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View 563 March 23 - 29, 2009

 

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Monday, March 23, 2009

I will be at:

30th Annual Vintage Paperback Collectors Show & Sale
Sunday March 29, 2009
9am - 4:30pm

GUEST HOUSE INN
(formerly Mission Hills Inn)
10621 Sepulveda Blvd
Mission Hills, CA 91345
(818) 891-1771

http://santabarbara.craigslist.org/eve/1018012261.html

I'll be there in the afternoon. Note that there is an admission fee for this; it's not an ordinary book signing.

===============

There is a new mailbag at Chaos Manor Reviews.

==========

The Treasury announced a plan (  http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB123780994825213465.html  ) for dealing with toxic assets.  Geithner explains it, sort of, in this morning's Wall Street Journal (  http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB123776536222709061.html  ). I seem to be a bit dense this morning; I am not at all sure I understand just what the plan is. I didn't really understand President Obama on 60 Minutes last night, for that matter: he kept saying that we had to figure out what to do about all kinds of hard questions, but I didn't hear what we would do: he did insist that we had to figure these things out.

I have this:

Mark Steyn on Obama

Jerry,

I have followed your advice to read Mark Steyn's piece on Obama. Rather than counter his biases with my own, I would like to make two factual points.

First, the various social benefits enjoyed by Europeans - a short work week, long paid vacations, extended maternity leave, etc. (and what's not to like about these?) - are a result of high worker productivity. Even Europe's high unemployment figures are made possible by increased productivity: those who are working support those who are on the dole.

Now, we know that American workers are as productive as those in Europe. The difference here is that the wealth produced by American workers is enjoyed by their managers and by investors. In the American system the wealth moves upward to the few percent at the top whose salaries, for example, are tens or hundreds of times greater than those of their employees. We can hope that Obama's and Geithner's plans for the banks will put a small crimp in some of those practices.

Second, Europe's demographic problem is not low birthrate among native Europeans. Again, a low worker/retiree ratio (both here and in Europe) can and probably will be ameliorated by increased worker productivity. And on a planet whose human numbers are outpacing resources, low population is not a bad thing.

But a high birthrate among Muslim immigrants, many of whom have no respect for European values and would like to replace them with alien religious concepts, is potentially a huge problem. This does not bode well for Europe. I am sorry to say that at present most of the push-back appears to be coming from racists who simply don't like immigrants at all. An optimist would say that second and third generations will assimilate and become normal Europeans, as immigrants to North America have done.

JMB

There is merit in his first point: the discrepancy between lowest and highest incomes has been growing, and I've remarked on that before. We have known since Aristotle that rule by the middle class works well, and the middle class are those who possess the goods of fortune in moderation. But I do not think that this is the whole of the new transformation that seems to be coming from Washington.

His second point has been discussed here before. The Melting Pot works: but it can be over-filled. It must also be allowed to work; but that's another matter.

I have other comments, but I have made them before. But I do believe that this, and last Friday's comments, explain what the current government intends. What one intends is not always what one accomplishes, of course.

=============

I have posted the essay Sic Semper Tyrannis, originally written in 1983. I suppose I ought to put that and the essay on Military Virtue and other like them in the Amazon short sales, but I prefer to leave them here. Do understand that this site operates on the Public Radio model. It is supported by subscribers, and it can't stay open without them. Thanks to all those who recently renewed their subscriptions. For those not familiar with the Reports section of this site, there are many such reports, some but not all of which are summarized here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Tuesday, March 24, 2009   

If you didn't see the Obama Op-Ed column on global financial action, it's because it only ran in three US newspapers. One of them was the LA Times, and I read it at breakfast. I am going for my morning walk to think about it.

I was able to chase down a copy:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
2009/03/24/obamas-global-
op-ed-a-tim_n_178331.html

I'd appreciate your comments as well. I haven't been able to figure out what it means.

===============

An interesting story: Ina Fried's book review essay on Microsoft intellectual property policy.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860
_3-10202356-56.html?tag=nl.e703

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Wednesday,  March 25, 2009

On our morning walk I saw a Time-Warner cherry picker with a guy working on the Time Warner cable up on the pole. That was three blocks away. When I got here my Internet connection was working for a while, but a few minutes ago it stopped, and there's no cable light on the cable modem. I presume it will all come back. If not, I need to look up how to report the problem...  Since I can't go on the Internet to do that.  Another thing to keep in a place you'll find it when, rarey, it is needed: your Internet Service Provider trouble number...

