Monthly Archives: November 2011

Mail 699 Sunday, November 06, 2011

· Dogs and humans

· Marines vs. Rome

. Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures (BEST) kerfluffle

· Eating Koala?

· On ABE Books, Hephaestus, and other such matters

Coevolution, humans and dogs

In a previous View I outlined my old cocktail party theory that humans got smart because we made a deal with dogs: “You keep your sense of smell, we’ll get smart using the part of the brain we use up on smell, you watch out for our kids, and we’ll watch out for yours.” The result was that tribes that kept dogs had more of their kids grow up. This generated a good bit of mail.

Cocktail party theory on dogs

I understand that there is some evidence of human habitation on America prior to the opening of the Siberian land-bridge 25,000 years ago. They are believed to have come along the front of the Atlantic Ice Sheet from what is now France, where the ice sheet then reached. The problem being that they clearly did not rise to the top of the food chain and wipe out all the big predators as the Siberian incomers did. Why could the one do this but not the other?

One possibility that occurred would be that the "French" couldn’t bring dogs with them (at least in sufficient numbers to establish sustainable breeding) and that humans on their own are much less effective hunters than humans + dogs.

Neil Craig

I am sure my Siberian Husky would agree with you…

From Cave to Kennel: The Evolution of Man and Dog – WSJ.com,

Jerry

I’m sure you got this already, but here it is:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203554104577001843790269560.html

For my money, we and dogs co-evolved, or at least European and Asian people co-evolved with dogs. Isn’t it interesting how, about the time our ancestors began associating with dogs, they began beating out the Neanderthals and the Denisovans?

Ed

I keep seeing more and more evidence that my cocktail party theory is true: we really are smart because we had dogs to do the smelling, leaving more brain cells to get smart with. Anyway it all fits…

Imitation as Flattery?

Dr. Pournelle —

I saw this and, naturally, thought of you:

Rome, Sweet Rome: Could a Single Marine Unit Destroy the Roman Empire?

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/digital/fact-vs-fiction/rome-sweet-rome-could-a-single-marine-unit-destroy-the-roman-empire?click=pm_latest

Anybody who has read your Janissaries series (and a good, fun read it is) would likely know what could be done.

Pieter

He seems to have a movie deal out of it. Congratulations. I think it’s pretty complicated – you’re only going to win a few battles and you’re out of ammo and helicopter fuel…

THE BEST (Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures) controvery has generated a lot of mail. It starts with Muller’s paper:

Transparent, for a change – Massive study concludes: ‘Global warming is real’ Jerry

This looks like actual science, in part because it was funded by people hostile to the current climate change orthodoxy:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/21/berkeley_earth_surface_temperature_study/

A hunk from the middle: “Muller gathered together a group of 10 prominent scientists – among them recent Nobel Prize winner Saul Perlmutter http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/04/nobel_prize_physics_2011/ – to create BEST. Funding was provided by such disparate sources as Bill Gates ($100,000) and the Koch foundation ($150,000) http://www.novim.org/resources/novim-news/88-novim-news , the latter accurately described by the foundation managing the funding as an organization "whose animosity towards action on climate change made the Berkeley project look yet more suspicious to some climate-change activists."

“The BEST team, however, had a stated goal of neither proving nor disproving global temperature increases. As expressed http://berkeleyearth.org/Resources/Berkeley_Earth_Summary_20_Oct by project cofounder Elizabeth Muller, Richard’s daughter, the goal was to conduct an analysis so data-rich and objective that it would "cool the debate over global warming by addressing many of the valid claims of the skeptics in a clear and rigorous way."

“The "valid claims" didn’t survive.

“For one, skeptics have charged that previous studies were done with selective data sets, but BEST lead scientist Robert Rhode points out that his team’s analysis "is the first study to address the issue of data selection bias, by using nearly all of the available data, which includes about five times as many station locations as were reviewed by prior groups."

“The data set was large, indeed: temperature data was gathered from 39,028 sites, collected by 10 different sources, resulting in 1.6 billion data points.

“Another objection that has been raised is that temperature observations over the decades have been influenced by sensors being encroached upon by human development – the "urban heat island" (UHI http://www.skepticalscience.com/urban-heat-island-effect.htm ) effect. The BEST analysis, however, found this effect to be negligible http://berkeleyearth.org/Resources/Berkeley_Earth_UHI at best.” <snip>

More: “Project cofounder Richard Muller is a fervent believer in data sharing and peer review – and an equally fervent critic of how journals such as Science and Nature stifle broad-ranging peer analysis, debate, and collaboration.

