Chaos Manor - Jerry Pournelle

The IRS Scandal, Harlan at his best, economics, and other interesting matters in a mixed mail bag.

jerrypournelle — Tue, 21 May 2013 06:55:22 +0000

Mail 775 Monday, May 20, 2013

Harlan Ellison at his best

Dr Pournelle

In a 1994 interview <http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2013/05/video-tom-snyders-1994-interview-with-harlan-ellison/> , Tom Snyder shocked Harlan Ellison into silence. Hard to believe but true.

Live long and prosper

h lynn keith

That is definitely Harlan at his best. Done back when Genie was still in existence. And as one might suspect, Harlan is like that off stage as well as on. He hand delivered his contribution to my 2020 Vision anthology in 1974. I have known Harlan for a very long time, and we remain friends. And this interview is worth watching.

IRS & 2012 Turnout

Jerry,

So, the number of conservative groups harassed and obstructed by the IRS

2010-2012 is at 500 and still rising.

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2013/05/15/reports-irs-spared-liberal-groups-as-tea-party-languished-more-conservative-orgs-targeted-than-first-thought-n1596864

Many of these groups say they would have worked on turning out conservative votes last fall, if they hadn’t been all tied up fighting the IRS with their fundraising crippled, or outright discouraged from organizing at all.

And Obama won last November essentially because liberal turnout broke records while conservative turnout was down several points from historical trends. Hmm. I am shocked – shocked I say – that the side perpetually howling about "voter suppression" turns out to have won by flagrantly using the power of the IRS to do wholesale voter suppression.

Meanwhile, today a reporter asked Obama if anyone in the White House had known what the IRS was up to – and Obama ducked the question. What, a forthright "no" seemed inadvisable? I wonder why?.. I predict that we’ll be a long painful time getting to the truth on that point.

It doesn’t decrease my respect for this administration, because I haven’t had any for a long time now. It sure does confirm my decision to remain, for purposes of public political discussion,

Porkypine

IRS WH Link?

Jerry,

Now this is interesting. The head of the IRS employees union (active in supporting Obama’s election) met with the President at the White House in spring 2010 – one day before the IRS first started officially targeting the Tea Party.

Who was at that meeting and what do they remember is one angle to investigate. It’ll most likely produce a lot of "I don’t recall"s, of course.

But emails and phone calls over the next 24 hours between the union head and the IRS managers involved could be worth a look.

The President has benefited from the assumption that he couldn’t have been directly involved from a lot of people writing about this. Many, I expect, who don’t necessarily believe it, but who assume he’d never be so clumsy as to be caught. That may not turn out to be the case.

http://spectator.org/archives/2013/05/20/obama-and-the-irs-the-smoking/

Porkypine

Non-Profit Double Standard

Jerry,

One developing line of counter-attack by Administration supporters on the IRS scandal seems to be that 501c non-profits are not SUPPOSED to do politics, therefore proctological scrutiny for the wave of Tea Party 501c applications was entirely justified.

What this misses is that lefty 501c’s have been flagrantly ignoring the politicking limits for decades and getting away with it. The precedent had been set, the 501c politicking limits were largely a dead letter – as long as your group had "Progress" or "Social Justice" in its name.

"Constitution" or "Tea Party", apparently not so much. When conservatives came along and started making use of the mechanisms the left had developed, suddenly the letter of the law was to be be applied again? (Over-applied; much of the data the IRS was collecting makes sense – name your donors, and associates, and oh by the way, interns too

- mainly in the context of building a political enemies database.)

Now, if the IRS BOLO criteria had also included "progress" and "justice"

as keywords, they might have a point. But the lefty political-group 501c apps continued to skate through the process.

It won’t fly. At least, it had better not fly – this is effectively a formal declaration of anathema against half the country. If what’s left of our traditional governing mechanisms can’t correct this, then they’ll have been conclusively proven broken. At which point, things will get far too interesting in ways I won’t even try to predict.

I like a quiet life myself. Which perversely means I’m going to have to get off my butt and get involved in local electoral politics for 2014.

Oh well, life in the early 21st century – one heaping serving of cognitive dissonance after another.

Porkypine

I do note that the plea that they needed a quick way to separate the “legitimate” social responsibility organizations from the political ones did not stop them from approving dozens to hundreds of organizations for “social responsibility” and favoring “progressive solutions to social problems” without much if any scrutiny, while those who used the word Patriotic in their statement of purpose got special screening.

As to how high this went, I know that campaign managers will sometimes hear stories they don’t want the candidate to know. The problem is that if the candidate is in political office – particularly if he is the President – and the activity is illegal, then it’s your duty to tell him. Those who knew and didn’t say understand – or should understand – that while they were expected to be silent, the cost of that is that they have to go.

Subject: White House Advisor On Tea Party Targeting: Law Is "Irrelevant" <http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/348729/white-house-advisor-tea-party-targeting-law-irrelevant>

This shouldn’t surprise us from an administration who considers themselves above the law:

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/348729/white-house-advisor-tea-party-targeting-law-irrelevant

Tracy

501(c)(4)s

When I was on the board of a 501(c)(3) an Oregon based association for Non Profits held seminars every January, which I attended with great attention to details offered.

The Oregon Department of Justice sent a speaker and the IRS always flew in Joe IForgetHisLastName, a high ranking manager from their San Francisco mot-for-profit branch office to give their POV on things.

Good thing because in the last 4 years, the IRS has been making pretty big changes for non profits.

A 501(c) application used to be pretty simple and inexpensive. It’s now over 30 pages and the filing fee is north of $700.

Once you could file a low volume non-profit’s tax return on a post card. That’s going away. The 990 annual tax form has gone from about 8 pages to over 30. There are questions you don’t get to not answer, though for now, they don’t care what you answer. That will change.

Questions like "do you have a written anti-discrimination policy?" and "Do you publish your annual 990 form on your website?"

Some of the current scandal is odd to me. For instance, if you incorporate a new not-for-profit TODAY and plan to file for 501(c)(3) status, you can give donors receipts for donations and they can deduct these donations based only on your intent. You have 18 months to file the application for a 501(c)(3). If you file, your donors can continue to deduct donations till the final determination. If you fail to file, they must stop taking donations for donations made after your 18 months in biz anniversary but the earlier donations are still kosher. If you file and are turned down, it gets squishy, but if you appeal and win, your donors are fine. If you appeal and are again turned down, the donations between 18 months and final TD can be challenged at audit.

The Barack H. Obama Foundation was approved in 34 days. This is unequal treatment. Since 2008 it has been 6-9 months for new corporations. The one on whose board I served took 18 months but it had a history to sort out.

Scotch

Stung by the Hornet’s Nest: Hasse Sex-with-Insects Tale a Hoax

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/468132/20130516/man-sex-hornet-s-nest-fake-hoax.htm

Yes, I thought at the time the story seemed unlikely, but then that was obvious. Had it been true it it certainly was a credential for a well earned Darwin Award. Ah, well.

ISDC, navy woman

Hey Jerry –

1) I’ll be giving two Server Sky talks this year at ISDC. Summary: http://server-sky.com/ISDC2013 . Redefining SBSP small works as well as making rockets big. Will I see you there, or should I stop in LA sometime?

2) I toured an Arleigh Burke class missile frigate with the fire control officer, a young woman in charge of the 5 inch deck gun. She /loves/ that gun, can do the physics and patch the software, and can put a shell through a dinner plate at 10 mile range. Whoever she targets dies quick. There may be consternation about service integration in high places, but women like her are doing a great job protecting the Republic.

Keith Lofstrom

I was a guest on the commissioning cruise for the missile ship USS Grace Hopper (“Amazing Grace”), which was the first ship designed for mixed sex crews. No one questions the capability of women to perform military tasks, particularly things like naval operations. The question is at what cost do youy integrate the sexes in the armed services? That depends in large part on just what you intend your armed forces to do. One of the costs is that you pretty well deny yourself the service of a particular kind of man, who makes a very effective soldier, but who is also very likely to end up on charges of sexual harassment.

There are other costs.

If you do not let women perform certain tasks then the cost is the service of some very competent people. We had managed that situation fairly well until recently when it was decided that military service was a right and all military jobs ought to be open to all who want to try out for them. We have yet to see the cost of that decision. My guess is that it will be greater than we expected it to be.

Stephen Vincent Benét

Dr. Pournelle, you wrote:

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

I first read "Nightmare Number Three" when I was in 6th Grade at Carson Long Military Academy in Pennsylvania. It was actually part of the required reader for my class in that long-ago school year of 1969-1970. The poem made such a deep impression on me that I always keep a copy around.

The school also had certain requirements in education that I think would serve the public system well. They held a twice-yearly competition where you had to recite a poem from memory – mine would always be Longfellow’s "Paul Revere’s Ride" due to an actual family connection to one of the other riders. The other requirement was that on Lincoln’s Birthday (still celebrated as a separate holiday at the time) you had to be able to recite the Gettysburg Address from memory if you wanted the day off from school or school activities.

David Crowley

A Very Good Year

Was 2, 870,002,013 BC, according to British and Canadian geologists who have tasted it and other vintages encountered as isolated springs of water , out of contact with the atmosphere for several billion years, and flowing from the newly opened deep levels of the two mile deep Timmens copper mine in Ontario.

Saturated with hydrogen, its capacity to support life resembles the hydrothermal fluids emerging from ocaen rift and trench black smokers today.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uy-6Jo34z1Y

–

Russell Seitz

Fellow of the Department of Physics Harvard University

Star Wars convention brawl -

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/article3765790.ece

Star Wars convention opts for the force of the fist

Norwich Star Wars fans clashed with rival sci-fi groups after claiming the town was not big enough for both conventions

Nico Hines <http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/profile/Nico-Hines>

Published at 3:56PM, May 15 2013

It was probably the first time Norfolk Constabulary officers have broken up a fight involving two doctors and a judge.

Rival science-fiction clubs had to be separated by the force last weekend as the Norwich Star Wars Convention descended into a daft brawl.

Aficionados of the George Lucas space series went head-to-head with Judge Dredd and two fully-grown men dressed as Doctor Who. It was the culmination of a long-running feud between two of Norwich’s most illustrious sci-fi organisations.

In a convention centre far, far away, just north of the A11’s Thickthorn Services, more than 1,000 people, many in fancy dress, gathered to catch up with friends and meet actors who had played minor roles in cult sci-fi films including The Empire Strikes Back and Blade II.

The unexpected melodrama unfolded when Jim Poole, treasurer of the Norwich Sci Fi Club, arrived at the event, which had been organised by the Norwich Star Wars Club. A dispute between the groups began when one of them claimed the town was not big enough for both of their conventions.

The Norwich Star Wars Club held its first annual fair in 2007, but stopped after three events because the organiser, Richard Walker, became seriously ill. According to Mr Walker, he gave his blessing for the Norwich Sci Fi Club to hold its own sci-fi convention in the city with stalls selling games and models, and guest appearances by actors in costume.

When Mr Walker had recovered from his cancer treatment, he announced his plans for the “4th Norwich Sci-Fi and Film Convention”, which went ahead last weekend. The chairman of the Norwich Sci Fi Club objected, however, demanding that the function should not be called a “convention” to ensure there was no confusion with his own event.

“It has been a long running saga,” said Mr Walker, who confronted the rival club’s treasurer on Sunday. “I saw him walking around with a digital camera videoing everything. I walked over and asked him what he was doing here and he told me he had paid his money to get in.

“I told him I wanted him to leave. I put my hand in my pocket and got out £10 and offered it to him, saying it was a refund on his £5 admission and another £5 to get a taxi.”

He admitted that he then laid his hands on Mr Poole and tried to escort him from the convention centre on University of East Anglia campus. “He refused to leave again and I told him I wanted him to go as he had caused enough trouble in the past,” he said.

Mr Poole, who claimed he was only at the event to improve his Doctor Who autograph collection, continued the argument with Mr Walker outside the venue. He was accompanied by three friends from his club. One was dressed as the Doctor Who played by David Tennant, another was impersonating Peter Davidson’s version in a cricket sweater; the third was wearing a Judge Dredd costume.

Police officers confirmed that they had been called to reports of a man being assaulted but made no arrests after studying CCTV footage. “The two rival groups were spoken to and advised to keep out of each other’s way,” a spokesman said.

The Norwich Sci Fi Club will go ahead with its own Nor-Con Norwich Sci Fi convention in September at the Norwich North Holiday Inn.

