Mail 776 Monday, June 03, 2013

A short selection of mail. There’s a lot more piling up. I’ll see what I can get to.  Previously today we had a View.  http://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=14072

The IRS And The Iron Law

Jerry,

I gather you had distractions last week. I hope all’s well, or failing that, will be so again soon.

This article strikes me as the best summary of the problem at the IRS I’ve seen: "The IRS scandal as an example of runaway organizational culture", http://ace.mu.nu/archives/340553.php. He largely takes for granted capture of the organization by those more interested in perpetuating it than in properly carrying out its nominal task. The focus is on the organizational culture that then evolved. Money quotes:

"Liberal politics, statism, the primacy of the regulatory state: it’s just the water these people swim in."

"Instead of being a nonpartisan tax-collection and compliance agency, the IRS becomes an agent of Democrat Party ideology where tax compliance is the tool rather than the purpose of the agency."

"The organizational culture in American federal service has become not just partisan but positively messianic during the age of Obama — they’re doing it for your own good, whether you know it or not!"

"The tacit approval of Barack Obama and other powerful Democrat politicians removes any vestige of unease. It explains the near-complete lack of guilt or remorse shown so far by IRS management. In their minds, they are doing nothing wrong."

and

"The solution to this scandal is not to fire the likes of Lois Lerner (though that would be a good start). The answer is to abolish the agency entirely, and to make a concerted effort to shrink the size and reach of the entire federal government apparatus. For the federal government apparatus is not nonpartisan; it is and will continue to be predominately Democrat in culture. The federal government bureaucracy has been captured by Democrats in almost exactly the same way college campuses were captured."

More or less what I’ve been saying for decades: Decimate ‘em. Place a ten-year Constitutional sunset on all Federal acts and agencies.

Stagger it randomly to start; each year one-tenth of the government is abolished. If there’s a defensible need for it, the Congress can re-authorize it and start it over. If not, good riddance. And in ten years, the Congress has to, very publicly, decide again. No more unfireable bunny inspectors, no more mohair subsidies outliving their usefulness by a century, no more bureaucracies generations removed from their nominal missions.

It will be occasionally disruptive and expensive, yes. But far less so than what we’ve got.

Porkypine

That would do the job, but I fear that I have no advice on how to make it happen. Elect a dictator for a nine year period, with a small political – not judicial – review committee with limited powers, and stand well back – but the problem there is whether the Emperor you have created will let go, and whether anyone will after that respect the limits of the Constitution. We have reached a pretty critical point in the constitutional history of these United States.

I hope to be recovering from distractions. Thanks.

Phlogiston and Vulcan

Dr. Pournelle

When I studied physics as an undergraduate, the search was on for quarks. I recall an article appeared in, oh, Omni or Analog that reported a physicist had found quarks. He reported that quarks were several feet in diameter and colored purple and green and yellow. All that was needed to see quarks was a warm Caribbean beach, a fifth or two of whiskey, and a great willingness to see quarks. In the ’70s, that was your basic quark detector.

In the 19th century, Urbain Le Verrier calculated the orbit of Mercury using Newtonian mechanics. Unfortunately, the measurements of Mercury’s passage differed slightly but measurably from Le Verrier predictions. Le Verrier posited the existence of a small planet inside the orbit of Mercury to account for the difference in order to save Newtonian mechanics. Lo and behold, astronomers came up with observations that purported to confirm the existence of Vulcan. One was awarded the Legion d’Honneur for his work. Le Verrier died happy, content in the knowledge that Vulcan existed. Except it didn’t.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_(hypothetical_planet)

Before Vulcan, chemists proposed the existence of phlogiston to explain combustion. Once it became possible to accurately measure the weights of materials before and after combustion, some chemists proposed that phlogiston had negative weight in order to explain the increase in weight of burned materials. The old chemists did not give up phlogiston. They just died. A new generation grew up with newly discovered elements and the theory of oxidation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory

When I was an undergraduate, my professors said that the equations for mass traveling faster than c yielded meaningless answers. We students replied, No, they yielded negative imaginary mass. The professors said, That’s meaningless. We students replied, No, it is not meaningless; we just don’t know what it means. I have waited many years for one of my fellows to ascribe meaning to negative imaginary mass. I still wait.

Now I read that there is more Dark Matter and Dark Energy in the universe than there is . . . Light Matter and Light Energy, I guess. And that, like String Theory, it is untestable. In the cases of DM and DE because we can’t get handles on them using the tools of our world. Question: If we cannot observe or manipulate DM or DE, how is it that they interact with our world?

A suggestion: Let’s give DM and DE the dignity they deserve and call them phlogiston.

Surely there must be a physicist or six who has thought similar thoughts. If modern physics require phlogiston to save the equations, perhaps the equations are not worth saving.

"All models are wrong, but some are useful."

The Einsteinian model is still useful, but so is Newtonian mechanics. You can plot a course to the Moon and back without resort to Einstein’s theories. But at the boundaries, the Einsteinian model requires contortions that are literally incredible.

Perhaps as happened with phlogiston and Vulcan, advance will come when the current generation of physicists — who have their careers invested in this model — die. A younger generation will work up new theories to deal with the discrepancies at the boundaries. And those new theories will work until they find a new boundary. And then we shall begin the round again.

"Vanity of vanities. All is vanity! . . . and there is nothing new under the sun." Ecclesiastes 1:2 & 9

Live long and prosper

h lynn keith

Well done. I will add that if you assume that gravity has a propagation velocity of the speed of light (local speed of light; no need to assume it is universal through the Universe) then the shift in the Perihelion of Mercury is predictable and explained; you don’t need either General or Special Relativity to explain that observation.

I am working on a presentation of the evidence for and against the Expanding Universe. Meanwhile Tom Bethell’s presentation of Petr Beckmann’s aether theory, Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessary? () is a very good non-mathematical explication of the Beckmann theories. Beckmann contended not that Einstein was wrong, but that every observation used to confirm Einstein Relativity could be accounted for by Backmann’s assumption of the local gravitational field as the aether, and could do so with enormously simple math, simple algebra and calculus, no tensors required. Hilton Ratcliffe, an astronomer, in The Static Universe Exploding the Myth of Cosmic Expansion makes the case that there is very little observational evidence in favor of the hypothesis that large objects are moving away from each other at rates of 70 kilometers per second, but this applies only to relatively distant objects. It’s 70 km/second time the distance from Earth in megaparsecs. If you take this literally you will end up with objects moving away from each other at speeds approaching the speed of light. Ratcliffe makes the observational case well. More on that another time.

I can’t quite make myself believe that most of the universe is invisible.

An alternate view of what ended the war with Japan –

Jerry –

This essay makes a pretty compelling case that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had essentially nothing to do with ending the war with Japan.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/05/29/the_bomb_didnt_beat_japan_nuclear_world_war_ii

–Gary P.

You have to subscribe or register or something to read the article, so I didn’t bother, but before the login screen covered everything I saw the headline “The Bomb didn’t defeat Japan, Stalin did,” which as been the communist party line since my undergraduate days. I find it unlikely that it has any new data that we haven’t had for a long time. Given that even after the Emperor ordered them to lay down their arms thousands of Japanese Army officers committed ritual suicide, it’s unlikely that the predictable Russian entry into the war would have done the job – and it’s not at all certain that Stalin would have entered the war at all without the bomb. In any event, Truman had little choice. He was President of the United States.

Derbyshire: The Vast and the Tiny

http://spectator.org/archives/2013/05/29/the-vast-and-the-tiny/print

Well written book reviews.

100,000 Christian Martyrs A Year 

Jerry,

"A top Vatican official has said around 100,000 Christians are killed every year for reasons linked to their faith…" "Monsignor Silvano Maria Tomasi was quoted by Vatican radio on Tuesday as saying that the figures were "shocking" and "incredible"."

http://www.breitbart.com/system/wire/CNG—4fd7225a1fea039d4d9f6435239389ed—6b1

"Another senior Vatican figure, the secretary of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Mario Toso, said recently that discrimination against Christians "should be countered in the same way as anti-Semitism and Islamophobia"."

Hmm, ultimately that’s the Israeli Defense Forces and al Qaeda he’s talking about. Knights Templar II, anyone? One would hope closer to IDF style than al Qaeda…

Seriously, I’ve been wondering just how long we’ll keep on turning the other cheek to the growing outrages against local christians in various third-world hellholes. It’s getting harder to ignore in recent years.

Porkypine

I’m going to let you think for a bit before answering this. Most modern accounts of the Crusades are heavily biased against them just as most of those I read when growing up were romantically in favor. I still remember Scott’s Talisman. One book worth reading is Harold Lamb’s Iron Men and Saints, and its sequel The Flame of Islam; the two were collected into the composite work The Crusades, ut I have not seen any copies of the combined work for sale. The first volume is the best. They give a pretty good picture of what things were like at the time. Lamb was not a professional historian, which is to his advantage since he was a good writer.

SUBJ: US Moon Base Defense Manual 1959

https://www.smallarmsoftheworld.com/content/pdf/S00110.pdf

{Download PDF, 9.5MB}

"Moon Base project, US Army, 1959. Project Horizon- Phase I Report “A US Army Study for the Establishment of a Lunar Military Outpost” Volume

III: Military Operational Aspects (U). 8 June, 1959."

"This military manual/report analyzes the USSR threat to US interests on a Lunar base, and methods and weapons to defend and fight on the moon.

Trajectory of projectiles under the light Lunar gravity is addressed."

"Lunar weapons recommended to use against the Soviet threat are a pistol that fires a buckshot round to maximize spacesuit penetration; Handheld directional mines on a stick because “The rapid fall off of blast pressure in the vacuum” would not cause danger behind a stick held claymore type device. Claymore type weapons; and of course, the Davy Crockett nuclear launcher. The illustrations are outstanding, from the short-sleeve spacesuits to the “Deely-bobbers” on the helmets, assumed to be for communication. This manual is from the collection of the late Dr. Edward Ezell, and Col. John Starling discovered it in the reference library at Shrivenham, and shared it with us. It’s not a Confidential Report anymore, so enjoy! LMO Working Reference Library"

I hadn’t known that particular document had been declassified. Actually I haven’t thought about it for decades. Interesting. The only phrase I particularly remember from it was the conclusion that blast was not a good kill mechanism for the lunar environment. It was all pretty well speculation, of course.

: HSV-2 Swift,

Rode hard, put away wet, and still kickin’:

http://dams.defenseimagery.mil/lightbox/assetcolcreate.action?name=previewcol&id=ba219eae2788ce3cec5d21fc3a88751f66dda5f8&scope=request&nextpage=/vims_lbox_preview.jsp

Intelligence cubed

Truly, he must be the kwisatz haderach !

http://youtu.be/K_gHa2x2OQA

Russell Seitz

Fellow of the Department of Physics Harvard University

Depends on where you rank the ability to solve the Cube.

SUBJ: Cheesed off

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/10076336/Grandmother-wont-make-Double-Gloucester-for-cheese-rolling-event-after-heavy-handed-threats-from-police.html

"For some 200 years, people have chased a large rolling cheese down a steep hill each year in Gloucestershire, England. And for the past 25 years, Diana Smith, 86, has made the cheese wheel they chase. But Smith says she won’t make the cheese this year, after getting threatened by police. Three officers showed up at her home and warned her the event was dangerous and she would be held liable for any injuries suffered by those taking part in the chase."