“When contacted by The Reg, Muller responded in an email that he believes scientific papers should be widely circulated in "preprint" form before their publication. "It has been traditional throughout most of my career to distribute preprints around the world," he writes. "In fact, most universities and laboratories had ‘preprint libraries’ where you could frequently find colleagues."

“This preprint system, he told us, is being stifled by major journals. "This traditional peer-review system worked much better than the current Science/Nature system, which in my mind restricts the peer review to 2 or 3 anonymous people who often give a cursory look at the paper."

“While this more tightly controlled review method may enhance the prestige of major journals, Muller told us, it does nothing for the advancement of science.

"I think this abandonment of the traditional peer review system is responsible, in part, for the fact that so many bad papers are being published," he writes. "These papers have not be vetted by the true peers, the large scientific world." And more.

I’ll be digesting this myself. I thought I’d send it along as something to ponder. If the Global Warming hypothesis is correct, it will not be because the AGW religion was correct in its liturgy. In fact, proving that the Earth is warming up is just the beginning of the inquiry, as you have pointed out many times. Now we come to whether this 1 degree rise has been driven by human activity. It is another point where the AGW religious doctrine must prove itself. Perhaps we should call it the Church of Arrhenius.

We’ve seen a bunch of these secular religions rise up in the past 60 years or so. As God-based religion fades, the pagans are replacing it with their cargo cults and their pounding of drums to make the sun rise every day.

Ed

As far as I can tell, BEST has shown that land surface temperatures have actually risen for the past couple of centuries, and while some of the data are not as good quality as we would like because the temperature collection points have gone from orchards to inside concrete islands, the temperature rises are real. I don’t know of anyone who still disputes this. BEST has helped define just how we calculate average temperatures at least for land surface numbers, and that is a good thing.

I said when BEST came out:

No one I know thinks the Earth has not been warming since about 1800, and everyone I know thinks it warmed a good bit up to the year 2000, and somewhat from 2000 to present. The way to bet it is about 1 degree F a century, possibly as much as 1 degree C.

The controversy, I would have thought, is HOW MUCH, and of that how much, how much is due to CO2?

Adding CO2 to the atmosphere has some positive as well as negative results.

Again the question is how much, what should we pay to avoid the negative results, and what’s the best way to do that?

Me, I’m for nuclear power to finance space based solar and interplanetary commerce, but then I always have been.

"And the earth is clean like a springtime dream No factory smokes appear For we’ve left the land to the gardener’s hand And they all are circling here…

But then I’ve been saying that a long time

==

BEST is not so Good

Jerry,

If you have a fan on, shut it off before the smelly stuff hits it.

"But today The Mail on Sunday can reveal that a leading member of Prof Muller’s team has accused him of trying to mislead the public by hiding the fact that BEST’s research shows global warming has stopped.

Prof Judith Curry, who chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at America’s prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology, said that Prof Muller’s claim that he has proven global warming sceptics wrong was also a ‘huge mistake’, with no scientific basis.

Prof Curry is a distinguished climate researcher with more than 30 years experience and the second named co-author of the BEST project’s four research papers."

The article is here:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2055191/Scientists-said-climate-change-sceptics-proved-wrong-accused-hiding-truth-colleague.html

It’s also covered on Watts Up With That, along with further analysis, here:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/29/uh-oh-it-was-the-best-of-times-it-was-the-worst-of-times/

Note that the BEST data is available on the BEST web site, but for some reason their results (either numerically or graphically) haven’t been on the BEST web site. Others plotted the BEST data and found the last decade flat (as other sources have found). According to The Mail:

"But a report to be published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation includes a graph of world average temperatures over the past ten years, drawn from the BEST project’s data and revealed on its website."

Muller has apparently given interviews where he says that there is no evidence of Global Warming having slowed down, saying "no leveling off" according to The Mail.

I recommend a look at both articles. The Watts Up With That article also shows a graph for Los Angeles temperatures and you might find that hits home even a bit more.

Regards,

George

My impression is that global temperatures have been fairly stable for the past decade, but the general trend of 1 degree/century has been consistent from 1800. Think of a slow and steady rise with some cyclic events superimposed. But we’ve postulated that before.