Sounds like an episode of The Big Bang Theory…

Jerry

APOD: 2013 May 14 – Galaxy Collisions: Simulation vs Observations:

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130514.html

It is very cool.

Ed

I will have more on the problem of colliding galaxies for The Big Bang and Expanding Universe theory in n upcoming review about cosmology. But yeah, it’s cool. Thanks.

The Organleggers

Jerry,

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/10055772/British-schoolgirl-murdered-for-her-organs-in-India-family-claim.html

Jim

Bug Jack Baron…

Unknown Mathematician Proves Elusive Property of Prime Numbers

Jerry

An unknown mathematician proves one of the oldest unsolved problems in mathematics — the twin primes conjecture, which proposes that there are infinitely many pairs of primes that differ by only 2:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/05/twin-primes/

“Rumors swept through the mathematics community that a great advance had been made by a researcher no one seemed to know — someone whose talents had been so overlooked after he earned his doctorate in 1992 that he had found it difficult to get an academic job, working for several years as an accountant and even in a Subway sandwich shop. “Basically, no one knows him,” said Andrew Granville, a number theorist at the Université de Montréal. “Now, suddenly, he has proved one of the great results in the history of number theory.”

“Mathematicians at Harvard University hastily arranged for Zhang to present his work to a packed audience there on May 13. As details of his work have emerged, it has become clear that Zhang achieved his result not via a radically new approach to the problem, but by applying existing methods with great perseverance. “The big experts in the field had already tried to make this approach work,” Granville said. “He’s not a known expert, but he succeeded where all the experts had failed.”

“Prime numbers are abundant at the beginning of the number line, but they grow much sparser among large numbers. Of the first 10 numbers, for example, 40 percent are prime — 2, 3, 5 and 7 — but among 10-digit numbers, only about 4 percent are prime. For over a century, mathematicians have understood how the primes taper off on average: Among large numbers, the expected gap between prime numbers is approximately 2.3 times the number of digits; so, for example, among 100-digit numbers, the expected gap between primes is about 230. But that’s just on average. Primes are often much closer together than the average predicts, or much further apart. In particular, “twin” primes often crop up — pairs such as 3 and 5, or 11 and 13, that differ by only 2. And while such pairs get rarer among larger numbers, twin primes never seem to disappear completely.”

The rest of the paper is about how he did it. But what drama! If someone wrote this as fiction, it would be dismissed as unrealistic. Heh.

Ed

I remember a six month fascination with number theory when I was in high school, and another as an undergraduate, but in both cases I found that the pretty theories required an awful lot of hard work if you wanted to master proofs; and I didn’t have the temperament for it.

Stocks and windows 8

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

Two things which I believe you will find of interest.

First , Microsoft has admitted defeat and is scaling back Windows 8. The ‘under the hood’ bits will remain, but Metro will be far less obtrusive. A good move on their part, I think. From what I’ve seen the same interface doesn’t work well on both tablets and PCs.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/330c8b8e-b66b-11e2-93ba-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2SgdQzjSe

Second, this article notes that although the US appears to be heading into recession stock markets index are higher than ever. Why is this?

http://www.cnbc.com/id/100718144

I suggest this explanation is accurate:

"It is precisely because growth continues to underperform that the Federal Reserve <http://www.cnbc.com/id/43752521> can and will keep interest rates at record lows and its supplemental bond-buying program in place.

And that guarantees two things: first, that investors—especially pension funds which need to hit annual return targets north of 5 percent—will continue to pile into riskier, higher-yielding assets; and second, that companies able to take advantage of these super-low borrowing costs will continue issuing debt to buy back shares of their own stock, supporting both their individual performance and that of the broader market.

No wonder investors describe it as a hold-your-nose-and-invest kind of environment. Voodoo shop? You bet, says Brian Reynolds of Rosenblatt Securities; but "we think this boom will go on for years to come because of those [pension] cash flows." A new acronym—FOBOR, or FOrced Buyers Of Risk—is making City rounds. Even the old Chuck Prince line ("As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance") is becoming alarmingly common again."

Oh yes. Also, Ender’s Game has evidently been made into a movie.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP0cUBi4hwE&feature=player_embedded

Respectfully,

Brian P.

CocaCola went back to The Real Thing after the New Coke fiasco. Now Microsoft…

I try to stay away from comments about investments, but it should be clear that very low borrowing rates is often a formula for producing a bubble.

Economic Recovery Still Lags

View online at: http://patriotpost.us/editions/18034

Monday Brief

Economic Recovery Still Lags

May 6, 2013 <http://patriotpost.us/editions/18034/print> <http://pdf.patriotpost.us/2013-05-06-brief-59d6b6ef.pdf>

The Foundation

"How prone all human institutions have been to decay." –James Monroe

Government

"US job growth in April beat economist expectations as nonfarm payrolls rose 165,000, and the jobless rate fell to a four-year low of 7.5%. But the report contained worrisome signs that President Obama’s health care reform law is hurting full-time, high-wage employment. While the American economy added 293,000 jobs last month, according to the separate household survey, the number of persons employed part time for economic reasons — ‘involuntary part-time workers’ as the Labor Department calls them — increased by almost as much, by 278,000 to 7.9 million. These folks were working part time because a) their hours had been cut back or b) they were unable to find a full-time job. At the same time, the U-6 unemployment rate — a broader measure of joblessness that includes discouraged workers and part-timers who want a full-time gig — rose from 13.8% to 13.9%. … The labor force participation rate was dead in the water. If it were back to January 2009 levels, the U-3 unemployment rate would be 10.9%. … Only 53.9% of private industries added jobs last month, the second lowest of the labor market recovery, according to JPM. … If the economy continues to add jobs at the 2013 pace of 196,000 a month, the labor market would return to pre-recession employment levels in seven years and ten months, according to the Hamilton Project’s ‘jobs gap’ calculator." –American Enterprise Institute’s James Pethokoukis <http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/05/was-the-april-jobs-report-really-the-obamacare-jobs-report/>

Post Your Opinion <http://patriotpost.us/editions/18034#post-comment>

For the Record

"9.5 million Americans have left the workforce during the presidency of Barack Obama, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In April, the total number of Americans counted as ‘not in the labor force’ declined for the first time since December, but that number was still near a record high at 89,936,000. Those not in the labor force declined by 31,000, from a record high of 89,967,000 in March. That broke the recent record of 89,304,000 not in the labor force in February of this year. Since February 2009, the first full month of Obama’s presidency, 9,549,000 people have left the labor force. There were 80,387,000 Americans not working that month, compared with 89,936,000 not working or looking today, according to the latest economic release from BLS. … In the 50 months since Obama has been in office, the number of people counted as not in the labor force has declined 16 times." –CNSNews’ Elizabeth Harrington <http://cnsnews.com/news/article/95-million-people-have-left-workforce-under-obama>

Re: The Left

"Liberals deny that raising labor cost through minimum wages reduces incentives to hire. But if you asked a liberal for advice on how to stop rich people from shirking their tax obligations, they’d say raise the penalty. Ask low-information Harvard University doctors what should be done to stem gun violence and they answer that government should institute ‘a new, substantial national tax on all firearms and ammunition.’ Ask Illinois’ Cook County Board of Commissioners President Toni Preckwinkle how to reduce purchases of bullets and guns. She’d say levy a nickel tax on each bullet and a $25 tax on each gun. Liberals demonstrate they understand the law of demand — that raising the cost of something lessens the amount taken — but they deny that it applies to labor. That’s as ludicrous as suggesting that the law of gravity applies to everything in the universe except cute creatures, such as pandas and puppies." –economist Walter E. Williams <http://patriotpost.us/opinion/17926>

Essential Liberty

"It used to be that Americans mostly agreed that in order to attain citizenship, immigrants had to not only come to this country legally but also demonstrate, after training and study in the American system, that they believed in the unique United States Constitution and embraced what it means to be an American. Though that still occurs in the naturalization process, we seem to have abandoned it altogether in connection with the immigration debate. What sense does it make that we seek to instill a love of America in those earnestly seeking to acquire legal citizenship through the proper procedures but ignore it altogether in our rush to legalize 11 million illegals? … Indeed, hard-leftists don’t just disagree with many of America’s founding ideals; they believe that it’s somehow backward even to have such ideals, because to them, it reflects a prejudice against other systems, cultures and values. So, you see, this is not really a debate over whether the American system and the ideas and values undergirding it produced the greatest nation in world history and thus should be preserved. It is a core disagreement about whether it’s even proper and desirable to endorse a unique set of founding ideals as being superior to any other." –columnist David Limbaugh <http://patriotpost.us/opinion/17993>

Insight

"Consensus: The process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner: ‘I stand for consensus?’" –British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013)

The Gipper

"The gun has been called the great equalizer, meaning that a small person with a gun is equal to a large person, but it is a great equalizer in another way, too. It insures that the people are the equal of their government whenever that government forgets that it is servant and not master of the governed." –Ronald Reagan <http://reagan2020.us/>

Political Futures

"[T]he institutions — the organs of the body politic — that are the most obsessed with eradicating bigotry (as liberals define it) tend to be the places that have to worry about it the least. The Democratic Party is consumed with institutionalized angst about prejudice, intolerance and bigotry in America. But the odds are that relatively few of these people (particularly those under the age of 50) have been exposed to much real racism or intolerance. The same goes for the mainstream media. In fact, many major media outlets have explicit policies dedicated to hiring and promoting minorities, women, gays, etc. Like the Democratic Party, some have very strict hiring quotas in this regard. The well-paid executives and managers of these institutions come from social backgrounds where the tolerance for anything smacking of overt bigotry is not just zero, but in the negative range; they bend over backwards to celebrate members of the officially recognized coalition of the oppressed." –columnist Jonah Goldberg <http://patriotpost.us/opinion/17998>

Opinion in Brief

"If our educational institutions — from the schools to the universities — were as interested in a diversity of ideas as they are obsessed with racial diversity, students would at least gain experience in seeing the assumptions behind different visions and the role of logic and evidence in debating those differences. Instead, a student can go all the way from elementary school to a Ph.D. without encountering any fundamentally different vision of the world from that of the prevailing political correctness. Moreover, the moral perspective that goes with this prevailing ideological view is all too often that of people who see themselves as being on the side of the angels against the forces of evil — whether the particular issue at hand is gun control, environmentalism, race or whatever. … The failure of our educational system goes beyond what they fail to teach. It includes what they do teach, or rather indoctrinate, and the graduates they send out into the world, incapable of seriously weighing alternatives for themselves or for American society." –economist Thomas Sowell <http://patriotpost.us/opinion/17925>

Culture

"Not long ago — OK, 50 years ago — Sports Illustrated put athletes on its covers because they did things only Mickey Mantle, Jimmy Brown, Bobby Orr or Wilt Chamberlain could do on the playing field, not in the sack. Now [NBA player] Jason Collins’s sexual affiliation is the biggest news in sports? Does anyone know, or care, how many points per game he scores or how many shots he blocks? No. Being gay and his being willing to announce it to the entire sports world is what’s important now. … I’m sure most of Collins’ family and teammates have known he was gay for years, but because they’re decent and good people who cared about his privacy, they kept the big sports ‘news’ to themselves. This isn’t about sports at all. It’s partly a case of identity politics. That’s why Obama was in such a rush to congratulate Collins on his courage to come out and say he was a proud member of the Democrat Party’s most loyal sex-based constituency. … Gays have been playing pro sports forever. Big deal. No one asked and no one told. Sports should be about winning and teamwork and accomplishment. Owners, coaches and fans don’t care what color their star players’ skin is, what their ethnicities are or who they sleep with — and neither should the rest of us. Wake me up when this embarrassing gay-pride parade is over, please." –columnist Michael Reagan <http://patriotpost.us/opinion/17978>

Post Your Opinion <http://patriotpost.us/editions/18034#post-comment>

Faith and Family

"If we believe America was founded on timeless principles that God wove into the fabric of human existence, then we must put our faith in them and believe they still ring true in good hearts. Secondly, we must employ the mechanism designed to be the most effective for passing them along, namely, small groups. The smallest living organism is the cell; as it divides it multiplies so that within a very short time a single cell has become a tissue, a tissue an organ, multiple organs with specific functions form a body, that is life. So then let us commit to forming these associations, first within our own families, our neighborhoods, our communities. Get a good study guide on the essentials of liberty to guide the discussion. Emphasize action. To ensure success keep Faith In God at the center; more specifically let Jesus Christ be the nucleus of the group to use each individual as His hands, eyes and mouthpiece to bring healing and hope. As you grow in wisdom, action and numbers divide the groups and continue to grow your influence. We didn’t get here overnight and we won’t get it back any faster. Difficult times are ahead; we will need each other and Him now more than ever." –Patriot Post Grassroots contributor Charlie Lyon <http://patriotpost.us/commentary/17962>