Will there ever again be an England?

Cordially,

John

Which may explain why the Scots want their own Parliament and laws…

Subject: cold fusion

Jerry,

I haven’t had a round tuit yet to look at that article, I had it by email from a friend before you published and set it on the back

burner, and there it sits…

I’ll note that in the US, Blacklight Power (www.blacklightpower.com) has continued to impress investors, make press releases (though

the most recent is a year old), and publish papers on the web site ever since I first heard of them 17 years ago, with its claim of

a non-fusion based energy source which literally defies conventional quantum mechanics.

Jim

I am willing to believe that low temperature fusion is possible. I am not willing to believe that if it is achieved it can be kept a secret and needsto be surrounded by hocus pocus, and alas, all the cases I have heard of turn out to have reasons why the press can’t take some meters and thermometers and go have a look…

I wish it were all true but I also knew Bussard pretty well. He was an honest man — and didn’t try to hide what he was doing.

Jerry Pournelle

Chaos Manor

Low temperature fusion IS possible. We’re doing it every day in our laboratory, using commercially purchased apparatus. But it is not a breakeven device, by orders of magnitude.

Roger that – if they won’t let someone else make an honest measurement, it’s not a honest result.

Jim

Forbes

Hi Jerry,

Forbes moved to a "contributor" model last year. Anybody can sign up and get approved to be a "contributor", and at that point they have their soapbox under the Forbes brand name. See http://onforb.es/M8zjVk

That’s why you’re confused why "Forbes" is excited about the cold fusion guy. Forbes is not; there’s just a "Forbes contributor" who is excited about him. Forbes doesn’t edit the Forbes "contributors" at all, is my understanding.

I see this as really unfortunate; Forbes basically has sold out its name to be a blog hosting site.

Regards,

B

Thanks. I hadn’t realized that.

A word about the Oklahoma tornado, from Oklahoma

There has been much disinformation and propaganda in the national press that global warming somehow played a part in the recent devastating tornado in Moore, Oklahoma. However, quite the opposite is the case.

I have lived in Oklahoma for all of my 58 years and this has been the coolest spring in recent memory. The thunderstorms that spawn tornadoes here in Oklahoma are the result of cold air from the North (Rockies) colliding with warm moist air from the South (Gulf of Mexico). This spring we have had an abnormal amount of strong cold fronts coming down from the North as well as arriving much later in the season than usual.

Apparently this is not a local anomaly either. There is a report out that the mean temperature of the Northern hemisphere was in fact cooler in April than in March:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/04/uah-global-temperature-down-significantly/

Of course not much has been said about this cooler weather. After all, who wants a visit from the IRS?

Blair

Norman, Oklahoma

London Terrorists

Dr. Pournelle:

Regarding "Mons Meg" and [presumably] your idea of reviving the Indian Mutiny era practice of "firing from [not OUT of] guns", I have a far better idea.

We’re both old enough to remember that great cheesy Viking movie, "The Long Ships", with Richard Widmark and Sidney Poitier. I propose that all such terrorists, including Nidal Hassan and Dzhokar Tsarnaev, be given a ride on the "Mare of Steel". Since in the movie, it was the concoction of a Moorish prince (Poitier), it can hardly be called "Islamophobic". I see great pay-per-view potential…

Chris Morton

It does not appear likely…

Mail 773 Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Concerning the schools and discipline (see View http://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=13822)

And here is an excerpt from a Wiki article on Albert Einstein.

—————————-

When the family moved to Pavia, Einstein stayed in Munich to finish his studies at the Luitpold Gymnasium. His father intended for him to pursue electrical engineering <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_engineering> , but Einstein clashed with authorities and resented the school’s regimen and teaching method. He later wrote that the spirit of learning and creative thought were lost in strict rote learning <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rote_learning> .

—————————–

To me, part of the problem with the schools is underscored by the above. Certainly discipline is important, but not to the point of reactionary adherence to mindless rules.

I attended my girlfriends sons graduation many years ago. The Valedictorian of the class gave a scathing speech about how the schools suppress creative thought. That fit well into my education experience, and things have gotten worse, not better, since I was at school.

The well disciplined kids who want to learn might actually learn something: but they better want it pretty badly, because the teacher is busy apologizing for disciplining the defiant. I recall when the schools were primarily unfair to the brightest kids. I was one of them. But bright kids have a way of figuring out the system. It’s those who are right around average who need teacher attention, and are likely to fail without it, yet succeed with it.

I know what you mean with this and get where you are coming from, but keep in mind this is about a school system which suspends students for stuff like this.

http://www.newschannel5.com/story/14861326/boy-suspended-over-inhaler

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1998-05-03/news/1998123148_1_christine-airy-middle-school-asthma

http://jonathanturley.org/2012/05/24/students-goes-into-asthma-attack-but-school-nurse-refuses-to-let-him-use-inhaler-without-a-signed-parental-form-nurse-watches-with-inhaler-as-student-collapses/

To me there is a difference between mouthing off and petitioning for redress of grievances.

There is a line between the two where one becomes the other.

Very few Einsteins involved here. I am concerned about the future plumber or book keeper who ends up at MacDonald’s because she can’t read, and she can’t read because the teacher wasn’t able to teach her because Mr. Valentine wanted to socialize with her.

Jerry Pournelle

Chaos Manor

I get it, but was Mr Valentine ‘socializing’ or discussing chemical bonding?

The article was not clear to me on that, but it is what I was alluding to.

Having spent my first eight years of growing up in a school system intended for farm worker children before being sent off to a bright kids high school, I can only tell you that this “suppression” of creativity didn’t really happen with me – it was more a case of “learn self discipline or we’ll make you learn it” and that, as it turns out, was probably all to the good. The real problem of bright kids in average schools is that the school work is so easy that they develop sloppy work habits that have to be corrected when they finally reach a place where being bright is not considered a defect and being smarter than the teacher a discipline problem.

But oddly enough here I am not as concerned about the bright kids – we tend to survive once we understand the rules – as I am the normal and even bright normal who really need some school instruction, but who won’t get it because the teacher has other things to do. My suspicion is that if Mr. Valentine wanted to discuss chemical bonding and electron orbits with his classmates the teacher would be overjoyed; the few quotes from the newspaper article indicate that he was more interested in his right to talk back to the teacher than in carbon rings.

I was fortunate enough to grow up in a system that didn’t tolerate undisciplined behavior in the classroom, and had the means of enforcement including corporal punishment. I didn’t need a lot of the classroom instruction. I had always read the textbooks ahead of the class discussion and often looked up the matter in the Encyclopedia Britannica, so I didn’t expect to be told anything by my 1-8 grade Normal School graduate teachers anything I didn’t already know. It was pretty clear to me that my mission was to survive, and what I was learning was the rules for doing that. It was a bit of a shock when I got to CBC and found teachers who knew one hell of a lot more than I did about just about everything, and who wouldn’t put up with my usual tactic of keeping just ahead of the class. They not only expected more from me, they made it clear that they would get more, my alternative being painfully worse. Of course dedicated teachers like the Christian Brothers of that era are a bit thin on the ground now. Not extinct, but harder to find.

But the teachers in Capleville were also dedicated, at least to keeping order in the class, and to getting the standards expected by the school district, and while those were not especially high, our Sixth Grade reader had stories that half the high school students in California can’t read. They didn’t get those results because they were all that good or that smart – they got them because they were told they could get them, and they expected them, and they were not going to let the local smart guy – like me – distract everyone else in the class from learning. I might have read more about Sir Walter Scott than anyone in the room including the teacher, but I wasn’t allowed to share my literary insights while Irma Cottanio was reciting, and if I knew more about who The Douglas was than the teacher, that wasn’t the point. The point was that Irma deserved her education as much as I did, even if her ambition was to marry and manage a farm and a household. Of course the teachers weren’t going to let Chuck Holmes pester her either. Discipline was expected and demanded.

I am aware that what we considered an orderly and normal school might be thought by some progressives as an over-disciplined concentration camp insisting on rote learning; but our teachers were at least empowered to keep their classes orderly, and if only a few in the class appreciated the flawed nobility of Roderick Dhu, they all bloody well learned to recite some of Scott’s lines, and if Chuck wanted to waste everyone’s time he soon learned better even if his father had six hundred acres. And if you learn to love The Lady of the Lake a whole new world opens to you. “Seek other cause ‘gainst Roderick Dhu!’

The purpose of a school system is to deliver at school leaving a population who have learned some self discipline, have learned to read, write, and cipher, and learned the basic structure of the civil government. And with luck to have learned something of the national saga and to have some appreciation of the importance of civil order, and to have developed some of the habits of good citizenship. Of course no one thinks that way now.

Incidentally the Los Angeles School District board just voted to forbid suspension of students for defiance, so perhaps we will learn something of what comes of that. I don’t predict that it will be for the good. But perhaps we’ll have more drugs for the boys in the classes.

Educating Damien

I agree that suspending the little xxx probably isn’t a good idea, he probably just enjoys a chance to goof off. Exchanging letters just plain won’t do any good, and what makes these people think the target kiddies even know how to read, anyway? That whole article sounds like something from The Onion. Bring back corporal punishment. A good whupping will get the point across.

Man Mountain Molehill

Well, I wouldn’t put it quite that way but I do think that one reason for investing as much as we do in the public schools is to instill a certain self-discipline into the pupils.

Here’s the "Religion Of Peace" showing exactly how peaceful they are, at a British WWII Military Cemetery in Libya.

Every time a joke and or cartoon is made about the Koran, the whole world turns upside down, and we are all called racists! However, these "peaceful Muslims" appear to do whatever they like and no one says anything.

Watch the video while it’s available, before Obama makes sure it’s removed.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/RtgbvotqVFE?rel=0

Nick

The Fantastic Mr Feynman

Hi Jerry

The BBC recently aired a program to roughly coincide with what would have been Richard Feynman’s 95th Birthday (and coincidentally my 54th birthday).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p016d3kk

You may not be able to watch the video outside of the UK, but I’m sure that it’s going to be available somewhere else online and maybe it will be shown in the US, if it hasn’t been already.

Best wishes

Paul Dove

It plays just fine here. Thanks for pointing it out.

Ice Tsunamis

"… longtime locals told him they couldn’t remember anything similar since the 1950s."

…

"You know you’ve got cement, concrete blocks and steel, and the ice goes through it like it’s just a toothpick," Dennis Stykalo, who also lost a home to the ice, told the CBC. "It just shows the power. There is nothing you can do; you just get out of the way and just watch."

http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/13/us/ice-tsunamis/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

Perhaps being warmer isn’t as bad as we thought. It certainly beats an ice age. Of course, this will undoubtedly be one of the warmest years on record. If this global warming gets any worse, I’m going to freeze to death.

Braxton S. Cook

I don’t think I have ever seen anything like this before.

‘This Week’ Roundtable on ABC.

George Will, Ret. Gen. James Cartwright, Ruth Marcus, and Jonathan Karl.

It’s nice to see a reasoned discussion and to hear General Cartwright’s opinion.

http://abcn.ws/163iB3F

Regards,

John Harlow

Re: A Little Pre-Ice Age Action

Jerry,

See the video at the end of the brief article. If you have kids around be warned of a spontaneous F-word near the end.