Scientist who said climate change sceptics had been proved wrong accused of hiding truth by colleague

Read more: http://wwwdailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2055191/Scientists-said-climate-change-sceptics-proved-wrong-accused-hiding-truth-colleague.html#ixzz1cbHbNb7i <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2055191/Scientists-said-climate-change-sceptics-proved-wrong-accused-hiding-truth-colleague..html>

Scientist whose climate change research on polar bears was cited by Al Gore will face lie detector test over ‘integrity issues’

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2055123/Climate-change-scientist-Jeffrey-Gleason-cited-Al-Gore-face-lie-detector-test.html#ixzz1cbI0KyFz <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2055123/Climate-change-scientist-Jeffrey-Gleason-cited-Al-Gore-face-lie-detector-test.html>

Tracy Walters

I have no suspicion that the report isn’t accurate; the question is what does it mean, and that isn’t likely to be solved by lie detectors.

BEST climate heresy 

Dr. Pournelle,

I wonder if part of the controversy over BEST is that it shows no recent rise in temperature in more than the last decade. To accept this would also mean accepting that there is no direct correlation between CO2 and global temperature.

Steve Chu

Well, certainly none over a 20 year period; but then we had the same happen in the Great Cooling Scare of the 70’s and that has not changed the Believer theory.

The coming Ice age

You posted:

“I admit that back in the 70’s I believed that the Ice might be coming back, because after all we are in the middle of an Ice Age. What startled me was the work of a Belgian scientist whose name I have forgotten – Daniella something – who found from the study of lake sediments that England and the Channel areas went from deciduous trees to under many feet of ice in under one hundred years, and possibly even quicker, back at the onset of the current Ice Age (in which we are enjoying a temporary respite).”

She wasn’t the only one. I remember an article in an old Scientific American coming to the same conclusions, only it was based on sediment layers from Connecticut ponds. As I remember, the plant pollen and such changed from ordinary New England forest to arctic tundra in the space of less than 20 years.

David Starr

From desiduous trees to under permanent ice in under 100 years: that’s not a model, that’s history. And it’s pretty scary.

Global temperatures dropping

Jerry,

Global temperatures are dropping again consistent with back-to-back La Nina events:

www.drroyspencer.com

Global (September Average – October Average) lower tropospheric temperature anomaly: -0.175 Celsius.

The AMSR-E satellite that was tracking sea-surface temperature and Arctic ice extent failed in early October, but the last data

http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Extent_L.png

shows that Arctic sea ice extent, which prior to September was trending to the second lowest in the 8-year record, had reverted towards the mean consistent with the onset of dropping atmospheric temperatures.

Jim

I understand that ice sheets are growing in the southern hemisphere. I am also given to understand that soot fallout from the increased burning of coal in China and India can cause the northern hemisphere ice to melt off. I haven’t enough evidence to comment further on that.

NCDC data shows… summers are cooler, winters are getting colder

Re: NCDC data shows that the contiguous USA has not warmed in the past decade, summers are cooler, winters are getting colder

Jerry,

Surprise!

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/05/ncdc-data-shows-that-the-contiguous-usa-has-not-warmed-in-the-past-decade-summers-are-cooler-winters-are-getting-colder/

Regards,

George

But does not the AGW theory predict monotonic temperature rises, and thus require an explanation for even temporary cooling decades?

Koala Bears

Here is a link to the Koala Bear story with a picture. There seems to be some doubt as to whether the offered animal was in fact a Koala Bear.

http://philly.barstoolsports.com/around-barstool/stewed-koala-bear-served-at-chinese-restaurant-would-you-eat-it/

DJ Drummond

I doubt that’s a koala. It looks a lot more like a big woodchuck. And why give a koala a carrot? I always doubted the story to begin with.

Letter from Italy

Ciao Jerry

Have you heard of the E-Cat ? It may be too good to be true, but still, worth a look. Wired says:

"Rossi, an Italian inventor, with support from his scientific consultant, physicist and emeritus professor Sergio Focardi (University of Bologna) claims to have come up with the Holy Grail of power generation, an "Energy Catalyser" or E-Cat, which produces limitless energy. He has already carried out laboratory demonstrations in front of scientists and the Italian media, and in October he plans to unveil a one-megawatt power plant in the US. If it works, the E-Cat is the biggest thing since atomic power, bringing an inexhaustible supply of cheap energy. It looks much too good to be true and many dismiss it as an obvious scam, but Rossi has powerful support from some surprising quarters."

NyTeknik (http://www.nyteknik.se) has an extensive analysis of the October 6 test.

Ciao !

Roberto

I would love for this to be true, but I would not bet much money on that.