Reader Comments

"The reason Obama wants to purge Christians <http://patriotpost.us/alexander/17989/> serious about their faith from the U.S. military is to remove any who would oppose his statist and dictatorial designs. He wants in the military only those who will follow orders from above blindly and without regard to either the Constitution or unalienable rights. Christians in the military are an impediment to his totalitarian plans, which he has been implementing throughout the federal government since he took office." –Bob in Hattiesburg, Mississippi

"Well Court Martial me <http://patriotpost.us/alexander/17989/> then because I won’t stop believing in Christ and telling others the reason for my hope and faith." –Jim in New Haven

"Courts Martial for the Faithful is outrageous <http://patriotpost.us/alexander/17989/> ! The president of the United States is under Oath to ‘support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic,’ and with this proclamation he becomes an enemy of our Constitution! I am retired USAF and I would’ve taken a court-martial before denying GOD!" –Harry in Belpre, Ohio

<https://patriotpostshop.com/categories/80>

The Last Word

"So Medicaid, which is going to cost a trillions, has shown in a new study to not improve the physical health of those who have it. Its trillions of dollars and does nothing. So it’s an easy choice to just cut this and save tons of money, right? Nope, the left are promoting how Medicaid improves ‘mental health.’ Trillions of dollars, and people feel better — which is probably just because people feel better thinking they’re covered even though the coverage actually does nothing. So we could just pretend to cover people — placebo coverage — and get the same effect for much cheaper. But the left will never go along with that. If a giant government program is a complete and utter failure, that just means it need to be made even gianter. If there was a government program that just put trillions of dollars in a hole and burned it, the left would go on and on about how much warmth for the poor that program created and how we need to burn even more money. We can’t ever get rid of government programs no matter how useless they are. And that’s why I think the only step is to start to train our kids to build a new, better government after this one collapses." –humorist Frank J. Fleming <http://www.imao.us/index.php/2013/05/medicaid-burning-trillions/>

Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!

Nate Jackson for The Patriot Post Editorial Team

*PUBLIUS*

eBook Sales; debate and social responsibility

jerrypournelle — Sat, 18 May 2013 00:51:59 +0000

View 774 Friday, May 17, 2013

E-book sales are up 43%, but that’s still a ‘slowdown’

After three years of triple-digit increases, the number of e-books sold last year grew by only 43%.

And that’s enough of a difference in the annual growth rate to have publishers talking about an e-book "slowdown," even as digital books remain the fastest-growing part of the market. They now account for about 20% of all book sales reported by publishers.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2013/05/15/e-book-sales/2159117/

Only 43% growth, and that’s a slowdown. You may interpret that any way you wish. I think it’s print publisher spin. In another conference science fact writer Jeff Hecht says

As with so much other reporting about the ebook market, you have to

wonder how they’re defining "books" and "the market", especially when

they are trying to do statistics without good numbers on paperbacks. Are

they counting textbooks, professional books, children’s books, and so

on? Are they counting the sales of ebooks in the 10,000- to 30,000 word

format, which essentially are not published in paper format?

Sales growth has to slow down as ebooks gain share of market — it’s a

lot easier to double market share when you start at 1% than when you

start at 20%. I’m starting to hear of people who have gone back to paper

after buying or being given an ereader.

My own experience is that backlist sales in eBook format are growing a lot less slowly than 40%, but they are growing; backlists have become an important part of an author’s income, and almost all backlist sales are in eBook format now. Obviously used print book sales bring to income to an author.

A discussion in another conference brought this to my attention. Charles Murray, one sociologist I have great respect for, has published in National Review On Line an important essay on the decline of rational discussion, along with an appeal to all readers to make an effort to do more of it. He reminds us of the important American intellectual tradition of defending the right to say the unpopular, as portrayed in great films such as Inherit the Wind, and how the American Civil Liberties Union defended the right of the Nazi Party to march through a Jewish section of Chicago, and he says:

Few remnants of those American themes survive. We too seldom engage our adversaries’ arguments in good faith. Often, we don’t even bother to find out what they are, attacking instead what we want them to be. When we don’t like what someone else thinks, we troll the Internet relentlessly until we find something with which to destroy that person professionally or personally — one is as good as the other. Hollywood still does films about lonely voices standing up against evil corporations or racist sheriffs, but never about lonely voices standing up against intellectual orthodoxy.

I’m sick of it. I also have no idea how to fix it. But we can light candles. Here is what I undertake to do, and I invite you to join me: Look for opportunities to praise people with whom you disagree but who have made an argument that deserves to be taken seriously. Look for opportunities to criticize allies who have used crimethink tactics against your adversaries. Identify yourself not just with those who agree with you, but with all those who stand for something and play fair.

In Defense of Jason Richwine
His resignation is emblematic of a corruption that has spread throughout American intellectual discourse.

By Charles Murray

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/348323/defense-jason-richwine/page/0/1

He does this in defense of Jason Richwine in a matter of considerable concern that we will address another time; it’s part of the long time controversy about IQ, race, Nature and Nurture, and other such complicated matters, and that’s all important and must be discussed; but Murray’s appeal hit me just as I had finished reading a defense of the Cincinnati IRS agents involved in the tax exemption application scandal. We’ll get to that in the next section.

Yesterday’s Los Angeles Times had story “Scandal born of vague IRS laws” by Matea Gold that present the IRS side of the tax scandal. There had been an enormous increase in applications for tax exempt status of semi-political organizations, and there had never been any rules established for how to deal with them.

At the heart of the issue is the murky role occupied by nonprofit "social welfare" organizations, set up under Section 501(c)4 of the tax code, which are allowed under IRS regulations to engage in a certain amount of campaign activity, as long as politics is not their "primary" purpose. The groups pay no tax on the money they bring in. They can accept unlimited donations and, unlike political committees, can keep their contributors secret.

That status became especially valuable three years ago with the Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case, which lifted the ban on direct campaign spending by corporations, including many nonprofit groups. The ruling triggered the boost of applicants to the IRS.

The stepped-up role of tax-exempt groups in politics has stymied the Federal Election Commission, which has deadlocked on questions about how much disclosure is required of advocacy organizations that engage in elections.

That has left much of their regulation in the hands of the IRS, which has never clearly defined how much political activity is allowed for social welfare organizations.

Faced with hundreds of applications, the civil service bureaucrats sought to find a formula to winnow out the easy cases with were unambiguously within the intent of the law, and the political organizations seeking tax exempt status for what were, in effect, political advocates. They came up with a formula, “tea party” which identified the political advocates, and those got set aside, and

The problem with this is that while every word is true, the words “social responsibility” or “progressive” would generally get the same results, and those weren’t used. It wasn’t that there were rules applied that made no sense: they made all too much sense in a time sensitive situation. I’m perfectly willing to listen to the IRS arguments but I don’t have to believe them. Oh, I can believe there are those who never thought about “social responsibility” advocates as political advocates. But that is yet another argument.

What needs debating is just how much tax exemption there ought to be for political advocates?

Iron Law and Hatch Act; Steven Vincent Benet on War; When Galaxies Collide

jerrypournelle — Thu, 16 May 2013 19:50:06 +0000

View 774 Thursday, May 16, 2013

Interesting. President Obama today told the press that he had never heard of the Treasury Inspector General report on IRS involvement in selective examinations of tax exempt status applications, given green light treatment to those professing “progressive” or “Social responsibility” goals, but putting primary hampers on those who mentioned “swollen government”, “too big government”, “tea party” and other conservative notions. http://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2013reports/201310053fr.pdf

The report wasn’t issued until May 14, but early copies were circulated well before that, and surely something of that importance – its public appearance caused the forced resignation of the Acting Director of the IRS – would have been known to any competent political advisors, and surely one of them would have leaked the information to the candidate. I understand the impetus to keep certain campaign knowledge from the candidate, and every political manager must deal with it: What the bosses don’t know can’t hurt them, they can deny it with good conscience. I don’t suppose there has ever been a political campaign without some such incidents. But once the campaign is over, and particularly when word of the shenanigan gets out to investigative reporters, there’s always a frantic scramble to cover things up, and at some point the top campaign managers must be told, and one of them has to tell the politician. The boss is, after all, the boss.

Now there was an Iron Law of Bureaucracy incentive in spades with big casino here: enemies of Big Government are by definition personal enemies of IRS bureaucrats. Pournelle’s Iron Law states that in every bureaucracy there will be two major factions, one dedicated to the goals for which the organization was formed (class room teachers who want the kids to learn as an easy example) and the other faction dedicated to the organization itself (teacher’s union executives); and the second faction always gains control of the organization. This is true of every bureaucracy, including the IRS, the FBI, the AFL-CIO, the General Services Administration, NASA, your local police force, your local fire department, the local PTA, and almost anything else you can think of, and if you think of a bureaucracy that doesn’t fit, wait a bit. So to any IRS bureaucrat organizations that say that the government is too big will be the enemy, and while Type One bureaucrats would resist the temptation to get out the red tape, Type Two bureaucrats would order a barrel full with some gusto.

Thus it’s hardly astonishing that people who want to control the growth of government would receive extra scrutiny from the IRS career civil servants. It’s even less astonishing that the political campaign workers (alas, with the gutting of the Hatch Act there is now considerable overlap) would simply smile and say nothing when they observed this sort of thing. But I would find it astonishing if no word of this reached the higher ranks of the President’s political campaign management within a year or more. Someone in the White House staff knew. The question is, how high up did the knowledge go? There is no evidence that Nixon knew everything or even very much about the machinations of Dean, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Colson in their “plumber squad” operations; the point is that he should have. He should have had in his top entourage at least one who would tell him what was being done in his name. Every CEO needs information sources other than the chain of command. Of course this President has little experience at management at any level.

I am not involved in breaking news stories, but as the facts become clear it’s important to understand them; there is more than politics involved here.

The original Hatch Act (upheld more than once by the Supreme Court) forbade civil service employees from engaging in political activities, and was usually interpreted as forbidding government workers who were “Hatched” from even being asked for political donations by anyone else. Of course the original theory of a civil services was to divorce it from politics while retaining responsibility to the public. That is a very narrow path to follow: if the public doesn’t like what a bureaucracy is doing, how can that be changed? The answer is supposed to be to change the political control, but if the bureaucrats are protected from political management stalemate takes place. This is easily observed in a great many places at all levels of government. An example is our usual example of a needless government activity, Department of Agriculture Inspectors who attend stage magic presentations to be sure that if the magician uses a rabbit in the performance, he has a Federal license to do so. There is probably no political appointee in the Department of Agriculture or anywhere else in the Federal Government who would defend this as a necessary activity during times of deficit financing; but the practice has continued for years, and likely will continue forever because there is no simple mechanism for ending it.

The Hatch Act worked fairly well for decades. The theory was that the civil service protections were strong, and accepting them required the civil servant to essentially give up political activity: you’re paid to implement policies, not to advocate for them. For younger readers this may seem like an astonishing statement, but that used to be the case, and every campaign manager knew it and acted accordingly.

Perhaps restoring the Hatch Act to its original intent and even strengthening it is order.

It’s time for lunch. Here’s something else to think about.

SUBJ: More on the the FBI’s Martha Stewart tactic

http://reason.com/blog/2013/05/14/fbi-well-decide-when-you-are-lying-to-us

Another example of the Iron Law at work. Most FBI special agents are precisely what they appear to be and what most of us grew up to expect of G-men; but the Iron Law continues to move in favor of gathering more power.

Cannibalism in Syria

Just in case anyone in your audience had any illusions about the war there.

http://world.time.com/2013/05/14/we-will-slaughter-all-of-them-an-interview-with-the-man-behind-the-syrian-atrocity-video/

http://world.time.com/2013/05/12/atrocities-will-be-televised-they-syrian-war-takes-a-turn-for-the-worse/

Of course, before one judges the man too harshly one must consider this fact about his victim:

"In an interview conducted via Skype in the early hours of May 14, al-Hamad explained to TIME what caused him to cut out the soldier’s organs: “We opened his cell phone, and I found a clip of a woman and her two daughters fully naked and he was humiliating them, and sticking a stick here and there.”

