Monthly Archives: December 2011

View 703 Sunday, December 04, 2011

Pakistan has now authorized its troops to return fire on NATO forces firing on Pakistani troops. This in the aftermath of the border incident in which Pakistani irregulars and militia fired on a NATO post and counterfire including air strikes killed 24 Pakistani. Meanwhile, Autralia’s Federal Labor party has voted to approve sale of yellowcake uranium to India. Australia is a major source of uranium ore. It already sells to China, but India was left out because it had not signed (and will not sign) the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty. Actual sale of uranium to India won’t begin instantly, but the way has been paved.

Meanwhile former Secretary Gates has made a speech blistering NATO. NATO has always been an entangling alliance within the meaning of George Washinton’s warning. It was deemed necessary to US interests during the Cold War, although as B H Liddell Hart wrote as far back as the 1970’s it was more useful to Europe than the US. Some NATO assistance in Afghanistan has been enormously useful – Canada stands out, as do the Brits – but the notion that the US benefits from alliances with nations encircling the former Soviet Union has been at best questionable.

And in Libya NATO is out of munitions and needs the help of the US. And the French are learning that adopting NATO standards might have been a good idea – they insisted on their own and we don’t make that and neither, apparently do the French, at least in sufficient quantities. NATO was important so long as the USSR existed and posed the threat of a drive to the Rhine, but now that there is no part of the Wehrmacht as a major ally of the Red Army (and for that matter there is no more Red Army) that threat is gone.

The US is backing the Philippines in their naval disputes with China. China is ready to denounce any assistance we give, and will do their best to prevent it. What will we do? And the United Viet Nam has sent many signals indicating that they would like to be our friends, and perhaps allies.

The Democratic controlled Senate Armed Services Committee wants to zero out further development and possible deployment of electric rail guns. There doesn’t seem to be much discussion of this, probably because of a lack of understanding of their possible importance to a modern navy.

In other words, foreign policy is still important, and the US needs people with a long view of history. There is no evidence that the current White House has any view of history at all.

Alexander the Great discovered that it was a lot cheaper to bribe the Afghanis not to attack his supply trains than it was to try to use military force. Gold worked a lot better than war. There is little evidence of much change since. One thing that unites Afghanistani is the sight of armed enemies in their country. One of the things they are united on is that foreigners on their soil are fair game, for looting or for blackmailing. The presence of the foreigners is an insult, but the insult can be washed out by gold. So has it been, so shall it be.

Silver bullets have won a lot of battles and for a long time. There’s not a lot of glory in winning by bribing the enemy commander or buying his supplies out from under him, but it’s almost always cheaper in blood and usually cheaper in gold than fighting it out. Depends, of course, on just what you want, and just how serious the other guy takes your threats. Mostly it depends on what you are trying to accomplish. Paying Danegeld is seldom a good idea. Even if you call it foreign aid.

View 703 Saturday, December 03, 2011

Well, the self-made black business leader and non-politician is out of the race. One supposed he will endorse Romney, but I have no real evidence of that. Cain terrified the White House. With Cain in the race, Obama had to run on issues, and there wasn’t much Al Sharpton could say except to call Cain an Uncle Tom, which doesn’t really carry much weight now. So Axelrod was loosed on Cain, and the Party that not long ago assured us that personal life and social values aren’t important – look at how good Clinton was! – has found a way to knock Cain out of the race.

It’s still not clear just what Cain is supposed to have done that disqualifies him from being President. A math major with a Purdue Master’s in Computer Science, he would have been about the best technically educated President we have had for a long time (or indeed ever). He was also clearly unprepared for what happens when you run for President.

Cain and Newt are friends, and it may be that Cain will endorse Newt. Cain is also a powerful fund raiser, and that gives him influence. There’s a good quick take on Cain’s influence in the Christian Science Monitor coverage of his drop out. Meanwhile the campaign continues, and we can be sure that it will get rougher. You have to have a lot of fire in your belly to run for President.