Regards,

George

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/11/still-waiting-for-spring-in-minnesota/

How to spot a murderer’s brain:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/may/12/how-to-spot-a-murderers-brain

“What are we to do, for example, Eagleman asked, with the fact that "if you are a carrier of one particular set of genes, the probability that you will commit a violent crime is four times as high as it would be if you lacked those genes. You’re three times as likely to commit a robbery, five times as likely to commit aggravated assault, eight times as likely to be arrested for murder and 13 times as likely to be arrested for a sexual offence. The overwhelming majority of prisoners carry these genes; 98.1% of death row inmates do… Can we honestly say that the carriers of those genes have exactly the same range of choices in their behaviour as those who do not possess them? And if they do not, should they be judged and punished by the same standard?"

Of course, one might say that if you are born this way, you have a heightened responsibility to work on curbing your impulses. But then, that is not a very PC answer. Instead, we have:

“Raine’s work is full of this kind of statistic and this kind of question. (One of his more startling findings is the extraordinarily high level of psychopathic markers among employees of a temping agency he studied, which came as no surprise to him. "Psychopaths can’t settle, they need to move around, look for new stimulation," he says.) He draws on a number of studies that show the links between brain development, in particular – and brain injury and impairment by extension – and criminal violence. Already legal defence teams, particularly in the US, are using brain scans and neuroscience as mitigating evidence in the trials of violent criminals and sex offenders. In this sense, Raine believes a proper public debate on the implications of his science is long overdue.”

And then ironically (or perhaps not):

“Raine was in part drawn to his discipline by his own background. In the course of scanning his murderers, Raine also examined his own PET profile and found, somewhat to his alarm, that the structure of his brain seemed to share more characteristics with the psychopathic murderers than with the control group.

“He laughs quickly when I ask how that discovery felt. "When you have a brain scan that looks like a serial killer’s it does give you pause," he says. And there were other factors: he has always had a markedly low heart rate (which his research has shown to be a truer indicator of a capacity for violence than, say, smoking is as a cause of lung cancer). He was plagued by cracked lips as a child, evidence of riboflavin deficiency (another marker); he was born at home; he was a blue baby, all factors in the kind of developmental difficulties that might set his own researcher’s alarm bells ringing.

"So," he says, "I was on the spectrum. And in fact I did have some issues. I was taken to hospital aged five to have my stomach pumped because I had drunk a lot of alcohol. From age nine to 11 I was pretty antisocial, in a gang, smoking, letting car tyres down, setting fire to mailboxes, and fighting a lot, even though I was quite small. But at that age I burnt out of that somehow. At 11, I changed schools, got more interested in studying and really became a different sort of kid. Still, when I was graduating and thinking ‘what shall I research?’, I looked back on the essays I’d written and one of the best was on the biology of psychopaths; I was fascinated by that, partly, I think, because I had always wondered about that early behaviour in myself."

“Despite his unusual brain structure, he didn’t have the low IQ that is often apparent in killers, or any cognitive dysfunction. Still, as he worked for four years interviewing people in prison, a lot of the time he was thinking: what stopped me being on their side of the bars?

“Raine’s biography, then, was a good corrective to the seductive idea that our biology is our fate and that a brain scan can tell us who we are. Even as he piles up evidence to show that people are not the free-thinking, rational agents they like to imagine themselves to be – entirely liberated from the limitations set by our inherited genes and our particular neuroanatomy – he never forgets that lesson. The question remains, however, that if these "biomarkers" do exist and exert an influence – and you begin to see the evidence as incontrovertible – then what should we do about them?

The field is called “neurocriminology.” There is much more in the article.

Ed

This continues a long tradition of trying to find the reasons for criminality. The problem is that a free society has to be built on the premise that people have choices, and are to be held responsible for what they do.

Aristotle teaches us that we learn courage by acting brave. That sums up nicely the deepest belie of Western Civilization: you can choose to act in a way so that you develop desired habits. It is why we have “reform” institutions and places to be penitent, and be rehabilitated (only the Western tradition until recently was that you had to rehabilitate yourself). The assumption in AA is that you have to want to be sober. You may fail, but if you don’t want to succeed you will not. There is a place for will in the divine scheme.

Science continues to undermine this basic belief or to try to do so; but the more it succeeds the more it appears that a free civilization is impossible.

don’t ever speak to a federal agent]

Hi Jerry,

A reminder this is not the country you grew up in.

Protect Yourself from FBI Manipulation (w/attorney Harvey Silverglate) http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jgDsbjAYXcQ (7 minutes)

No, it’s not, is it>? The Martha Stewart case hangs over the constitution…

Several houses were destroyed, the Winnipeg Free Press <http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/Ice-destroys-several-homes-along-Da-207043001.html> reports, after "a massive ice floe rose out of Dauphin Lake" in central Canada. One local homeowner described the ice’s arrival as "so powerful that it plowed through his two-storey home, pushing furniture from one bedroom into another. It pushed the bathroom tub and vanity into the hallway."

This kind of reverse-Titanic moment occurred just as the gentleman had sat down to watch TV: "Then he heard the ice coming."

Photos and more:

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/Ice-destroys-several-homes-along-Da-207043001.html

The Sound of Silence

Dr Pournelle

Have you noticed what you are not hearing?

Nothing is issuing from the insane asylum that is North Korea.

All the saber rattling earlier this year was for internal consumption. Construct a foreign threat so that the people will be distracted from the fact that they are, you know, starving.

April is the key month. All the food reserves of the previous year have been exhausted and the spring harvest has not come. The rulers of the DPRK rattle sabers to distract the people from their plight.

When the sabers rattle in March, the DPRK will survive. When the sabers rattle in February, the DPRK may survive. When the sabers rattle in January, game over.

Place your bets before the windows close.

Stay tuned for next year’s saber rattling.

Live long and prosper

h lynn keith

It is quiet over there, isn’t it?

The problem is, no one wants North Korea. At least not all that much.  Germany absorbed the East without too much economic turmoil although it did leave less to give to the Greeks and Cypriots and Italians and Spanish to bail them out so that they can continue to have 6 week vacations.l..

“It starts to change the relationship between the citizen and state, you do have to get permission to do things.”

<http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/05/immigration-reform-dossiers/>

I’m not generally a big fan of the ACLU, but in this case, they’re spot-on.

–

Roland Dobbins

The ACLU was not always entirely dominated by its present ideology. An organization dedicated to defense of constitutional liberties ought to be important and popular. But it has to be dedicatged to all of those…

The following was from "The Accident", a story from "More Tales of Pirx the Pilot", by Stanislaw Lem:

"He conjured up that legendary, wordless, mythical situation that everyone – Pirx included – now knew would never come to pass: a revolt of robots. And knowing with a tacit certitude that he would have taken their side, he fell asleep, somehow exonerated."

Wowsers! I see in these two sentences an entire novel. The robots rebel

- _and_some_people_take_their_side_!

I read this in the public library in Memphis about 1940.  I have never forgotten it:

We had expected everything but revolt
And I kind of wonder myself when they started thinking–
But there’s no dice in that now.
I’ve heard fellow say
They must have planned it for years and maybe they did.
Looking back, you can find little incidents here and there,
Like the concrete-mixer in Jersey eating the wop
Or the roto press that printed ‘Fiddle-dee-dee!’
In a three-color process all over Senator Sloop,
Just as he was making a speech. The thing about that
Was, how could it walk upstairs? But it was upstairs,
Clicking and mumbling in the Senate Chamber.
They had to knock out the wall to take it away
And the wrecking-crew said it grinned.
It was only the best
Machines, of course, the superhuman machines,
The ones we’d built to be better than flesh and bone,
But the cars were in it, of course . . .
and they hunted us
Like rabbits through the cramped streets on that Bloody Monday,
The Madison Avenue busses leading the charge.
The busses were pretty bad–but I’ll not forget
The smash of glass when the Duesenberg left the show-room
And pinned three brokers to the Racquet Club steps
Or the long howl of the horns when they saw men run,
When they saw them looking for holes in the solid ground . . .
I guess they were tired of being ridden in
And stopped and started by pygmies for silly ends,
Of wrapping cheap cigarettes and bad chocolate bars
Collecting nickels and waving platinum hair
And letting six million people live in a town.
I guess it was tha, I guess they got tired of us
And the whole smell of human hands.
But it was a shock
To climb sixteen flights of stairs to Art Zuckow’s office
(Noboby took the elevators twice)
And find him strangled to death in a nest of telephones,
The octopus-tendrils waving over his head,
And a sort of quiet humming filling the air. . . .
Do they eat? . . . There was red . . . But I did not stop to look.
I don’t know yet how I got to the roof in time
And it’s lonely, here on the roof.
For a while, I thought
That window-cleaner would make it, and keep me company.
But they got him with his own hoist at the sixteenth floor
And dragged him in, with a squeal.
You see, they coöperate. Well, we taught them that
And it’s fair enough, I suppose. You see, we built them.
We taught them to think for themselves.
It was bound to come. You can see it was bound to come.
And it won’t be so bad, in the country. I hate to think
Of the reapers, running wild in the Kansas fields,
And the transport planes like hawks on a chickenyard,
But the horses might help. We might make a deal with the horses.
At least, you’ve more chance, out there.
And they need us, too.
They’re bound to realize that when they once calm down.
They’ll need oil and spare parts and adjustments and tuning up.
Slaves? Well, in a way, you know, we were slaves before.
There won’t be so much real difference–honest, there won’t.
(I wish I hadn’t looked into the beauty-parlor
And seen what was happening there.
But those are female machines and a bit high-strung.)
Oh, we’ll settle down. We’ll arrange it. We’ll compromise.
It won’t make sense to wipe out the whole human race.
Why, I bet if I went to my old Plymouth now
(Of course you’d have to do it the tactful way)
And said, ‘Look here! Who got you the swell French horn?’
He wouldn’t turn me over to those police cars;
At least I don’t think he would.
Oh, it’s going to be jake.
There won’t be so much real difference–honest, there won’t–
And I’d go down in a minute and take my chance–
I’m a good American and I always liked them–
Except for one small detail that bothers me
And that’s the food proposition. Because, you see,
The concrete-mixer may have made a mistake,
And it looks like just high spirits.
But, if it’s got so they like the flavor . . . well . . .

Stephen Vincent Benet

Preference Cascade, or Fit Of Pique?

Jerry,

"There is a bit of a lull in news about the Benghazi affair." Heh. The White House press corps tore Jay Carney several new ones over Benghazi prevarications today.

The proximate cause was an ABC report that far from one minor stylistic fix as Carney maintains, ABC now has a dozen successive edited versions of the original Benghazi talking points, with much substance removed, along with considerable information about who removed it.

Not news to anyone who’s been following the story with the few outfits going after it before today. But a breakthrough for the mainstream press.

Much as I’d like to think we’re seeing a preference cascade (the crowd all at once says to each other "wow, the Emperor’s naked") it still could just be a temporary fit of pique by the WH press corps over having been massively misled. Never underestimate the MSM’s ability to once again suspend disbelief and cover for this gang, once they’ve vented.

But then there’s also the IRS’s sudden confession that they brought raw partisan politics into evaluating Tea Party non-profit applications last year. Again, no surprise to us curmudgeons, but new to the mainstream.

Maybe the MSM won’t be able to suspend that much disbelief all at once? Nahh – I have great faith in their collective reinsert-head-in-sand skills.

cynically

Porkypine

Mail 770 Wednesday, April 17, 2013

First a few words on security:

WordPress Attack

Dr. Pournelle:

It appears there is an attack against WordPress installations that is placing a phony ’500′ error page on the site that allows additional commands to be executed. I don’t have all the details yet, but one report indicates that there is a brute-force password guessing attack against the ‘admin’ user of a WordPress site.