Found it. Studio City is entirely down. But they're aware of it, so there's nothing else to be done. Fortunately the AT&T telephones work. VOIP is off, of course.

It makes it difficult to write because there's no way to check facts or look up quotations. It's astonishing how dependent I have become on Internet access.

=======================

The Internet is back, but I have a dental appointment. There is interesting mail, on Taking back your government, Irving Krystol on the Enlightenment, and about Freeman Dyson.

=================

My  teeth need cleaning but there's no abscess. The CAT scan of my head shows nothing wrong. I guess it's just some minor damage from the radiation, since no one can find any sign of actual problems.

We have a good offer for Lucifer's Anvil. Announcement shortly. We're very pleased.

And if you haven't read ESCAPE FROM HELL, this would be a good time to do it. I've just been reading it over again, and it's quite good...

 

 

 

 

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Thursday,  March 26, 2009

I will be at:

30th Annual Vintage Paperback Collectors Show & Sale
Sunday March 29, 2009
9am - 4:30pm

GUEST HOUSE INN
(formerly Mission Hills Inn)
10621 Sepulveda Blvd
Mission Hills, CA 91345
(818) 891-1771

http://santabarbara.craigslist.org/eve/1018012261.html

I'll be there in the afternoon. Note that there is an admission fee for this; it's not an ordinary book signing.

==================

The President continues his perpetual campaign, with an Internet "Town Hall". My impression is that this isn't a great idea: the President has already said we don't have enough electricians to string the new wires needed for all the Green energy we will generate very soon now. It may be that I don't understand some of the complexities here, but we seem to have strung a lot of wires in the last decade. My point is that the President hasn't done a great job of explaining himself here, and I am not sure this is a good investment of his time...

 ===========

And for a different view of last week's biggest headline events:

Resignation letter from Jake DeSantis, Executive Vice President, AIG Financial Products

You've probably seen this by now. It is the resignation letter from Jake DeSantis, Executive Vice President, AIG Financial Products.

Strongly recommended reading, He makes some very good, very important points.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/25/opinion/25desantis.html?_r=2&ref=opinion&pagewanted=all 

There are always at least two sides to any story, and this one is no exception.

--John R. Strohm

===================

Quote by or Attributed to John Adams

Jerry,

I thought this quote is apropos for our times.

"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other"--John Adams

Regards, Charles Adams, Bellevue, NE

We are apparently headed for a vigorous stress test of that proposition.

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Friday,  March 27, 2009

I will be at:

30th Annual Vintage Paperback Collectors Show & Sale
Sunday March 29, 2009
9am - 4:30pm

GUEST HOUSE INN
(formerly Mission Hills Inn)
10621 Sepulveda Blvd
Mission Hills, CA 91345
(818) 891-1771

http://santabarbara.craigslist.org/eve/1018012261.html

I'll be there in the afternoon. Note that there is an admission fee for this; it's not an ordinary book signing. Note that many LA authors will be there; this is a sort of convention.

==============

I'm still hard at work on Mamelukes. I am also a bit whelmed by the news; the Obama budget is startling. It is certainly change, and at a fairly fundamental level. And once this road is taken, it is very difficult to go back. Meanwhile, the Gospel of Man Made Global Warming seems to spur ever more frantic efforts, despite overwhelming evidence that what is proposed wrecks economies without making any great change to the environment.

Sabatini's Scaramouche begins "He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad." One needs the gift of laughter in these trying days.

MSNBC is running a poll on Obama's performance. He is likely to be given a high grade.

==============

 

 

 

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Saturday,  March 28, 2009

You will have heard about turning your lights off for an hour tonight. (8:30 local time, I gather)

 

++++

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/
news?pid=email_en&refer=&sid=aY6tEqqelKBE 

Earth Hour May Prompt 1 Billion to Turn Off Lights

by Jason Scott

March 28 (Bloomberg) -- Earth Hour <http://www.earthhour.org/home/> , an event created in Sydney two years ago by environmentalists keen to cut energy use and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, started today as residents of New Zealand’s Chatham Islands turned off their lights.