The upshot is that it appears that humans on both sides have been made into monsters by the war. And that raises a problem: When this orgy of killing, murder, and cannibalism finally subsides, the people who fought in this won’t instantly turn into civilized saints and go back to pumping gas or selling cars. No, I suspect that when the war in Syria is over the barbarized winners will make trouble elsewhere in the middle east as well. At this point I suspect it doesn’t matter who wins — whatever comes out is going to be horrible.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

It was, of course, inevitable. George Washington warned us against getting involved in the territorial disputes of Europe, and from entering into entangling alliances. Our strategy of Containment required that we have alliances and that we become involved in territorial disputes; if you are going to contain communism, you have to contain it, and sometimes that involves sending Americans to Korea and Viet Nam. The problem with containment is that it is a form of attrition, and strategies of attrition work much better against democracies than against one-party systems. The rulers of a one-party system don’t feel the effects so very much, while the costs are shared in a democracy. After 1980 the US added a strategy of technology to accompany Containment, and it all worked extraordinarily well: in 1986 there was still evidence that we were headed for a CoDominium with the USSR surviving well into the 21st Century, but that didn’t happen. Once the Soviets understood that we would not disarm ourselves with “Arms Control” but were dedicated to neutralizing their most expensive weapons, things rapidly came apart over there. Arthur Koestler had long before said that a sufficient condition for the collapse of a totalitarian state would be the free exchange of ideas within it. That might have been an overstatement but it contained much truth, and the small computer revolution faced the Soviet leadership with an impossible dilemma: forfeit the technology race, which was clearly military suicide (clear after the Falkland Islands War) or open up the society to free discussion. Gorbachev tried Glasnost while maintaining communism, the Old Guard tried to eject him by force, and the short insurrection that followed ended the USSR as such. The Seventy Years War aka the Cold War was ended.

Alas, the US had become addicted to projecting power overseas. The USSR, having won (by default when the US withdrew after Watergate) Viet Nam tried for Afghanistan; the result of that action was instructive to those who study war. It was not instructive to the leaders of the United States, who decided to exert the power of this Republic to restore the “legitimate” government of Kuwait after this artificial Kingdom was seized by Saddam Hussein. Then after 9/11 we intervened again into Middle Eastern affairs. Quick Victory in Afghanistan was followed by an inane decade of “nation building”. The Baathists were turned out in Iraq but we could find no one to take over, and the artificial of Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish Nationalists broke into pieces, with barbarism taking over in much of the area.

There have been other events in the Middle East, and US attempts to exert power in order to preserve civilization in them. They have not been notably successful. We projected power into the Balkans with the less than favorable results. A side result was to earn the thorough dislike of the Russians whose long history of dedication to Slavic interests seems to have escaped the geniuses of the State Department. We intervened in Egypt and in Libya. In all cases we didn’t do much: the lesson of Iraq was that we couldn’t afford to exert the power of the republic. The cost was too high. We do not have a generation of soldiers to send overseas. But of course that was predictable.

Stephen Vincent Benet was a pacifist. His pacifism was shaken by Hitler and World War II, and he wrote in intellectual defense of opposing Germany. He did not live to see the peace after the war.

His view was that war never led to good results. This is not true, and he realized it before he died, but his vision of the consequences of war was never one of rosy optimism. There may be reasons to seek out and destroy dragons, but such actions have consequences. Sometimes it no longer matters much who wins. Here is Benet on war, published in 1935.

Nightmare With Angels

An angel came to me and stood by my bedside,
Remarking in a professional-historical-economic and irritated voice,
"If the Romans had only invented a decent explosion-engine!
Not even the best, not even a Ford V-8
But, say, a Model-T or even an early Napier,
They’d have built good enough roads for it (they knew how to build roads)
From Cape Wrath to Cape St. Vincent, Susa, Babylon and Moscow.
And the motorized legions never would have fallen,
And Peace, in the shape of a giant eagle, would brood over the entire Western World!"

He changed his expression, looking now like a combination of
Gilbert Murray, Hilaire Belloc,
and a dozen other scientists, writers, and prophets,
And continued, in angelic tones,
"If the Greeks had known how to cooperate, if there’d never been a Reformation,
If Sparta had not been Sparta, and the Church had been the Church of the saints,
The Argive peace like a free-blooming olive-tree, the peace of Christ (who loved peace)
like a great, beautiful vine enwrapping the spinning earth!

Take it nearer home," he said.
Take these Mayans and their star-clocks, their carvings and their great cities.
Who sacked them out of their cities, drowned the cities with a green jungle?
A plague? A change of climate? A queer migration?
Certainly they were skillful, certainly they created.
And in Tenochtitlan, the dark obsidian knife and the smoking heart on
the stone but a fair city,
And the Incas had it worked out beautifully til Pizarro smashed them.
The collectivist state was there, and the ladies very agreeable.
They lacked steel, alphabet, and gunpowder
and they had to get married when the government said so.
They also lacked unemployment and overproduction.
For that matter," he said, "take the Cro-Magnons,
The fellows with the big skills, the handsome folk, the excellent
scribers of mammoths,
Physical gods and yet with sensitive brain (they drew the fine, running reindeer).
What stopped them? What kept us all from being Apollos and Aphrodites
Only with a new taste to the nectar,
The laughing gods, not the cruel, the gods of song, not of war?
Supposing Aurelius, Confucious, Napoleon, Plato, Gautama, Alexander –
Just to name half a dozen –
Had ever realized and stabilized the full dream?
How long, O Lord God in the highest? How long, what now, perturbed spirit?"

He turned blue at the wingtips and disappeared as another angel approached me.
This one was quietly but appropriately dressed in cellophane, synthetic rubber and stainless steel,
But his mask was the blind mask of Ares, snouted for gasmasks.
He was neither soldier, sailor, farmer, dictator, nor munitions-manufacturer.
Nor did he have much conversation, except to say,
"You will not be saved by General Motors or the prefabricated house.
You will not be saved by dialectic materialism or the Lambeth Conference.
You will not be saved by Vitamin D or the expanding universe.
In Fact, you will not be saved."
In his hand was a woven, wire basket, full of seeds, small metallic and shining like the seeds of portulaca;
Where he sowed them, the green vine withered, and the smoke and armies sprang up.

Stephen Vincent Benet

As I expect all of you know, I am no pacifist; but I am a student of history. And when we send our armies out to remake the world, I cannot help but be reminded of Ortega y Gasset, and his tale of the story of Napoleon reviewing his troops. “See my soldiers, how splendid, how the light glistens on their bayonets.” To which Talleyrand replied, “Sire you can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it.” Once the bayonets have destroyed the firm seat, restoring a new one may be more difficult than supposed. There was a good reason for John Quincy Adams to say that America is the friend of liberty everywhere but the guardian only of our own. He understood that he who defends everything defends nothing, and those who undertake to defend the rights of all the people in the world may end by finding the coast was their own liberty. We can break things and kill people. Rebuilding is a more difficult job, and we learned the wrong lesson from our accomplishments with Germany and Japan after World War Two. We cannot rescue everyone and when we find what the cost has been, who rescues us? It is no small thing to be a free society and defend that freedom. The thing about defending our own liberty is that it generally increases our power. When we go out to slay foreign dragons, the cost can be far greater than we think – and we may not be the ones who pay it.

Mike Flynn calls my attention to this:

New system could predict solar flares, give advance warning

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Researchers may have discovered a new method to predict solar flares more than a day before they occur, providing advance warning to help protect satellites, power grids and astronauts from potentially dangerous radiation.

The system works by measuring differences in gamma radiation emitted when atoms in radioactive elements "decay," or lose energy. This rate of decay is widely believed to be constant, but recent findings challenge that long-accepted rule.

The new detection technique is based on a hypothesis that radioactive decay rates are influenced by solar activity, possibly streams of subatomic particles called solar neutrinos. This influence can wax and wane due to seasonal changes in the Earth’s distance from the sun and also during solar flares, according to the hypothesis, which is supported with data published in a dozen research papers since it was proposed in 2006, said Ephraim Fischbach, a Purdue University professor of physics.

http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2012/Q3/new-system-could-predict-solar-flares,-give-advance-warning.html

Of course the notion of variable decay rates in radioactive substances is startling to those of us brought up on the notion that it is invariable. So we have neutrinos, which no one can find, changing the decay rates that can’t be changed; but if all that works we may be able to have some advance warning of events that may destroy our civilization. A brave new world.

And to end the day on a cheerful note, our galaxy won’t collide with Andromeda for about a billion years. But here’s the picture of the day.

Galaxy Collisions: Simulation vs Observations,

Jerry

APOD: 2013 May 14 – Galaxy Collisions: Simulation vs Observations:

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130514.html

It is very cool.

Ed

Schools, discipline, Feynman, physiology and crime, ice tsunami, and other matters of interest.

jerrypournelle — Thu, 16 May 2013 06:38:19 +0000

Mail 773 Wednesday, May 15, 2013

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

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

—————————-

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

—————————–

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jerry Pournelle

Chaos Manor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Educating Damien

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

Man Mountain Molehill

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

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

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

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

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

Nick

The Fantastic Mr Feynman

Hi Jerry

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

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

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

Best wishes

Paul Dove

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

Ice Tsunamis

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

…

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

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

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

Braxton S. Cook

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

‘This Week’ Roundtable on ABC.

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

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

http://abcn.ws/163iB3F

Regards,

John Harlow

Re: A Little Pre-Ice Age Action

Jerry,

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

Regards,

George

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

How to spot a murderer’s brain:

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

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

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

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

And then ironically (or perhaps not):

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ed

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

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

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

don’t ever speak to a federal agent]

Hi Jerry,

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

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

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

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

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

Photos and more:

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

The Sound of Silence

Dr Pournelle

Have you noticed what you are not hearing?

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

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

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

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

Place your bets before the windows close.

Stay tuned for next year’s saber rattling.

Live long and prosper

h lynn keith

It is quiet over there, isn’t it?

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

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

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

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

–

Roland Dobbins

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

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

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

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

- _and_some_people_take_their_side_!

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

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

Stephen Vincent Benet

Preference Cascade, or Fit Of Pique?

Jerry,

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

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

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

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

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

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

cynically

Porkypine

Update Tuesday. IRS Plot thickens slightly. Never try to rape a hornets nest.

jerrypournelle — Wed, 15 May 2013 21:50:00 +0000

View 774 Wednesday, May 15, 2013

This is Wednesday, and all the Windows computers here need updating. For reasons I do not understand, the Windows 8 machine wants to be told to do the updates including the resetting although it says that it does it automatically. That is, there is a screen that says updates are automatically installed, but if I manually tell it to update I am told there wre 13 critical updates do I want to do them now?, and if I do I get to download them, and after downloading install them, and then I get to tell the machine to restart or it will do it in a week or so without my having to tell it so. Now it may be that I have insufficiently pored over the Help files and other instructions for Windows 8 and my cursory look is insufficiently informed. I no longer spend about half my time mucking about with small computers, so that I do all these silly things so you don’t have to. Still, I have had some experience with these little machines over the years, and you’d think that I could get the automatic updates setting right on Windows 8 – but I don’t.

Now true, the machine is in sleep mode on Tuesday nights, and it’s not my primary machine. My primary machines are two older Windows 7 machines, and on Wednesday Morning when I sit down at my desk they will both be asking me to log in, having done their updates during the night. They’ll want me to log in. When I do that all is well and over, for them, and for me I know to go to Alien Artifact, a Windows 7 system that will have been in deep sleep for days, and get his started on his updates; and then go tend Swan, our very powerful Windows 8 system, and tenderly bring her into update condition, and that’s going to take some personal attention until it’s done. I suppose I should make an effort to find out what’s going on, and perhaps I will; but meanwhile, take this as a reminder to wake up all your sleeping machines and update them.

When Windows does an update, this is a signal to all the hackers to update their software, since there will be new fixes to older hacks, and sometimes fixes to hacks not yet loose in the wild, and that means there are millions of machines vulnerable to those hacks. Hacking is a big business now, and some of the best computer scientists in the world are employed by those interested in penetrating your computer and using it for various nefarious purposes. If you are lucky you might be taken over by a concern that merely uses your system to forward a ton of spam, and if you’re really lucky the proprietor will not only install his control software, but another virus that protects you from other hackers. There are concerns out there that do that. There are even rumored to be some who recognize that a machine has already been hacked, and stop trying to get this one – a sort of professional courtesy. And then there are those who update the scripts they sell to script kiddies who use them to try to start their own companies of zombies they can rent out.

In other words, it’s dangerous out there, and keeping your systems up to date is the first – but not the only – line of defense.

