I seem to be recovering form whatever malaise has struck me, but it’s slow. Meanwhile, Victor Davis Hanson has a piece called “Can California be fixed?” which tells pretty well why Californians are often depressed. http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/299975/can-california-be-fixed-victor-davis-hanson# It’s worth your time.

It’s pretty well [...]]]> View 724 Tuesday, May 15, 2012

I seem to be recovering form whatever malaise has struck me, but it’s slow. Meanwhile, Victor Davis Hanson has a piece called “Can California be fixed?” which tells pretty well why Californians are often depressed. http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/299975/can-california-be-fixed-victor-davis-hanson# It’s worth your time.

It’s pretty well accepted among those who study education that schools can be fixed – or at least doubled in effectiveness – by the simple expedient of firing the 10% least competent teachers and not replacing them. Just allocate their students to the other teachers. As to who are the 10% least competent, you will find by and large that everyone knows who they are. Principals know (although there are incompetent principals who need to go). Parents know although some will have political agendas. Students know, although some will of course have a grudge against competent but unpopular teachers. Other teachers know. But when you come down to it, you can choose the 10% least competent by using almost any rational procedure and you will get most of them, and of the few that you fire who shouldn’t be fired, essentially none will be in the top 50% of effectiveness.

But that’s unfair! If you fire even one who should not be fired –

But, alas, the alternative is to inflict all these incompetent teachers on the children unfortunate enough to be stuck in the public school system (and you will note that few who can afford an alternative will inflict this system of education on their own children).

Now the California courts have held that education is a right, meaning that paying for education is a public duty. I don’t accept that, but assume it is true: surely if you have a right to education then you have a right not to be stuck with an incompetent teacher? Whereas if you assume that education is an investment in the future, then surely you would not invest your money in incompetents? Those who claim that incompetent teachers have a right to a job at public expense have not explained the origins of that right.

In eBook era, slackers are out, reads the head for a New York Times thought piece picked up by a number of local papers. It tells stories of writers doing, not one novel a year which was the goal most writers aspired to but seldom met, but ten novels a year, plus a cascade of short stories, and a ton of blogging. The good news is that they’re selling, particularly for thrillers.

I find I’m not likely to join this new revolution, but it’s inspiring – and ought to be so for all those who want to make a living at this racket. Productivity counts…

Fortunately, backlist sales are up, too, and I’ve got a fairly large backlist. Backlist isn’t as good as a new thriller every couple of months. Back when I got into this racket, you had to write a lot, but it was mostly small stuff for the magazines, fleshed out with non-fiction, and the right non-fiction paid more than the magazine fiction. I don’t suppose that’s true any longer.

But the writing business is pretty good for those of an age and temperament to enjoy it. And science fiction writers are still the bards of the sciences.

In digging around on this topic I came across this, done back before we knew the effects of the Internet. A lot of it is still valid. http://www.whedon.info/Joss-Whedon-SciFi-com-talks-to-SF.html

And I do find I have a bit more energy every day, so apparently things are improving.

And the poll data are good. The President’s approval rate is about 43%. And it’s falling with key groups. Even Democrats are drawing away from him. It sure would be nice if some sanity returned to the Democratic Party. Maybe the New Democrats will come back?

Eric has been scanning and proofreading the ancient first BYTE columns that I did. We’re going to put them together into a book, with some comments by me looking back thirty years. I must say the darned things were pretty interesting – I started with the notion of seeing what Eric had got done, and ended up reading several of my old column, and my conversations with my mad friend Mac Lean. Mac Lean was an old retired spook with strange hobbies, one of which was small computers – he’s the guy who got me into it. Anyway, we’ll be putting much of that together in the next month or so.  But it got late and I haven’t done the mail and I guess I won’t get to it tonight.

And just as I was going to bed I got

‘The dominance of modern humans could have been in part a consequence of domesticating dogs — possibly combined with a small, but key, change in human anatomy that made people better able to communicate with dogs.’

<http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.15294,y.0,no.,content.true,page.1,css.print/issue.aspx>

Roland Dobbins

Which looks like my cocktail party theory of the coevolution of humans and dogs – they kept their sense of smell, we used our forebrains to get smart, and we each look after the others kids – may be getting respectable.  I’ve always believed it, which implies to me a pretty strong ethical obligation to dogs, but then I have other weird ideas.

Anyway good night.

And of course I just had to see if there was a new Freefall panel, and there is. If you don’t know Freefall, I would be astonished if anyone who reads this place regularly didn’t like it. http://freefall.purrsia.com/default.htm The problem is that it won’t make sense unless you go to the Story Start and read from there. That will take a while, and it’s worth it. Trying to backtrack the current story line won’t work very well.  The first few episodes may not be as good at hooking you as they should be, but read on. It will get to you. And in case you are wondering, no, Sam is not human. He’s not even humanoid. But he’s not a robot.

© 2012, jerrypournelle. All rights reserved.

I just received word that Jay Kay Klein, THE photographer of science fiction, passed away on Sunday morning, May 13, in a Catholic hospice (a “Francis House”) in Syracuse, NY, at age 80, of esophageal cancer.

This sad news came to me [...]]]> Mail 724 Monday, May 14, 2012

 

I just received word that Jay Kay Klein, THE photographer of science fiction, passed away on Sunday morning, May 13, in a Catholic hospice (a “Francis House”) in Syracuse, NY, at age 80, of esophageal cancer.

This sad news came to me today by phone from Craig Peterson, a local plumber and a great-souled man, whom Jay Kay originally hired to fix a bathroom faucet in his longtime home in Bridgeport, NY….and who then, miraculously, took it upon himself to become Jay Kay’s final friend, exactly what he needed, helping him with his constrained living situation (Jay Kay’s late wife had been a serious hoarder), plowing his driveway, and (all gods be thanked) helping him get his immense and precious collection of over 65,000 negatives of virtually everyone in our field over a 40-year+ period safely to the University of California’s Riverside Libraries Eaton Collection of SF & Fantasy.

Craig’s been going through Jay Kay’s address book all day, calling people like Fred Pohl, Bob Madle, and me. He tells me an exhibition and celebration of Jay Kay’s photos will be mounted at Chicon 7, the 70th World Science Fiction Convention (Aug 30-Sep 3), by Melissa Conway, the Head Librarian at Riverside Libraries, who now has charge of the collection.

He just forwarded me by email a copy of the obit notice he wrote up for Jay Kay. I attach it, and the photo he included of Jay with one of his own iconic photos of Isaac. (I’m not sure who took it. Craig, I think.) He also sent particulars for Melissa Conway, which I’ll paste below.

I met Jay Kay at one of Ben Bova’s legendary parties. I am attaching two photos he took of me—not that there’ll be any shortage of his photos in Locus’s archives! The first was taken shortly after I was introduced by Jim Baen to Robert A. Heinlein, before the 1975 Nebula Banquet at which Robert was given the first-ever Grandmaster Award; the second is a favorite shot of Jeanne congratulating me right after I received the Skylark at Boskone XV in 1978. (And just as I’m about to mail this, Craig sent along another shot I can’t resist including, of Jay Kay with what appears to be a rare photo of a beardless Samuel R. Delany.)

Craig mentioned that at one point while he was helping Jay Kay shovel through his wife’s incredible store of hoarded stuff, they found a small fortune in GM stock. Jay had had no idea it existed, and continued to live like a man of limited means. God knows what his treasure trove of photos is worth, even just in dollars.

Science fiction owes Craig Peterson an incalculable debt. It’s only thanks to his hard work those 65,000 negatives reached the right hands in time. I exchanged long snailmail letters with Jay Kay twice in the past couple of years, and knew he was in extremely poor health. He wrote by hand, because, he said, it hurt his fingers too much to type, and sadly his handwriting was incredibly bad. But I could tell he badly needed a friend, and made a couple of unsuccessful attempts to scare up a volunteer who lived near enough to help. I can’t express how happy I am to know that Fate sent Craig Peterson to fix Jay Kay’s bathtub faucet. I understand Jay Kay left Craig his awesome collection of vintage guitars, and I am very glad. He says they were the topic of the first conversation he and Jay Kay ever had, that day he came to fix the faucet.

Let’s hoist a glass in memory of Jay Kay Klein, my friends. I never left his company without a smile on my face. Somebody call Gordy, and Randall, and Ted, and Isaac, and we’ll all pass the guitar round in his honour. Science fiction’s most acute and astute eye has closed for the last time. But what it saw, we have forever, thanks to photography and the kindness of Craig Peterson.

–Spider

I first met Jay K in Seattle in 1961, and we were convention friends for years after. I have a number of photographs that he took. One, of me and Mr. Heinlein, hangs on my stairway and is a prized possession. My thanks to Spider Robinson for this.

From the horse’s mouth – why the CAS mission should chop to the Army.

<http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/dear-boss-i-dont-just-quit-i-give-up>

Roland Dobbins

Commenting about the forthcoming NSA facility in Utah.

"The $2 billion facility, slated to be complete by September 2013, is allegedly designed to be able to filter through yottabytes (that’s 10^24 bytes) of data. Put into perspective, that’s greater than the estimated total of all human knowledge since the dawn of mankind. If leaked information about the complex is correct, nothing will be safe from the facility’s reach, from cell phone communications to emails to what you just bought with your credit card. And encryption won’t protect you – one of the facility’s priorities is breaking even the most complex of codes."

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/technology-blog/4-high-tech-ways-federal-government-spying-private-153556125.html

And look what is happening to Bones…

I am given to understand that there are encryptions that will require times long relative to the age of the universe to crack by brute force. Perhaps I am misinformed?

$20 Bribe for Janissaries Book 4

Dear Mr. Pournelle,

I’m a big fan. I first read the Janissaries series when I was a kid. I’m 31. That may seem young, but not when measured in decades waiting for a book.

I’m a big enough fan that I have, quite literally, invented a new business model to incentivize the authors I like to publish the books I like. It’s called u-Wish, and the website is u-Wish.com. I launched just last week. The idea is that fans can pledge money to fulfill wishes — for instance, getting a book they like published. They don’t pay anything unless and until the wish actually comes true — for instance, you actually publish the book.