The ‘admin’ user is created by default on a WordPress installation; that user has full privileges to the WordPress installation. If the owner has chosen a weak password, or ohe that is easily guessed, then the attacker would get full admin privileges to the WordPress site, including the administrative area.

WordPress login process allows for brute force attacks; an unsuccessful login will just let you try again. There might be some delays if you try brute-force logins, but it is possible to keep on trying a WP login.

The attack will put a phony ’500.php’ file in your site root (and perhaps other places). So a search for those files might be prudent. Delete any that contain unfamiliar code.

Initially, it looks like many sites that have been successfully attacked are also not current in their WordPress version level. So, prevention would indicate these steps:

1) Create a new ‘admin-level’ user with a strong non-dictionary type password.

2) Log in as that user to ensure that all is OK

3) When logged in as the new admin-level user, demote the user ‘admin’ to the lowest level. Leave the user there just to irritate the hacker.

4) Ensure that your hosting account, and any FTP accounts, have strong passwords. Strongly consider changing FTP passwords.

5) Don’t use an FTP client that stores passwords in plain text. (WinFTP does this.). I recommend WinSCP (open source, free) which encrypts FTP credentials.

6) Ensure your WordPress installation is current. Update all themes and plugins on a regular basis.

And the usual precautions on your home computer: Windows updates, Application updates (Secunia Personal Software Inspector is recommended), uninstall Java (if it is not needed; Javascript is OK), don’t clck or open unfamiliar attachments, etc.

(BTW, your site is OK. I already did the mitigations noted above when I set up the WordPress installation.)

Regards, Rick Hellewell, Security Geek and your faithful web guy

HEAR AND BELIEVE

I view all mail in plaintext and never follow links until I have some reason to assume it’s safe; and I see a lot of intriguing new phishing schemes lately. It’s getting bad out there.

And this just in:

Identity Theft

Hi Jerry,

We hear a lot about identity theft but here’s a statistic to chill the blood, from the Senate committee testimony of National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson on April 16 –

"Yet despite the revamped identity theft victim assistance procedures, more stringent filters, and improved cooperation with the private sector, the volume of identity theft returns continues to grow at an alarming rate. The IRS had more than 1.25 million identity theft cases in inventory as of the end of February 2013, a sharp increase from a year ago, when the volume was less than 235,000 cases."

Then, imagine how many more there are that don’t lead to an IRS contact.

–Mike

Re Dark Matter & Dark Energy

Dr Pournelle,

At <http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1068>, Eric Raymond relates this anecdote:

“In 1992 I was an invited speaker at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Yes, this was five years before I was famous; what I was doing there was a seminar on advanced Emacsing. My sponsor, the astrophysicist Piet Hut, took me around to meet a number of the stellar eminences at the Institute.

“One of them was a cosmologist whose name I don’t remember. We chatted for a while – he was doing interesting work on the apparent quantization of red-shift distributions. Then I said to him, ‘Oh, by the way, I know what dark matter is made from.’

“Eying me dubiously, he said, ‘What?’

“I said, ‘Phlogiston.’

“He damn near fell out of his chair laughing.”

—Joel Salomon

I can I suppose accept dark matter, although it’s a stretch – why isn’t there a lot of it around here, and why isn’t it making the solar system deviate from Newton? – but dark energy isn’t anything I can get my head around. I still believe in experimental evidence rather than the beauty of equations or lack thereof…

Henry Vanderbilt on last weekend’s Space Access conference and the future of man in space:

Despair is a sin, as you’ve mentioned more than once. Worse, in this case it’s an error. We’re actually doing remarkably well as far as development of reusable transport goes, at least compared to where we were fifteen years ago when X-33 had just eaten everything. It’s just that it’s mostly not in the government, most of it subject to the eccentricities of its private sponsors, and much of it grossly underfunded.

That last is my immediate worry – Armadillo has already been set back a year because they couldn’t afford to build the canonical three copies of their "Stig-B" test vehicle, XCOR will shortly be betting the company on the one copy of Lynx they can afford, and even the (relatively) lavishly funded Virgin will have problems if they break their first "SpaceShip 2".

SpaceX’s reusability tests strike me as sincere but still secondary; they’re funded at a level justifiable by the FUD they inspire in competitors, not (yet at least) as something primary to the company. And Blue Origin remains an enigma. What little comes out does not convey to me a sense of urgency, FWIW.

Jess Sponable going back to DARPA is potentially good also, though he’s been frustrated in his attempts to do something useful before. Mitchell Burnside Clapp, by the way, is also at DARPA these days, running an air-launched reusable project called ALASA – he was going to come out and talk about it till his travel budget got sequestered.

My chief hope is still the small startups, the XCORs, Armadillos, and Mastens – they’re the ones most closely focused on low-cost fast-turnaround reusability. Chronically underfunded, as I said. If you know someone who might want to support a non-profit strategic investment fund to the tune of a few tens of millions, I could do a huge amount of good there. (It’d probably make a considerable profit too, in the long run, which could then be applied to the next step outward.)

I’m recovering from a bug that hit me Monday – the perils of being one of your own mike-runners; I effectively traded bugs with 50% of everyone who had a question at the conference. I’ll have to check and see how Tim Kyger is doing; he drove out from Albuquerque to help out this year, and collected the other 50%. Having mike-runners who know the players is priceless, though.

I’m currently reading "Lenin, Hitler, and Stalin – The Age Of Social Catastrophe" by Gellately – part of my last few years walkabout through twentieth century history. Very interesting so far for the tactical details; that sort of thing tends to get glossed over.

Hmm, well, I must be feeling better; I’ve gone on far too long.

Henry

In other words, little has changed, and actually that’s progress. Moore’s Law continues: of the three major fields in space exploration, control and avionics gets better whether we like it or not, structures get stronger and lighter as everyone experiments with materials, and there are advances in reliability and manufacturing of propulsion. Operations improve.

Bob Bussard said a long time ago that we already did the easy stuff. He was prophetic, but we seem through some of that phase. In the 70’s we underestimated how hard things would be, but we also had the costs of the standing army to bear. Now the Navy and Air Force need mission capabilities and NASA doesn’t even pretend to be able to make them. This is the right time for real X program: develop the technology and let industry apply it to mission oriented spacecraft. Some of those missions will turn out to be commercial.

: How NASA brought the monstrous F-1 “moon rocket” engine back to life

Here’s an article you may be interested in reading:

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-monstrous-f-1-moon-rocket-back-to-life/

and another related article on the developing F-1B engine:

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/new-f-1b-rocket-engine-upgrades-apollo-era-deisgn-with-1-8m-lbs-of-thrust/

- Paul

Rocketdyne F-1 lives!

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-monstrous-f-1-moon-rocket-back-to-life/

An absolutely brilliant article. Puts many rumors to rest about the plans for Apollo being lost–and underscores yet again how Apollo was an amazing achievement in both design and execution.

I was shocked to hear up-rated F-1B was not only done, but tested.

The details on the gas generator and the turbopumps was astonishing.

Apollo lives!

a wonderful article on bringing the F1 engine back to life

You’ll love it.

Phil

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-monstrous-f-1-moon-rocket-back-to-life/

Indeed. And they’re cheaper now. In that sense Apollo was an X project. We learned a lot from Apollo. Propulsion wasn’t my thucktun, but I got to watch some of that development. We learned a lot about human factors until NASA froze the spacesuit designs and lost a lot of the progress the Ames people had made. Not lost forever, though.

And I would love to have some reports on this one:

Space program simulation game

I thought that you may find this interesting. From the review; “You’re given rocket parts, a space center, a solar system of planets and moons, and you’re left to find your own fun. Orbit the planet? Go to the moon? Throw a kerbanaut into the sun? Build a space-jet? Make a giant tower of fuel tanks and blow them up? Whatever.”

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=19396

Edward Armstrong

If I get a chance I’ll try it, but perhaps someone has more time…

SAGE,

Jerry

Cold War-era command center that once guarded the nation up for sale in Cicero, NY:

http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2013/04/cold_war-era_command_center_th.html

And why is this interesting? It’s an old SAGE complex.

“Keeping with the goal of survivability, the buildings have no windows. Not a single one. From the outside, they look like big concrete bunkers that could survive nearly anything the old Soviet Union could have thrown at it.” “Evertz said records storage is still probably the best use for the buildings.”

Kind of a follow-up to last week.

Ed

I recall visiting operating SAGE installations. They did it all with brute force.

Looking at the Rocketdyne F-1 Engine Again

Jerry,

Very interesting article.

Regards, Charles Adams, Bellevue, NE

<http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-monstrous-f-1-moon-rocket-back-to-life/>

"….Watching the test

On the morning of February 20 I found myself perched on a set of metal bleachers under an iron-gray Huntsville sky, with the thermometer reading 33ºF-quite a bit cooler than this Texas boy is used to enduring, especially since the wind wouldn’t stop gusting. The payoff was that the observation area sat only a short distance from the gas generator test stand. Through a clearing in a row of evergreens and scrub, separated from us by a dirt path, I saw the test stand itself: a jungle-gym pile of metal and pipes, with personnel scurrying around to make last-minute adjustments.

The gas generator test firing I was there to witness was neither the first nor the last, but it still drew a hefty crowd of folks-civil servants, family members, and no small number of Dynetics/PWR employees. As the clock ticked down toward firing, we packed ourselves into the rickety bleachers and the buzz of conversation gradually quieted; I focused on holding my camera steady and trying not to touch any of the exposed metal of the heavy (and freezing) telephoto lens.

And see:

New F-1B rocket engine upgrades Apollo-era design with 1.8M lbs of thrust <http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/new-f-1b-rocket-engine-upgrades-apollo-era-deisgn-with-1-8m-lbs-of-thrust/>

Gallery: Behind the scenes at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center <http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/gallery-behind-the-scenes-at-nasas-marshall-space-flight-center/>

More on the F-1B monster. If we need them we can build them.

* * *

Fast trip to Mars

Interesting news: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/10/nasa_fusion_engine_fast_mars_trip/

Michael Lund Markussen

airplanes, cell phones and Ordnung.

One more email on using cell phones/electronic devices on airplanes and Ordnung.

Recently I took a flight on American airlines from Atlanta to Miami. We stopped short of the gate and the pilot announced that another plane was still at our assigned gate and we would wait just short of the gate until it was free. You could see the gate and plane. I was sitting in an aisle seat. A man on the other side aisle seat and two rows up, pulled out a cell phone and started to make a call. The stewardess scurried up to him and told him to turn it off. She said that Federal regulations prohibit using cell phones until the cabin doors were opened. She went on to say that he was endangering our lives because the phone could cause problems with the avionics. He laughed at her and said we can see the gate, if my phone messes up the avionics, tell the pilot to maintain current altitude and go to VFR. I started laughing (remember we are sitting on the ground), getting a glare from the stewardess. At that point she threatened to have security arrest him when he deplaned for interfering with the flight crew, if he did not comply. He wisely turned the phone off while shaking his head at the stupidity.

Mike J.

Wise move on his part. The flight attendants aren’t engineers…

a case of importance and horror

http://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2013/04/13/gosnellgate/?singlepage=true

The main stream media is suppressing it so that people don’t question their pro-choice stance.