Be safe.

So having gone the rounds of the Chaos Manor computers to get them properly updated, I sat down to the mail, to find this the first mail in my inbasket.

Tried to have sex with a hornet’s nest

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=sv&ie=UTF-8&eotf=1&u=http://nyheternasverige.se/forsokte-ha-sex-med-getingbo-avled/

No matter what I’m exposed to, no matter how many times I think I’ve seen or heard it all, somebody tops it. The big, neon, flashing lighted sign in my head reads "What did you think was going to happen?"

I hope this is some sort of weird joke.

Graves

Have a nice day.

The IRS scandal develops. The White House insists that no instructions came from there. Here is the official report of the Inspector General.

http://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2013reports/201310053fr.pdf

I have made only a cursory inspection, and found no surprises.

We are awaiting the President’s speech on the IRS mess. The official story is that two lower level IRS employees in Ohio took it upon themselves to delay the applications for tax exempt status of all groups using the word “Patriot” or the phrase “Tea Party” or other libertarian/conservative code words in their title or statement of purpose, while expediting those who claimed to be “progressive” or “responsible.” There was no knowledge of this at higher levels,k and certainly none at the political level. It was all a matter of low level professionals.

Of course that opens the question of the civil service. If a nation cannot control its bureaucracies, perhaps a spoils system with naked political appointments would be preferable, because that way at least you get political responsibility: everyone knows who appointed his ward leader as Commissioner of Public Roads, and if you want a road past you house you elect someone who lives near you. That way eventually you get your road, whereas with a bureaucracy you never get a road. A politically responsible system would be able to remove the bunny inspectors after a few years of ridicule but in fact it has been several years and they are still inspecting stage magician performances to insure that if the magician uses a pet rabbit in the performance he has a Federal License to do so, and no, I am not making that up. Indeed, if the magician geeks the rabbit – slays it with his teeth and eats it raw – he may be in violation of state or local laws, but the Federal Inspector of the Department of Agriculture has no jurisdiction, whereas if he uses the rabbit in the performance and keeps it as a pet, he must have a Federal License to do so.

The President is speaking now, and he will fix it, and see to is that nothing like this will ever happen again, and it was never anyone in his staff who ordered it, and it’s all going to be all right, and trust him. It was outrageous and inexcusable and it will never happen again, and the acting head of the IRS has resigned, and it is all going to be all right. The perpetrators have been “disciplined” but so far have not been identified nor discipline defined.

So it goes. More breaking news. There is a link between the two people in Cincinnati and the acting director of the IRS (who has resigned). Too much for me to follow. The President took no questions and left after promising to make everything all better. And of course he may well be completely sincere. But someone in his campaign staff knew exactly what was going on. The story is not yet over.

The Tea Party frightened the campaign to reelect the president, and someone took steps to place a primary hamper on the Tea Party after 2010. Who knew what, and when did they know it? Those who lived through the Watergate investigations will remember all this…

IRS Scandal expands to EPA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yI53kkF-WGM&feature=youtu.be

John David Galt

And now there are stories of leaks from tax returns to political groups. The old Nixon Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP) never went this far. One wonders what the media will make of all this. The last time, a President resigned. That isn’t likely here.

And I don’t know about any of this:

[Link formerly here deleted as it does not lead where I thought it did.]

We have a case in Los Angeles of a guy who was curious about bombs so he built some. He never exploded one, nor threatened to. He just wanted to see if he could do it.

Having done something of that sort at age 14 – I am sure there is a statute of limitations at work here – I suppose I have a bit of sympathy. Of course I made mine down by the hog pond having turned the hogs out into a previously harvested cornfield, and he was working in a city apartment, so I suppose it’s right that he be charged with endangerment – but if he wants to volunteer for the Army bomb squad I’d let him go do it. Rather see him there than in jail…

I see on tonight‘s news that sexual harassment in the military is now one of the gravest of problems. It must be “solved.”

Of course a long time ago this was predicted as an inevitable consequence of making military service a “right” and sexually integrating the services. It was unfair to women to exclude them from any part of the military, and any attempt to segregate the sexes was just wrong.

Of course the purpose of a military is to break things and kill people; to win battles; and the kind of people who do that are not always those we want as our neighbors. The French long ago created the Foreign Legion for that purpose. They never though of making membership a right, and ringing women into the Legion barracks.

It is certainly the case that women can do many of the functions of military forces. It is also true that one has to have career paths for the troops at the sharp end. When the fighting me begin to think it unfair that women are promoted over them through a quota system, that has an effect. If your goal is to have a sexually integrated service with no segregation of the sexes while also having no sexual harassment you may have set yourself a more difficult task than you think.

It may be easier to win battles than to integrate your armed forces without sexual harassment. History doesn’t show many successful military forces with sexual integration – except of course the present one. Which, we are now told, suffers from an intolerable problem of sexual harassment that must be rooted out of the system. And of course full sexual integration of the forces requires that mothers be sent overseas at the need of the unit, not making much allowance for the needs f the children – who are future citizens and future warriors.

I know that women can perform many of the military functions, and probably do some of them better than men can. But to try to erase sexual differences while building an invincible military has yet to be done; and the flurry of complaints about sexual harassment suggest that it’s not going as well as we would like it to. Yes, certainly, it’s a lovely ideal and we have had some movies based on the notion of absolute equality of the sexes in military forces. We have rather fewer examples of battles and wars won by forces that enforce absolute egalitarianism.

It will be interesting to see what comes next. The Navy has a long experience of men at sea; rather less than men and women at sea; if it’s going to work anywhere it should be in the Navy and perhaps the Air Force. We’ll see, But is the goal to win battles or to demonstrate sexual integration?

Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for the West as it commits suicide. James Burnham made that observation log ago, and as the Soviet Union collapsed we all forgot it. Let’s hope that we know how to bring this off and build a thoroughly integrated force that wins battles and can be deployed when and where it is needed.

Education conflicts

jerrypournelle — Tue, 14 May 2013 06:52:20 +0000

View 775 Monday, Thursday, May 09, 2013

Today’s LA Times has two education essays. One is “Closing the Education Gap” by Michele Siqeiros. It’s on the editorial page, and it’s a pretty standard exhortation . “The state must develop a comprehensive strategy for public K-12 education, adult education and higher education systems for addressing remedial education.” We have to spend more money, and we have to pick up where the schools have left off or are leaving off, etc. etc.

Apparently they admit that the schools are awful and probably unfixable so we need to set up a second education system for remedial education. That will certainly hire a lot of teachers. It beats the Mexico system where a bunch of education students in one of the colonies are holding 8 state policemen hostage demanding that they all be employed on graduation. I hope I am imagining having read that is happening, and even more I hope it was in Mexico and not somewhere in the US. So we need to fix the system with remedial education at all levels. Apparently we just write off the enormous sums being spent on the present failing system,.

The second essay isn’t supposed to be an essay but a front page story. My edition of the paper has it as “A Milder Way to Fight Defiance” by Teresa Watenade http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/12/local/la-me-adv-lausd-discipline-20130513 and it appears above the fold on page one.

“Damien Valentine knows painfully well about a national phenomenon that is imperiling the academic achievement of minority students, particularly African Americans like himself: the pervasive and disproportionate use of suspensions from school for mouthing off and other acts of defiance.

The Manual Arts Senior High School sophomore has been suspended several times beginning in seventh grade, when he was sent home for a day and a half for refusing to change his seat because he was talking. He said the suspensions never helped him learn to control his behavior but only made him fall further behind.

"Getting suspended doesn’t solve anything," Valentine said. "It just ruins the rest of the day and keeps you behind."

But Valentine, who likes chemistry and wants to be a doctor, is determined to change school discipline practices. He has joined a Los Angeles County-wide effort to push a landmark proposal by school board President Monica Garcia that would make L.A. Unified the first school district in California to ban suspensions for willful defiance.”

The rest is about the same. And of course it’s another attack on the notion of schools as places of opportunity to get an education. They’re not that: a school is a place you are entitled to be at, whether you belong there or not, whether you behave yourself or not, whether you are capable of learning or not; and Damien Valentine has as much right to be there, and to talk in class, and defy the teachers, and make it impossible for those around him actually learn something, as anyone else. The fact that Damien’s presence is one reason for the failure of the schools doesn’t seem to impress anyone.

The answer it seems is “restorative justice” in which the teacher spends a lot of time “working with” Damien and those like him. Teachers “exchange letters” with disruptive students, “each taking some blame and pledging to better cooperate.” Of course time spent with Damien and his ilk is taken from the students who just want to learn and who don’t insist on their right to be disruptive, and don’t insist on “restorative justice” if they are disciplined.

So long as the voodoo “education science” insists on transferring educational resources from those who can and want to learn, to Damien and others who are more concerned with their rights than their education, and who render themselves pretty well impervious to actual education, we are never going to have schools in which all but a very few learn to read, write, cipher, learn some civics, and generally have an educational foundation that helps them go out and find jobs or go to college. We need remedial education, not for Damien, but for those that Damien robbed of the chance to get an education in the regular system.

We must pour more money into the schools so that there can be restorative justice for Damien and others like him; we must no have enforcement of discipline and teacher control of the classroom; and of course it is senseless to question what the results of all this will be. We don’t need to. We can see what the results are.

One result is increased class rigidity. There are those who go to good schools with hard discipline – they are the children of the rich, and a favored few who manage on some sort of charity or scholarship. There are those who live in the parts of town where the students tend not to talk in class and tell the teacher to shut up when they are disciplined, and who manage to get through a public school, so that they can now go to a college where they acquire a lifetime debt. And those whose parents can pay or work the system so that the kids can graduate without those crushing debts.

For a while it looked as if we were working on a system that paid attention to The Bell Curve and did trend toward a meritocracy; but now apparently we are to dismantle all that. The way to be sure that no child is left behind is to make sure that only the rich kids get ahead. The rest are to be subjected to Damien Valentine, who was wronged by the system and must be rendered restorative justice; and the teacher needs to spend time exchanging letters with those who won’t accept classroom discipline, or else must support the union which protects her from that stuff, and whatever the union’s faults it at least doesn’t make her spend her scarce free time in T-groups and sensitivity training, but can just get on with teaching those who want to learn. Given those choices I’d support the union. I don’t want to exchange letters with Damien. But Damien wants to be a doctor, and all those suspensions “never helped him learn to control his behavior but only made him fall further behind”, and he wants to be a doctor, and surely there are patients who deserve him? So it is time for retributive justice.

The well disciplined kids who want to learn might actually learn something: but they better want it pretty badly, because the teacher is busy apologizing for disciplining the defiant.

Apologies for the rant. I presume that those who are in this crazy movement really believe the voodoo social science garbage they have been fed. Alas, I suspect that some know perfectly well what they are doing. If teachers are evaluated on actual results – how many students can actually do calculus when they graduate high school – then a lot of teachers aren’t going to be given the bright students to work with. But that’s another story for another time. Apologies for the rant. But not many.

If you want your kids to get ahead, learn about the Kahn Academy lectures, and learn more about Art Robinson’s education programs. Make sure they can all read, and by read I mean read anything including nonsense words like montheoretics and polydodmanite by the time they are in second grade. If they can’t read those words they can’t read. And note that they won’t know the meaning. Learning the meanings of words is important, but first you need to be able to READ words you have never seen before. If you want to be sure of it all, start them at age five on Mrs. Pournelle’s Reading Program http://www.readingtlc.com/. But it’s your job: don’t rely on the school system, because the goal of the schools is retributive justice, whatever that is, not teaching the kids anything at all.

I’ll have the California Sixth Grade Reader ready as an eBook shortly. It will help; the notion is to show what all California sixth graders were expected to read in 1914 – and with luck get out 10^th graders up to that level. But for your kids, you’d best be able to get them up to that level in 5^th grade. Which you can do, you know. Our modern protoplasm isn’t inferior to that of rural Florida or California back in the days of World War One…

The pledge drive ended reasonably well. For those who don’t know what that is, this place operates on the Public Radio model. It’s free but it needs to be supported if it’s going to stay in business. I run my pledge drives when KUSC the LA Classical Music station runs theirs. I don’t bug you about money much except at those times. The drive is ending, and thanks to those who subscribed or renewed. If you haven’t subscribed yet, this would be a great time to do it; and if you haven’t renewed in a while, it is never too late. And that’s enough about money for a while.