If you fulfill the terms of the wish, the pledged amount is charged and transferred to you. In other words, everyone wins. Your most ardent fans to pay a premium to incentivize you to do what they want. You have a guaranteed payday, in addition to whatever you get from a publisher, and in addition to whatever you get from sales. Basically, it’s free money. I have personally pledged $20 for the sequel to be published by 2013. If you do that, then u-Wish sends you a check for $20. If more people pledged between now and then, well then you get whatever has been pledged.

I will be promoting the wish regardless, because I want it to happen. But no one has better access to your fans than you do. And if you promote it, i’m sure the wish will get a lot more traction.

If you have any questions about the concept, please call or email me. Phone is [redacted-Ed].

Thanks!

-Ted Glotfelty

(CEO and founder of u-Wish).

An intriguing idea. This is the first I have heard of it. I am plugging away on the book. I admit this is a titillating incentive…

My science writer colleague Mitch Waldrup writes:

My apologies in advance for the group email — with double apologies for those of you who get this message more than once.

Once again, I am running the Marine Corps Marathon with Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Team in Training (TNT). Until last year I had alway been a cyclist and occasional swimmer, never a runner. But then I got it into my head that this was something I wanted to do while I was still healthy and strong enough to consider it. When I first started training just a year ago, when a mile seemed like an epic run, it didn’t seem possible that I would ever make the finish line. But I did. And when it was all over, I felt such a high that I didn’t want to let it go. So here I am again — this time running with my wife, Amy Friedlander, on Team Amy and Mitch.

The larger purpose, of course, is to support LLS in its mission-to help find cures and more effective treatments for leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin’s disease and myeloma. My grandmother, Lucile Rabun, died of lymphoma, and Amy’s mother, Dorothy Friedlander, died of a rare variant. So we are running in their memory.

Please make a donation in support of our efforts at our team web site, http://pages.teamintraining.org/nca/corps12/teamamyandmitch <http://pages.teamintraining.org/nca/corps12/teamamyandmitch> .

Thank you so much.

Mitch Waldrop

"The Lovitz Curve"

http://pjmedia.com/zombie/2012/05/11/the-lovitz-curve/?singlepage=true

this is great.

Phil

And readable.

New word in my vocabulary

Thanks to Roland Dobbins, I now have a new word in my vocabulary: Holitburo. Hollywood political bureau = holitburo. Sheer genius, Mr Dobbins.

James Snover

What do we make of this?

http://www.disinfo.com/2012/05/soho-watcher-claims-nasa-cover-up-of-spaceship-spotted-near-sun/

This is crazy; if it is true, what would it mean?  Three times this thing pops up on cameras?  Someone is splicing UFOs into the camera as a joke or something is up…  What do you think?

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

I think I have been seeing stories like this all my life. When Close Encounters of the Third Kind did its world opening, NBC decided to have a science fiction panel see the movie and then discuss it. Participants were Niven and me, Harlan Ellison, Ted Sturgeon, and I suspect there were a couple of others but that’s all I remember. We sat just behind the Director and several big names in the TV industry, and when the mashed potatoes scene came on and went on and on — :This means something” – Niven, said, in a voice that could be heard throughout the Dome, “Clearly the man is not entirely sane,” Followed by loud laughter, followed by a considerable cut in that scene before the moview was released,

Anyway in the panel afterwards Ted Sturgeon announced that he had been following flying saucer stories for years, and was now going to hold out for wreckage and bodies. Show me wreckage and bodies. Anything else I’ve seen before and it never worked out.

I am not quite that adamant, but I do have good reasons for doubting that the United States has any alien space technology kept in secret places like Wright Patterson, I wrote all that in the preface to Karl Pflock’s book on Roswell. Pflock, a true believer in UFO;s obtained a grant to write a book showing that the Roswell incident proved the existence of UFS’s — and, to his horror and disappointment, found that there was a truth and something of a secret, but it had nothing to do with UFO’s. It’s all in Pflock’

mixed blessing

"For those who don’t know, this confirmation extends down to the lowest ranking commissioned officers in the armed forces. That is more or less ceremonial now in so far as it affects ensigns and lieutenants, but it’s fairly vital when it comes to flag ranks."

They might not have done it any differently if they had foreseen the size of the country’s future military but it would be interesting to know what else they would have done differently if allowed a glimpse of how the country has turned out.

–Mike

A&D Matures Layer-by-Layer 3D Digital Manufacturing

Aviation Week & Space Technology May07 , 2012 , p. 48

http://www.aviationweek.com/awin/ArticlesStory.aspx?id=/article-xml/AW_05_07_2012_p48-452346.xml

“Additive manufacturing— producing parts layer by layer direct from digital models —is moving into aerospace. Three-dimensional printing is widely used for rapid prototyping with polymer materials , but technologies for additive manufacturing with aerospace metals are maturing. Working with engine manufacturer Rolls-Royce , Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology has developed a technique to produce bladed compressor disks—blisks—using a laser beam to melt nickel- or titanium-based alloy powder and build the blades layer by layer , reducing material use by up to 60% and manufacturing time around 30% compared with machining blisks from solid metal . Working with Lockheed Martin, Chicago-based Sciaky is developing the capability to produce titanium structural components for the F-35 using electron-beam direct manufacturing . Sciaky and additive-manufacturing system makers EOS and Optomec are working with Pennsylvania State University’s Applied Research Laboratory to establish a manufacturing demonstration center for the U.S. Defense Advanced ResearchProjects Agency to develop and promote direct-digital manufacturing technology.”

I remember reading an SF story about this kind of stuff, 40-50 years ago. Now it’s coming true. Hey. Ya wanna build an airplane in your garage?

Ed

I continue to examine 3d printing technology. It’s amazing.

Subj: Charles Murray: The view from ground level in working-class America

http://blog.american.com/2012/05/the-view-from-ground-level-in-working-class-america/

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

I am very much an admirer of Charles Murray. We correspond, infrequently as neither of us has enough time.

Subject: A rare privilege

Jerry, here’s a story I think you’ll love about a gate guard who was given the rare privilege of drawing his side arm because a sergeant didn’t understand that the gate guard outranks everybody. Not once, as you’ll see, but twice:

http://everything2.com/user/Roninspoon/writeups/Two+stories+of+the+pistol

I wandered off the route I was supposed to take across Henderson Field one day in late 1951. I was challenged by SAC security forces and treated – let us say professionally. I was on my way home from the Far East at the time and the plane, which lost a cowling piece at Wake Island and kept us stuck there for a couple of days while it was repaired (a bleaker place to be stranded would be hard to imagine other than the cartoonish desert island). Apparently our plane wasn’t where it was supposed to be, and we were not supposed to wander past the B-47’s over on one side. I suspect now I know why…

Subject: Farenheit 451 anyone?

http://money.cnn.com/video/technology/2012/05/07/t-frx-plastic-fire.cnnmoney/

Tracy

Cut 15% of teachers and give the rest a 14K bonus/.

….The Oconomowoc plan is to cut the number of high school teachers from 75 to 60, but not to cut what is offered or increase class size. "This is a plan that really puts first what’s best for the kids," said Joseph Moylan, the high school principal.

The plan calls for most teachers to teach four blocks a day. Add on all the other things that need to be done as part of good teaching, and it’s a formidable schedule – impossible, some would say.

A big trade-off: Oconomowoc is planning to offer teachers with four-block loads $14,000 a year extra. That would mean the starting salary at the high school would be just over $50,000; the top salary would be in the mid-$80,000s. (Even with that, the reduction in staff will mean savings of over $500,000.)……

http://www.jsonline.com/news/education/time-will-render-bold-oconomowoc-school-plan-effects-da56n8d-149398195.html

.I would like to see that tried.

Solar quiet spell like the one now looming cooled climate in the past,

Jerry

Solar quiet spell like the one now looming cooled climate in the past:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/08/climate_is_affected_by_the_sun/print.html

Ice skating on the Thames, anyone?

Ed

And yet we see signs of enormous storms on the Sun. None of this is easily predicted. I fear a859 sized solar storms…

Herman Kahn’s _Techniques of Systems Analysis_ is also available online, for free, from RAND:

http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM1829-1.html

And if you take the "Browse by Author" link at the left side of that page, and look for Kahn, Herman, you’ll find a bunch more interesting-looking titles.

If I have not said it clearly before, I consider Herman Kahn’s Techniques of Systems Analysis one of the most valuable books an aspiring systems analyst must read. It is at that graduate level and assumes a working knowledge of calculus; and it explains what systems analysis / operations research is all about, why one would do it, and gives examples.  If you are ever stuck in the logistics business, or the analysis business, or even the strategy business, and you have not read Herman;s book, go do so immediately. Then read it again, because you won’t have got some of his better points the first time, but they’ll be more apparent after you get through to the end.  If you know calculus, read this book.

Subject: April jobs report: Hiring slows, unemployment falls

“….the unemployment rate fell to 8.1% as 342,000 workers dropped out of the labor force. At 63.6%, the portion of the adult population participating in the job market is now at its lowest level since 1981 <http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/03/news/economy/unemployment-rate/index.htm?iid=EL> ….”

http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/04/news/economy/jobs-report-unemployment/index.htm?hpt=hp_t2

© 2012, jerrypournelle. All rights reserved.

Reaping the Whirlwind

As you sow, so shall you reap. They sow the wind, and they reap the whirlwind. I’ve been saying this for years, and now it’s happening. It can be a depressing experience, particularly if you live in California, where the [...]]]> View 724 Monday, May 14, 2012

Reaping the Whirlwind

As you sow, so shall you reap. They sow the wind, and they reap the whirlwind. I’ve been saying this for years, and now it’s happening. It can be a depressing experience, particularly if you live in California, where the coming train wreck is absolutely predictable, nearly everyone sees it coming, and no one seems able to stop it – indeed, the frantic activity by the governor and legislature is to make it worse. Now the President is sending advocates to induce California to spend even more money on a rail system that everyone knows cannot be completed because there just isn’t the money.

California has the highest paid teachers in the country but hardly the best or even adequate schools; so the proposal is to continue giving them more money. What is called ‘drastic cuts’ is in fact lowering the projected raises; it’s still spending more money than was done last year. Everyone knows this; but that’s called austerity.

And it goes on. We have high income taxes and high sales taxes. The streets are not properly paved, much of the water system is ancient, and within a few years the pension costs will be larger than the income even with new taxes. It can’t go on and we all know it; but on it goes. We continue to sow the wind even as we reap the whirlwind.

And it’s discouraging.

