Category Archives: View

View 792 Friday, October 04, 2013

I am down at the beach house and about to go over to the Town and Country where ComicFest will take place. Precisely why I am involved is a long story: I’m don’t usually go to comic related conventions, and I don’t recall doing anything for comics that ever got published.

Periodically I try to work on an episode for Chrissie Claus, a not very widely circulated comic I happen to like a lot, but even with the help of Marv Wolfman on fundamentals of writing for comics I find it’s not easy for me. I sort of wish I had started a few years ago when I could work really intensely for a couple of days on something. In any event nothing has ever come of this other than that I continue to like Chrissie when she infrequently appears in a new edition.

However, a long time ago in the earlier days of my science fiction career, my son Alex, then at UC San Diego, fell in with a group of science fiction fans who were involved in starting ComicCon, and I was invited as one of the guests in an early rendition of ComicCon before it became so large.I had a great time, but about the only other guest I met who had read anything of mine was Adam West. I didn’t know Marv Wolfman then. Anyway, as a Result I got a “Gold Card” which entitled me to attend any future ComicCon, but it wasn’t really my cup of tea. Recently some of the fans involved in putting on the first ComicCon decided they wanted a comic convention limited in size. They got Larry Niven as GOH, and remembered that I’d been part of the early ComicCon, and somehow I ended up agreeing to come although I can’t remember doing it. I’m sure I’ll have a great time. I may even meet a fellow Chrissie Claus fan.

The result of all this is that I am on dialup network access because I forgot to go to the AT&T store to renew some time on my little AT&T gadget which I’ve used in the past when I was somewhere I didn’t have a wifi connection, but apparently I didn’t use it often enough and AT&T has forgotten me, so I’ll have to go to an AT&T store and I just didn’t. And probably won’t.

And FireFox in one of its upgrades has installed the Yahoo Tool Box which means that it has somehow slowed down Google something awful and made Y! the default search engine. I can go to some trouble to search with Google and that is much faster and smarter than Y! – and it’s getting late and I have to go to Town and Country and I didn’t bother last night to seek out how to kill y! and that Yahoo tool bar. I don’t use any of this junk at home because I haven’t used the ThinkPad recently. For some reason the Yahoo Tooled Bar didn’t take over my home establishment. I’ll know more when I get home. Meanwhile if I have to abandon FireFox to kill Y! and it’s tool bar I am prepared to do that. I could live with Bing if I had to but Y! isn’t working for me and I have no incentive to explore its secrets. I wish it would just go away but FireFox seems determined not to tell me. I know it’s in there somewhere.

I used to make a living finding out strange stuff about computers – “I do all these silly things so you don’t have to!” – but lately I just wish I had me of the old days to consult. I suppose I’ll have to go back into questing mode. Capitalism beats bureaucratic socialism, but sometimes tricks like installing its own tool bar surreptitiously can mask that.

I have a friend who has been told she cannot answer her email because it is a government account and she is on furlough. I am told that the courageous armed security forces who shot down the deranged woman who wanted to talk to the President were unpaid but on duty, which seems a very odd situation – one can volunteer to be on Pennsylvania Avenue with a gun while the government is shut down and you are not being paid, but answering your email is an enforceable offense under the weakened civil service regulation? I am sure I have something wrong here, and someone will inform me.

I do think that the principle that the House controls the purse strings is an important one. The President having spent a week saying he won’t talk with reckless anarchists is now saying he’ll negotiate with the House, but in such ambiguous terms as to lead one to believe his notion of negotiation was derived from MacArthur on the deck of the Missouri.

Meanwhile apparently the government can find people to reinstall the barricades that prevent private busses from turning around on the federally built unmanned turnoff to the privately maintained Mount Vernon estate; someone removed them but they were soon restored. Understand, this is merely a paved strip where busses can turn around, not a gated or attended area. It has no facilities. It’s just a paved turnoff from the highway. There are not any barricades or police line tapes anywhere near it, so it cost money to put them there while doing nothing would not have; yet the government took the trouble to barricade it, and has renewed the barricade when someone pushed it aside. This is your borrowed government money at work in a budget crisis and demonstrates the great wisdom of those in charge in this critical time.