Phil

Boston Marathon Bombing

Another possible connection; Israel’s Independence Day began at sunset on April 15. Allowing for time zone changes, the bomb went off just about the time that Independence Day began in Jerusalem. (In the Hebrew calendar, the new "day" begins at sunset.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yom_Ha%27atzmaut

Ken Mitchell

Presumably someone will come take credit for it. We’ll just have to wait.

It’s Tax Time

Hello Jerry,

"It’s tax week, and I’m up to the ears."

When a citizen of your undoubted competence is ‘up to their ears in taxes’ for a week (or more), trying to comply with a tax code that NO ONE understands, it kinda reminds me of this, from ‘Dr. Floyd Ferris’:

"“There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed or enforced nor objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt.”

I think that ‘Dr. Ferris’ would be very pleased with the ‘progress’ that the US has made in the 56 years that it has been ‘progressing’ since he made the above observation in 1957. The tax code provides a prime example of WHY.

But, as we have learned to our sorrow, the ‘progressives’ who now rule us can always find new facets of our lives which require additional governmental ‘progress’, so they continue beavering away, apparently ad infinitum. One thing about progressives: they are all about progress, but as long as there is ONE citizen out there who insists on inhaling and exhaling on his own schedule, they will never have ‘arrived’.

Bob Ludwick

I won’t argue. Liberals are worried that someone, somewhere, is doing something without permission. That was Bill Buckley’s mot juste a long time ago. It seems to be true, but add that they worry that someone is doing something without paying a tax on it.

This should have been posted last week, but I was busy.

debt limits and hyperventilation

Dear Mr. Pournelle;

I’ve been reluctant to comment on a recent posting, but it continues to disturb me. To quote several paragraphs:

"You may get death threats, so many you’ll lose count, and there may well be actual attempts on your life. Don’t forget, the Chicago gang is in town and they play very rough. The more public you are, the less they may target you. The CorruptMedia will oppo-research every hidden nook and cranny of your life to smear and expose whatever dirt they can find on you.

You must understand that America now has a government run by gangsters – by crooks, thieves, looters, and thugs who will be utterly ruthless in ruining you if you try to be in their way. Putin’s Russia, Chavez’s Venezuela, has come to America; and the Chicago gang and the cartels have come to D.C.

So if you don’t have the courage to band together and stand up to them, quit now. They can’t spend money you don’t give them. They will do whatever it takes, legal or illegal, to force you to give it to them."

I’m aware that you noted it needed to be toned down; thank you. However, I think extravagant rhetoric like this is highly destructive. As citizens, we are NOT each other’s enemies; rhetoric like this seems to me to serve no purpose except to estrange us.

Also, I note that the original posting was apparently anonymous. My experience is that anonymous letters deserve neither attention nor publicity. They are not an invitation to discussion; there’s no way to reply. They’re more on the order of a tantrum.

Regarding the actual topic of the note: while I agree that spending needs to be brought under control, I believe that the time to do that is *before* we spend the money, not after. Anyone considering not raising the debt limit enough for us to pay the bills ought to consider the probable unintended consequences of such a strategy.

Okay, we’ll be paying the bills with borrowed money. That irritates me; but, again, the time to fix that is before we make the expenditures. Not honoring our debts is *not* heroic; it would simply mean that the "full faith and credit" of the United States was thenceforth worthless. The consequences of such a declaration would, I think, be rather abruptly ruinous.

Thank you for your consideration –

Allan E. Johnson

Something like this is needed once in a while…

Scott Turow’s take on the ‘publishing revolution’

Jerry:

I came across this article in my daily readings and it appears that the American author is indeed becoming an endangered species.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/opinion/the-slow-death-of-the-american-author.html?pagewanted=all&_r=3&

Mr. Turow’s conclusion is a bit chilling -

"Last October, I visited Moscow and met with a group of authors who described the sad fate of writing as a livelihood in Russia. There is only a handful of publishers left, while e-publishing is savaged by instantaneous piracy that goes almost completely unpoliced. As a result, in the country of Tolstoy and Chekhov, few Russians, let alone Westerners, can name a contemporary Russian author whose work regularly affects the national conversation.

"The Constitution’s framers had it right. Soviet-style repression is not necessary to diminish authors’ output and influence. Just devalue their copyrights"

John L.

I am going to leave this in the queue because I still have hopes of commenting on it, but it has waited long enough. I don’t know the current status of Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak in Russia today. It is a chilling thought. Turow is president of the author’s guild. I have not noticed significant comment on this from SFWA.

And we end with

A Coyote Tale…

The Governor of California is jogging with his dog along a nature trail. A coyote jumps out and attacks the Governor’s dog, then bites the Governor.

The Governor starts to intervene, but reflects upon the movie "Bambi" and then realizes he should stop because the coyote is only doing what is natural.

He calls Animal Control. Animal Control captures the coyote and bills the State $200 testing it for diseases and $500 for relocating it.

He calls a veterinarian. The vet collects the dead dog and bills the State $200 testing it for diseases.

The Governor goes to hospital and spends $3,500 getting checked for diseases from the coyote and on getting his bite wound bandaged.

The running trail gets shut down for 6 months while Fish & Game conducts a $100,000 survey to make sure the area is now free of dangerous animals.

The Governor spends $50,000 in state funds implementing a "coyote awareness program" for residents of the area.

The State Legislature spends $2 million to study how to better treat rabies and how to permanently eradicate the disease throughout the world.

The Governor’s security agent is fired for not stopping the attack. The State spends $150,000 to hire and train a new agent with additional special training regarding the nature of coyotes.

PETA protests the coyote’s relocation and files a $5 million suit against the State.

TEXAS:

The Governor of Texas is jogging with his dog along a nature trail. A coyote jumps out and attacks his dog.

The Governor shoots the coyote with his State-issued pistol and keeps jogging. The Governor has spent $0.50 on a .45 ACP hollow point cartridge.

The buzzards eat the dead coyote.

And that, my friends, is why California is broke and Texas is not.

Mail 768 Thursday, March 28, 2013

Every now and then I am reminded that I covered a pile of subjects long ago and most of that remains available if a bit obscured. I recently had reason to dig about in my old Reports, and found this one which is still quite current: The Voodoo Sciences

Things That Go Thump In The Easter Parade

Dear Jerry :

What stands four feet tall, weighs fifty pounds, and has a price on its head in North Korea?

The Easter Bunny:

http://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-rabbit-wars-if-kim-jong-il-seems.html

–

Russell Seitz

You just can’t help some people…

Morale: Korean Roulette,

Jerry

Apparently the South Koreans have finally come up with a way to deter Northern aggression – threatening statues:

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htmoral/articles/20130328.aspx

An interesting notion, akin to building monuments.

Ed

Interesting. Let us hope it works. Of course the North Korean system reminds me of Kipling

It has been a while since I put up a copy of this. It’s time again:

Dane-Geld
A.D. 980-1016
By
Rudyard Kipling

It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation
To call upon a neighbour and to say: –
“We invaded you last night–we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away.”

And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you’ve only to pay ‘em the Dane-geld
And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!

It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say: –
“Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away.”

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.

It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say: –

“We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that pays it is lost!”

Actually last time I put that poem up I was remarking about another set of barbarians. They might even be interesting. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=1355

As if we didn’t know – Jerry,

None of this will come as a surprise to you or your readers. This is a committee hearing in the Washington state senate. It’s 111 minutes long, but worth it.

http://www.black-and-right.com/2013/03/28/the-br-thursday-movie-3/#disqus_thread

The link is to a blog and I couldn’t discover the original video. The News Tribune article has comments mostly from those critical of Dr. Easterbrook, but, predictably, little criticism of his data. Senator Ranker couldn’t seem to get his mind around the fact that Dr. Easterbrook was using "raw", original data while he was looking at "corrected" data — data that have been changed (read "falsified") and then presented to the public as genuine and valid. "Who are you going to believe — me or your lying eyes?"

A Google search on Don Easterbrook shows an abundance of links that clearly attempt to discredit him. About what you’d expect.

Richard White

Austin, Texas

Quite a bit longer than I have time to watch. Dr. Easterbrook is a highly qualified but elderly geologist who predicted in 2006 that actual global temperatures would be lower than those predicted by the IPCC. So far he is right. http://myweb.wwu.edu/dbunny/

His view is that Earth temperatures are cyclical, and we have reached a period when they will start downward again. I think that’s a good summary. My own view is that Earth temperatures are cyclical – heck we know that they have been higher and lower than at present in historical times, and far higher and lower in geological times – but we don’t really know what causes the cycles or where we are in them; we simply haven’t been keeping good records for long enough to have much confidence in our inferences.

Re: Zuckerman’s Article

Jerry,

I’m not certain of the sources, but I saw a report on the news last week to the effect the the $85 billion sequester is not $85 billion this year, nor all at home. The report was that ~$44-45 billion hits this year and the remaining next year. Further, that out of the ~$44-45 billion, $22 billion are domestic spending. So Zuckerman’s note that sequestration is taking certain monies out of the economy, "including $85 billion this year alone" might be well off the mark.

Is foreign aid part of the US economy? Recent complaints that the US Government just released $500 million to the Palestinians (I am not sure to which entity) is certainly thought provoking.

Back to Zuckerman’s article, since when is a reduction in an increase reasonably called (closely paraphrasing) ‘taking out’? The reductions under Sequestration are not cuts, despite what most politicians tend to call them. The Administration, in managing the spending adjustments under Sequestration, is simply deciding where to spend how much more than last year. Without sequestration the increase would be larger.

The monies Zuckerman refers to as being taken out of the economy via reduced federal spending this year and over the next 10 years under sequestration are actually not even in the economy at present. The monies in question would be spent on credit. That poses problems that you have discussed at times. Paying for that spending via taxes also poses problems, as it removes the additional money from the hands of taxpayers.

Whether either one of those alternatives is better than spending less is a different question. I am concerned that the rhetoric used by politicians gives a misleading impression of what is occurring, and that is made worse by others just giving in and using the same terminology. I know that you don’t, but Zuckerman did. Whatever good points he made, we should recognize that even under Sequestration the federal government is still spending more than it did last year, and that a great deal of what it is spending is borrowed.

Regards,

George

It is easy to fall into the fallacy of believing that a cut is an actual cut, not just raising the budget less than we said we were going to do it. Many readers simply cannot believe that: that a continuing resolution actually means raises and expansions in spending. And of course “entitlements” are not only not cut, but are not subject to lowering the raising in spending levels built into them.

: Roomba dust-bust bot bods one step closer to ROBOBUTLERS .

Jerry

It’s after March 21, so it must be The Door Into Summer. “At last week’s GPU Technology Conference in California, a team from iRobot claim to have developed the first real-time generic object recognition algorithm:”

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/26/object_recognition/

The object recognition algorithm is “based on the Deformable Part Model (DPM), which is based on the idea that objects are made of parts, and the way those parts are positioned in relation to one another is what defines a person from a chair or a car from a boat.” Easy to say, but hard to do: “Running DPM is highly compute-intensive. Each pixel requires about 100,000 floating-point operations, 10,000 reads from memory and 1,000 floating-point values stored. A VGA image consumes 10 billion floating-point ops, loads a billion floats and stores 100 million. For more context, using the LINPACK benchmark as a metric, an iPad 2 can crank out 1.65 billion floating-point ops a second, while a middling desktop i5 system can drive around 40. So while it’s compute-intensive, it’s not insurmountable.”