I am sure I’ll be over this fit of depression shortly. At some point everyone must be aware that it can’t go on. What happens after that? Will we then burn down the cities? I’ve been heavily under the weather lately. I think I am recovering. thanks to all those who have asked.

One subscriber writes:

This is horrible; I no longer trust cops.  Maybe good ones exist; I don’t care.  It’s not worth looking for them.  These creep wear black uniforms, lie, and are always on the news hurting people.  You’re at more risk for police brutality than you are a terrorist attack.  I’m teaching every kid I know that enough police are sadistic creeps that you should not trust any of them, ever.  It’s just not worth it.

http://www.infowars.com/police-hunt-man-for-sport/

The video shows a particularly disgusting incident in Fullerton, California, about fifty miles east of here, where the Fullerton police for reasons still unclear set out to terrorize a homeless schizophrenic and ended by beating him to death. It is difficult to discern a motive here. Feeding frenzy is more likely than sport. I suspect that most of the Fullerton police involved in this incident would be horrified at the notion that they hunted down and killed this man for sport. Two of them have been charged, one with second degree murder, and the wheels of justice grind on, slowly, because even with the evidence from the video (and the audio is in some ways even more disturbing) have been unable to overcome the general faith of the community in the police.

It used to be a stock movie situation: a town so corrupt that it must hire mercenaries to come in and clean it up. The townsfolk, unable to govern themselves, hire a hard man to come in and impose order. They hope to be able to control the forces they have unleashed, and in the US Western version they can, because the hero turns out not to be interested in wielding the power he has been given. In the real world the townsfolk find they have sown the wind.

Self government requires that some of the good guys do some of the governing. Democracies fall when the middle class no longer rules, but hires others to rule for it. The result is a Nomenklatura, what Djilas called “the New Class.” And over time the Iron Law prevails.

Of course blackguarding the police is not usually a way to recover control of one’s destiny. In this world – at least in the world around here – there are tigers. Today’s news tells us of headless bodies distributed at random in Mexico, and areas of Arizona which have in essence been abandoned by the forces of law and order.

Having for a short time been involved in the politics of controlling the police by allocating police resources, I can tell you that the difficulties are immense, particularly in today’s climate of political correctness. We no longer want self government. We now want politically correct police willing to endure the contempt of those they protect, but still willing to stay on the job. It is another way to sow the wind.

In my judgment, victory in Afghanistan means that it will no longer be a safe haven for the enemies of the United States; it will not be a place of refuge in which terrorists may plot and from which they may operate and launch attacks. That, surely, will be enough.

That is likely to be achievable. It does not require the submission of the provinces of Afghanistan to Kabul. It does not require that the US build up a large Afghan national army capable of suppressing the tribesmen. It does require that the tribesmen be able to call for, if not effective assistance against attack from the Taliban, then at the very least swift and more importantly certain vengeance. Attack our friends and Delta Force will find you and kill you. Depend upon it.

I don’t know if that is achievable in practical terms, but it doesn’t seem impossible.

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2010/Q2/view629.html

I said this several years ago, and again in 2010. At the time it seemed obvious. Now, it seems less certain. We set out to compel the submission of the provinces to the Mayor of Kabul, presumably with the end in view of having Kabul submit to us and become a puppet state with an American resident issuing instructions to an Afghan caudillo. That was never going to work. From Alexander the Great on conquerors have vainly sought to unite Afghanistan, only to find that the only unity that could be imposed was a united opposition to the invader who sought to make a puppet of the Khan in Kabul. Why we thought it would be different when we tried it is a bit hard to discern – I have read the enthusiasts without finding their arguments worth repeating. We continue to sow the wind in Afghanistan and periodically we reap a whirlwind.

And having said all that, it is not too late. The United States has a long history of recovering from its soft periods. We won the Cold War, the Seventy Years War that threatened to turn the entire Earth into a Hydraulic society. As Wittfogel noted in his Oriental Despotism, societies organized around the state ownership of everything can be eternal. He reached this conclusion from Marxist theory: there is no further development. As Trotsky put it, when the state owns all the means of production, opposition to the state means starvation. Such cultures fall, sometimes to the merest push – but it is a push, from outside. They rarely fall to internal opposition. The Nomenklatura in the USSR were never seriously challenged until the system collapsed. Prague Spring happened. The Hungarian uprising died stillborn. It took the United States to bring down the USSR, and it did so without the wild death throes we all feared.

In the euphoria following the end of the Cold War some neo-conservatives thought that we had reached the end of history – that liberal democracy would sweep the world, and there would be no more great developments. That nonsense – unlike Marxism this was quite literally nonsense – did not survive long. History has not ended.

There are still free people, and it is still true that free people can do anything they have a will to do.

© 2012, jerrypournelle. All rights reserved.

A great deal has happened in the past couple of days. The by-elections Tuesday were significant, and a repeat of the pattern of the November 2010 elections. A convict in Texas gets 41% of the vote in a Democratic presidential primary election — http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57430719-503544/4-in-10-choose-convict-over-obama-in-w.va-primary/ [...]]]> View 723 Wednesday, May 09, 2012

A great deal has happened in the past couple of days. The by-elections Tuesday were significant, and a repeat of the pattern of the November 2010 elections. A convict in Texas gets 41% of the vote in a Democratic presidential primary election — http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57430719-503544/4-in-10-choose-convict-over-obama-in-w.va-primary/ . The Tea Party and the Club for Growth bring down Republican Senator Lugar, one of the Republican establishment. The governor of Wisconsin, running unopposed for the Republican nomination in his union-organized recall election has gathered more votes than the two Democratic nominees running to be his opposition in the recall. All across the country the news is bad for Democrats, and not very good for establishment Republicans. The electorate that turned out to vote was pretty conservative – including many Democrats.

Of course President Obama will win next November if the conservatives do not turn out to turn him out. Sitting back and cursing Romney for being a part of the Republican Establishment will pretty well insure four more years of Mr. Obama; and given the president’s proclivity for appointing czars, officers unknown to the Constitution, the republic isn’t likely to survive. Yes, I know – that seems a rather obscure thing to base the fall of the republic on. Appointment of officers not confirmed by the Senate. But think on it, and think on why the Convention of 1787 made the confirmation of officers of the United States a necessary part of the federal government process. For those who don’t know, this confirmation extends down to the lowest ranking commissioned officers in the armed forces. That is more or less ceremonial now in so far as it affects ensigns and lieutenants, but it’s fairly vital when it comes to flag ranks. Think on it. It is and was intended to be a definite limitation on executive power.

As to Mr. Romney, I will have more to say on this over the summer, but I do want to point out that of those considered part of the Republican Establishment, he would be my choice. The primary American virtues are deference to religion – perhaps not quite what the Romans insisted on as pietas, but close enough; industriousness; family loyalty; and adherence to community values. Those, I would say, are also the primary virtues of practicing Mormons, and from what I can see, Romney is more Mormon than Establishment. He is also a firm believer in state’s rights, and limitation of federal power. One may not care for Romney-care as implemented in Massachusetts, but Romney has never said that you should: he has held from the beginning that the federal government doesn’t have the constitutional power to implement anything like that. At one time he may have been an advocate of the Romney-care system for other states, but as experience grows in how it has worked out, we hear less of that.

Now this, I put it to you, is precisely the conservative view of such matters. The States have the right and power to try experiments that are forbidden to the Federal government.

Moreover it’s interesting to hear what Mr. Romney says were his reasons for favoring compulsory health insurance: he says, and although I have no evidence I have no reason not to believe him, that the number of people in the state who didn’t have some form of health insurance was very small – and they were getting it anyway, without paying; the health care law was a way to make them contribute something toward the insurance they were as a matter of practice already enjoying. Put that way I’s still oppose it, but note that it isn’t being sold as an entitlement: it’s being sold as a requirement that you pay for something you are as a practical matter already getting.

My point is that of those in the Republican establishment, I see none closer to traditional American views than Mr. Romney, and much of what he says makes sense. And he is far more likely to restore every day government to the kind of limits the Framers intended than Mr. Obama who, with his czars, and ‘recess appointments’ made when the Senate is not in recess, and a health care bill passed at the last dying moments of a lame duck Congress using arcane procedures, has changed the relationship of the Executive and Legislative branches of government.

And who knows, Romney may actually rid us of bunny inspectors.

The story is even better if Romney wins with a big turnout of conservative voters who also elect conservatives to other levels of office, state and local. He’s not stupid. He can hear that message loud and clear. As all of us should have heard the massage in the votes yesterday.

I was going to write more, but at 1530 Niven came over to pick up Roberta and me, and we went off to a theater where we were joined by Larry’s nephew and family to watch The Avengers.

Great fun. Those who are Marvel Comics fans will love it. Those who aren’t familiar with the Marvel universe might want to look up a few of the characters, but you don’t really have to. You can roll with the flow. It probably helps to understand that Black Widow and Hawkeye (the archer) were lovers, and it certainly helps to have seen the two Iron Man movies, but it’s still a rollicking good adventure with oodles of spectacular special effects. If you hate action adventure movies you’ll hate this one, but then you already know that.

Gwyneth Paltrow is one of my favorite actresses – I particularly liked her performance as Sylvia Plath in what I think is a very underrated film – and she has managed to do something that a lot of ingénues don’t manage, to find a part that isn’t character acting after their ingénue career ends. She has made Pepper Potts into a believable character, a capable and mature woman, still quite attractive and who doesn’t neglect her appearance, but who doesn’t live off her looks. She isn’t a major action character (In one of the Marvel universes she certainly is) but she has a substantial role even so.

Scarlett Johansson has a major part as an action adventure heroine with near superpowers. She is said to have done most of her own stunt work.

I didn’t find any of the men’s performances outstanding although Downey does his usual job of making Iron Man believable, and Tom Hiddleston is quite good as Loki.

It’s a long movie. I thought it perhaps too long, but I’m not sure what I’d cut. The action never stops. I found a few of the plot changes too abrupt (too little preparation) but Niven and my wife hadn’t noticed them until I brought it up, so I’m probably too analytical for this kind of film. Try it, you’ll like it.

Roland had this to add, and I agree:

Avengers.

I thought it was fantastic. I loved the Iron Man, Iron Man 2, and Captain America movies (my one quibble with the Captain America movie was that for some reason, the producers of the film didn’t want to show him fighting actual *Nazis*), I liked the Thor movie – but I thought that Avengers was greater than the sum of its parts.