How the different agencies react to the shutdown online

I am fascinated to see the different agencies response to being shutdown when it comes to the on-line presence. National Archives still has their website up, but you get a warning banner that information is not being updated. On the other hand, Library of Congress has shut down their website, with the exception of the services provided to Congress. Similarly, NOAA is shutdown, except for information critical for preserving life and property. The Department of Transportation warns that some of their websites may not be updated. But the State Department’s website seems to be business as usual.

Go figure…

Karl Fritz

I have a sensible analysis of some health care problems from a cardiologist friend who has thought about it, but I won’t be able to get to it this weekend. It’s worth thinking about.

2100:  it was an interesting day. I have some good pictures of Niven, had a good hour with Marv Wolfman who renewed my interest in trying to write a graphic story, had dinner with Niven and Wendy All to discuss illustrations of a book we sort of did twenty years ago and let it flag and we may renew, and altogether had a great day.  I’ll have lunch with Niven and  Barnes tomorrow.

It has been a great day.

I am off to the Convention (this is Saturday Morning) but this seemed relevant. I’ll put it into today’s post when I do that one tonight.

Shutdown and e-mail 

Dr. Pournelle,

Just a quick couple of comments on shutdown rules.

If the employees are essential, e.g., the various federal police you mentioned, they are required to go to work on the hope of eventually being paid and the threat of punishment for skipping work if they don’t show up. They are required to do their normal jobs, plus extra duties caused by the shutdown, except they are severely constrained in any action that may involve spending money.

Non-essential employees are sent home and are not allowed to access offices, use computers, access official e-mail accounts, or work at home on projects from their job. They must have a method of being contacted in case they are called back by being declared essential (either temporarily or permanently), or their agency or office within an agency is funded.

—

Bryan

"Son, crying into your drink is bad enough;

crying into a hot fudge sundae is disgusting." — Heinlein

View 792 Thursday, October 03, 2013

I am off to the San Diego ComicFest, which is being done by many of those who started ComicCon and became weary of its great size. I’ll be back on sometime soon.

1600: here, safe and sound. Normally if I am in a convention with Larry we travel together, but it didn’t happen this time. Larry is coming tomorrow. We hadn’t coordinated as well as we might.

The news everywhere is over the DC incident. When I heard the cautious reporting: “police officer injured” but never a word about him being shot, nebulous references to “another person in the car” and all the rest it was clear from the beginning that this panicked woman had no gun, and was shot down when she exited the car. By whom I don’t know yet: I would hope that the Secret Service which started this chase (although precisely why isn’t clear: she had some kind of collision with one of the new barriers that keeps closed off a street that has been open to the public for 200 years, and then drove off at high speed with a child in the car – but she was pursued by the Secret Service, than Metro police. It is not clear whether the elite Capitol Police were involved. I met some of them when Newt was Speaker and they seemed to understand who they worked for; they didn’t have that us vs. the damned public attitude that is getting all too common with armed Federal employees.

But that’s just grousing, and it may well come out she was entirely mad. Actually it will certainly be asserted, whether she was or not. And given the state of our Fourth Estate we may never know. I wish more of the current press had performed in The Front Page when in drama class…

Origination Clause  

Jerry,

I’d been mildly against the current House Republican confrontation over delaying Obamacare, on the grounds that it’s a worthwhile goal but I wasn’t at all sure it was tactically wise.

Harry Reid just converted me to a full-fledged supporter of doing whatever it takes – enduring this "shutdown", delaying a debt-limit increase, walking barefoot over hot coals – to enforce the House’s will over what does and does not get funded.

How did Reid do this? There’s a minor fuss today over his saying "why would we want to" in answer to a loaded question about funding NIH and helping kids with cancer. In context, what he said wasn’t nearly as crass as it’s being portrayed.

But in the same video, he said something far far worse. Harry Reid, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0lFyFJeZSY, starting about 45 seconds in: "What right do they [the House] have to pick and choose what part of government is going to be funded? … They have no right to pick and chose."