Mostly notes. Pledge drive continues

jerrypournelle — Fri, 10 May 2013 21:13:45 +0000

View 773 Friday, May 10, 2013

The pledge drive continues, and thanks to all those who have opened new subscriptions or renewed their old ones. This site operates on the Public Radio plan, meaning that it is free to all, but it remains open only as long as it gets enough subscribers to keep it open. If you have not subscribed this would be a good time to do it. And if you haven’t renewed in a while, this would be a great time…

The good news is that I pretty well confine my appeals to pledge week, and I don’t do pledge weeks until KUSC, the LA classical music station, does theirs. And I don’t do advertisements. As I said, the Public Radio model…

There is a bit of a lull in news about the Benghazi affair. It is the duty of the Congress to act as the Grand Inquest of the Nation, and we have the death of our ambassador to explain and policies to prevent this sort of thing to develop.

Subject: The Benghazi Incident

Jerry, as you can probably guess, I’m not exactly a fan of our current president. However, in this case, I can only find one fault with what he did: in my opinion, at least, he turned the job over to the wrong person. This isn’t a matter of 20/20 hindsight; if I’d been asked at the time who should be in charge, I’d have said the same thing: he should have given the job to the Secretary of the Navy.

I say this for two reasons. First, the Navy was almost certainly going to be doing the job, so you might as well give them control. Second, it’s a long-standing tradition that the President can commit the Navy (and, of course, the Marines) on his own authority, but using the Army requires Congressional approval. In this case, of course, I can’t know how effective any intervention would have been, but I’m sure that something would have been done, and the Marines would have been as eager to land at Benghazi as they were on the shores of Tripoli.

Joe

That’s pretty close to my view. Of course what came after that, with the cover-ups and the talking points, and the rest is a bunch of political nonsense designed to obscure facts, but the simple truth seems to be that the President was in over his head, understood that, and turned it over to people who had convinced him they were smart enough to handle their jobs. I am disappointed in Panetta: he had the authority. Why didn’t he use it? As to handing it to the Navy, we are very much in agreement.

Bring back the Iwo Jima

Jerry,

LHD 7 is still out there.

http://www.iwo-jima.navy.mil/

She has the 26th MEU embarked now http://www.navy.mil/local/lhd7/

Dan Greif

Actually the present Iwo Jima is a new ship built to replace the old LPH Iwo Jima, which it did well. It is supposed to be in the Mediterranean and had it been anywhere near Syrtis Major could have easily handled the Benghazi situation. It is a great puzzlement that given unrest in the area and the deployment of the US Ambassador from Tripoli over to Benghazi there were no support assets over there. The USS Tripoli, an Iwo Jima class LPH, was my son’s first sea deployment ship back during the Somalia incidents. She and the Iwo Jima have been scrapped.

The new Iwo Jima is Wasp class, and a bit fancier than the LPH Iwo Jima. It is more capable but also more expensive.

My point mostly was that if we are going to act as if we are the great superpower of the world, the original analysis of Cold War days leasing to the assessment of a requirement for a rapid response force that could inject a battalion of Marines anywhere along the shorelines seems relevant, although certainly needs revision from the time I worked on that problem in the 1950’s. If we are going to meddle in Arab affairs we need a force majeure that can react swiftly to get our agents out fast: few terrorist groups or even local militias care to face a full battalion of helicopter-supported Marines, and sending enough force is usually the best way to avoid actual combat.

Think of this as a ramble. I haven’t thought in detail about these matters for a while because I do not have access to operational details, and it’s details that dictate the actual force requirements. On a strategic level, it’s clear that if we are going in meddle in Arab affairs we need a way to get the meddlers out of there at need.

Changing earth

http://news.yahoo.com/stunning-30-year-timelapse-shows-earth-s-changing-surface-161911528.html

My first thought was, what was the position of the moon each day these were taken.

Was the tide in or out?

A daily overlay might be a better example.

B

Glacial advances and retreats are more a function of rainfall than temperature, and that tends to change in cyclical ways. The rain/drought cycles change across the world. But those are striking pictures, and there’s a good bit to think about.

Regarding your recent columns, there is a successor planned for Hipparchos, Gaia, scheduled to be launched this October by the ESA. It should be capable of doing parallax measurements to some tens of thousands of light years, and easily refine/confirm/refute current "standard candle" definitions.

-Ed

I wonder about the accuracies at that distance, but it should get astronomy back to observations and data, not theoretical calculations. In particular we can verify the size of the Andromeda Nebula, and thus its absolute brightness, which will help a lot with detgermining distance to far distant nebulae.

Yesterday was spent with Niven, mostly working. And now I have to pay the bills.

Bring back the Iwo Jima?

jerrypournelle — Thu, 09 May 2013 19:38:14 +0000

View 773 Thursday, May 09, 2013

Pledge week continues. This journal operates on the Public Radio model – it is free to all, but it will continue only so long as enough people subscribe. If you have not subscribed, this would be a great time to do it. We encourage you to become a patron of this place of rational discussion. It is also a daybook. If you have subscribed but have not renewed in a while, this would be a good time to do that. Since this is a Public Radio model site, I hold periodic pledge drives. I time them according to the pledge drives of KUSC, the Los Angeles good music station. They’re having their Spring drive now which is why you are seeing this. Normally I don’t pound on you with exhortations.

And thanks to all those who have already responded to this Spring pledge drive, both with new subscriptions and renewal of older ones.

Discussion of the Benghazi Incident in which the American Consulate in Benghazi was left hung out to dry in the face of a major terrorist attack over a period of some ten hours resulted in the deaths of four Americans including the US Ambassador to the newly “liberated” Libya continues without much result. For reasons not yet revealed, the US Ambassador to the United Nations went on national television five times with the story that the Benghazi Incident was a general uprising in reaction to an obscure anti-Prophet video posted on You tube. This supposedly erupted into a spontaneous demonstration which grew into an actual attack by mortars and other heavy weapons. Various US responses including sending in a military reaction team to secure the Benghazi airport and conduct an evacuation of US personnel were contemplated, and at one point a team was ready to depart from Tripoli when it was told to stand down. We do not know who gave the order to stand down – either who was directly responsible for conveying the order, or who originated it. Normally the US military is more clear in defining its chain of command.

The US State Department second in command in Libya (a career Foreign Service Officer who was in Tripoli) was told by the Ambassador on the telephone that the Consulate in Benghazi (and the Ambassador personally) was under armed attack. There was no mention of a video or of any spontaneous demonstration. He has since been demoted from second in command to a desk officer. No explanation of this has been published.

The Congress is the Grand Inquest of the Nation, and it is supposed to determine why extraordinary events happen. Such inquiries can be used as political weapons, but that is not their purpose. One would think that both political parties would be interested in knowing how such a thing could happen and what the US, with the world’s most powerful military establishment, might do for the future. Perhaps a company of airborne troops on ready alert in each major theater? That might be overly expensive. Still we have this greatly powerful military – surely that confers some capabilities? We have carrier groups. We have various air weapons. Has no one given any thought to such matters?

And for the record, the President left the scene at 5 PM with the instruction to the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State to “do what you have to do”, which I would have read as a blank check to include anything up to a nuclear weapons response. One can understand that a President with no military experience might turn the matter over to the Department of War (well, we call it defense now). It may be that he simply went back to the domestic quarters of the White House having left the matter in what he thought was good hands with full power to deal with it.

What happened was that nothing happened. No rescue units were sent, no airplanes were sent to buzz the area, no tankers were sent to stand by to refuel any fighters that might be sent; there not only was no single integrated operational plan (although one might think that on the anniversary of 9/11 there might be some reason to have some active forces on ready alert), there don’t seem to have been any plans at all for dealing with major incidents in Northern Africa – an area that is still volatile.

Is that worth discussion? Are operational plans being formed now? Have any units been designated as standby for alert in case of a repeat incident? If so I don’t know of any. It all seems very odd.

In past times here wasn’t a lot of choice. Technology dictated that we would do nothing but react to incidents of this sort although I seem to recall that we had contingency plans on how we could react swiftly – it was the lack of any real operational plan that led to the developments in the early days of the Korean War with the defeat of Task Force Smith and the near disaster when the Pusan Perimeter was threatened. MacArthur and the Marines saved us at Inchon, but with that came a determination that we would be more ready in future. Of course that is a long time ago and few will remember those times.

The Iwo Jima class helicopter carriers with a battalion of Marines aboard were designed to be the ready force available for brush fire wars and general world peace keeping. They came about due to a number of strategic theory papers published in the 1950’s: a way to project a fair amount of force in a reasonable time. They were built and in use in the last part of the 20th Century, and were quite effective. Over time they were sold off and scrapped, supposedly replaced with more effective systems. Perhaps so but has a couple of Iwo Jima class ships been cruising the Mediterranean the Benghazi incident would not have happened. Of course those ships were not cheap and keeping operational level of troops on alert is expensive, but if we have goals requiring the projection of force we need to have forces to project.

Perhaps we need to rethink the need for swift reaction forces for the future with the technologies available to us now. They would be useful for either a Republic or a Competent Empire.

It has been a while since I gave serious thought to these matters; but it is time someone did.

Subject: space shuttle main computers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_AP-101

They required a cold plate to keep from burning up. Brute force, the flower of 1970′s tech. 24 layer printed circuit boards etc.

Phil

Even more primitive than I remembered.

IBM_AP-101

You missed this ( or at least didn’t point it out ) in the link about the space shuttle’s computer.

"The shuttle software was written in HAL/S, a special-purpose high-level language."

Arthur C. Clarke, where are you?

"Open the pod bay doors, HAL."

Pete

Peter Wityk

Static or Expanding Universe? Grand Inquest

jerrypournelle — Thu, 09 May 2013 07:05:25 +0000

View 773 Wednesday, May 08, 2013

I posted a mixed bag mailbag earlier today. It has some interesting items and comments.

I’m trying to catch up. In theory this ought to be pledge week – KUSC is having their Spring Pledge Drive, which means that I sort of do the same. This site operates on the Public Radio model: it’s free to all but if not enough subscribe to support it, then it will go away. I don’t spend much time bugging you about this, but whenever KUSC, the Los Angeles classical music station, does a pledge week I do the same. But since I didn’t have much going in the first part of the week, I decided not to inflict the pledge drive on you. If you haven’t subscribed, this would be a good time to do it. If you haven’t renewed your subscription in a while this would be a good time to do that.

The news today is dominated by the recovery of the three young women kidnapped a decade ago and kept in slavery in a house in Cleveland. I expect we’ll have to comment on that at some point, but mostly I am reminded of the conclusions Possony and I reached many years ago: societies deep in decadence and subject to revolutions tend to have a massive increase in bizarre crimes as harbinger. Of course as the population grows the absolute number of all crimes increases, but still, we do seem to have a lot of the bizarre…

The other story of the day is that the Congress is acting as The Grand Inquest of the Nation in looking at the Benghazi Affair. This is a necessary and proper power of the Congress and has been known from the earliest days. It should not be a simple political witch hunt. And it is important to understand just who ordered the C-130 with the rescue teams about to take off from Tripoli to stand down. Who issued the order, and why? And there may be very legitimate reasons for that: it’s one reason I don’t want to play with breaking news. But I am glad to see Congress acting properly here.

Continuing the discussion of The Static Universe by South African astronomer Hilton Ratcliffe. Radcliffe’s style can be irritating, and one definitely has to read his book twice because he assumes you know things he won’t get to until two chapters later; but he does a fair job of raising doubts about the Standard Cosmology Theory with its Expanding Universe, Big Bang, Dark Matter, Dark Energy, massive Black Holes, and other constructs necessary for the Theory but which have not been observed, and in some cases can’t be observed from here. The Standard Theory seemed rather simple when I learned it in high school, and seemed confirmed by the discovery of the 3◦ microwave background radiation by a pair of Bell Labs radio engineers. True, it was about 20 times smaller than the background radiation Gamow had calculated, (and was very similar to the background temperature expected by the static universe theorists well before the Big Bang was postulated); but there it was, a universal background, the temperature left over from the Big Bang. I remember the headlines. I was involved in missiles and space analysis at the time and didn’t have much time to appreciate it, but I remember being impressed.

Ratcliffe devotes the largest chapter of his book to this radiation and possible causes of it, and if you ignore the snarky language, he does make a pretty good point: it’s predicted by many theories, and it’s smaller than the Expanding Universe Standard Theory expected it to be.

: Did you C that? —

OK, I’m definitely out of my league in this group on this subject, but someone here surely knows something about this.