Yes, Robert Downey, Jr. is always superb and makes Tony Stark believable – but Chris Evans stole the show with his all-American maturity, stolidity, and just general overall *goodness*. I’ve always liked tortured antihero types (which probably says a lot about my own character flaws, heh), but Evans’ Captain America as a wholesome, uncomplicated, good guy is a breath of fresh air in both the Captain America and the Avengers movies. I’m shocked that his line in Avengers about religion, "There’s only one God, ma’am, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that," made it through the Holitburo, but I guess they figured that it would also appeal to Muslims, so they let it slide.

Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner was pretty good, too, IMHO.

Roland Dobbins

Agreed. I wrote that late after we got back from the theater and dinner.

© 2012, jerrypournelle. All rights reserved.

Is intelligence a genetic mistake?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/07/intelligence_and_bad_gene_copies/print.html

A paper “finds that a gene dubbed SRGAP2 has, during cell divisions, been incompletely copied three times in human evolution: once around 3.4 million years ago, and again 2.4 and 1 million years ago. The gene in [...]]]> Mail 723 Tuesday, May 08, 2012

Is intelligence a genetic mistake?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/07/intelligence_and_bad_gene_copies/print.html

A paper “finds that a gene dubbed SRGAP2 has, during cell divisions, been incompletely copied three times in human evolution: once around 3.4 million years ago, and again 2.4 and 1 million years ago. The gene in question is associated with cortical development.”

“The researchers also find the timing of the mutation suggestive (although not conclusive): one of the partially-copied genes seems to arrive in the human genome at around the same time as modern humans began to supplant their hominid predecessors.”

Ed

Carl Sagan used to speculate that one answer to Fermi’s Question – “Where are they?” – is that when a race gets intelligent enough to go to space it will have nuclear power and other such sources of energies of mass destruction – see McPhee’s The Curve of Binding Energy – and will be unable to control everyone who has access to weapons of mass destruction – and will decivilize and destroy itself. That’s why there are no aliens landing on the White House lawn.

I have always thought that humans developed intelligence because we were fortunate enough to have dogs as partners. They use their forebrains to smell intruding enemies, leaving us free to use ours to develop smarts.

Our lives are being sold in the name of political idealism — again:

<.>

69 members of the U.S. House of Representatives have sent Barack Obama a letter expressing their concern that a new international treaty currently being negotiated would essentially ban all "Buy American" laws.  This new treaty is known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and it is going to be one of the biggest "free trade" agreements in history.  Critics are referring to it as the "NAFTA of the Pacific", and it would likely cost the U.S. economy even more jobs than NAFTA did.  At the moment, the Trans-Pacific Partnership includes Brunei, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore.  Barack Obama is pushing hard to get the United States into the TPP, and Australia, Peru, Malaysia, Vietnam, Canada, Japan and South Korea are also reportedly interested in joining.  But quite a few members of Congress have heard that "Buy American" laws will essentially be banned under this agreement, and this has many of them very concerned.  You can read the entire letter that was sent to Obama right here.  Unfortunately, the leaders of both major political parties are overwhelmingly in favor of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, so the objections of these 69 members of Congress are likely to fall on deaf ears.  The Trans-Pacific Partnership will accelerate the flow of American jobs out of this country, and meanwhile our politicians will continue to insist that they are doing everything that they can to "create jobs".

</>

http://www.infowars.com/is-obama-negotiating-a-treaty-that-would-essentially-ban-all-buy-american-laws/

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

The question of Free Trade vs. selected protectionism is complex and bitterly debated. We will probably reopen the debate here. Lincoln once famously said that if he bought a shirt from England, he got a shirt, possibly at a bargain, but the money left the country. If he bought it from New England he got the shirt, the money stayed home, and could be taxed. Obviously the situation is more complex than that, but Lincoln understood that. Unprotected industries seldom survive starup. On the other hand, over protected industries generally grow stale and inefficient – look at Detroit in the 1950’s. Or the history of the steel industry.

One thing seems clear to me: if you put in a lot of expensive regulations without some tariff, you cannot compete with those who don’t face the regulations – especially if they have bought your production technology.

Tax loophole costs billions – 13 WTHR Indianapolis

http://www.wthr.com/story/17798210/tax-loophole-costs-billions

4 Billion dollars in tax fraud. Worse than bunny inspectors.

How truly good. Hardly a surprise of course.

Markets for human flesh

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

I believe you once stated that unbridled capitalism would lead to a market in human flesh. It appears you were not mistaken .

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57428878/south-korea-cracks-down-on-human-flesh-capsules-from-china/

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2140702/South-Korea-customs-officials-thousands-pills-filled-powdered-human-baby-flesh.html

Of course, thousands of babies are aborted or die soon after birth in the land of the one-child policy. I suppose it was only a matter of time before someone decided it was a shame to see all that material go to waste.

The irony that China is not, technically, a capitalist country is of course not lost on me.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

This is neither the first nor the last. Welcome to the future.

‘The world could not get enough of Mussolini until he teamed up with Hitler and the Nazis.’

<http://takimag.com/article/red_flags_and_a_red_rose_nicholas_farrell/print>

Roland Dobbins

Mussolini made the trains run on time and actually built much of the railroad system. He was a socialist. Generally socialism requires a command economy. Mussolini was admired by many including FDR and Huey Long (who understood him quite well). Argentina is still recovering from Peron who was a would be Mussolini – as is Chavez. John Stuart Mill once said that a society unable to govern itself must settle for a Charlemagne or an Akbar if they are fortunate enough to find one. Some would add Mussolini to that list, but what you are more likely to get is a Castro, Peron, Chavez…

McAfee founder raided in Belize by gang-busting police

My organization has had similar experiences in third world countries … but mostly in Africa.

Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/04/mcafee_busted_belize/

McAfee founder raided in Belize by gang-busting police

Claims political persecution and dog murder

By Iain Thomson in San Francisco <http://forms.theregister.co.uk/mail_author/?story_url=/2012/05/04/mcafee_busted_belize/>

Posted in Business <http://www.theregister.co.uk/business/> , 4th May 2012 18:31 GMT <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/04/>

John McAfee, retired founder of McAfee Antivirus, has had his Belize laboratory raided and his dog shot during a dawn raid by thirty officers of the local police Gang Suppression Unit.

At 6am on Monday morning the officers with a warrant stormed McAfee’s laboratory, which researches ways to use bacterial communication to fight disease. In a statement <http://edition.channel5belize.com/archives/69892> [1] to local station Channel Five, McAfee said police smashed open unlocked doors, handcuffed the 12 employees and "murdered my dog in cold blood."

"This is clearly a military dictatorship where people are allowed to go and harass citizens based on rumor alone and treat them as if they are guilty before any evidence whatsoever is obtained," he said. "It is astonishing, it is beyond belief and I intend not to let this stand. I will not stand idly by to let this happen to me."

The police claimed that the facility had unlicensed firearms, and McAfee claims the correct documents were all handed over, but after the raid a single firearms certificate was missing and he and his staff were left handcuffed in the compound for 14 hours. It took copies of the original certificates and the intervention of the US embassy to get him released, but his passport was seized.

McAfee claims that he was approached by a local politician who asked for a donation to his campaign. He refused. McAfee has spent millions on local health and police programs, but has not wanted to get involved in politics, he said.

"I am an old man, I am sixty-six. I have a fair amount of money and not much to do. So I spend it where I think it will do good. And I don’t ever invest in politics," he said. "I don’t donate to any political party; I don’t have any political affiliations. I think politics is foolish for a private citizen like myself to engage in — the winning party, you never get your money and the losing party, you’re on the outs."

McAfee originally started researching the Brain virus as an intellectual exercise, before marketing code <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/01/07/in_computer_disease_there/> [2] to handle the first malware by pioneering shareware. He eventually started McAfee before selling it to Network Associates and retiring to study yoga, while still investing in technology and research.

Of course you must expect this sort of thing if you put your trust in princes. But who would have taught McAfee that?

With this announcement, I expect the AGW doomsayers will increase their strident rhetoric by several decibels.

Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/04/greenland_the_glaciers_are_ok/

Greenland glaciers not set to cause disastrous sea level rises – study

Another blow for hippy doomsayers

By Lewis Page <http://forms.theregister.co.uk/mail_author/?story_url=/2012/05/04/greenland_the_glaciers_are_ok/>

Posted in Science <http://www.theregister.co.uk/science/> , 4th May 2012 11:24 GMT <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/04/>

US government funded scientists have measured the speed of glaciers in Greenland as they move down to the sea over the past ten years, and discovered that – while the glaciers have speeded up somewhat – there’s no indication that this will mean major sea level rises.

"Observed acceleration indicates that sea level rise from Greenland may fall well below proposed upper bounds," write the boffins, who are based in Seattle and Ohio.

There’s a lot of interest in Greenland’s glaciers, as opposed to the rest of the Arctic ice cap, as they rest on solid land and thus – if they should all slide off – sea levels would rise seriously around the globe. Just a few years ago, the fearmongering hippies* at Greenpeace were bandying <http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/features/greenlandmelting170206/> [1] a wild figure of seven metres about, adding:

That’s bye-bye most of Bangladesh, Netherlands, Florida and would make London the new Atlantis.

In the real world, scientists had thought that – if the glaciers accelerated faster and faster as some models predicted – melting Greenland ice might cause 19 inches of sea-level rise by the year 2100. Other scenarios pointed to a lower figure, of four inches. Combined with melting from the Antarctic and mountain glaciers around the world – though many of these latter don’t appear to be melting at all <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/16/himalayan_karakoram_glaciers_gaining_ice/> [2], according to recent research – this could still mean greater rises than the normal 6-7 inches as seen in the 20th century. <clip>

Of course sea levels were much lower when much of the Northern Hemisphere was under kilometers of glacial ice. The Persian Gulf was marshland…

Fred, on education

Fred nails it again.

http://www.fredoneverything.net/Enstupidation.shtml

Al Perrella

Yes, I covered that in View, and thanks. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=7235

NUIverse

"The amazing NUIverse astronomy application by Dr. David Brown puts the cosmos at your fingertips like never before."

http://www.flixxy.com/nuiverse-astronomy-application.htm

Quite something!

Andrew.

Sable has hunted gophers on that hill for all of her eight years, and today she caught one

So… did she offer to share with the leader of her "pack" ie- you?