Uh, Harry, ever read a little thing called Article 1, Section 7 of the US Constitution? And the discussion of that in the Federalist Papers, and 224 years of subsequent practice? The House has every right to decide what does and does not get funded in the Federal government.

Reid has gotten away with bypassing this since 2010 by refusing to have the Senate pass normal Appropriations bills which would be subject to detailed haggling with the House, forcing reliance on catchall Continuing Resolutions instead. Now the House is calling him on that, insisting again on their right to choose what does and does not get funded in the US government, CR or not.

If the Dems in fact see this head-butting contest as an opportunity to permanently remove that right from the House – and that’s what Harry Reid is saying here – then I say to the House Republican caucus, you go!

Do what it takes to win. The actual issue at stake is far larger than a few details of implementing Obamacare.

Porkypine

Certainly the principle that all money bills must originate in the House – which comes from British experience when the House of Lord was important and generally allied with the Crown, and control of the purse strings was vital – is important and worth fighting for.  And now I think the die is cast.

View 792 Wednesday, October 02, 2013

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

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

The President has brought in workers from off furlough to barricade the national monuments in the Mall. Last time I visited that place I was able to walk through the Korean War memorial and up to the Lincoln Memorial, and all along the Mall, at midnight, and I never saw anyone; there were no barricades or barriers and none were needed. Of course there is a need for maintenance, but the money spent putting up the barricades would have paid for weeks of routine maintenance of the mall and reflecting pool, and if that weren’t true then a short appeal for public help in keeping America beautiful would have turned out an embarrassing number of volunteers complete with retired officers to organize them: there is no danger that the national war memorials will be neglected whether the government shuts down or not. The President knows this, but the barricades went up anyway.

This is small and petty, as is the refusal to negotiate anything.

Newt Gingrich visited Mount Vernon – a privately operated national monument and well worth a visit – and has noted that the bus turnaround (a paved turnaround off the national highway) has been closed by the Federal Government. Taking those barriers out there and setting them up cost money: normally it’s just a place for busses to pull off the highway and turn around, there are no facilities and it has no operating personnel, so the barriers are an added cost. No word on whether bus operators have simply throws the barricades off, as the WWII vets sort of did at the WWII monument on the mall.

This is the new presidential leadership. It is probably effective. The Republicans closed down the government. Any inconvenient consequences of that clearly are the fault of the stubborn Republicans who want to keep the poor from getting their free health care.

One strategy I would consider would be to pass the continuing resolution, including funding Obamacare, with the stipulation that it is funded exactly as written in law, without illegal exceptions; and all the subsidies that make life easier for Congress and its staff are removed; they all must buy their own insurance, on the exchanges or from private vendors, just like anyone else. Congress and its staff must live like the rest of us, and the rest of us must live under the law: no blanket exceptions to one group but not another. If Business is to be granted exceptions, so must individuals. Pass that, make sure the terms are widely known, and send it to the Senate as the Restore ObamaCare Act.

It makes it clear that whatever the consequences of ObamaCare may be, they belong to the Democrats: which is to say, if it’s really a great thing, they get the credit and those of us who thought it would be a disaster were dead wrong and should take the consequences; but it was not a grant of arbitrary authority to use for party building or as a slush fund.

The Wall Street Journal today has an important piece:

Visions of a Permanent Underclass

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303918804579107754099736882.html

It is a book review and worth your time.

Tom Clancy, RIP

My first contact with Tom Clancy was a package. I thought it was a book to be autographed, but when I opened it I found it was an autographed book: The Hunt for Red October, published by the US Naval Institute. There was a letter: it said “I’ve always wanted to write you a fan letter, but I thought I’d wait until I had a work of my own.” There were other comments in the letter, including, of course, an invitation to read the book if I had time, because he thought I would like it.