As Mr. Beaufils pointed out, much of cosmology is based on assumptions. Assumptions should be re-examined from time to time to see if they still hold water (or whatever it is they are supposed to hold). You will be familiar with this notion since you have been exposed to Korzybski.

So, what about the speed of light? We assume that it is constant not only in space but in time. That is, it was the same yesterday as it is today, on back through the eons. But is it? Googling reveals that there are those who don’t think so and they can point to the fact (which I am not equipped to check) that every time we measure C, it gets smaller. Not by a lot, but one would expect that errors in accuracy would be random – some smaller and some greater. But with C, it’s always smaller, apparently.

The implications are non-trivial. If C were significantly larger in the past, then objects are not nearly as far away as we think.

As you are wont to say, “it may well be that the universe is not only queerer than you imagine, but queerer than you can imagine.”

Richard White

Austin, Texas

I am convinced that it is queerer than we can imagine; QED convinces me of that. But that doesn’t mean it has to be so complicated that it takes tensors to explain it. I am prepared to believe that the speed of light is different in different media – few dispute that – and that there is no vacuum: space is never empty. As to what medium light waves in (if any) I consider that still an open question. One thing is certain. If we don’t know how far away things are it’s hard to tell how long light took to get here from there, and what objects or media pools it had to go through to get here.

Mike Flynn, sometime collaborator and statistical inference expert who dabbles in philosophy says

Medieval science and logical positivism

Jerry,

You quote Feynman as saying "It was thought in the Middle Ages that people simply make many observations, and the observations themselves suggest laws." This is only partly correct. The whole process as described by Grosseteste was a loop. The Aristotelians held that all knowledge begins in the senses (which may be why mathematics has always flirted with Plato!) But they would have been puzzled by the suggestion that inanimate "observations" could ever "suggest" anything. From the quia, or particulars, the natural philosopher derived a propter quid, or rationale, by inductive reasoning, a la the Posterior Analytics. Then using this propter quid and deductive reasoning, a la the Prior Analytics, conclude to the quia. But Grosseteste emphasized two things.

1. The deductive phase ought to conclude to quia that were not part of the formation of the propter quid. Otherwise the reasoning would be circular. In modern terms, the theory ought to predict facts that were not included in the original reasoning.

2. Between the inductive and deductive phases, the philosopher must perform the "work of the intellect" (negotiatio intellectus). That is, he must consider all the various explanations of the phenomena under examination and determine which of them is truer to the facts. For example, in concluding from the phases of the Moon that the Moon must be a sphere, the philosopher would consider all sorts of other geometric shapes: a plate seen flat-on, a cylinder seen base-on, etc., and show how each of them fails in some manner. This is a work that many Late Moderns, even scientists, now neglect. Publish-or-perish does not permit measured reflection, and one usually goes with some bright notion, never considering other possible explanations. Feynman was being very Feyerabendian because he recognized that facts do not explain themselves. There is always more than one theory that can explain the same set of facts.

But it is also the case, as Einstein told Heisenberg, that theory determines what can be observed. That is, our prior beliefs will not only condition how we see the observations, but also determine what observations we consider important to make. Keep in mind that all astronomical observations for more than two millennia were adequately explained by Ptolemaic models. Right up to the discovery of the phases of Venus. The Ptolemaic model predicted Venerian phases, too; but not the same phases as were seen. Whereupon, astronomers abandoned Ptolemy for… (wait for it) … the Tychonic and Ursine models. Tycho’s system was mathematically equivalent to the Copernican and matched it, prediction for prediction. It was up to physics, not astronomy, to cast the deciding ballot: ca. 1800, with the measurement of actual Coriolis effects and parallax in the fixed stars. (And somewhat earlier, but less surely, of stellar aberration.)

In all this it is well to keep in mind something Aristotle said:

We are far away from the things we are trying to inquire into, not only in place but more so in that we have sensation of exceedingly few of their accidents.” – De Caelo, 2.3.286a5-7

and further:

It is good to inquire about these things and so to deepen our understanding, although we have little to go on and we are situated at such a great distance from the attributes of these things. Nevertheless, from contemplating such things nothing [we infer] should seem to be unreasonable, holding them now as fraught with difficulties.
– De Caelo, 2.12.292a14-18

Thomas Aquinas also appreciated the work of the intellect. He noted on his Commentary on the Physics as well as en passant in:

“The theory of eccentrics and epicycles is considered as established because thereby the sensible appearances of the heavenly movements can be explained; not, however, as if this proof were sufficient, forasmuch as some other theory might explain them.”

– Summa theologica, I, q.32, a.1, ad. 2

Which led Pope Urban to comment to Cardinal Zollern (who then wrote Galileo in a personal letter) that “the Church had not condemned nor was about to condemn Copernicanism as heretical but that the theory was rash and that, furthermore, astronomical theories were of such a kind that they could never be shown to be necessarily true.” So Pope beat Popper by 300 years. (This BTW was the comment that Galileo mocked in the Dialogue and got himself into deep kimchee.)

Anyhow, the medieval method can be found explained from a modern perspective here:

http://home.comcast.net/~icuweb/c02001.htm#10

and continuing through #11

MikeF

Superluminal motion

Hi Jerry.

The phenomenon of certain astronomical objects travelling faster than the speed of light is known as Superluminal motion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superluminal_motion

and can often be easily described as an optical illusion from material travelling at relativistic speeds. Of course, whether that describes everything that is observed is another question. I’ve done some work on one of these objects (M87), and for this particular object I’d be surprised if another explanation came to light. I don’t know about other objects.

As for the determination of distances, this is known as the Distance Ladder, of which a reasonable description is given here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distance_ladder

And Cepheid variables *are* bright enough to determine distances to the nearest galaxies that are subject to cosmological redshift (max distance about 29 Mpc), and thus callibrate that rung of the distance ladder

- that’s how Hubble originally made his discoveries in the first place.

The initial callibration by Hubble at the time was wrong, but it’s drastically improved over the years, although not without many bumps along the way. It was also one of the key missions of the Hubble Space Telescope. The HST observations are given here:

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2001ApJ…553…47F

I hope this helps!

Cheers,

Mike Casey

A fair statement of the Standard Theory. Ratcliffe picks holes in that by pointing out that not much of that ladder is based on primary observations, and many observations are cast out as ‘anomalies.’ Of course most Cosmologists believe in the Standard Theory. I tend to glitch at postulating Dark Matter and Dark Energy as the major components of the universe. Why would God play such a trick on us? But of course such questions are way outside science.

The distance ladder depends on accurate measurement of distance to the nearest galaxy, M31, better known as the Andromeda Galaxy. Hubble estimated that it was 900,000 lightyears away. He underestimated the luminosity of the Cepheids and thus greatly underestimated the distance., which we now believe to be nearly 3 million lightyears. Incorrect distances lead to incorrect estimates of the sizes of the galaxies. And triangulation only works out to about a hundred parsecs, and that with a 10% error. We are probably getting better and better at that, and one hopes that we will be able to use some form of triangulation out to a thousand parsecs at some point; but that puts us a very long way from finding the distance to M31 or even to the Magellanic Clouds. The ladder is built heavily on theory, and the theory must make a number of assumptions about light and the media it moves in.

I have no expertise in the accuracy of estimating the absolute magnitude of Cepheid Variables, but I note that Hubble himself was off by a factor of four – and this on fairly close objects in which we can see something of what’s between us and M31. Which doesn’t mean the Standard Theory is wrong, but it does indicate that it’s legitimate to question it, particularly when distance estimates depend on accepting the Standard Expansion Theory, thus making it rather circular after a few hundred million parsecs…

Quasars with a proper motion

I am minded of an article (possibly tongue-in-cheek) by Ben Bova and published in Analog many years back, in which he suggested that quasars might not be the fantastically distant, fantastically huge energy sources they seem, but the flare of Bussard ramjets blasting their way around this neck of the galaxy. Presumably we would see both blue-shifted as well as red-shifted signatures and, depending on distance, proper motion

I do not recall ever seeing any kind of follow-up, whether in fiction or speculative fact. However, the hypothesis should be easily testable, although long-term observation would probably be needed: Do any of the objects display acceleration over time? Do any vanish or appear? Whatever the answer, what will we do with it?

Thanks for all you do. Be well.

Ralph A. Moss

Good story. I vaguely recall it. Niven and I briefly thought about a story with that premise.

Hydrogren Fusion in the Sun

Jerry,

The fusion process in the sun is known as the PPI cycle. It runs like this:

p + p -> 2D + (e+) + v

2D + p -> 3He + (gama ray photon)

3He + 3He -> 4He + 2p

where the numbers to the left of the letters are to be superscripted, the "p" is a proton, the "D" is dueterium, the "(e+)" is a positron, and the "v" is an electron neutrino. You can see that the second step must happen twice in order to supply the required inputs for the third step. What you cannot see is that the predictions that the core of the Sun was too cool to allow this reaction were based upon classical calculations. When quantum effects are taken into account, it is seen that at the temperatures and pressures at the core of the sun, the protons can readily tunnel past the Coulomb barrier your reader from Paris was alluding to. Even with quantum effects taken into considerations, however, this first step is the most difficult to accomplish and drives the rate of the entire reaction and is responsible for the fact that the Sun will take roughly 10 billion years to exhaust its supply of hydrogen.

Kevin L Keegan

There are some other inconsistencies in solar observations. Our Sun’s corona is hotter than the surface under it. That wasn’t expected. Does this change what people on a planet orbiting Tau Ceti see as the temperature and luminosity of our Sun? I confess I don’t know, but then I don’t know a lot about astrophysics of the Sun. I doubt I ever will understand all of it.

subject: "Consensus Theory of Climate Change"

Hi, Doc.

I prefer the term "Climate Creation Science".

Matthew Joseph Harrington

"What occurreth in Gomorrah, stayeth in Gomorrah."

DSM Going Down? Navy futures; X-15; Quantum networks; Penguins in space; entangling alliances; Saving slow learners; Science and politics; Gelzinis and the Martha Stewart dilemma; and other matters of interest in a mixed mailbag

jerrypournelle — Thu, 09 May 2013 00:31:56 +0000

Mail 772 Wednesday, May 08, 2013

We have paid a lot of attention to Cosmology recently so this is a mailbag catchup on other subjects. It is a mixed bag on a variety of subjects.

NIMH Delivers A Kill Shot To DSM-5,

Jerry

NIMH Delivers A Kill Shot To DSM-5:

http://www.science20.com/science_20/blog/nimh_delivers_kill_shot_dsm5-111138

“The weakness is its lack of validity.”

About time.

Ed

Re: DSM and NIMH

Jerry,

The DSM might be losing ground.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/514571/nimh-will-drop-widely-used-psychiatry-manual/

Regards,

George

About time indeed. See also http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/04/psychiatry-dsm-melancholia-science-controversy.html

A new kind of "Chinese knock off"

Pardon the pun, but there are some new Chinese knock offs on the horizon…

http://www.scientificcomputing.com/news/2013/05/rise-drones-china-emerging-new-force-drone-warfare

And I wonder wouldn’t be at all surprised on some future date to fins out that Skynet’s mother tongue is Mandarin or Cantonese.

Gary P.

My son Commander Phillip Pournelle has an essay in the current Proceedings of the US Naval Institute on missile carriers and the future of the fleet which might be relevant here. The Navy is thinking about the problems.

Bear vs. monkey.

<http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2320745/Bear-forced-ride-bike-sick-circus-stunt-crashes-mauls-monkey-large-crowd.html>

——

Roland Dobbins

When I was a graduate student at the University of Washington I had a job as graduate assistant to a major medical project. I had to take care of monkeys. I developed a lifelong hatred for the little beasts…

Voice Activated Elevator in Scotland

Jerry

What could possibly go wrong?

http://dotsub.com/view/6c5d7514-5656-476a-9504-07dd4e2f6509

Ed

What indeed?

The X-15 Rocket Plane: Implications for Reusable Booster Schedule & Cost (1966) | buffy willow

Jerry

Nice piece on the X-15 project – one of my favorite models when I was a kid:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/05/the-x-15-rocket-plane-reusable-space-shuttle-boosters-1966/

An interesting bit on reusability:

Station supporters envisioned that reusable spacecraft for logistics resupply and crew rotation would make operating the station affordable. In November 1966, James Love and William Young, engineers at the NASA Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, completed a brief report in which they noted that the reusable suborbital booster for a reusable orbital spacecraft would undergo pressures, heating rates, and accelerations very similar to those the X-15 experienced.