John

I hadn’t thought about it, but yes. She was of course astonished that she caught it, but clearly she is programmed to kill them quickly without thinking about it. It’s not as if we have any shortage of gophers, although the rattlesnakes are keeping them a bit in check. The West Nile virus has far worse than decimated the crow population, and the crows haven’t thinned the latest rattlesnake hatch. Of course there is always an ecology. I’d rather have crows and more gophers than rattlesnakes, but that’s just my convenience. The Nature Conservancy bought up the hills to take them out of the development market, and the cuts in state budget keep the ranger population down, so we’re seeing natural development in the California scrub hills – and without fire. For a while. Of course eventually there will be a fire they can’t control.

Jedi Jerry -

I’m sure others have brought your attention to this: dinosaur flatulence may have warmed the Earth -

http://news.yahoo.com/gas-dinosaur-flatulence-may-warmed-earth-160634516.html

And here I thought beans and onions were Cenozoic.

Ed

Jerry

A better description of the dinosaur flatulence scenario:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/07/dinosaur_flatulence_warmed_earth/print.html

Ed

I remember many years ago being part of a briefing in which Possony told Reagan that much “greenhouse warming” was caused by “the flatulence of cows.” I have never actually worked the numbers on that. And how many dinosaurs were there? Surely not as many as people and cows now?

Climate Wars: The Heartland Billboard Fiasco

Long, long ago, on a billboard far, far away :

http://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2012/05/umpire-strikes-back.html

Russell Seitz

fake minorities in academia, who would have thought it?

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/all-fall-down/?singlepage=true

Phil

I know a genealogist who is doing very well in constructing ancestries that include privileged minorities…

© 2012, jerrypournelle. All rights reserved.

A MALWARE WARNING from a long time subscriber:

Malware warning – NCH software "Doxillion"

Jerry,

A warning for your users, the default windows application search when trying to open up a .wps file leads to malware from "NCH software". It purports to [...]]]> View 723 Tuesday, May 08, 2012

A MALWARE WARNING from a long time subscriber:

Malware warning – NCH software "Doxillion"

Jerry,

A warning for your users, the default windows application search when trying to open up a .wps file leads to malware from "NCH software". It purports to install doxillion software converter which on the face of it appears legit and since microsoft’s own application search listed it, you might think that it is in fact legit. In reality, it doesn’t really do anything worthwhile but now opening almost any data file will lead to a pop-up saying that you need a converter update from NCH doxillion so please click here.

I’m 60 minutes into rooting it out of my registry since microsoft program remover doesn’t come close to removing the damage done, and I’m probably going to have to do a system restore or restore from backup since it has altered document opening/conversion settings for nearly every application on my computer (including itunes features for converting between sound file formats).

This is badly destructive and poorly behaved, and microsoft is part of the problem since the automatic application search feature links to this (instead of the correct microsoft word document converter which works fine) and windows doesn’t offer up a way to undo the damage caused without rolling the system back to a restore point created before the installation.

So, my fault for trusting a microsoft "approved" solution, but your readers might be saved a lot of hassle by a warning to treat this as the worst kind of malware.

Oh btw neither Norton nor Microsoft security essentials nor msie’s site screening feature offered any help. And CCleaner wasn’t able to completely root it out of the registry either, the damage was so widespread.

Sean

I have not experienced this and with luck never will, but be careful.  BEWARE.

As usual, Fred cuts through the euphemisms and gets to the point in his latest essay on education.

I wonder what purpose the public schools serve, other than to warehouse children while their parents work or watch television. They certainly don’t teach much, as survey after survey shows. Is there any particular reason for having them? Apart from their baby-sitting function, I mean.

Yet public schools remain very popular, and people are willing to tax themselves (and raise inordinately on others) to “support education” and “support the schools.” Of course this all became inevitable when the Supreme Court in its infinite wisdom declared education – something never mentioned in the Constitution or its amendments – as a federal entitlement, rather than as something provided by citizens for whatever reasons appeal to them. When schools are funded by local property owners who also elect the local school board, you get one kind of school; when “education” becomes an entitlement and is paid for by the state (on the basis of attendance, not results) you get quite another.

For my first eight years in grade school, we had about 20 students to a grade and two grades to the classroom. Capleville school was in the middle of nowhere and my classmates were farm children brought in by school bus. In my case the school was about a mile and a half from my house, but the school bus route wandered all through the country east of Highway 78 picking up farm kids. What they learned in Capleville consolidated was pretty standard for Tennessee. The math instruction was arithmetic and pretty well stopped at 6^th grade. English literature included what was standard fare in those days, Ruskin, Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake, Longfellow, that sort of thing. There was world history, Tennessee history, US history, and in 5^th grade as I recall mostly European history; I remember that because there was a textbook with a picture of something medieval or renaissance (I doubt that we were taught the difference) and the village idiot, a girl about 14 still in 5^th grade, had copied the caption to a picture in the history textbook and read it aloud as her writing assignment.

Fred continues

Schooling, sez me, should be adapted to the needs and capacities of those being schooled. For unintelligent children, the study of anything beyond minimal reading is a waste of time, since they will learn little or nothing more. For the intelligent, a public schooling is equivalent to tying an anchor to a student swimmer. The schools are an impediment to learning, a torture of the bright, and a form of negligent homicide against a country that needs trained minds in a competitive world.

Let us start with the truly stupid. Millions of children graduate—“graduate”—from high school—“high school”—unable to read. Why inflict twelve years of misery on them? It is not reasonable to blame them for being witless, but neither does it make sense to pretend that they are not. For them school is custodial, nothing more. Since there is little they can do in a technological society, they will remain in custody all their lives. This happens, and must happen, however we disguise it.

And that is where I disagree with him. I don’t recall anyone at Capleville who was in misery over schoolwork. Everyone in my classes – gathered from farms all around, there being no more than a couple of hundred families in Capleville itself – could read, and all of them except me learned something. I suppose I learned something too – I would never have read most of the items in our readers if they hadn’t been assigned – but mostly I was on my own. I had the Britannica at home and a pretty good memory, so I often knew more about anything brought up for class discussion than the teachers did, and mostly I learned that this wasn’t always a good thing – adults don’t really appreciate being corrected by ten year olds in sixth grade – and that I hated penmanship classes. And that what you learn from Captain Marvel comic books isn’t very good science, but the notion of an intelligent worm setting out to conquer the earth can be interesting.

Moreover, in my eight years in grade school I didn’t know anyone who couldn’t read. Plenty who didn’t really understand what they were reading, but even the village idiot could read in the sense that she saw words and pronounced them, even though she didn’t see why reading the caption to a picture (The man and the lady are playing chess, a popular game in those times) would be thought amusing to students who had seen that in their history lesson book a week before. Incidentally, the girl in question got pregnant at age 16 and married an Italian prisoner of war who worked on the farm her parents owned, and when I last heard of her she had two children and had inherited the farm.

The point being that the farm owners in the Capleville consolidated district were presumably satisfied with the school. I don’t really know, but I don’t recall any contested school board elections. I think the local general store owner was one of the school board members.

But Fred’s depiction of many schools as sheer hell for bright and stupid pupils alike, and not much use for all those in between is I gather fairly accurate for most of the Los Angeles Unified School District. I happen to live near one of the LAUSD flagship schools and in a neighborhood of mostly behind the scenes movie people – I expect there are more employed writers in Studio City than in any other square mile on earth. Our local school serves us well and people all over the city try to find ways to get their kids into it. There are other decent schools in LA. Alas, Fred’s horror stories apply to a lot of it.

And his conclusion:

What is the point of pretending to teach the unteachable while, to all appearances, trying not to teach the easily teachable? The answer of course is that we have achieved communism, the rule of the proletariat, and the proletariat doesn’t want to strain itself, or to admit that there are things it can’t do.

In schooling, perhaps “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” isn’t a bad idea. If a child has a substantial IQ, expect him to use it for the good of society, and give him schools to let him do it. If a child needs a vocation so as to live, give him the training he needs. But don’t subject either to enstupidated, unbearably tedious, pointless, one-size-fits-nobody pseudo-schools to hide the inescapable fact that we are not all equal.

As I have said, repeatedly, the best way to be certain that no child is left behind is to be certain that no child gets ahead. If you reward schools for attendance and nothing else, then try to modify that by demanding that all the students get over a very low bar, you can predict the result: all the effort will be spent on those who would fail without it. Resources won’t go do bright kids, nor will they go to the average students who could greatly benefit from it. It will go to those below normal and they’ll get just enough to get them over the bar. And of course the unions will insist that there are no incompetent teachers. There never are.

For all its floundering around with the notion that every kid is entitled to a world class university prep education, the Gates Foundation has made one key discovery: you can get about 100% improvement in any school simply by firing the worst 10% of the teachers in it. Don’t replace them, simply get them out and distribute the others into the remaining classes, even if you have to go to two grades to the room. Get the dullards out of the school teaching business and things will get better. Of course twice as good as what we have is pretty awful, but it’s something.

But the only systematic solution to the ‘education problem’ is to go back to transparency and subsidiarity. Let local school boards run the schools, and let them be elected by the people who pay for them. That way there might be some justification for thinking of the schools as ‘investments.’ So long as they remain subject to a central bureaucracy, the Iron Law will see to it that many bright kids, supposedly entitled to a world class university prep education, find themselves sentenced to Hell.

More later, but we have a virus warning.

© 2012, jerrypournelle. All rights reserved.

New Chinese Motto: “Have One Child. Please.”

Steve Barnes is in town, and Niven, Barnes, and I went up the hill, 4 miles round trip and 750 foot elevation. Sable has hunted gophers on that hill for all of her eight years, and today [...]]]> View 722 Friday, May 04, 2012

New Chinese Motto: “Have One Child. Please.”

Steve Barnes is in town, and Niven, Barnes, and I went up the hill, 4 miles round trip and 750 foot elevation. Sable has hunted gophers on that hill for all of her eight years, and today she caught on. A good day, but I’m exhausted. And the Lakers blew game three in Denver.

Good night…

To remind you of what Scientific American once was and sometimes can be again http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/thoughtful-animal/2012/04/30/dogs-but-not-wolves-use-humans-as-tools/  (This was actually mail but now I can’t find it. I’m good at losing things.) Psychologists have been trying to determine who is smarter, dogs or wolves, but that’s the wrong question. Dogs do what they are good at, and rely on humans to do the rest.  Wolves don’t think they have that option.