“Not surprisingly, the concepts and maths that are the foundation of the DPM are highly complex. But they make the DPM robust when dealing with viewing angles, different scales, cluttered fields of view, and other visual noise that would confound other algorithms. After the software is trained, which consists of showing the model about 1,000 objects in order to learn that particular class of objects, it can identify complex objects with a high rate of accuracy. As long as you don’t need to do it quickly, that is.” Lots more stuff in the link.

Robert [Heinlein] would have loved this. But I don’t think he thought it would be this hard.

Ed

Where science fiction writers get it wrong is in underestimating how hard it is to do it the first time, but also not understanding that once we have done it technology tends to make it easier and cheaper. As we pointed out in The Strategy of Technology, http://baen.com/sot/ there is a sort of Moore’s law associated with nearly every advancing technology field (although of course not based on the number of transistors you can put in a given area on a chip). Technology advances in S curves, slow growth at first, then rapid rising to what looks like exponential growth, then a slowing of the acceleration at some point. Robotics are at the lower knee and can be expected to have near exponential growth now.

It won’t always be this hard.

British Natural Gas Shortage

Jerry:

The British have ‘driven into the ditch’ with their AGW based policies, and are running out of natural gas. The video link to a several year old talk by MP and former energy secretary Milibrand is revealing.

Even worse than ‘bad science’ is believing it and basing public policy on it. NG Shortage <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/25/uk_energy_crisis_illustrated/>

Chris C

There are none so blind as those who refuse to see. California is very much in the same hole. Apparently there is an epidemic of energy blindness in the District of Columbia as well. We’re all right, Jack. We’ve got ours…

This came in last November after the election and got lost. I recently saw it in a vain attempt to clean up old mail.

Two years is your probable limit

Sent to me, author unknown. This may need to be "toned down" a little, but it’s the thought that counts.

An Open Letter to the Incoming Republican House Members of the 113th Congress

Dear GOP House Members and Members-Elect:

Congratulations to you all for surviving the absurd calamity of November 6th. You need to know what’s in store for you.

To put it bluntly, you have two years to politically live as the House Majority.

You are going to be demonized and destroyed by the Chicago Gangsters who run the White House and the presstitutes of the CorruptMedia. Your chances of retaining your majority in 2014 are 0%.

The question is: What are you going to do with these two years? Realize that the political outcome will be the same no matter what you do. While many of you may individually survive and be reelected in 2014, collectively your majority will be gone and you’ll all be just minority schmucks.

So if you plan to cringe, compromise, and cooperate with the gangsters just to be reelected as a minority schmuck, why not just resign now and collect your pension rather than continue a charade in order to keep your perks of power for a little while longer, and all that while you’ll have to look into the mirror every morning and see a coward?

Why not, then, see someone of courage in that mirror instead? There is a power that only you – a majority of members of the House – have that neither the Senate, the Resident nor any of his agencies, nor even the Supreme Court has. If you choose to exercise it, you will be feared and respected, instead of being Obama’s poodles.

But far more importantly, you will have done your patriotic duty to protect our country from the lethal illicit damage Obama is poised to and will inflict upon it.

The power the House Majority uniquely has is the Other Golden Rule: He who has the gold, makes the rules. Article I Section 7 of the Constitution states it very clearly and without ambiguity: "All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives."

The Resident with his ill-gotten Executive Orders, no-basis Czars, multitude of agencies and departments, Harry Reid’s Senate, the Supreme Court, no part of the vast US Federal Government has the Constitutional authority to spend a dime that the House don’t give them. You all (The House), of course, know this. What is required of you now is to act on it.

The day after the Catastrophe of November 6, Harry Reid loudly proclaimed that the Federal Government will soon require the debt ceiling raised another $2.4 trillion, and that when the time comes to do so, "We’ll raise it."

<http://cnsnews.com/news/article/harry-reid-hiking-debt-limit-18794t-we-ll-raise-it>

The question to ask Mr. Reid is: "What do you mean "we, Harry (and every other Senator has no say in the matter)?

If you, the House Majority do not vote to raise the debt ceiling, it is not raised, no matter what temper tantrums Harry or the Resident have or threats they make. Pelosi either; buy her some more cover up and dismiss her to the ladies room.

Right now, as you read this, your children and grandchildren – in fact, every single American under 18 – is saddled with over $216,000 of federal debt <http://cnsnews.com/news/article/4-yrs-private-college-130468-median-priced-existing-home-173100-us-debt-american-under> they will be expected to pay off. They can’t, they won’t, and it is immoral in the extreme to expect them to. Their debt has to be defaulted upon. The way to start is to refuse to raise the debt ceiling. Oh, and by the way, speaking of debt; there has not been a budget since the usurper moved into the White House. Guess what else? It isn’t really the debt that should be the focus. Why don’t you take a look at something called the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR). This is the under the table set of books that shows where the bullion is really hidden and I would not be surprised if there is not enough ill-gotten loot in there to pay off the debt.

Just to be clear – when I say you have two years left to live politically, that’s a best case scenario. Unless you roll over and become Obama’s poodles, being a Republican Congressman may be the most dangerous job in America.

You may get death threats, so many you’ll lose count, and there may well be actual attempts on your life. Don’t forget, the Chicago gang is in town and they play very rough. The more public you are, the less they may target you. The CorruptMedia will oppo-research every hidden nook and cranny of your life to smear and expose whatever dirt they can find on you.

You must understand that America now has a government run by gangsters – by crooks, thieves, looters, and thugs who will be utterly ruthless in ruining you if you try to be in their way. Putin’s Russia, Chavez’s Venezuela, has come to America; and the Chicago gang and the cartels have come to D.C.

So if you don’t have the courage to band together and stand up to them, quit now. They can’t spend money you don’t give them. They will do whatever it takes, legal or illegal, to force you to give it to them.

If you can’t say "No" to raising the debt ceiling, if you can’t Defund Obamacare and the EPA and Obama’s steady stream of illicit Executive Orders, if you can’t refuse to appropriate money for more Food Stamps and Obama’s crony capitalist subsidies, quit now.

But if you can say "No", if you can Defund, then you will be heroes to at least half of America, the half that stands for honesty, decency, and protecting our children’s future. The numbers who view you as heros will grow annually. Make us proud or be gone. This is your chance to be heroes – or to be schmucks. Make these next two years the time you live up to the character and courage of America’s Founders.

Right now, history has chosen you to be America’s only hope to avoid her falling into destitution and tyranny. Live up to it. It will take more courage than you ever thought it possible for you to have. Reach down deep inside for the best within you. America’s future depends on it. The weight of history is on your shoulders. Stand up straight and accept the burden.

Minor edits by sender

Middle Class Rule  Jerry,

I’ve been thinking on western-style representative democracy and why it works (when it works) for a while now. The key, I think, is that the majority of a country’s electorate be middle-class. That is to say, people who possess the goods of fortune in moderation, and who have a culture emphasizing earning those goods rather than pillaging them – people who will not consistently vote en masse for economically destructive policies.

Countries where such middle-class types are a minority, if most fortunate will end up ruled by an autocracy whose good economic management grows that middle class to a majority capable of stable rule.

South Korea comes to mind, as do Chile, Spain and Taiwan. Brazil.

Turkey still has a good chance. Iran might get back on that path if it ever shakes off the mullahs. China may well be on that path, if the Party doesn’t wreck things hanging on past its time.

The somewhat less fortunate ones end up with, via revolution, "one man one vote, once", populism, or some combination of these, an autocracy that will hobble the economy and growth of the middle class, out of some mix of incompetence and buying support from the poor majority. The examples, alas, are numerous.

(The really unlucky ones end up ruled by ideological fanatics who devastate their economies and people. Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, North Korea under its bastard hybrid offspring of Stalin and the Imperial Japanese Army occupation…)

This brings me to the "Arab Spring". The sorry results of supporting overthrow of the existing autocracies, from the above viewpoint were highly predictable – none of these countries has close to a middle class voting majority. Egypt arguably had an autocracy that wanted to support its middle class, albeit not very competently. (Egypt’s middle class minority is large and active enough that the Army may yet ally with them and re-suppress the Islamists.) Libya had an autocracy that at least imposed stability, its economic incompetence compensated for by oil revenue. (A pattern much echoed in the Arabian peninsula.)

My next stop, unfortunately, is right here at home. The US has enjoyed a solid middle-class ruling majority (albeit by means of property qualifications for voting in the early days) for its entire history.

This may now be coming to an end – the US middle class over the last century has been under enormous cultural pressure, with damage accumulating fast in recent decades. The education and common sense to avoid voting for economically destructive measures can no longer be taken for granted.

Since 2008, massive economic pressure has been added. The permanent underclass, "low-information voters" – whatever you call it, it’s growing fast. We may get one last chance when things get bad enough to reunite what’s left of our middle class against destructive policies, but absent reforms deep enough to reverse the overall trend, our long era of prosperous stability is coming to an end.

Porkypine

Aristotle told us that the only stable democracy is rule by the middle class, which is defined as those who possess the goods of fortune in moderation. It was clear to him that enormous discrepancies in wealth were a problem, in that the rich would be tempted to form an oligarchy, while a poor underclass would vote to confiscate the property of the rich.

It was that sort of stable republic that political philosophers have sought through the ages, and which the Framers hoped to establish on the continent of North America.

We still don’t know if that’s a stable force. We do know that enormous discrepancies in wealth can cause great friction. On the other hand, despoiling the rich to buy votes from the poor was the great fear of the Framers, because throughout history that has led to bad results.

Product placement just for you

Jerry

Don’t like ads? Well, here’s product placement just for you (be sure to watch the video):

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/23/digital_advertising_futures/

No getting around it. Even the oldies are game. I won’t call it “fair game,” mind you. But somebody’s gotta pay for the content.

Ed

Mail 767 Sunday, March 17, 2013

Mark Steyn on Overreach

Jerry,

Mark Steyn in his piece "Axis of Torpor" starts with a sarcastic strafing pass on Hollywood international relations – "I greatly enjoy the new Hollywood genre in which dysfunctional American families fly to a foreign city and slaughter large numbers of the inhabitants as a kind of bonding experience" – but ends with something that sounds remarkably like he’s channeling you.

"As the CPAC crowd suggested, there are takers on the right for the Rand Paul position. There are many on the left for Obama’s drone-alone definition of great power. But there are ever fewer takers for a money-no-object global hegemon that spends 46 percent of the world’s military budget and can’t impress its will on a bunch of inbred goatherds. A broker America needs to learn to do more with less, and to rediscover the cold calculation of national interest rather than waging war as the world’s largest NGO. In dismissing Paul as a “wacko bird,”

John McCain and Lindsey Graham assume that the too-big-to-fail status quo is forever. It’s not; it’s already over."

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/343140

Porkypine

I suppose I have been saying things like that since this site began, and before; I hope someone has paid attention. There do not seem to be very many of us realists yet. I prefer a republic to empire. Incompetent empire is an absurdity, except, of course, for the obvious exceptions. Follow the money.

Competent empire frightens me, but I prefer it to incompetent empire. Competent empire doesn’t expend its own blood and treasure on liberating Iraq and then abandoning it. But that is another story.

The establishment Republicans seem enamoured of expending blood and treasure without favorable results.

Survival with Style — Water for More People!

Jerry,

This is very good news indeed.