“Love and Young wrote that some space station planners expected that a reusable booster could be launched, recovered, refurbished, and launched again in from three to seven days. The X-15, they argued, had shown that such estimates were wildly optimistic. The average X-15 refurbishment time was 30 days, a period which had, they noted, hardly changed in four years. Even with identifiable improvements, they doubted that an X-15 could be refurbished in fewer than 20 days.

“At the same time, Love and Young argued that the X-15 program had demonstrated the benefits of reusability. The cost of refurbishing an X-15 in 1964 had, they estimated, come to about $270,000 per mission. In 1964, NASA and the Air Force had accomplished 27 successful X-15 flights. The total cost of refurbishing the three X-15s for those flights had thus totaled $7.3 million.

“Love and Young cited North American Aviation estimates which placed the cost of a new X-15 at about $9 million, then calculated the cost of 27 X-15 missions if the rocket plane had not been made reusable. They found that the all-expendable X-15 program would have cost the United States $243 million in 1964. This meant, they wrote, that the cost of refurbishing the three X-15s amounted to only 3% of the cost of building 27 X-15s and throwing each one away after a single flight.”

When I was at Boeing I developed an admiration for the X-15 and visited Edwards several times to learn more – I was in human factors then, in the 1950’s, and the concern was man in space. But Seattle is a long way from Los Angeles and was much further back in the days before jets. The best way there was to fly to Long Beach Airport and get North American to take you to Edwards on their DC-3 they kept for that purpose. When I got to California I was working on strategic missile forces and didn’t get to see much at Edwards and when I got back to manned space it was in support of Apollo, so I was only an observer of the X-15 program. We learned a lot from it. It’s time for a new reusable manned space X project.

‘Quantum network? We’ve had one for years,’ says Los Alamos,

Jerry

It seems the ads at Los Alamos has a quantum network up and running. It’s hub and spoke, but it is working:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/07/quantum_cryptography_network_los_alamos/

As the article says, “It’s not a perfect system. While it’s relatively scalable within a locale, the hub and spoke system has inherent disadvantages on very large scales, and the authors acknowledge that if the hub is compromised in any way, the messages are insecure. But it’s a hell of a lot further along than anyone else is admitting to in public, and it’s a credit to US national scientists and their sense of discretion that they kept it a secret for this long. As network bragging rights go, this takes some topping.”

Ed

I have seen some of this, mostly back east, and I have actually communicated though a secure quantum link network. Last experience I had it wasn’t ready for actual use, though.

Subject: Penguins in space!

Jerry, you may consider Linux to be little more than a jobs program for gurus, but it appears that NASA is inclined to think differently:

http://training.linuxfoundation.org/why-our-linux-training/training-reviews/linux-foundation-training-prepares-the-international-space-station-for-linux-migration

The article explains that NASA likes the idea of having complete control over the programs in use on the ISS, including the underlying OS so that they can adapt, extend or patch things as needed instead of being stuck with whatever the owners of proprietary software are willing to give them.

Joe Zeff

For much of the life of the Shuttle, the main computer of use to the Astronauts was a Mac laptop; the Shuttle main computer was something like a Z-80 as I recall. I know that Atlantis was built with an obsolete computer system although our Council recommended through the Space Council that they go with something more modern, not just with the computer but much of the other stuff; but they built what amounted to a Columbia clone.

Finally!

Jerry,

In case you haven’t yet heard of it, the lens makers at Zeiss have finally made it possible to buy a round touit. Pic attached.

Warmest regards,

Frank

Stratfor on Nostalgia for NATO:

http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/geopolitical-journey-nostalgia-nato

Mr. Friedman ends with this: “I don’t know that NATO can exist without a Cold War. Probably not. What is gone is gone. But I know my nostalgia for Europe is not just for my youth; it is for a time when Western civilization was united. I doubt we will see that again.”

Ed

NATO always was what G Washington called an entangling alliance. During the Cold War it was a necessary component of a Containment strategy, but I do not see why it is needed now.

We’re all gonna die!!! =)

By the late 80′s, I knew it was too late to bomb these people and here we go:

<.>

Senior scientists have criticised the “appalling irresponsibility” of researchers in China who have deliberately created new strains of influenza virus in a veterinary laboratory.

They warned there is a danger that the new viral strains created by mixing bird-flu virus with human influenza could escape from the laboratory to cause a global pandemic killing millions of people.

Lord May of Oxford, a former government chief scientist and past president of the Royal Society, denounced the study published today in the journal Science as doing nothing to further the understanding and prevention of flu pandemics.

“They claim they are doing this to help develop vaccines and such like. In fact the real reason is that they are driven by blind ambition with no common sense whatsoever,” Lord May told The Independent.

“The record of containment in labs like this is not reassuring. They are taking it upon themselves to create human-to-human transmission of very dangerous viruses. It’s appallingly irresponsible,” he said.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/appalling-irresponsibility-senior-scientists-attack-chinese-researchers-for-creating-new-strains-of-influenza-virus-in-veterinary-laboratory-8601658.html

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Here we have a seriously sick critter. He planned to kidnap, torture, rape, and then eat a small child. He had a dungeon all nicely equipped for the job. Fortunately he was caught.

This is as clear a case of a need for capital "punishment" as a sanitation measure rather than punishment. The guy probably never can be cured. And there seems to be serious risk with letting him live that some Rose Bird type might come along again and turn him loose. If he is dead, that simply cannot happen.

Briton Geoffrey Portway admits US plot to kill and eat child

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22437771

{^_^}

I think I have no comment on this. Perhaps I should. When Possony and I studied precursors to the collapse of a society, or a major revolution, one of the harbingers was an outbreak of bizarre crimes. And now I read today’s headlines.

This was forwarded to me by an academic colleague who I greatly admire, which means that she takes it seriously, so I do:

Structure associated with memory formation predicts learning ability

By Meghan Rosen

Web edition: April 29, 2013

A child who is good at learning math may literally have a head for numbers.

Kids’ brain structures and wiring are associated with how much their math skills improve after tutoring, researchers report April 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Certain measures of brain anatomy were even better at judging learning potential than traditional measures of ability such as IQ and standardized test results, says study author Kaustubh Supekar of Stanford University.

These signatures include the size of the hippocampus – a string bean-shaped structure involved in making memories – and how connected the area was with other parts of the brain.

The findings suggest that kids struggling with their math homework aren’t necessarily slacking off, says cognitive scientist David Geary of the University of Missouri in Columbia. "They just may not have as much brain region devoted to memory formation as other kids."

The study could give scientists clues about where to look for sources of learning disabilities, he says.

Scientists have spent years studying brain regions related to math performance in adults, but how kids learn is still "a huge question," says Supekar. He and colleagues tested IQ and math and reading performance in 24

8- and 9-year-olds, then scanned their brains in an MRI machine. The scans measured the sizes of different brain structures and the connections among them.

"It’s like creating a circuit diagram," says study leader Vinod Menon, also of Stanford.

Next, the kids began an intensive one-on-one tutoring program that focused on speedy problem-solving and math skills such as counting strategies and basic arithmetic. After eight weeks and about 15 to 20 hours of tutoring, Menon, Supekar and colleagues tested the students’ math abilities again and compared the kids’ progress with their brain scans.

Overall, tutoring improved the kids’ math skills, and the children with the biggest improvements had big hippocampuses that were well connected to brain regions that make memories and retrieve facts.

"It’s a very interesting and surprising finding," says cognitive neuroscientist Robert Siegler of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

In adults, the hippocampus isn’t all that involved in math, he says. But in kids, "it apparently is involved in math learning."

Supekar thinks the findings could help educators tailor math tutoring strategies to different kids. "Right now, math education is like a one-size-fits-all approach," he says. One day, maybe 10 years from now, Supekar says, scientists might be able to scan children’s brains and place them into programs that cater to their specific mental signatures.

But for now, Menon says, "It certainly behooves us to not give up on children who are slow to learn, and to think of alternate approaches to boost learning."

Citations

K. Supekar et al. Neural predictors of individual differences in response to math tutoring in primary-grade school children. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Published online April 29, 2013.

doi:10.1073/pnas.1222154110. [Go to]

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/350018/description/Brain_measurem

ents_predict_math_progress_with_tutoring

I am now reviewing a case history of an ADHD child who was about to be institutionalized, but his father wouldn’t give up; the story is now told by the boy and his father. It is different from Temple Grandin’s story. And that tells us a lot.

Robert Goddard: The Ultimate Migration.

<http://www.bis-space.com/2012/03/23/4110/the-ultimate-migration>

———-

Roland Dobbins

Earth is too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

Scientific review and Politics

Jerry

Don’t know if you have seen this but if not here it is.

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/05/02/republican-congressman-introduces-bill-to-require-political-approval-of-scientific-papers/

Gordon C. Snelling

I have not had a chance to read this but I will try. Meanwhile it sounds frightening but perhaps I have misconstrued the idea.

The Gunpowder Plot

Dear Jerry :

In retrospect, my testimony to the House Judiciary Committee on the Comprehensive Antiterrorism Act of 1995 seems to have been a waste of time.

The West, Texas explosion tetifies that there is still a lot of ammonium nitrate lying around, and now comes word from the WSJ <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324235304578440843633991044.html> that Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsaraev purchased his explosives legally, anonymously, and in substantial quantities from a New Hampshire fireworks store .

Instead of emulating the patient Unabomber, who clipped the ends off thousands of kitchen matches to fuel his postal bombs, Tsarnaev bought a small number of semi-pro display fireworks:

"William Weimer, a vice president of Phantom Fireworks, said Tamerlan Tsarnaev on Feb. 6 purchased two "Lock and Load" reloadable mortar kits at the company’s Seabrook, N.H., store, just over the line from Massachusetts. Each kit contains 24 shells and four tubes for firing them into the air.

Mr. Tsarnaev paid cash for the kits, which retail for $199.99. The company has turned over records of the purchases to investigators, Mr. Weimer said. Another Phantom Fireworks store sold fireworks used in the failed 2010 Times Square bombing.

It isn’t yet known if the powder from fireworks was used in the Boston bombings, and authorities continue to search for any other explosives purchases and possible accomplices who may have provided materials for the bombs, U.S. authorities said.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation already has described other parts of the bombs, which were placed in pressure cookers and packed with nails and BBs.

Each of the parts described so far has innocuous uses and could be purchased easily, showing how a weapon could be built without arousing suspicion."

Russell Seitz

One reason I tend to avoid breaking news. Eventually the truth comes out.

I delayed publishing this until I could get a dialogue and response, but I have run out of time and it ought to be seen.

Gelzinis

Jerry,

This is a response to Ed and his Gelzinis link. I’d first like to say these young men should have the full weight of the law thrown at them. The article is correct. Had they told police about their friends, the MIT officer might be alive today, a police officer would have been spared the agony of surgery and rehabilitation, and Boston might have been able to sleep a little sooner than it did.

All of that said, however, what did anyone expect? Can anyone honestly say they are not afraid of the police? Are not afraid to get involved lest they be accused of being a part of whatever they are reporting on? Martha Stewart was just the very visible fact that our law enforcement now thinks of Americans as subjects; subjects to be bullied and that must submit to any indignity they can think of just to prove we are not "guilty" of something. The Kabuki dance we all do at the airport – we to prove we are not dangerous and they to prove they even care what we’re trying to prove – should be enough to tell all of us that the time of American citizenship has long passed.

I think these young men should be punished for more than obstructing justice. At the same time, I understand why they did what they did. They came from a totalitarian country into an even more totalitarian one. Is there any reason why they should not have been afraid for themselves and for their friends?

Braxton S. Cook

I find myself in the same dilemma. Yes they done bad; and yet we make it dangerous to cooperate with the authorities. More and more the government is ‘them’ not ‘us.”

Cabling

If I recall correctly from a long ago Byte column:

Pournelle, addressing a SCSI issue: "Ninety percent of the time it’s a cable."

Niven: "So you’re checking everything else first?"

Both principles were added to my troubleshooting checklist. Just a quick stroll down memory lane.

Wayne Kurth

Print yourself a pistol

the ‘Liberator’ again!

http://natmonitor.com/2013/05/04/worlds-first-3d-printed-handgun-is-here-congressman-fights-to-extend-ban-on-plastic-firearms/

And how do we regulate that?

Subject: North Korea

Is there some reason why we can’t just offer the office class of the North Korean army, a 20k a year life long stipend if they over throw Kim and turn over the country to the south?

I would guess that Sun Tzu would approve of that strategy. Silver bullets are often effective. Machiavelli would have understood very well.