Foxconn going into the robot business

Hello Jerry,

I knew this was a big story when I first brought it to your attention in August. Now it’s even bigger and more meaningful!

Foxconn – the company that assembles Apple products in China – is going to mass produce their own robots from a new research facility and factory in Taiwan and has plans to deploy 1 million robots within 3-5 years in their factories in China. This will double the world’s industrial robot population! An amazing feat and a blow to German and Japanese robot manufacturers who had hoped to get a share of the business.

As of this moment, nobody else except The Robot Report http://www.TheRobotReport.com has picked up on this story.

Here are the two sources:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jmmlqDVBEClVdpCoGcZe-2q–ybw?docId=CNG.c985efcfab53ba89f922bddeac7ead11.2c1

http://focustaiwan.tw/ShowNews/WebNews_Detail.aspx?Type=aECO&ID=201110290024

I hope this information stimulates a story idea about robotics – perhaps one where I can help.

Cordially,

Frank Tobe

I need to think on this one. Thanks.

Investigating Chinampa Farming <http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/ioa/backdirt/Fallwinter00/farming.html>

Re your daughter’s writings on fertile crescent cities being formed on swamps:

This appeard to be how the Aztec empire was built. A small tribe forced to live in the middle of a lake became enormously productive & begat a great nation.

"

How the Aztec Empire fed the burgeoning population of its capital, Tenochtitlan, has long intrigued researchers. Most of Tenochtitlan’s estimated 150,000 to 200,000 inhabitants at the time of Spanish contact were not food producers. The system, known as chinampas, of draining swamps and building up fields in the shallow Basin of Mexico lakebeds, was a remarkable form of intensive agriculture that Jeffrey Parsons of the University of Michigan suggests provided one-half to two-thirds of the food consumed in Tenochtitlan.

At the time of Spanish contact, shallow lakes covered approximately 1000 km2 of the Basin of Mexico. Archaeological surveys show that large expanses of the lakes were converted into chinampas."

Neil Craig

Jenny has created considerable scientific interest in her theories of marshlands and the origins of civilization. Needless to say I am proud of her.

"The Soda Pop Board of America"

Though most of the old ads in the pages linked to on Thursday are real, the one from "The Soda Pop Board of America" is a recent fabrication:

http://rjwhite.tumblr.com/post/472668874/fact-checking

Too bad. It’s the best one. 🙂

. png

Pity…

Switchblade

As someone commented at the Strategypage site, it is basically a guided light mortar round. A good squad support weapon. Can also be helicopter launched from 2.75 inch rocket tubes. And, I imagine, dropped out of tubes in fixed wing aircraft, like a sonabouy.

Switchblade Manpack UAV demo http://deepbluehorizon.blogspot.com/2011/05/switchblade-manpack-uav-demo.html

Tinkerbell’s Law

The economy is subject to Tinkerbell’s Law: It’s only alive as long as everyone believes it’s alive. Sooner or later, no one is going to buy T-bills, not Chinese, not oil sheikhs, and certainly not any Swiss bank or anyone with an account in one. Republicans have run up the debt just as consistently as Democrats have. The Tea Party will go into the darkness that consumes all American third parties, another sound and fury, signifying nothing. Remember George Wallace’s American Party? I do. I remember how he said he was going to take the attache cases from all those Washington people and thrown them in the Potomac. I haven’t heard any reports of attache case jams blocking the flow of the Potomac.

Jerry,

Subj: Mixed metaphors

Outtakes from Firefly and Serenity – set to the classic Trek filk, "Banned from Argo"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN1WSkFXmzU

Wheedon fans should not miss this. Thanks.

On ABE BOOKs, Hephaestus, and other such matters:

Hephaestus Books: Content Scrappers, not pirates

I’ve taken a look at the Hephaestus Books "titles," and they seem to be content scrapped from Wikipedia rather than actual omnibus editions:

http://www.lawrenceperson.com/?p=6829

So they are indeed dishonest scumbags, but they’re primarily ripping of readers through deceptive advertising, not writers through piracy…

—

Lawrence Person

Avast!

Not sure if this is the actual novels or wiki-articles about the novels. For $13 stealing if no permission or royalties for novels. Overcharging and fraud if the wiki-articles.

"Hephaestus Books represents a new publishing paradigm, allowing disparate content sources to be curated into cohesive, relevant, and informative books. To date, this content has been curated from Wikipedia articles and images under Creative Commons licensing, although as Hephaestus Books continues to increase in scope and dimension, more licensed and public domain content is being added. We believe books such as this represent a new and exciting lexicon in the sharing of human knowledge. This particular book is a collaboration focused on Novels by Jerry Pournelle."