The United States makes it a career to learn how to get the office of President; we don’t require that you have learned how to do it. A math degree in a successful businessman argues a very good approach to assessing probabilities, but we don’t want that in a President. Precisely what we do want isn’t clear. In any event, Cain won’t be there, but with any good fortune he will be part of a new government. Secretary of Labor, perhaps.

We need someone who KNOWS what the regulations and bureaucracy have done to American commerce and labor. That’s assuming we would like to remain the land of the free.

I note that the ten year projected deficit is about $40 Trillion. That is largely from ten years of increased growth of government, ten years of exponential increase in spending – all of which is assumed to be “normal.” Note that the Supercommittee was charged with reducing that $40 Trillion by $1.4 Trillion, and they couldn’t do it.

I can remember when the nation was shocked: Lyndon Johnson was going to spend more that $100 Billion in one year. This would give us a great society, and take care of just about all poverty. We had a War on Poverty, and this $100 Billion a year would win it, and –

And now we cannot find a way to cut the increase in spending by $1.4 Trillion in ten years.

We may deserve what is happening to us. But feel good: there will be big pensions for government workers, raises for the civil service, continuing good times for those who live on taxes. We’ll have to raise taxes on those who actually produce something, and we’ll have to confiscate most of that loose capital that corporations have accumulated (how dare they flee overseas!!) and we can have sales taxes as well as more progressive taxes, but we’ll be able to pay the government workers and their pensions.

Then there’s the health care we can provide, and open borders, and all we need is for those people who work to go on working. But it is wrong to talk about teaching work habits. We teach entitlement habits. Let the rich teach their children work habits. Someone has to work. Who should it be, me?

We can’t reduce the increase in deficit from $40 Trillion to $38 Trillion over the next ten years. Just not possible. We can’t cut spending, so we just have to raise taxes. If anyone objects, occupy the public squares. We’ll teach them.

Sorry about that. It’s just a tirade. Never mind.

The best display of the remaining candidates I have seen yet was on the Fox channel with Governor Huckabee and three state attorneys general questioning each of the Republican candidates in turn. It wasn’t exactly a debate since the candidates didn’t interact, but it did give each a chance to present clear answers to relevant questions on such matters as constitutionalism and states’ rights. No one won, but none of them lost, either. They all tried to contrast their views with those of Obama, and they all came off well, very much including Mitt Romney.

Newt was impressive. Peggy Noonan in her current Wall Street Journal column “The Comeback Kid of 2012” (link) says

Even Mr. Gingrich’s biggest supporters begin conversations about him with, "Believe me, I know the downside, I understand the criticism." They stress his strong points: experience, accomplishment, intelligence. But they are to a man surprised by his new appeal—they didn’t really know he had any—and they’re surprised by his resurrection. They are impressed by his brains, and always have been, and impressed by his will. They also fear he will blow it, that he’ll prove unsteady, impulsive.

I will refrain from comment on most of that, but the notion that Newt’s friends didn’t know he had any charm and appeal is an odd one. During the 1980’s Newt and his team made speech after speech to an empty House chamber, carrying the conservative and constitutional message, and over time that built to the position of Minority Whip, then the coalition that led to the Republican takeover of the House for the first time in some forty years. I don’t know where Miss Noonan was – well, actually I do, but apparently she was so involved with what she was doing that she didn’t notice Newt’s steady progress toward becoming Speaker. Newt’s got plenty of appeal.

However, he also spent years as a public intellectual never expecting again to hold public office, and he managed to do some foolish things that will come back to haunt him now. It should be interesting to see what the attack machine will develop now that he’s the front runner.

View 703 Friday, December 02, 2011

I went to the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society (LASFS) ** last night, and after the meeting I got into a conversation with an old friend. The conversation drifted to politics as such things do this year, and he denounced Newt Gingrich as flighty and impulsive. I asked for an example, expecting the immigration issue, and was told that he wanted to change the Child Labor laws to allow children to be janitors, and that was a terribly dangerous thing to do because of all the chemicals involved. I hadn’t heard anything about this, and there was nothing in this morning’s paper about it, but the radio is full of denunciations of Newt Gingrich. Al Sharpton charges racism, of course. Some web site that looks as if it were Tea Party but probably is not speaks of “disgusting rhetoric from eye of Newt”, and says:

Incredibly, Gingrich compared making kids work as janitors to a successful program that paid kids to read books. Of course, reading books is not hard labor and is directly relevant to education — cleaning bathrooms is not.