<http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/03/16/lockhead-martin-throws-more-dirt-of-mathus-grave/>

"Cheap, clean water may soon be available for the whole planet. According to Reuters, defense contractor Lockheed Martin has developed a filter that will hugely reduce the amount of energy necessary to turn sea water into fresh water. The filter, which is five hundred times thinner then others currently available, lets water pass through but blocks all salt molecules. It will use almost 100 times less energy than other methods for making salt water drinkable, giving third world countries another way of expanding access to drinking water without having to create costly pumping stations…."

I remember your story about having "special ice cubes" to be used to make a point to Luddites. I always enjoy the image of them spitting out the drink after being informed the ice is made from the LA river water. Then the grand finale, "using the best filtering possible!"

Ain’t technology grand? For some things, yes, yes it is.

Regards, Charles Adams, Bellevue, NE

Technology won’t solve all problems but proper application of technology will reduce many problems to soluble multiple problems. A new source of fresh water would do that for a number of problem situations.

: Molten salt reactors

The molten salt concept is gaining in popularity as it does appear to have the passive safety and low-waste properties mentioned. Possibly even better is the LFTR (liquid flouride thorium reactor), a variant that uses thorium for the fuel instead of uranium. Thorium is much more abundant than uranium, and has the advantage of not producing any waste product that can easily be used in bombs. (This, by the way, is likely one of the reasons uranium was originally chosen over thorium). The ability to burn existing nuclear waste and to produce Pu238 (used to fuel spacecraft) are advantages the two concepts share. Another advantage is that because of the much higher melting point of the molten salt, there is no need for high-pressure vessels as in conventional reactors (the salt takes the place of water as the primary working fluid). This enormously increases the safety yet again. The main problem holding these concepts back seems to be the huge investment required for a new design.

Chris Barker

As I said in A Step Farther Out, cheap energy solves most problems; and if your philosophy is one of distribution of resources, then it helps to have a large pie to distribute. But it does require insight. The initial capital costs of Space Solar Power Satellites and a new nuclear power system are comparable. I’d prefer space solar power because the side effects are beneficial and large.

Random House eBook imprints offers contracts that would make a music executive blush

Jerry,

If you encounter aspiring writers who don’t have an agent, it’s worth noting that Random house has some eBook imprints that are trying to snare new writers with lousy contract terms. One is an SF imprint.

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2013/03/06/a-contract-from-alibi/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2013/03/06/note-to-sff-writers-random-houses-hydra-imprint-has-appallingly-bad-contract-terms/

Writers should understand that publishers want everything they can get. It is the writer’s job to see that they don’t get it.

RE: North Korea and the revealer rattling of cutlery by them to gain attention and goodies.

You often have said that you prefer a Republic, but if Empire we must, let it be Competent Empire.

I agree. However, which sort of Competent Empire? We have legions with auxiliaries and Pro-Consuls (usually inept hacks of the Bremer sort, but even Caesar had to put up with those), classic Latin Roman stuff in Afghanistan and Iraq, and most of Latin America is Classic Roman Ally sort of statecraft, down to the "poke A Stick In The Roman (Yanqui) Eye but don’t mess with Roman (Yanqui) Trade.

But then we have the OTHER Roman Empire model, the one Gibbon renamed Byzantine, though the "Byzantine" never called themselves anything other than Roman, though in Greek. Those Romans never had a problem doing the math on whether it was cheaper to Pay Off the Thugs and Barbarians rather than dispatch a Strategoi and several legions of cataphracts to crush them.

We seem to follow that policy with North Korea, and not just because they have a few Hell Bombs to rattle. We followed it long before they went Plutonium on us, for all sort of reasons involving our allies in the region and the Chinese Hordes ("Hey, Sarge, just how many Hordes are there in a Chinese Platoon, anyway?").

In life consistency is the most under rated virtue. In statecraft this is true Doubled in Big Casino with Spades.

The NORKs are hooked on our bribes. Now they want more, and we are going broke.

Oh well, with any luck one of those Horrible Anti-Missile programs the current regime in DC abhors will save us. By the way, doesn’t the current Caudillo in DC have a Pied A Terre in Hawaii? Well within range of even the Kaputnik level rocketeers of the NORKS.

Want to bet there is an AEFGS vclass destroyer/cruiser just offshore from that vacation home?

Petronius

Welcome back. For those wondering about the reference to hordes, it comes from Col Fehrenbach’s excellent history of the Korean War, This Kind of War, which is up there with Cameron’s Anatomy of Military Merit as a must read book for anyone interested in military theory and why men fight.

Competent empire does know how to use bribes, but the best way is to bribe one enemy to fight another. Aetius, sometimes called the Last Roman, understood this full well, to the point at which he kept his Gothic Allies from exterminating the Huns after Chalons: he knew he would have need of the Huns another time. His Emperor decided that he didn’t need Aetius and killed him with his own hand, a deed known popularly at the time as “Caesar has cut off his right hand with his left.” The Emperor did not last much longer: his soldiers watched as another general struck him down on the Campus Martius.

None of this would make sense to our current rulers, who have read neither Gibbon nor Macauley, and probably are not aware of their existence.

Tri-focal computer glasses,

Jerry

Like you, I use tri-focals for daily wear and bifocal computer glasses when I am at my computer. Thank you for inventing the latter. I go to A.J. Pone Optical here in New Jersey, where Dave Pone has been grinding me my custom lenses for several years. In formed they were ready, today I went to pick up new glasses in updated prescriptions.

And Dave had a surprise for me. “Ed,” he says, “You’re just the man for this. I’m trying an experiment on you.” He said he received some trifocal blanks from a lens supplier, and he thought he would try something new. Given that I surf the Net at 40 inches but I like to read papers and things at a normal distance, he sent a pair of blank tri-focal lenses to “the lab” to have them ground to my prescription for the far (40 inches) and near, with the middle magnification falling between them. Coated with anti-glare and finished with a hard layer, the lab sent them back to his shop where he ground them for my frames.

Glory be! They work! I can sit back and enjoy my browsing, sit forward and type at the screen, or look down and read, with the proper magnification for each. Seems like the best ideas are those that in retrospect you say, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Thought you’d like to know of an innovation on your invention.

Ed

I should say that I can make a case for having invented “computer glasses.” I have worn bi-focal glasses for more than sixty years. After I built Ezekiel, my friend who happened to be an S-100 Buss computer, I found bi-focals to be annoying and asked my optometrist to make me a pair of glasses in my prescription with a focal length of 28 inches. This worked well, and I wrote that up in one of my BYTE columns, and I believe I called them my “computer glasses.” Later I found they were ubiquitous. It may have been simultaneous invention – anyone with bifocals might find it obvious – but I think I was the first to publish the notion; and the 28 inches came from my sitting at the computer and using a tape measure to determine the distance from my eyes to the screen.  I have experimented with other distances and found that with my prescription it isn’t critical and 28 inches continues to work.

I never suspected that my computer glasses couldn’t be improved.

Modern slavery

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

I’ve been doing some research on slavery and learned a few things that may be of interest.

I quickly learned that there are more slaves today than at any time in our history. The great majority of these are debt contracted slaves (forced to work off a debt) or sex slaves.

That rang a bell. So I researched a little more and, sure enough, found that all these evils still flourish in the US among Mexican immigrants. All the laws about minimum wage, workplace safety, health and so forth are meaningless when they are applied to workers who have no legal existence in the first place. Many of them are forced to take debts and labor in backbreaking conditions for next to nothing. Not a few are sex slaves.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/30/world/americas/mexico-sex-slavery-ring-on-border-is-broken-immigration-officials-say.html?_r=0 <http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2013%2F01%2F30%2Fworld%2Famericas%2Fmexico-sex-slavery-ring-on-border-is-broken-immigration-officials-say.html%3F_r%3D0&h=4AQHxB4Yi&s=1>

http://www2.palmbeachpost.com/moderndayslavery/

http://www.mediamouse.org/news/2006/02/the-realities-o.php

Naturally, the people who oppose this state of affairs and insist that all residents of the US should be legal and have protection of American law are dubbed "RAAAACIST!" I would have thought that demanding brown-skinned people labor as slaves for white-skinned agribusiness would be more "racist" then demanding equal protection of law for all in the US, but this is America. Up is down, black is white.

What can we do about it? Well, I’m an educator by gift so that’s what I do — go out and learn things, then pass it on to others.

But i think the first, most revolutionary thing we can do is to believe the truth and refuse to believe lies. Believing and teaching truth is ITSELF a revolutionary activity, especially since so much of the world depends on lies.

And the truth is this: Illegal immigration to the US is all about exploiting cheap labor , NOT about charity.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

There are none so blind as those who will not see. The evidence for widespread slavery in this vale of tears is pervasive. Of course in the Roman Republic debtors were free to sell themselves into slavery to relieve their debt. Laws against prostitution often result in slavery to pimps as a side effect. Good intentions need to be applied with prudence…

Cubans evade censorship by exchanging computer memory sticks, blogger says:

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/03/09/185347/cubans-evade-censorship-by-exchanging.html

“Information circulates hand to hand through this wonderful gadget known as the memory stick,” Sanchez said, “and it is difficult for the government to intercept them. I can’t imagine that they can put a police officer on every corner to see who has a flash drive and who doesn’t.”

Tag. You’re it.

Ed

Jerry,

Unfortunately, the "whole number" method as described by Mike Flynn is hardly a joke.

When the kids (and the nieces) were in school I noted that in fifth grade a wholly inappropriate amount of the math coursework was devoted to estimating the answer to math problems instead of reinforcing the ability to do addition and subtraction.

http://www.glencoe.com/sites/common_assets/mathematics/math_review/Estimate_Whole_Num.pdf

Jim

http://www.thefederalistpapers.org/founders/washington/drones-wisdom-from-our-first-commander-in-chief

Roger Miller

Thank you. Very relevant.

McGuffey Readers

This link is about life of McGuffey and his books called "Eclectic Readers".

http://www.timesdispatch.com/opinion/their-opinion/columnists-blogs/charles-f-bryan-jr/the-man-who-taught-america-to-read-mcguffey/article_f768af21-6700-5377-ad01-650476d7b811.html

Bill Moore

The McGuffey readers helped unite the nation. They were excellent for their time, and still worth finding for home schoolers. They could never be adopted in a public school today. The first words of the Soviet first grade readers were “For the joys of our childhood we thank our native land.” The McGuffey readers began with “No man can put off the law of God” which instantly disqualifies them from public adoption.

Reaffirming the Net of a Thousand Questionable "Facts"…

Dr. P,

I know you generally can trust your readers to share facts instead of innuendo, but whoever forwarded the "All European Life Died In Auschwitz" article should have done at least a cursory search to verify the claims accompanying the article. A quick Google search turned up this 2006 blog entry critiquing the copies already in circulation – a little over a year before the claimed publication date of 15 JAN 2008:

who is Sebastian Vilar Rodrigez and who cares? <http://plancksconstant.org/blog1/2006/02/who_is_sebastian_vilar_rodrige.html>

By Bernie on 27 Feb 2006

I can tell a fake when I see one. Before I go into the details let me say that about 100 blogs in the past 6 months repeated the story below and a few like vodkapundit <http://pajamasmedia.com/vodkapundit/2005/11/30/ouch-11/> rightfully had qualms about its

authenticity: ‘With some reservations, I’m posting the translation in full. If it turns out this is a fake, let’s steal a page from the MSM and call it "fake but accurate."’