Dowlan Smith

Thanks. I didn’t look closely enough.

Hephaestus Books

Jerry

I found a book about People Who Went to LaSalle Univ. (nee College) in Philadelphia, myself being one of those in the title. Apparently someone has learned they can copy Wikipedia pages and put them together into a book. It reminds me of some comments Mark Twain made to Rudyard Kipling when the latter had come to Elmira to interview him. He told of a man who had gathered a bunch of essays on a topic, excerpted what Mark Twain had said in interviews about it and printed it as "Mark Twain on (Topic)." "He’s dead now," Twain said to Kipling, adding reflectively, "I didn’t kill him."

MikeF

Thanks for that story.

Hephaestus ABE Books Flap

Are you sure you aren’t losing sales from this? If these show up in a

search ahead of your legitimate offerings, it’s going to be harder to

find and buy your work.

Mike Johns

They don’t show up in my lists, at least not so far, until several pages in. But I will watch for it. Thanks.

Abe books/pirated books

Abebooks as far as I know is little more than an agent for used book stores. Stores sell their books through Abe, Abe handles billing, and the store ships to the customer.

As to fakes on Amazon, they seem to come in waves. Amazon takes them down regularly, but they reappear under a different "company" name a few weeks later. With the ease of eBook publishing, people can create these fakes very quickly now, the cat is out of the bag so to speak.

Good luck battling them!

J.T. Wenting

My conclusion is that I over reacted to this. Hephaestus puts out not very useful collections of comments which are easily mistaken for pirated collections of books. ABE Books sells them sometimes. I don’t think any of this actually costs me money, but I do think my readers ought to be aware that this is a questionable at best operation. Thanks to all my readers who looked into this for me.

Population Control Global Warming BS

What did we hammer on? Climate change is about killing people. Now the NY Times — a mouthpiece — blurts it out:

<.>

What’s the impact of overpopulation? One is that youth bulges in rapidly growing countries like Afghanistan and Yemen makes them more prone to conflict and terrorism. Booming populations also contribute to global poverty and make it impossible to protect virgin forests or fend off climate change. Some studies have suggested that a simple way to reduce carbon emissions in the year 2100 is to curb population growth today.

</>

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/opinion/kristof-the-birth-control-solution.html?_r=1

So, carbon emissions — that buzzword again. Carbon tax is a life tax and now we are getting to the point — just like the Koran does. If you read it, it starts out with four types of people: believers, non-believers, harm doers, and evil doers. As you progress evil doers and harmdoers become one group. Then believers one group and everyone else is in the bad group and it goes on about horrible and humiliating punishments and so forth. The climate change dogma turns in that direction, now we get to the eugenics and the population reduction and the life tax.

Let’s have less people so we can save the forest and eradicate poverty? Let’s cure the headache by cutting off the head? This Malthusian approach is unnecessary. And, population control does not start at home — it starts in the third world. Bill Gates knows this, which is why his eugenics operations happen over there.

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

An interesting view. Wrecking the global economy will certainly reduce the population. We have had two generations who never knew the ghastly kind of famine that once stalked many lands; technology, food storage and transportation, (See A Step Farther Out http://www.amazon.com/A-Step-Farther-Out-ebook/dp/B004XTKFWW ) have made famine rare in our times, although I remember famines from headlines when I was a child. I doubt Bill Gates has the intents you impute to him. Melinda would be horrified at the thought. The Gates Foundation has made some important discoveries in education research.

Famine may become very real again as the economy falters.

View 699 Friday, November 04, 2011

Even if I did do breaking news there would be little to write about the Cain imbroglio other than it may serve as a good test for the Republican candidates. Those that pile on to denounce Cain given the actual evidence available so far deserve special attention from conservatives. As things stand now, Obama would lose to nearly anyone of any party; the major Democrat hope now is to divide the voters. Classically that means all out attacks, negative campaigning with the intention of keeping the vote turnout low – who wants to vote for one of those jerk? They’re all adulterers. They’re all thieves. They’re all alike. There ain’t a dime’s worth of difference. Why bother, they all stink. Then win the ground game by turning out your organized voters.