Well, it may be that cleaning bathrooms is hard labor and not relevant to education, but when I was a pupil at Capleville consolidated in Tennessee, the 7^th and 8^th graders were expected to mop floors (not with any chemicals I know of; just whatever you mopped floors with) and we didn’t even get paid for it. We also cleaned up after ourselves in the lunch room from 4^th grade on. But of course what Newt was driving at had nothing to do with janitorial work per se, and most of the examples he gave were for more clerical tasks; and his point was that there are generations growing up now who have no work habits, and little conception of the connection between showing up on time, doing a job, and getting rewarded for that. Today’s children are apparently entitled to two (or even three) meals a day from the school without even having to refrain from disrupting the classes, much less actually do some work for the meal.

I know precisely where this idea came from. I can recall when Newt was still Minority Whip a conversation with Newt and my son Richard, then a Congressional Committee staffer, in an Irish pub across the street from the Capitol. The conversation came around to laws that got in the way, and I brought up the Federal Minimum Wage and other regulations that ended the “board jobs” that enabled me to get through my first year at the State University of Iowa in Iowa City. I worked at Reich’s Café; a “board job” was an hour of waiting on tables, in exchange for a meal off the Café menu. I also got to keep any tips I might earn, which in my case amounted to about thirty cents an hour, which wasn’t trivial in those days of 25 cent milkshakes. Those jobs are all gone now, ended by Federal labor laws.

We also discussed the loss of work habits. When I was young I wanted a .22 rifle (and it wasn’t unusual in Tennessee in those days for ten year olds to have and to carry .22 rifles). I was paid ten cents an hour for picking cotton, later raised to a quarter an hour after I learned to be more efficient (and I suspect my parents felt sorry for me). So there I was in the fields along with the sharecroppers, who thought it was amusing, but who kept my bags separate from the rest, I suspect so that they could go through them and be sure I hadn’t left hulls in there, which would lower the price Mr. Lamb’s gin in Mineral Wells, Mississippi would pay for the cotton. I learned a lot from doing that: to show up on time, to work steadily (I got docked for low productivity at first, on the testimony of the sharecropper), and to find some other way to make money because picking cotton sucked.

But the point was that I grew up knowing there is a connection between productive work and being paid. So did my son Richard, but Richard pointed out that there were still many laws in place that made it very difficult for youngsters to get work. Richard and his older brothers swept Studio City sidewalks for the merchants, but it had to be done in rather mysterious ways because of the various laws. Here were these boys who wanted the job, and merchants who wanted their sidewalks swept off after wind blew leaves all over, but it was illegal just to pay them for getting the sidewalks clear. This made no sense.

We went on to talk about the effects on a nation of having generations who grow up not really connecting work habits with life, and who felt entitled to anything they got without having to do anything in exchange.

Incidentally, in those days Newt Gingrich and Mr. Jones and some other of his supporters were establishing a program to pay kids to read books – it had to be a “reward” rather than “work” because of the various child labor laws. It’s all right to give a kid a dollar for reading a book, but giving him a job reading that book is illegal. This is, after all, the land of the free and the home of the brave.

The conversation went on well into the night – we were all younger in those days – and I am sure Newt has been thinking about these matters ever since, and it’s no surprise at all that he brought it up in a Presidential campaign. It’s who he is. And all of you, and I, and Newt know that any changes in fundamentals like Child Labor are going to be thoroughly discussed, and hazards like disinfectants and cleaning chemicals will be thought about, but the fundamental principle remains:

Either kids grow up expecting to work for a living and developing elementary work habits, or they don’t; and if they don’t, they are going to be handicapped for the rest of their lives. That’s hardly a racist statement: it’s as true of Yuppie kids in the Valley as ghetto kids, and it shows in both cases. Kids who learn that you’re supposed to work for a living have a head start. It makes a lot of sense to look at such matters to see what results the current legal system have on that fundamental notion.

