the other machine and integrate all that, and when it was all over I had all my files back, all my records back except two sent messages that didn’t get into the exported files I saved and I won’t bother with them. But there was a bit of panic when I thought I had managed to mismanage my backups to the point of losing everything Outlook had done for a couple of weeks. Which has resulted in a flurry of backups yesterday and today, and not getting much done. So it goes.

And Roberta has banished me to the Monk’s Cell to work on Janissaries, which works because I have a couple of new books on medieval naval warfare that fit with the next scenes I have to write. After which I will try to catch up on MAIL – one of the things I thought I had managed to lose was my selected mail file with inputs on the “do we understand evolution very well” discussion. (That’s how I choose to see it. I have no investment in “believing in evolution” or not believing in it, and I have some faith in science as a means to discover the actual mechanisms of the world. Less faith in scientists in being scientists and not advocates for their theories and beliefs which seem as firm and unshakable as those of the Inquisition; but that’s another story.)

Anyway that’s where I have been for the past few days. A bit of computing at Chaos Manor. It was sort of fun, and we had the happy ending I always insisted on for my column. And now I will go off to work on Janissaries, and maybe I’ll get back on schedule…

And Kaiser tells me how to do the hearing aid deal. I pay 20% of cost, which seems reasonable.

My teen age granddaughter wants a Surface 2 with a pink keyboard. Shopping is crazy today but the most precious commodity here at Chaos Manor is time with some energy, so I am not worried about bargains. But I would appreciate suggestions about accessories that a teen age girl would think were cool. We raised four boys but no girls here so I am not much of an expert on what bright and sane teen age girls find cool. We’ll get the Surface 2 with pink keyboard. But what else is worth considering? I know Griffin makes some really cool stuff for Macs but she wants this since it has Office.

I’ll try to get to mail tonight. And some other stuff.

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