As for me, I find it credible that Cain is dumfounded because he doesn’t know what he’s accused of. He turned the matter over to staff and was no longer President of the National Restaurant Association ended before it was settled. He never signed the settlement. It’s quite possible he never saw it. Why should he? Organizations often settle matters just to get them to go away. Of course it’s possible that Cain is guilty as charged – but before condemning him it might be well to know what he was charged with. Is he supposed to have made a sexual offer to an employee? Was it explicit or implied? What was proposed? Was the proposition accepted? I suppose I am as tempted by gossip as anyone, and in this case I need not seek out the gossip, It will be revealed to me without my having to will it. I can wait until I know what Herman Cain is accused of before I condemn him for it. Meanwhile, I suspect that the real reason that Politico, the Washington Post’s political opinion and gossip blog, is devoting so much time to this “unnamed people condemn Herman Cain of undescribed sexual harassment; specifications not available” “story” is pure fear. Black conservatives scare the hell out of the political establishment, both Republican and Democrat. They can tolerate uppity blacks with the right academic credentials and came up through the chairs with proper obeisance to the establishment, but Cain didn’t do any of that. He is contemptuous of economic theorists (the smart ones who got us into this mess). It doesn’t look as if he would “grow” in office if he became politically important. Have no truck with him! Kill!

And that’s probably enough ramble about a breaking story for someone who doesn’t do breaking stories. Sorry. This whole mess offends me, and I am not proud of how some of the Republican establishment has handled it.

Do I need to comment on this:

http://nation.foxnews.com/air-force/2011/11/04/air-force-academy-retreats-christmas-charity

The Battle for Egypt: The Army Strikes Back

http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin/

Of course our government is against the Army’s actions. Since our gov knows no history, why would they understand the Mamelukes?

Phil

We do not seem to have a consistent policy regarding Egypt; and it is a matter of considerable importance. The best Middle East policy for the US is a domestic energy policy, which would make the middle east less important to the US. Let Europe assume its historic and proper role in the region. Territorial disputes in Europe and the Middle East should not be so important in US foreign policy.

Incidentally I do not agree with that article’s assessment of the Shah. The Shah of Iran’s “White Revolution” was explicitly designed to build a middle class and move toward a parliamentary monarchy in which the monarch retained considerable power. It had to be done slowly: the collapse of the regime would lead to —  well, we need not speculate on whither it might lead. We know where it lead, thanks to President Jimmy Carter.

We are the friends of liberty everywhere but we are the guardians only of our own.  But we guard our liberties with jealous fervor.

And the best way to guard our liberties is to develop our own resources. That, incidentally, leads toward prosperity, too. Freedom and energy lead to wealth.

Back when I used FrontPage to do this site – wow do I miss it! – I used to put up poems. Now I find I can’t format them properly. I have to put this up with Windows Live Writer, and it has very limited ability to accept formats copied from Word. I tend to write this stuff in Word, then paste it into Live Writer, then fiddle with the formatting because LiveWriter wants to do all sorts of strange things to what is pasted into it.

Anyway I was reminded of Kipling’s poem MacDonough’s Song, but importing it would require extensive formatting I don’t have time for. You can find it here, and you may enjoy it.

While I was searching I found this statement on Global Warming I made in July 2008. It seems to remain relevant.

I tend to be conservative: deliberately raising the CO2 level doesn’t look like a good idea. I am less afraid of somewhat higher CO2 levels, and somewhat warmer climates, than I am of ice; and until we know more about what engines drive climate change — you can’t warm Earth without warming the seas, and we don’t know a lot about sea temperatures and nothing at all about El Nino La Nina phenomena — until we have more information, it is unwise to spend much in the way of scarce resources in "fixing" what we don’t understand.

The US appears to be headed for a Great Depression, and the incoming administration and Congress seem determined to make that happen, with increased regulations and taxes and "creating jobs" by expanding the bureaucracy. The only way out of all this is increased production, and the only utterly reliable correlation with increased wealth and production is a negative correlation with the cost of energy.

The US has chosen to invest trillions in war in order to continue paying trillions to the Middle East for overpriced energy.

The simple announcement that the US will put America First in energy policies, that we will build new refineries, drill in the Gulf (where Castro is drilling) and build nuclear power plants (as France is doing now) would cause a huge drop in oil futures prices, which would drive many speculators out of the market; but Barack Obama has said that we can do nothing about gasoline prices, and of course He Speaks Truth as Revealed.

We continue to sow the wind.

That caused me to go do some archeological digging for other stuff, and I came across http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2view/view315.html which starts with a live report from the Mojave airport and the X-Prize flight, contains Kipling’s Gods of the Copybook Headings, and thence to what I thought about Digital Rights Management and Intellectual Property in June of 2004. I can’t say I have any regret for my views of those times, but the technology sure has changed. It was an interesting week. It reminds me of just how long I have been doing this day book. Thanks to all the subscribers I have been able to keep it up.