I would never have advised Newt to bring something like that up in a campaign for nomination, but I sure understand where he’s coming from. So should you. It’s impossible to sustain an economy in which large segments of the population do not associate work with earning, and who think they are entitled to the goods of fortune at the expense of someone else. That’s not the way the world works, and any society not founded in productivity is doomed: as Lady Thatcher observed long ago, Socialism is great until you run out of other people’s money.

But we all knew that.

—-

** As you may guess the LASFS web site is maintained by science fiction fans who have volunteered to build and keep the site. Any resemblance to the cast of The Big Bang Theory is not entirely coincidental.

I keep repeating this. Freedom is not free. Free people are not equal. Equal people are not free.

But if you don’t care for freedom, you must look into the alternatives. We are back to the notion of a command economy, which is supposed to be more efficient and more stable than freedom. China is often held up as an example. What America needs is a Five Year Plan.

And we have “social science” classes at grade, high school, and college levels taught by teachers who do not know that this experiment has been run, many times, in many places, and the results have not been favorable. No matter what twists have been employed, and no matter how rational the arguments for a command economy appear to be, the experiments have always had the same result.

I can recall when “The Five Year Plan” was the punch line for a great many jokes. Now, apparently, in many “social science” classes it is the remedy to all our problems. Such is the state of education in these United States of America.

Freedom is not free. Free people are not equal. Equal people are not free.

The headlines are that unemployment is below 9%, magically down to 8.6%. This is because more people gave up looking for a job, not due to more people being employed. The real unemployment rate in the United States is above 15%. But of course it you don’t count someone who isn’t looking for a job because he simply gave up and is now looking to maximize entitlements, that brings the numbers down. Ah well.

I managed to pay the bills and get them off to the post office. They were high this month because of the water damage to my bathroom and the dining room ceiling. If you’re thinking of subscribing, this would be a good time to do it. I have caught up with the October subscriptions and the first part of November, and I’m plugging along on that; apologies if you subscribed and I haven’t answered. I’ll get there. Really and truly.

Steve Barnes has sent what he things is a publishable draft of Black Ship Island, a novella set in the interim between Legacy of Heorot and Beowulf’s Children. It features an intriguing new alien and some more on the strange ecology of Avalon, and of course has a whacking good story involving the Starborn without the adults. Larry and I discussed this a bit at LASFS last night, and we’ll both take a pass through it, then merge our works. I expect magic from Niven and usually get it. We’re also discussing Anvil (working title; the publication title will almost certainly be something else) and how we might fix the United States if it just had to be done. Imagine that you had that power. What might you do? The devil is in the details…

So things do get done here, if a bit slowly.

NHK satellite CO2 data

no firm conclusions but a little more discussion.

the silence from the media is deafening

http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/10/31/japanese-satellites-say-3rd-world-owes-co2-reparations-to-the-west/

Ron Mullane

Worth looking at, not sure what conclusions are supported. It does seem clear that the remedies involving CO2 production in the US and Europe are not working and will not work.

Of course not everyone seems to agree that this is a subject for rational debate.

http://climateaudit.org/2011/11/28/direct-action-at-harvard/#more-15067 

Sallie Baliunas is a long time friend and a very competent scientist; so of course Harvard students are invited to take direct action against her, rather than engage in rational argument. But then a lot of the students at Harvard don’t seem to have been required to learn much about rational debate.

And if you don’t know about Freefall, you probably should. Start here http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff100/fv00001.htm and for the first few pieces it may seem frivolous or confusing; plug along. It is not only interesting, it invites thought about some very serious matters. It may help to know that Sam, the main character in the first few screens, is not really the main character; and that Sam is unique. He is an intelligent non-human on a planet of millions of Asimov 3-law robots. He isn’t mammalian, either.

I am not a fan of Snopes, but it happens I ran across this the other day. Snopes labels it false or fraudulent or something. I think the story is worth paying some attention to. It is probably made up by someone determined to be anonymous, but there are points made that need making.

http://www.snopes.com/rumors/freezing.asp

View 703 Thursday, December 01, 2011

I was involved in a discussion in another conference, and was reminded of my Megamissions Essay. I had to search to find it, and was astonished to find that I last worked on it in 1994. It needs some work. We did not develop THOR, nor did we built Thoth missiles, but we did develop Hellfire and drones.