Inhabitants of the islands <http://www.chathams.com/framesets/factset.html> , 800 kilometers (500 miles) east of New Zealand, were among the 1 billion people worldwide organizers say may participate in the event. Lights at the Sydney Opera House were cut two hours later, one of 829 iconic landmarks expected to darken including the Empire State Building in New York, London’s Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Las Vegas Strip, according to an Earth Hour statement. A total of 3,929 cities in 88 countries are expected to take part. <snip>

===

“Bjorn Lomborg, director of the Denmark-based think tank Copenhagen Consensus Centre and author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” said in the Australian yesterday that Earth Hour participants using candles after switching off their lights would probably emit more CO2 gases. Earth Hour is “an entirely symbolic gesture that creates the mistaken impression that there are easy, quick fixes to climate change,” Lomborg wrote. “

The Capital Records building in Hollywood (and I assume City Hall) will take part. No data on whether Las Vegas glitter will be shut down.

Lomberg's point is a good one: there are no easy, quick fixes to climate change. Indeed, there's probably no fix at all, but one thing is pretty certain: wrecking the economy of the United States will have essentially no effect on world wide atmospheric CO2 levels. China has spent $2 trillion on coal fired electric plants; they're not going to tear them down. The only way the United States could prevent China from pouring millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere would be to declare war and forcibly prevent the burning of coal. I do not suppose there is anyone who advocates this.

For that matter the link between CO2 and global temperature is tenuous at best. The theory linking CO2 and global temperature is this: the Sun shines. The sun's rays, from Infra-Red (IR) to Ultra-Violet (UV) (and the visible light in between) pass through the atmosphere unabsorbed by the air and strike the ground. (Actually, the IR is subject to atmospheric absorption on the way down, so it never has a chance to heat the Earth, but that's a quibble.) Some of the energy from the Sun's rays is reflected back to outer space. That reflected energy doesn't warm the Earth.

The rest is absorbed by the Earth. The  ground warms, and some of that heat is then re-radiated. Since it's heat, it's IR. CO2 absorbs IR better than Nitrogen and Oxygen, so the IR heats the atmosphere, and the IR re-radiated thus warms the Earth. Therefore, the theory states, if we reduce the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere we will reduce the IR absorption in the atmosphere, and thus slow global warming.

Freeman Dyson has pointed out a problem here; actually anyone who has studied high school physics should be asking a couple of questions at this point. First, of course, one should ask "how much?" It's always worth getting the numbers. One ought to ask, can anything else be absorbing that re-radiated IR? If absorbing re-radiated IR is causing (or at least significantly contributing to) global warming, is CO2 the principal stuff that's doing the absorption? And immediately we run into something else we learned in high school: water vapor absorbs IR, and does so a lot more efficiently than CO2. CO2 is measured in parts per million. There's a lot more water vapor: indeed, in many places, more than enough to absorb just about all the IR that's going through the atmosphere. Which means that CO2 is important in dry places, but has essentially no effect in humid areas. Most of the Earth is covered by water. Moreover, any rise in air temperature brings about an increase in the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, which means more absorption of reflected IR. But of course more water vapor in the atmosphere means more clouds; clouds reflect sunlight back out into space so it doesn't get absorbed. There are many other feedback loops, and while some computer models include some of them, none include all.

If the purpose of Earth Hour were to draw attention to the need for more genuine understanding of climate phenomena, it would be a good idea.

I have a better one: rather than propose Carbon Tax and various other extremely expensive measures to fix the CO2 problem when we can't be sure that CO2 is causing the problem (assuming there is a global warming problem to begin with and that we're not drifting into a new Little Ice Age) do this: Congress establishes a $1 billion prize for the first institution that produces a computer model that starts with the conditions known in 1950 and successfully predicts the climate of 2010.  Well, that probably wouldn't work. It's actually pretty easy to make up such a model since you already know the answer you want. All right, establish a big prize for the first computer model that takes the initial conditions of the year 2000 and successfully predicts the climate prevailing in the year 2025. Come up with a number of such prizes for understanding climate, but in every case to win the prize one must do successful predictions: come up with falsifiable hypotheses and test them with real observations. There's a good bit of a devil in working out the details -- how close is "success" -- but it would be one heck of a lot cheaper than wrecking the US economy while China and India continue to pump out CO2.

==================

The true agenda is revealed.

<http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,510937,00.html>

--- Roland Dobbins

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Sunday,  March 29, 2009

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