© 2012, jerrypournelle. All rights reserved.

Paul Ryan talk to Georgetown, have you seen it"

This is the link

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/297054/paul-ryans-whittington-lecture-daniel-foster

I especially note

"We need a better approach.

To me, this approach should be based on the twin virtues of solidarity and subsidiarity – [...]]]> Mail 722 Tuesday, May 01, 2012

Paul Ryan talk to Georgetown, have you seen it"

This is the link

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/297054/paul-ryans-whittington-lecture-daniel-foster

I especially note

"We need a better approach.

To me, this approach should be based on the twin virtues of solidarity and subsidiarity – virtues that, when taken together, revitalize civil society instead of displacing it."

The whole talk is very good and on point.

R/Spike

Paul Ryan’s Whittington Lecture at Georgetown

This guy takes subsidiarity seriously.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/297054/paul-ryans-whittington-lecture-daniel-foster

Video:

http://www.c-span.org/Events/Rep-Paul-Ryan-Defends-Budget-at-Georgetown-University/10737430203/

>>Government is one word for things we do together. But it is not the only word.

We are a nation that prides itself on looking out for one another – and government has an important role to play in that. But relying on distant government bureaucracies to lead this effort just hasn’t worked.

Instead, our budget builds on the historic welfare reforms of the 1990s – reforms proven to work. We aim to empower state and local governments, communities, and individuals – those closest to the problem. And we aim to promote opportunity and upward mobility by strengthening job training programs, to help those who have fallen on hard times.<<

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

Transparency and subsidiarity are both necessary for the survival of self-government. We seem dedicated to eliminating both. Or perhaps I am merely in a bad mood.

Alive?

You said "Why we did not take Bin Laden alive for interrogation has not been explained, and probably never will be."

Of course we know the answer, even if it is never officially stated.

Nothing we could do to interrogate him would pass muster for avoiding the faux war on terror standard of torture, including just holding him in solitary. We have no place to keep him which passes the legal and practical tests forced on us after the last presidential election, and even though we’ve not shut down Gitmo, just imagine the stink of putting UBL there. No, there was no advantage and plenty of problems for us if we took him alive, but no downside if he died.

I’ve been saying for a while I’m just not capable of understanding why it is worse to execute them than it is to take them alive and do to them what we do to every SEAL, Green Beret or pilot in our service. Yet doing what you are directed to do, with written opinions from the DoJ that it is legal won’t protect you from legal attacks later on. I wonder what effect that will have on national security?

You know it, I know it, and the Legions know it. That is not a good situation.

Apple & Corporate Taxes

I’ve been reading news articles about USA corporations "not paying taxes" since the early 80′s. Every single time when you get to the end of the piece you discover that the reality is almost the exact opposite of what the headline and the rest of the article implies. In this latest issue most of the posters aren’t even bothering to put the truth at the end. Now they entire piece is a mistatement.

In the USA corporations are required to pay income tax deposits throughout the year based upon the prior year’s taxes (unless they expect income to be less in the current year but in that case if you underpay you can be subject to penalties). Any additional taxes over the prior year are paid on March 15 with the tax return or the extension letter. In Apples case they are apparently comparing the current interim payments (based upon last year’s income) with the current year’s income which is much higher. A truly apples to oranges comparison. I think The Register had a piece explaining reality.

Apple apparently does take advantage of legal loopholes to lower their taxes but nowhere near the amount that certain sources are lying about.

In the 80′s and 90′s I used to see claims that all these large corporations "owed no taxes", implying they didn’t pay any corporate income tax despite large income. It was usually that the corporation paid their taxes in full during the year and didn’t owe anything on their tax return. Only in the media can paying your taxes in full equal not paying any taxes.

Gene Horr

No one has a moral obligation to overpay taxes; one may have moral obligations to pay back, to give to charities, to support public enterprises; but taxes generally do not do that, and when governments get money they spend more than they get, nor do they cut back when the income comes down. It is sinful to let the government have a dime more than you must give it, or so say some who have analyzed what government does with the money.

Subj: Lawyerly advocacy vs Science

An explication, based on a recent alarmist publication, of the distinction Dr. Pournelle has pointed out several times:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/29/from-schmidt-2005-to-miller-2012-the-not-needed-excuse-for-omitted-variable-fraud/

>>The anti-CO2 alarmists are behaving like lawyers in an adversarial

>>legal proceeding, hiding what hurts their own case while overstating

>>what can be fashioned in support. In the courts an adversarial system

>>is able to elicit a measure of truth only because there is a judge to

>>maintain rules of evidence and a hopefully unbiased jury examining the

>>facts. These conditions do not obtain in science. The anti-CO2

>>alarmists are both the peer-review jury and the judge/editors,

>>devolving into a pre-scientific ethic where acceptance is determined

>>by power, not reason and evidence.<<

Note also the reference and link to the 2005 exchange between Dr.

Pournelle and the alarmist Dr. Gavin Schmidt — search within the article for "Pournelle".

I did not re-read the Pournelle–Schmidt discussion carefully, only skimmed it. My impression is that the slight-of-hand concealment of the possibility that there might be solar effects *other* than Total Solar Irradiance comes through more clearly in the above-linked piece than in the original P–S discussion: in my skimming, I noticed only a single reference, at the very end of the archived web page containing the discussion (more of a postscript, actually), to the possibility of

magnetic-field->cosmic-ray->clouds effects.

Continuing in the above-linked piece:

>>Schmidt looks askance at GCR-cloud as “new physics,” but it isn’t new in any fundamental sense. The cloud micro-physics that Svensmark, Kirkby and others are looking at is presumed to follow established particle physics models. It is a new application of current physics. What Schmidt is really suggesting with his jaundiced eye is that we should be reluctant to extrapolate our current understanding of physical principles to illuminate the biggest scientific controversy of the day.

At the same time, he and Miller and the rest of the alarmists have introduced something that really is new and problematic. They are using model runs to test their hypotheses. They are using theory to test theory, with no empirical test needed. <<

After which the piece quotes at some length from the Shindell-Schmidt paper "a highly abridged description of the hypothetical steps that their model works through."

>>It is fine for people to be working on these models and trying to make progress with them, but to use them to make claims about what is actually happening in the world is insane, and using them as an excuse for ignoring actual empirical evidence is worse than insane.

This really is a new kind of science, and not one that stands up to scrutiny. We are being asked to turn our world upside down on the strength of the most elaborate speculations in the history of mankind, yet Schmidt thinks it is cloud microphysics—traditional science!—that should be eschewed. All to justify the destruction of the modern world, now well underway.<<

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

Cheating In School

Jerry,

Apparently cheating in school has become a protected right, or is fast becoming one: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-school-cheat-20120427,0,1656872.story

Kevin L. Keegan

Given that the purpose of universities has changed enormously, so that most of them no longer have a goal of education but are run by Iron Law, the old notion of honor changes a lot. Getting grades in universities is now vital to one’s career because of credentialism, but the faculty is run by an entirely different moral. This is not a stable system.

Wind farms can cause climate change.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/9234715/Wind-farms-can-cause-climate-change-finds-new-study.html

“The spatial pattern of the warming resembles the geographic distribution of wind turbines and the year-to-year land surface temperature over wind farms shows a persistent upward trend from 2003 to 2011, consistent with the increasing number of operational wind turbines with time,” said Prof Zhou.

Charles Brumbelow

Think of that! The old slow turning windmills that pumped water were an entirely different proposition; but now the high speed turbines generate electricity and kill birds, and the electricity pumps water. And the Iron Law prevails.

WOW, you will not believe the new Corning Glass!!! AMAZING!!

Jerry,

WOW, you will not believe the new Corning Glass!!! AMAZING!!

Enjoy the knowledge.

click on the BLUE GLASS below.

If you’re wondering why HP and others are dropping desktops etc., look at this. It’s called GLASS.

THE FUTURE IS ALMOST HERE WITH CORNING GLASS, AND THE IDEAS ARE MIND BOGGLING!

(Ignore the camera ad at the beginning!)

CLICK HERE GLASS <http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=6Cf7IL_eZ38&vq=medium>

Astonishing.

That which is not seen

Dr Pournelle

I have the Bastiat piece on my Kindle. It is the lead work in a volume entitled "The Economics of Freedom <http://www.amazon.com/The-Economics-Freedom-Professors-ebook/dp/B004QZ9X6M/> ".

In the chapter he titled ‘Restrictions’, Bastiat argues against import duties thus:

—–

[A French iron mill owner, M Prohibant, argues:]

"Belgian iron is sold in France at ten francs, which obliges me to sell mine at the same price. I should like to sell at fifteen, but cannot do so on account of this Belgian iron, which I wish was at the bottom of the Red Sea. I beg you will make a law that no more Belgian iron shall enter France. Immediately I raise my price five francs, and these are the consequences: "For every hundred-weight of iron that I shall deliver to the public, I shall receive fifteen francs instead of ten; I shall grow rich more rapidly, extend my traffic, and employ more workmen. My workmen and I shall spend much more freely to the great advantage of our tradesmen for miles around. These latter, having more custom, will furnish more employment to trade, and activity on both sides will increase in the country. This fortunate piece of money, which you will drop into my strong-box, will, like a stone thrown into a lake, give birth to an infinite number of concentric circles."

Charmed with his discourse, delighted to learn that it is so easy to promote, by legislating, the prosperity of a people, the law-makers voted the restriction. "Talk of labour and economy," they said, "what is the use of these painful means of increasing the national wealth, when all that is wanted for this object is a Decree?"

And, in fact, the law produced all the consequences announced by M. Prohibant; the only thing was, it produced others which he had not foreseen. To do him justice, his reasoning was not false, but only incomplete. In endeavouring to obtain a privilege, he had taken cognizance of the effects which are seen, leaving in the background those which are not seen. He had pointed out only two personages, whereas there are three concerned in the affair. It is for us to supply this involuntary or premeditated omission.