Here is the post, usually prefaced by Written by Sebastian Vilar Rodrigez, Spanish Writer or "This is a translation of an article from a Spanish newspaper":

All European Life Died In Auschwitz

I walked down the street in Barcelona, and suddenly discovered a terrible truth – Europe died in Auschwitz. We killed six million Jews and replaced them with 20 million Muslims.

In Auschwitz we burned a culture, thought, creativity, talent. We destroyed the chosen people, truly chosen, because they produced great and wonderful people who changed the world. The contribution of this people is felt in all areas of life: science, art, international trade, and above all, as the conscience of the world. These are the people we burned.

And under the pretence of tolerance, and because we wanted to prove to ourselves that we were cured of the disease of racism, we opened our gates to 20 million Muslims, who brought us stupidity and ignorance, religious extremism and lack of tolerance, crime and poverty due to an unwillingness to work and support their families with pride.

They have turned our beautiful Spanish cities into the third world, drowning in filth and crime. Shut up in the apartments they receive free from the government, they plan the murder and destruction of their naïve hosts. And thus, in our misery, we have exchanged culture for fanatical hatred, creative skill for destructive skill, intelligence for backwardness and superstition.

We have exchanged the pursuit of peace of the Jews of Europe and their talent for hoping for a better future for their children, their determined clinging to life because life is holy, for those who pursue death, for people consumed by the desire for death for themselves and others, for our children and theirs.

What a terrible mistake was made by miserable Europe.

________________________________

Here are a few problems.

1. The phrasing and syntax look like they were originally written in English but as if translated.

2. I disregard any post as true unless it gives me the name of the paper and date of publication.

3. Sebastian Vilar Rodrigez only exists in these posts.

4. And most importantly – there is no European Paper with the cojones [one can take a cojones test here

<http://www.queendom.com/jff_access/the_cojones_test.htm> ] to actually publish anything this provocative against Muslims. Indeed Spain has been on a push to encourage Muslim immigration since 2004, see Jihadwatch.

<http://www.jihadwatch.org/2004/10/spain-is-seeking-to-integrate-growing-muslim-population.html>

As to "fake but accurate"; it is undoubtedly true that almost all the sentiments expressed in this "article" reflect the Muslim reality in Europe. It is too bad that no paper actually published it.

Update: The email stating that this appeared in a Spanish Newspaper is false. It did however appear on the rightwing, pro-Israel, anti-Communist, Spanish language website Gentiuno <http://plancksconstant.org/blog1/2006/03/sebastian_vilar_rodriguez_turn.html> .

I noted that the source was unimportant; the question was whether the concept leads to any truths. It is a disturbing thought. Burnham said that liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western Civilization as it commits suicide. He said this during the Cold War. The Soviet Union imploded before the West could sink completely, but that does not mean that he was not correct.

Reaffirming the Net of a Thousand Questionable "Facts"…

Dr. P,

As an unapologetic propagandist, my focus is not on the source, it is on protecting fact-based credibility.

One of the most compelling ways to beat opponents in any public debate is to discredit them, and that can be done by showing where they have claimed something provably false. It doesn’t have to be important, it just has to be something they can’t deny saying that just ain’t so. Shifting the focus from what is right to who is telling the truth is akin to throwing dirt in someone’s eyes during a fist-fight — and usually just as effective. Death by a thousand fact-checks, as it were.

That’s why I like the blogger’s label of "fake but accurate" — I expect to find myself using that label frequently, because "apocryphal" seems to have faded from the common vocabulary.

So, when confronting folks denying that the Holocaust ever happened, I think it’s better to correct (or at least identify) known errors up front, even if it takes a little of the pungency away. Why make it easier for them to accuse you of spreading a Big Lie by passing along easily disproved little lies?

      Regards,

      William

"Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well." – John Gardner

Omnibus Bills, Madison & Goo Goos

Jerry,

I read a quote from Madison in the Federalist that is very apropos today and for the past few decades:

The internal effects of a mutable policy are still more calamitous. It poisons the blessings of liberty itself. It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood: if they be repealed or revised before they are promulg[at]ed, or undergo such incessant changes, that no man who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow.

Madison, Federalist 62

One of the more egregious examples in the last year or two is the Affordable Health Care Act–Choose your own example [even the bills for the major departments are great examples too.]

In its defense Speaker Pelosi memorably said:

"You’ve heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one or the other. But I don’t know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future, not just about health care for America, but about a healthier America, where preventive care is not something that you have to pay a deductible for or out of pocket. Prevention, prevention, prevention-it’s about diet, not diabetes. It’s going to be very, very exciting.

"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy. Furthermore, we believe that health care reform, again I said at the beginning of my remarks, that we sent the three pillars that the President’s economic stabilization and job creation initiatives were education and innovation-innovation begins in the classroom-clean energy and climate, addressing the climate issues in an innovative way to keep us number one and competitive in the world with the new technology, and the third, first among equals I may say, is health care, health insurance reform. Health insurance reform is about jobs. This legislation alone will create 4 million jobs, about 400,000 jobs very soon."

Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, at the 2010 Legislative Conference for National Association of Counties, March 9, 2010 <http://pelosi.house.gov/news/press-releases/2010/03/releases-March10-conf.shtml>

Here is a charitable report of interpretation of Speaker Pelosi’s remarks

"In the fall of the year," Pelosi said today, "the outside groups…were saying ‘it’s about abortion,’ which it never was. ‘It’s about ‘death panels,” which it never was. ‘It’s about a job-killer,’ which it creates four million. ‘It’s about increasing the deficit’; well, the main reason to pass it was to decrease the deficit." Her contention was that the Senate "didn’t have a bill." And until the Senate produced an actual piece of legislation that could be matched up and debated against what was passed by the House, no one truly knew what would be voted on. "They were still trying to woo the Republicans," Pelosi said of the Senate leadership and the White House, trying to "get that 60th vote that never was coming. That’s why [there was a] reconciliation [vote]" that required only a simple majority.

"So, that’s why I was saying we have to pass a bill so we can see so that we can show you what it is and what it isn’t," Pelosi continued. "It is none of these things. It’s not going to be any of these things." She recognized that her comment was "a good statement to take out of context." But the minority leader added, "But the fact is, until you have a bill, you can’t really, we can’t really debunk what they’re saying…."

Jonathan Capehart, Washington Post, 6/20/12, "Pelosi Defends her Infamous Health Care Remark",<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/post/pelosi-defends-her-infamous-health-care-remark/2012/06/20/gJQAqch6qV_blog.html>

Being a "good government type" (derisively described by the party regulars as a Goo Goo) I would suggest [It has been suggested before by others] to Speaker Pelosi and others of her ilk on both sides of the aisle that there be a public review period for each bill "… so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy."

One suggestion I like for a review period is to have a day of review for each 20 pages (I define a page as 250 words) of a bill. The Affordable Health Care Act has about 363,000 words

See <http://computationallegalstudies.com/2009/11/08/facts-about-the-length-of-h-r-3962/>

and thus would require about a 73 day review period.

I would even recommend that the bill be in "final form" so that one would not have to bounce around the US Code to following the references.

I have always been an unrepentant Goo Goo. The party regulars’ tactic has always been to outwait the Goo Goos as they generally have to go back to their life and cannot remain long in the arena thus allowing the party regulars to continue unhindered as before.

Regards, Charles Adams, Bellevue, NE

The origin of the term “goo goo” for the Good Government clubs goes back a long way. It is discussed extensively in Boss Flynn’s “You’re the Boss”, still one of the best accounts of how machine politics works. (Flynn died in 1953 so our ridiculous copyright laws decree that the book, which is long out of print, won’t be public domain for ten more years, and I suspect that my copy has long vanished into the coffers of the book borrowers. ) Flynn’s point was that the goo goos come and go, but the machine is around for the long haul.

We seem to be building a national machine. The Democratic Party had such in the South from the time I was born until the Solid South went from solidly Democrat to somewhat reliably Republican. Oddly enough the Negro vote, which would have been solidly Republican (the GOP freed the slaves) had it existed in the early part of the 20^th Century was won over by Roosevelt to be Democrat.

Of course Madison knew precisely what he was talking about: make the law so complex that no one can understand it or even know it, and you have effectively finished off the republic. This is one reason why the words of Dick the Butcher in Shakespeare’s Henry VI is so popular: “First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” Of course Dick the Butcher is a revolutionary and wants to bring chaos. On the other hand, at one time at least the Constitution of the Republic of Andorra (a small county sized micro-nation nestles in the Pyrenees between France and Spain which supports itself on smuggling and tourism had these words. “Those black robed ones whose profession is to stir disputes are forever banned from this Republic on pain of instant death.” I think they may have changed that n the last decades. Probably at the instigation of the lawyers?

John Adams considered the lawyers the aristocrats of the republic. It was an aristocracy one could enter by hard work and intellectual merit.

re: "reading education"

Jerry,

Read and pondered all of the bits and pieces on the topic in the recent stuff, set me to looking back into my own past….

My world didn’t have this current debate over method/style to educate the little ones and I can’t speak as to the effectiveness of 50′s/60′s era "Dick and Jane" books that were the norm at the time, I pretty much disregarded them as trivial. What I do know and remember quite well was that, by the time I was 4 I knew:

a) What a dictionary was

b) How to use it

c) Where in my house the thing was located And I was so massively curious that I knew full-well that, if I was to understand something unfamiliar on a printed page, that my very best friend was that honkin’ big book chock full ‘o words that I had to climb up on a chair to fetch down with both hands…..

Perhaps some thought into something so basic as teaching kids dictionary use?

Craig

Rev. C.E. Aldinger

Subj: Failure analysis: Failed steam tubes were too-perfectly manufactured!

http://atomicinsights.com/2013/03/san-onofre-steam-generators-honest-error-driven-by-search-for-perfection.html

>>At just the wrong condition – 100% steam flow – a combination of relatively dry steam, precisely manufactured anti-vibration bars (AVB), and densely packed u-tubes resulted in a few hundred (out of nearly 10,000) tubes vibrating with a large enough amplitude to make contact. The unexpected vibration and contact resulted in accelerated wear and caused one tube to fail while the steam generator was operating.

…

Surprisingly enough, the reason that the condition does not exist in Unit 2 is that the anti-vibration bars (AVB) in Unit 2 were made with enough less precision that they prevented the perfect pitch situation.

Instead of being virtually perfectly round holes through which the steam generator tubes could penetrate with tight tolerance but no contact, the AVB’s in unit 2 had enough manufacturing variation that they made contact with the penetrating tubes with an average force that was twice as high as the minor, incidental contact achieved in Unit 3.

…

That extra contact force, which was considered to be undesirable by the designers at the time they designed and manufactured the tubes, provided enough unplanned disruption to the tube bundle that the harmonic vibration could not get started and could not reach enough of an amplitude to cause tube to tube wear (TTW).

It is instructive to learn that the tighter tolerances in unit 3 were purposely chosen because the supplier was seeking continuous process improvement. MHI engineers had determined that a small change in the manufacturing process could improve the repeatability of the AVB holes.

The design team agreed that the tighter tolerances resulted in a design that was “significantly more conservative than previous designs in addressing U-bend tube vibration and wear.” (page 48 of MHI’s root cause

analysis)

Because the computer models used for the design process were not perfect fidelity reproductions of the complete environment of the steam generator, simulation runs did not reveal the potentially detrimental effect of the tighter tolerances.<<

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com