In searching for my megamisions essay I found an exchange of mail with a reader on USAF and US Army missions that is still relevant today.

Meanwhile the power is out in many places in Los Angeles. We had a minor flicker last night, but the neighborhood seems to be intact. All’s well, but I am again far behind in other stuff.

I am curious about the Herman Cain affair. Apparently the first barrage against him with Gloria Allred leading the charge came to nothing, and the stories told of his ‘sexual harassment’ seem to have fallen apart. Comes now Ginger Smith. I don’t know if she has any connection with Axelrod, and of course her story of a decade and more long affair with Mr. Cain may be true: but so far we haven’t seen the evidence. There are claims that Cain paid her, but there’s no specification: how much, and how? Cash? Check? Credit card? As to the telephone communications, we don’t know who called whom, now long they talked if at all, who texted whom, were any answered? Cain may well have had a long time mistress whom he met infrequently; she herself describes all this as ‘a casual affair’; but one would think that if she is going to come forward with this story – and why is she doing that? – she would add corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative. So far we have not seen much in the way of corroborative details.

So we now have Newt as the latest “I’m not Romney” and the big guns will be laid using different aiming stakes. We may expect a large TOT barrage shortly.

And I really have stuff I have to do. I can recommend the old but still relevant stuff linked to above:

Megamissions

On USAF and Army doctrines

And I am off to lunch.

The latest polls show that Newt beats Obama, 45% to 43%. Incidentally, I know of no political figure in any contested political office who has been reelected with 43% or lower approval rating.

Immigration Absolutism    Jerry, I can understand absolutism on rejecting amnesty for illegal immigrants for the same reason I can understand absolutism on rejecting tax increases. Both make huge sense – as tactical positions.

In both cases, we have a fundamental political conflict not practically solvable by compromise: Open borders (with US citizenship meaningless) versus secure borders, and exponential growth in government’s share of the economy (with as endpoint the government becoming the economy) versus limited government.

In both cases, the other side has repeatedly made "compromise" deals (offering reduced spending for higher taxes, offering more secure borders for amnesty) then flagrantly violated them. Spending wasn’t reduced, the borders weren’t secured.

Tactically speaking, any position other than insisting on reduced spending (or secured borders) before even discussing any tax increase (or amnesty) is suicidal – the other side cannot be trusted, period.

Newt’s partial amnesty position was as I recall explicitly hypothetical – given the borders secured, then what? Gingrich is either foolish or brave to discuss longer term complexities in the simplistic heat of a primary campaign, but you’re not the only one who thinks that he may be looking past the primaries to the general election, where he’ll need to appeal to the center.

Note in that regard today’s Gallup poll that for the first time has the former Speaker leading the current President, 45-43. Newt’s signal to the center was received, apparently.

sign me

Porkypine

I agree regarding tax increases: no tax increase without irrevocable spending cuts in the same bill. Under those conditions I might be amenable to selective tax increases, particularly the largely symbolic taxes on “the rich” (they are symbolic because they are easily avoided; and they do give the appearance and sometimes even the reality of being more fair). But any tax increase not accompanied by not the promise, but the actual cut, in spending should be rejected. I don’t really mind taxes that reduce the gap between top and bottom, but I would rather have that gap than have the government get more money to use to increase spending, and we know that is what will happen if government gets more money. It always happens.

Interesting speculation on why Newt brought this up. May well be. I wouldn’t have advised it, but it seems to have been successful.

From your daybook last Wednesday:

"As Governor Perry put it, there ought to be a visa stapled to the degree certificate. I can’t think anyone would object to that."

Sigh. You’d think so, wouldn’t you? I said as much on a CSPAN segment a couple of months ago, then posted my speaking notes to my blog. Read the comments thread. An amazing amount of vitriol, hatred, and ignorance. And these people get to vote.

http://academicvc.com/2011/09/28/immigration-and-competitiveness/

Despair is a sin. Keep up the good work.

Stephen