It is true, the crown-piece, thus directed by law into M. Prohibant’s strong-box, is advantageous to him and to those whose labour it would encourage; and if the Act had caused the crownpiece to descend from the moon, these good effects would not have been counterbalanced by any corresponding evils. Unfortunately, the mysterious piece of money does not come from the moon, but from the pocket of a blacksmith, or a nail-smith, or a cartwright, or a farrier, or a labourer, or a shipwright; in a word, from James B., who gives it now without receiving a grain more of iron than when he was paying ten francs. Thus, we can see at a glance that this very much alters the state of the case; for it is very evident that M. Prohibant’s profit is compensated by James B.’s loss, and all that M. Prohibant can do with the crown-piece, for the encouragement of national labour, James B. might have done himself. The stone has only been thrown upon one part of the lake, because the law has prevented it from being thrown upon another.

Therefore, that which is not seen supersedes that which is seen, and at this point there remains, as the residue of the operation, a piece of injustice, and, sad to say, a piece of injustice perpetrated by the law!

[emphasis added]

—–

I say it is M Bastiat’s reasoning which is incomplete. Bastiat assumes a theoretical, frictionless exchange. He assumes — and does not reveal his assumption — that Belgium 1) trades freely, 2) offers no gov’t bounties to ironmakers to lower the price of Belgian iron, 3) produces iron of quality equal to French iron, and 4) that Belgian workers’ pay equals French workers’ pay. There are likely other assumptions he makes that I have missed.

Bastiat took "cognizance of the [things] which are seen, leaving in the background those which are not seen." In this, he was as blind as all economists. He preferred the clean, linear world of theory to the dirty, chaotic world of reality.

The reality is that the French Parlement has a duty to secure prosperity to the French. The only economic means it has to do so in the instant case is import duties. (I suppose the French could invade Belgium, raze the iron factories there, and summarily execute all Belgian ironworkers, but that seems a trifle excessive even for the French. )

Pat Buchanan in an interview, "Suicide of a Superpower" <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GG1rFA_QEk> , articulated the case for tariffs better than I can. The interview is an hour long. Buchanan’s first rant against free trade begins 23 minutes in. The second begins 27 minutes in.

I shall close with my own observations. I have seen free trade benefit the wealthy. They can buy goods cheaper. I have seen free trade harm labor. They lose the competition for wages to the Chinese, Vietnamese, and Indonesians. They could buy goods cheaper if they had the money, but they don’t have, and they won’t have. Labor become unemployed, become dependent on the gov’t for handouts, and lose all self-respect for themselves because they no longer work for their bread. Thus, the spirit of the Republic diminishes.

Live long and prosper

h lynn keith

Free trade works when applied with other free enterprises. It is not really free trade when you place enormous regulatory restrictions on your own labor force, then require your factories and labor to compete with imports that face no such regulations. And as Lincoln observed, if I buy a shirt from London, I have the shirt; but if I buy it from a mill in New England the money stays here and I can tax it.

On the other hand, without some free trade you get the situation of the US automobile industry prior to overseas competition; and the internal self destruction of an automobile industry that could not resist paying ever larger sums to those whose productivity was restricted by union rules.

The simple rule is “it’s complicated.” There is such a thing as hostile trade, as the Japanese discovered in Shogun times. But the political class does not think much past the next election. Given that reality, what is to be done? Regulations pile on through the Iron Law. Nations build structure with their wealth. The structure feeds itself and starves everyone else. Free trade is one weapon in slowing that.

As I said, it’s complicated.

USAF Air to air squadron of the year (Raytheon trophy) video – 67FS

Dr. Pournelle,

This video was put together in honor of the 2011 air to air squadron of the year (Raytheon award), the 67FS (F-15C). The video and especially the radio chatter is authentic, a better look at what we do than I’ve ever seen in an unclassified video. I used to do this for a living flying the F-15E instead of the F-15C, but the air to air mission was essentially the same and this video captures it very well.

http://vimeo.com/40935850

If anyone asks why I kept flying fighters after my back injury, I’ll just give them the link to this video.

Sean

Hurrah.

1992 LA Riots

Jerry,

I would hold the Media responsible for the 1992 LA Riots.

If the general public had been shown the same evidence that the Simi Valley jury was shown, the verdict would not have been a surprise.

After the first day or so after Rodney King’s arrest the LA TV Stations stopped showing the complete video of the "beating." The first five seconds or so showing Mr. King trying to get up we’re no longer shown.

The fact that there was a passenger in Mr. King’s car who followed instructions and was restrained without incident was no longer mentioned.

It was interesting to note a correction earlier this week in the LA Times. A story about the zing arrest said that he was handcuffed during the "beating." This was false, he was not handcuffed during the beating. The error occurred because a 1992 LA Times story inaccurately stated that he was.

This type of thing happens frequently. It would seem that much of this is done on purpose to make a story fit the agenda of the Reporter or the reporting entity. A current example is the NBC editing of the Zimmerman 911 call. An earlier one would be the 2004 60 Minutes 2 piece by Dan Rather with the rather obvious Bush National Guard forgeries.

(Dan Rather, based on recent statements, still believes this documents are genuine.)

We as Citizens not only get the Government we deserve through our ignorance and inaction; we also get the type of media we deserve.

Bob Holmes

Steve Barnes asked me what I thought the police were doing in the Rodney King case. I said they thought they were beating hell out of a guy who had taken them on a dangerous high speed chase in a residential district.

If we insist on being guarded only by saints we will have few guardians. If we have few guardians we will have to guard ourselves. Few of us are saints.

The police sometimes get out of control. I was once part of those who watch the watchers – that is, I was Executive Assistant to the Mayor. I went out to police precincts and into problem situations to see what was happening.

If we insist that only saints are fit to guard us, we will have few guardians. It would be nice if it were different.

Jerry: Memory capacity of the human mind.

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/04/the-human-minds-raw-capacity.html

Unfortunately, my neurons seem to be used for ad jingles and 60′s TV trivia.

Chris C=

Since the cancer treatments my memory has been unreliable, and sometimes humourously so. My only compensation is the knowledge that my lousy data retrieval system now is about what Niven has had for the forty years I have known him. That gives me a bit of hope…

drudge malware

Jerry,

Careful going to drudge report. It’s serving up at least one and maybe two bits of malware. At least that’s what seems to be happening. It’s fairly convincing too. If microsoft security essentials hadn’t reacted, the malware appeared at first glance to be a MSIE feature, stopping a pop-up and offering to block something bad.

In any case, drudge isn’t safe right now.

And apparently fixed. This happens periodically. Fortunately Windows Live Security seems to work pretty well. But I don’t go to Drudge. One advantage of being me is that if something really interesting happens one of my readers will tell me. And I read all my mail in plaintext.

Korea Today

Pohang, Korea

Dr Pournelle

Pohang lies on the east coast of Korea and straddles the Hyeongsan River. <http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=39547> That big reverse L in the middle of the photo is the POSCO steel mill. All the red-colored area belongs to POSCO. The docks south of the mill (to the left of the mill in the photo) belong to POSCO, too. AFAIK the navy yard lies along the Hyeongsan River.

North of the river, Pohang is all residential and tourist districts: restaurants, bars, hotels, and coffee shops dominate the bayside.

South of the river, POSCO owns or controls every square meter. (POSCO used to mean POhang iron and Steel COmpany, but, like AT&T, the acronym became the company name.) Depending on when or whom you ask, POSCO is either the fifth or the third largest maker of steel in the world.

I am visiting Pohang this weekend. The water along the beach is clean and warm, and the beach slopes gently into the bay: 50 meters out I am only chest-deep in the sea. Because the bay is sheltered by the headlands to the south and north, the waters of the bay are flat and rollers rise about 30cm (1 ft) at the beach. I was sitting in one of the numerous coffee shops along the boardwalk when I noticed something. Actually I noticed something missing.

Pollution.

Up to three fingers above the horizon, the air is dusty brown, but the air is dusty brown all over Korea at this time of year because of the yellow dust that blows here from China. (They don’t call it the Yellow River for nothing.) There was a whisper of smoke from the smokestacks at POSCO. If you look again at the photo, you will NOT see a blanket of smoke over the steel mill. Look close enough and you may see a whisp of smoke from the mill extending over the river. But you can see the city of Pohang clearly.

Here’s my point.

I remember pollution. I remember brown skies and black water. I remember weathermen warning us to stay inside. I remember Lake Erie burning. The kids don’t have those memories. The kids have been told all their lives that their air and their water is polluted and that the leetle innocent animals are dying from it and that it is our fault.

I sit a mile from one of the world’s largest operating steel mills, and I look up, and I see blue, blue sky. Within a mile of that same mill, I have enjoyed the clean, warm waters of Pohang Bay.

Draw your own conclusions.

As for me, please tell the fearmongers to sell panic somewhere else. I ain’t buying any.

A Correspondent in Korea.

Just right?

<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/9230801/Astronomers-find-new-planet-capable-of-supporting-life.html>

Roland Dobbins

Subject: World Digital Library

Jerry,

Presumably, most of the visitors to Chaos Manor know of this site already, but I ‘rediscovered’ it for myself recently, and thought it would be nice to remind them.

http://www.loc.gov/wdl/

http://www.wdl.org/en/

Tracy

.

“All histories of Rome are histories of empire.”

<http://nationalinterest.org/bookreview/singular-empire-6815?page=show>

Roland Dobbins

The Republic began to change with the incorporation of Sardinia and the parts of Sicily that were ruled rather than admitted to citizenship. Once Romans learned to rule without consent of the governed they applied that principle to others. Over time an empire, still without an emperor, took shape; but that sort of thing is very unstable. Then came Marius and the Gallic invasions, and —

Cardboard Korea

I’ve often said North Korea is like a movie display with cardboard backing.  Still, they have many hungry people that could invade the south in search of groceries.  While they would not hold South Korea forever, they could create serious problems.  Without outside help, I doubt they could sustain a war.  I’m sure the Chinese want to keep their conscripts alive:

<.>

North Korean missiles that were paraded as part of the 100th anniversary celebrations of the country’s founding father, are probably fakes.

The weapons which were showcased to mark Kim Il Sung birthday were heavily criticised by researchers who insisted they would be unable to fly let alone defend the country from potential attacks.

That conclusion has cast further doubt on the country’s claims of military prowess after its recent rocket launch failure.

</>

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2135727/Missiles-paraded-North-Korea-fake-say-scientists.html?ITO=1490

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

I continue to marvel at the US lack of policy with regard to North Korea. Or perhaps we have one that I do not understand.

© 2012, jerrypournelle. All rights reserved.

Breaking News from MSNBC

Headline:

Bin Laden Killed One Year Ago!