About a week later a reporter caught President Reagan reading a book and asked what it was. Regan replied that it was a new novel, The Hunt for Red October, and it was really good. This was before the Internet and things going viral but Time carried the story and within a week Tom’s book was on the best seller list. We had other correspondence – again this is before email and Internet – and the next time I had to go to DC I arranged to add a few days to me trip and stayed with Tom and Wanda and the kids in his house in Frederick. We drove down to the Navy base at Patuxent River and spent the day there, taking some of the test pilots to dinner and having a great time. I wrote up that visit in my BYTE column. After that when I had to visit Washington we usually saw each other, for a meal or for a day. We drove to the old shooting club which he had bought and was turning into his new house, so I saw that being built and later after it was finished. I was a fairly successful writer, but Tom was spectacularly so. He used to say he was making so much money it scared him.

We saw each other fairly frequently until sometime in the 90’s after which correspondence tapered off. It picked up again for a bit during my cancer treatments, but we had both slowed down by then. I think I last saw him during one my trips to DC for some SIGMA event; by then he was living in I think New York, and it just happened we were both in DC at the same time. We remained friends, but no longer very close, I didn’t know he was ill.

Tom once told me that a lot of his classmates went into the Navy and were doing all these neat things, and he thought somebody ought to tell about them. He had in those days fairly rigid writing schedule habits – on a visit to his home I once spent two hours telling stories to the children while Tom went into his room and pounded away on his Mac – and he was a good story teller. His success was deserved. We toyed with the notion of collaboration at one time, but this was early into the computer era and no one outside academia had high speed digital communications, and it just wouldn’t work. I’d be a richer man if it had, of course, but whether I could have improved his stories is questionable. What he did he did very well.

He was a long time subscriber to this place even if he didn’t comment much. I can’t really say I’ll miss him in the sense that we were close or even that I thought about him much in recent years, but I will miss him for all that. He was a good story teller and a patriot. And I’ll certainly miss his stories.

View 792 Tuesday, October 01, 2013

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

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

The government is ‘closed’. You can’t view the baby pandas live on-line (wonder what they save by taking that off?). The Copyright Office has a new document in pdf on small claims court and copyright infringement, but if you didn’t download it last night you cant get it now: http://www.copyright.gov/eco/notice_special.html If you try to follow that through you get to

https://eco.copyright.gov/eService_enu/start.swe?SWECmd=GotoView&_sn=AvxXpeHmpES71DI8aKPOdRB7DygyDfPLPeQ6h-OrR.5MP153yJBDRziUt-A.mlQR&SWEView=Home+Page+View+%28eService%29&SWEHo=eco.copyright.gov&SWETS=1380654308

but you will never get the pdf itself. I wonder why they didn’t pass that along to others who would be glad to make it publicly available, but I am sure there is some government hoo haw preserving civil service jobs that prevents that.

The kabuki goes on. I have not yet been able to determine whether we are having to do without bunny inspectors, but I am sure they even if they have been furloughed they will be able to collect their back pay when the government comes back into existence.

The US government takes in more than $2 Trillion in revenue and cannot operate without borrowing a Trillion or so more. Some of the borrowed money goes to the bunny inspectors. Maybe the House ought to pass a budget line by lane, sending the funding to the President who seems too busy to take that laser-like look into the budget he promised at his first inaugural. Or perhaps he has and has decided that the Bunny Inspectors do a job so important that we must borrow money in order to pay them for their services. The Federal Government is the largest employer in the nation – the President reminds us of that daily – but there is not one surplus employee in there.

And the LA County employees are going to strike for 12% raises, because they have not had a raise in years, and surely they deserve more. None of them are surplus either.

And it’s lunch time.

L.A. Unified School District started distributing free iPads recently to the students.  LA Unified has tried to get its iPads back since they all got hacked and started accessing social and porn sites.  These weren’t just any iPads. They were higher priced than usual because they had special programs and –  well you get the idea.  But they were misused and are being recalled, except that only a third of them are still missing and apparently will not be found.

And the LA Unified superintendent tells us that this is a move to deny deserving students the means to succeed.  If it weren’t lunch time I’d comment on that: how does a random student deserve an iPad paid for by my neighbor, or for that matter you since there is a federal subsidy involved.  What do they do to deserve these marvels? Exist? But we have not talked about the deserving poor in a while, and apparently no one cares any longer.  Everyone is deserving of everything. As it was in the beginning, is now….

Obamacare starts today but the web site, which is not closed, isn’t working. Real soon now.