View 699 Thursday, November 03, 2011

Don’t know when you’ll see this. Time Warner Cable Internet service has been unreliable for the past couple of weeks, with intermittent periods of no service. It’s been out for over an hour now. Ah. Now it’s back. We’ll see for how long. Time Warner has been doing this to us recently. Hah. It was back for less than a minute. Now the cable modem is blinking again. I sure wish I had a reliable alternative to Time Warner Cable Internet service, but I don’t think I do.

It came back on at 1400 and seems to be working again. When it works it works well, but I have had a several minute failure every couple of days for the past week. It’s more annoying than anything else, of course. I expect you can just call this griping. I’d have been happy for this much service a decade ago.

What with the Time Warner Internet connection being out again it’s probably as well that I don’t do breaking news. (Now it’s back, but I still don’t do breaking news. And now it’s gone again.)

The reason I don’t do breaking news is that although the media give you the impression that they know what’s going on, they don’t, but they have a great interest in making you think they do.

There are now many new versions of the Herman Cain story, none with much in the way of facts. What’s clear is that he’s fair game for anyone who can come up with something to say, and even fairly conservative outfits are eager to get in on the game, with announcements that turn out to say little to nothing that can be confirmed, and some of which has already been withdrawn.

I understand the blood lust of the liberals against Cain. I am not sure why outfits that call themselves conservative are joining that hunt given the ambiguity of the charges. Yes, it proves that Cain can be flustered. So have a number of presidents. I am not at all certain that stability under media fire is at the top of the list of qualifications to be president in what is the biggest crisis since – well, certainly since the end of the Cold War. Being cool is a virtue, but the President is not often called before an Inquisition without advisors and staff. President Obama seems to have that skill; has it served the nation well? Presenting a good front to journalists is not actually the ultimate achievement for a president.

The journalism game has changed a lot since I got into the racket. Of course I was and am a columnist rather than a reporter, and while I have done factual reporting – I was science correspondent for National Catholic Press for a number of years and did a lot of straight reports – it wasn’t my strongest point. Mostly I deal in what I choose to call informed opinion and rational argument. But I have noticed that over the years journalists have become more frantic, a lot more like paparazzi.

I wonder if that is caused by the Internet and blogging? Now everyone has access to the public. Everyone is a publisher. Having a Press Card counts essentially for nothing. Anyone is a reporter. In my day journalists were more concerned with getting it right than getting it first – the old Hearst days of getting it out there as an Extra to sell more papers were over and taught as bad examples. Of course being right rather than first could be taken too far; I recall some of us ribbing Eric Burgess, the highly respected science correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor, and incidentally the man who thought of “The Plaque” that went out with Pioneer – Niven and I were with him when he thought of it and saw him dash off to talk to Sagan about it. At a National Association of Science Writers meeting once Burgess, in a public discussion, said “Everything in the Monitor is true!” At which point several of his colleagues said “Yes, Eric, and it has been for a long, long time…”  But in general we were all agreed that it was better to get the facts right before breaking the story.

But the myth of the scoop continued even then and seems potent now. After all, you might have that golden story, the one that goes viral and gets you a million readers, and you can turn that into your own web site. You can be the Daily Koz or rival Huffington, all you have to do is hit it right. That still doesn’t explain how supposedly conservative and well established web sites rush into the Pound Cain and Pound Him Now contest.

As for me, I can wait for the facts on his personal story. I like most of what Cain proposes. I particularly like a national excise tax. Taxing consumption has the great merit of being inescapable. Everyone has to pay some of it. The worst thing about democracy is that it gives the power to tax to those who aren’t paying that tax. The very principle of a ‘progressive’ tax is that it’s a tax on someone else, but if it’s actually progressive then there’s some hope that even the poorest must pay something, and thus have an incentive to think about what that something is spent on.

It’s really easy to vote for a tax you won’t pay that is targeted for something that either benefits you directly, or makes you feel generous and charitable, a bit like Robin Hood. It’s not charity when you rob the rich to give to the poor, and it’s not really all that moral when you slaughter the King’s Men in ambush in order to rob the tax collector . You may also learn that you have made mortal enemies of the King’s Men, and that they may be better at their job than you are, but that’s another story. But I ramble. My point is that Cain proposes taxes that everyone will pay, which gives everyone a powerful incentive to keep those taxes low.