I have no data on why MSNBC considers that breaking news, but that was just up. I doubt it will last scrutiny from the program managers on duty in the news control center. [...]]]> View 722 Tuesday, May 01, 2012

Breaking News from MSNBC

Headline:

Bin Laden Killed One Year Ago!

I have no data on why MSNBC considers that breaking news, but that was just up. I doubt it will last scrutiny from the program managers on duty in the news control center. It might be interesting to find the reasoning of those who thought it worth having a banner calling that breaking news.

The President is spiking the ball while taking victory laps accompanied by the team band. I guess that’s called running on your record. I understand that Vice President Biden voted not to go after Bin Ladin. I actually understand that: it was the open and undeniable invasion of a sovereign ally without their permission; a rather grave thing to do, reminiscent of sending in the Marines to a banana republic. I don’t know what alternatives the President was given. And it did go better than Carter’s attempt to rescue our embassy hostages, when President Carter sent too little and kept Colonel Beckwith on the telephone during the entire operation. Why we did not take Bin Laden alive for interrogation has not been explained, and probably never will be.

The President is taking his victory lap. This is breaking news.

We have been under heavy attack from fake subscriptions (multiple thousands), and some real ones got buried. I have means for sorting the real from the fake, but it has caused a bunch of problems. In particular I haven’t answered a number of comments and questions that came with the subscription. These are all subscriptions entered through the website. Anyway, my apologies to all I actually missed in the past few months. I’m dancing as fast as I can. It has wasted a bunch of time, but I think we have means to deal with these now.

There are several articles about how Obama is increasing the efficiency of government regulators. One wonders if they have made bunny inspection more efficient? And how that would work? We clearly need the bunny inspectors since Obama promised in his inauguration to make a laser like focus on the budget to eliminated needless jobs and waste in the name of Hope and Change. That was years ago, so one presumes that the lasers have been applied. Since we still have bunny inspectors – grown men and women whose job is to be certain that stage magicians who use bunny rabbits in their stage acts have a federal license to keep rabbits – one presumes that this is needed activity. The President must after all take care to see that the laws are enforced. He can’t get all of them, but this one must be important. One magician I know got out of the charge of keeping an unlicensed rabbit by feeding it to a friend’s pet snake and claiming that it wasn’t a rabbit bought for a stage act but only as snake food. The Federal Government doesn’t require a license for you to keep rabbits as snake food (or to eat or skin for bunnyskin; only for keeping as pets or for stage acts). I am glad to hear that bunny inspections will be made even more efficient. (For those new to this site, no I am not making any of this up.)

A few years ago California by initiative voted for about $9 billion in bonds to build a high speed railway from Los Angeles to San Francisco, with some expectation that this would be enough money to do the job, or maybe it would take longer and cost more as all such things do, but this would be enough for a good start and surely it wouldn’t be more than – gulp – twice as much? Well, nothing so far as been done except to pay millions to lobbyists and engineers and architects and bureaucrats and grant application experts and cubicle workers, nothing has been built, and the expected cost is well above $100 billion and climbing. At one point the High Speed Railway was to be about 10 miles between a prison and a village that lost its post office years ago. There are various other proposals. None get to either San Francisco or Los Angeles. None really cope with the San Andreas Fault and other known difficulties. The State hasn’t issued the bonds yet, but they probably will be issued: the purpose of the project now is to pay workers, particularly engineers and architects and cubicle workers who will apply for grants from the Federal government. The estimates are that there will be tens of thousands of people a day who will take this high speed train from nowhere to nowhere else, and the operating costs are officially estimated at about half the operating costs of the best railway systems in the world. The whole scheme is merely a way to extract money to pay our masters.

Part of the efficiency improvements that President Obama is proud of include changing regulations so that Federal grant money for transportation can consider social factors like low cost housing rather than engineering and ridership and economic factors. This allows more money to be transferred from those who have to those have nots who need it so much. Salve Sclave.

At LAX today there are demonstrators trying to keep airport workers from going to their jobs. There are few to no airport workers in the demonstrations. Those are public employee union members bussed in from downtown. No one has yet explained why public employees deserve both civil service and union protections, and why the unions can require membership then spend money on lobbying for higher wages while the civil service protection means – well, a very long time ago at Boeing we called the BOMARC “the civil service missile. You can’t fire it and it won’t work.” And the unionized professors of the California State Colleges are taking a strike vote because they haven’t had a raise in five years. Tuition will go up. Taxes will go up. Salve Sclave.

Microsoft is investing in Nook. There will now be a Nook App for Windows. This may be interesting. Meanwhile we have

Why e-books will soon be obsolete (and no, it’s not just because of DRM)

The shift will not be instant, and there’s still a good couple of years of life left in the e-book market before the alternatives work out the kinks of presentation, distribution and retailing.  But e-readers will be obsolete in a few years, and once they’re gone, the sole weak advantage an e-book has over its future replacements will be gone.  Any publisher banking on e-books being around 5 years from now is in for a rude surprise.

http://gyrovague.com/2012/04/30/why-e-books-will-soon-be-obsolete-and-no-its-not-just-because-of-drm/

Which may be interesting. The eBook revolution has been wonderful for authors with a backlist. I would myself guess that the iBook and other tablets are here to stay, and iPhones and iBooks and the Windows Phone and the new Nokia stuff and tablets will just get better and better; and the eBook revolution will continue. Dedicated book readers probably will go obsolete and die away, but so what? The eBook revolution in publishing is here to stay and will get larger, not smaller. And it’s good news that Microsoft is investing in it. Amazon is wonderful , but monopolies aren’t so good.

© 2012, jerrypournelle. All rights reserved.

This is from a Huffington Post article:

A mile and a half from Apple’s Cupertino headquarters is De Anza College, a community college that Steve Wozniak, one of Apple’s founders, attended from 1969 to 1974. Because of California’s state budget crisis, De Anza [...]]]> View 722 Monday, April 30, 2012

This is from a Huffington Post article:

A mile and a half from Apple’s Cupertino headquarters is De Anza College, a community college that Steve Wozniak, one of Apple’s founders, attended from 1969 to 1974. Because of California’s state budget crisis, De Anza has cut more than a thousand courses and 8 percent of its faculty since 2008.
Now, De Anza faces a budget gap so large that it is confronting a "death spiral," the school’s president, Brian Murphy, wrote to the faculty in January. Apple, of course, is not responsible for the state’s financial shortfall, which has numerous causes. But the company’s tax policies are seen by officials like Mr. Murphy as symptomatic of why the crisis exists.
"I just don’t understand it," he said in an interview. "I’ll bet every person at Apple has a connection to De Anza. Their kids swim in our pool. Their cousins take classes here. They drive past it every day, for Pete’s sake.
"But then they do everything they can to pay as few taxes as possible."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jared-bernstein/apples-and-health-spendin_b_1464262.html

It took me a while to remember where I had heard of De Anza College before. I was sure I had been there. Then I recalled: sometime in the late 1970’s or early 1980’s when I wrote The User’s Column for BYTE – then owned by McGraw Hill and the leading computing magazine in the world – I was invited to come up to De Anza College and take part in a weekend Faculty Symposium. I don’t recall much of the visit. I was invited by the college administration, probably by its President, and the subject was what the college ought to do given the coming computer age. The faculty were given a day of class suspension so that they could attend; I don’t think most of them wanted to come. I had been invited in part because of my computer articles, and partly because of my former professorial status. I think John McCarthy had something to do with the invitation.

They didn’t offer much besides expenses, and I told them I wouldn’t have time for much preparation, but they were more interested in my taking part in a symposium on what community colleges ought to do to prepare for this coming computer revolution. This was in the days of the S-100 buss and the Apple ][ which was invading the business world because of VisiCalc, the first spread sheet. I had personally witnessed thoroughly naïve business people going into a computer store and asking for “A VisiCalc”, only to be told that was a computer program and they would have to have an Apple ][ computer to run it on. “Yeah, yeah, whatever it takes, I got to have one of those.” Computers were not well known in the general public but they were beginning to penetrate business offices. In those days the big computer show was the West Coast Computer Faire, and Apple and Microsoft were in competition for leadership. An entrepreneur named Sheldon Adelson was starting an annual convention called COMDEX in Las Vegas.

I don’t remember the details of my weekend in Cupertino. It involved several presentations, most of which I found dull because in those days BYTE had more expertise on matters computerish than any academic institutions other than Stanford and MIT and ETH in Zurich, and the De Anza budget couldn’t afford the fees charged by major figures in those institutions. I believe one speaker was one of John McCarthy’s graduate students. I don’t recall what I told the faculty of De Anza, but I vividly recall an interchange with one of the professors. After I outlined where I thought the computer revolution was going – using, I expect, ny usual theme of the early 1980’s that “Before the end of this century, everyone in the Free World will be able to get the answer to any question that has an answer, certainly within days and probably within hours.” I thought that a fairly profound observation, and coupling that with Arthur Koestler’s observation that a sufficient condition for the destruction of any totalitarian ideology would be the free exchange of ideas within that ideological society made for some interesting predictions about the future of the Soviet Union.

After my presentation there was a general discussion. One of the professors, I think of social science, asked “but what should we do, then? Prepare our students to serve the Lords of Silicon Valley?”

As I understand it, this symposium was a required event for the faculty, and they were all present. Many to most of them indicated high approval of the question and its implications. My reply to that was to ask what else a community college in Cupertino ought to be doing. It seemed to me they were in a golden place at a golden time, and my only real question was why the Lords of Silicon Valley weren’t at the symposium. I fear that didn’t get much enthusiastic approval from the majority of the faculty, although in the reception afterwards I found that this was an ongoing question at the college. As it ought to have been.

I gave my talk and participated in the symposium and went home, and I don’t think I have thought about community colleges in Silicon Valley since; but I did find that attitude fairly common when I visited other University of California and California State University campuses over the years, and I suspect that may have something to do with the current crisis in higher education. It may even be more important than a lack of funding. It may also have a bit to do with Apple’s tax strategy.

If the local community college can’t prepare its students to serve the lords of silicon valley, you may be sure that someone else will.

Roland had this comment

The Lords of Silicon Valley.

It seems to me that the faculty of De Anza College should've been preparing their students to *become* the Lords of Silicon Valley.

Which is exactly correct. Instead, apparently they are unhappy because the Lords aren’t paying enough taxes and aren’t appreciative enough.

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