And yes: I think that even those who live entirely off the public teat, whose entire income is given to them by the government either as a pension or as salary or as Food Stamps or Health Care Benefits or as an “earned income tax” (aka negative income tax, a ‘refund’ of withholding taxes only there were no taxes withheld) – even if your total income is from government payments to you of other people’s tax money, you ought to pay some taxes. There ought to be some consequence to you for voting for tax increases. Or so I believe. And Cain seems to appreciate that.

It may well turn out that Cain has prohibitive personal faults. Or he may not. We can wait to find that out. Meanwhile, conservatives ought to learn something from the enemy: rally round the flag. Support your own people, and don’t be in a big hurry to bash them. Yes, we have principles, and if one of our own has committed the unforgiveable sin we will reject him: but we are certainly not going to look for reasons to pile on just because the rumors are flying. We can expect those rumors about every candidate we ever field. It’s the other side’s stock in trade.

I’ll let someone else break the news. Here we deal in principles.

The Long Beach Police have, as expected, have been cleared of all wrong doing in gunning down without warning a man seated on private property waving about a water hose nozzle that looked something like “a six shooter.” http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/11/long-beach-officers-cleared-in-water-nozzle-fatal-shooting-case.html

The police never identified themselves, there was no complaint against the victim other than that it looked like a gun –

I thought Americans had the right to keep and bear arms. That would, I would hope, include the right to keep and bear them on private property making no threats against anyone. It would include the right to keep and bear a toy weapon on your front porch.

I had never heard that it was against the law to sit on a porch and wave a toy gun about. I would have thought that the Long Beach police would be obliged to protect a man who, realizing he was drunk, retreated to a friend’s front porch and sat patiently waiting his return. I would have thought it criminal to sneak up on someone and gun him down without warning, whether you are a policeman or a scared neighbor or a would be robber. But I grew up in a time and place when we thought we were free.

Salve Sclave.

Martinmas approaches.

IT fell about the Martinmas time,

And a gay time it was then,

When our goodwife got puddings to make,

And she’s boild them in the pan.

 

The wind sae cauld blew south and north,

And blew into the floor;

Quoth our goodman to our goodwife,

‘Gae out and bar the door.’

 

My hand is in my hussyfskap,

Goodman, as ye may see;

An it shoud nae be barrd this hundred year,

It’s no be barrd for me.’

 

They made a paction tween them twa,

They made it firm and sure,

That the first word whaeer shoud speak,

Shoud rise and bar the door.

Then by there came two gentlemen,

At twelve o clock at night,

And they could neither see house nor hall,

Nor coal nor candle-light.

‘Now whether is this a rich man’s house,

Or whether is it a poor?’

But neer a word wad ane o them speak,

For barring of the door.

 

And first they ate the white puddings,

And then they ate the black;

Tho muckle thought the goodwife to hersel,

Yet neer a word she spake.

Then said the one unto the other,

‘Here, man, tak ye my knife;

Do ye tak aff the auld man’s beard,

And I’ll kiss the goodwife.’

‘But there’s nae water in the house,

And what shall we do than?’

‘What ails ye at the pudding-broo,

That boils into the pan?’

 

O up then started our goodman,

An angry man was he:

‘Will ye kiss my wife before my een,

And scad me wi pudding-bree?’

Then up and started our goodwife,

Gied three skips on the floor:

‘Goodman, you’ve spoken the foremost word,

Get up and bar the door.’

The Hephaestus ABE Books flap continues: I find that at least one of the POD “collections” of my novels, which lists superbookdeals as the publisher, is in fact not a collection of my works but of some statements about those works. That is not stated comprehensibly by the book description, which tries its best to look as if it is offering the books themselves in a new POD edition. At best, then, this is a deception, and offering it for sale does not make add to ABE Books’ reputation.

I am pretty clear that I am not losing any sales to this, and that I over-reacted to the discovery. Anyone buying one of those ‘collections’ and finding that he has paid for a few pages of commentary is not likely to be more reluctant to buy the books themselves, and in fact may even want the real thing even more. I also doubt that there are many sales of these things. My first thought when I saw this was that it was a matter for an author association committee: this whole matter needs a policy considered by experts, not merely the opinion of one author even if that’s me. I need to remember. I don’t do breaking news. And whatever damage this Hephaestus / superbooksdeal is doing to authors is not so huge as to warrant running about in panic. SFWA used to have a copyrights committee to consider such matters. Perhaps it will start that up again.