February 2012 – Page 5 – Chaos Manor

Preventive medicine and contraceptive pills’; We’re in trouble

By Jerry Pournelle | Feb 15, 2012 - 11:11 pm | Updated: February 15, 2012 - 11:22 pm | View

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View 713 Wednesday, February 15, 2012

I have a ticket for a flight to Boston for tomorrow morning at O Dark Thirty, but I won’t be using it. I am scheduled to be an honored guest at Boskone, and I was planning to go for weeks, when I came down with this. Yesterday afternoon I decided I was still contagious, and given the way I felt I would be far more a burden than an asset to my friends, so I regretfully informed them I wouldn’t be coming. Given the way I felt all day it’s clear that this was the right decision. I don’t know what this thing is, but it has laid me out. The good news is that I feel better – not good enough that I would contemplate getting up tomorrow for a trip with anything but dread, but better, meaning that I was actually able to get an hour’s work in on clearing off my desk. If that doesn’t sound like much, it’s a positive triumph compared to what I’ve been able to do for the past week.

I want again to thank all those who have responded to this weeks’ pledge drive and sent in subscriptions and renewals. This place operates on the public radio model. It’s free to everyone but it won’t be around if it doesn’t get subscriptions. Taking my cue from KUSC, the Los Angeles good music public radio station, I don’t bug people very often about this, but from time to time I have a week long pledge drive. I do this when KUSC has its pledge drive. They spend a week, all day each day, telling people that it’s time to pay, and if you were thinking about subscribing but hadn’t got around to it this would be a great time to do it, and all the rest of it. So there. I’ve told you, and if you haven’t subscribed, or you haven’t renewed your subscription in a year or two, now’s the time to do it.

I have been thinking about the logic of providing free birth control pills and other such stuff to women as part of the Obamacare package, and I don’t really understand. The story is that the Obama package provides for preventive health care, and birth control pills are justified under that. This apparently presumes that pregnancy is an illness. It’s an illness that happens only to women, but given the existence of the human race it’s a fairly common condition at one or another point in a woman’s life. That doesn’t sound much like an illness.

I suppose the logic is that unwanted pregnancy is the illness to prevent. It’s certainly true that unwanted pregnancy is a life changing experience, and having an unwanted baby can be a disaster for any family. Of course there are plenty of instances in which it turned out not to be a disaster at all; you can find those stories in both fiction and non-fiction. But yes, unwanted pregnancy often has bad effects, and thus I suppose could be classified as an illness, and something to be prevented.

The question is how it should be prevented, and that gets us into religious matters. Clearly the simplest way not to get pregnant is not to engage in sexual intercourse. That really works, and we were at one time told that if all the girls were taught that in school, and made aware of all the mechanics of sex, the number of unwanted pregnancies would go down and down. It may come as a surprise to many readers, but for most of the history of this Republic, right up into the 1950’s and beyond, sex education was considered a family matter, and the public education authorities didn’t supply it, Moreover, it wasn’t considered polite or proper to talk about sex, and girls were brought up to enforce that as a social taboo.

Now all that didn’t work perfectly, but when I was in high school teen-age pregnancy was rare. It was more common in certain parts of the city than in the middle class areas where I lived, but it wasn’t all that common even so; and a good part of the time the result of an unwanted pregnancy was a fairly hasty marriage. There weren’t that many illegitimate children. There were enough that it worried social scientists, who thumped the drums for sex education as the remedy. There were classes involving condoms and cucumbers, because in those days condoms were the only real contraceptives. Condoms were pitched to both men and women, not only as protection against unwanted pregnancy but also as protection against sexually transmitted diseases. The Army gave out pro-kits to soldiers since it was a lot cheaper to give them condoms and antiseptic wipes than to treat the various STD’s they might come home with. Officers and non-coms were urged to make sure men thought about the subject, and one story that was always told was that you could be in a combat zone with no possible contact with women and sure enough in the morning report the sergeant would have to tell the company commander that Private asdfasdf had a fresh dose.

In his 1953 novel Childhood’s End Arthur Clarke wrote of a future in which there was reliable contraception and an infallible paternity test. This ended the sexual taboos, there were no more unwanted pregnancies, and mankind evolved to a new state of being. We invented the reliable contraception and paternity tests, and they certainly changed the social order, but not in the manner that Sir Arthur described. Moreover, the number of unwanted pregnancies went up and up, and the paternity identity capability didn’t do a lot to change things either.

In any event, Obamacare mandates that women be given free conception prevention stuff, which generally means pills. One may be certain that there is some lobbying going on: those who make the pills certainly want to sell them. So contraception prescriptions are now a mandated entitlement, and you get them free. Or women get them free. Men don’t need them.

Oddly enough, there doesn’t seem to be anything in the Obama health care bill mandating free condoms for me, although it’s certainly easier to show that using a condom will not only be an aid in preventing pregnancy which may or may not be an illness, but also STD’s which certainly are and can be transmitted in both directions. The Army didn’t care so much about soldiers getting girls pregnant – in those days the remedy for that would be a transfer of the soldier to someplace far off – but it certainly did worry about a fresh dose of clap.

Of course once we start thinking about preventive medicines we can come up with lots more. Toothbrushes and toothpaste certainly prevent some fairly severe conditions that would be costly. What are not toothbrushes and toothpaste given as a free entitlement? Once we concede that someone else is responsible for paying for our health care prevention aids, and we are not our selves responsible for our actions – after all, there is a sure fire way to prevent unwanted pregnancy – then what are the limits? What is it that we are NOT entitled to? Perhaps every school child should be given tofu and broccoli for free? Actually, there appear to be places where that is argued quite seriously, but there’s a problem getting the kids to eat the broccoli.

So I do wonder: why the great emphasis on contraceptives for females? Why is that an entitlement of such great importance? Are free condoms next? And how long until you must eat your broccoli under pain of being paddled in the principal’s office?

Perhaps my afflictions have caused me to take leave of my senses? Sometime I think so.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a short article “Killer drones are science fiction” that takes an operations research approach to the situation: we don’t need automated drones because they won’t be any more useful or effective than what we have now.

“The key is to understand that regardless of whether a military strike is conducted autonomously or with human involvement, it is not an isolated act. The actual launching of a weapon onto a target is one step in a sequential process that the military refers to as the "find-fix-track-target-engage-assess" chain.”

The author looks at each of those stages and concludes that the decision to engage doesn’t take much time compared to the others; humans are useful in some of the other stages of the process; QED. It’s not a bad non-mathematical OR argument.

“Ready for another rotten highway bill?” asks Jim Demint in todays Wall Street Journal; and he explains why the bill is very likely to be rotten, and why there’s little possibility of anything else.

Of course the real question is why are highways a federal matter to begin with? When Eisenhower proposed the Interstate Highway system, it was largely proposed as part of a national defense system, and although it is forgotten now, part of the justification was the this would make it possible to build a large number of civil defense shelters – bomb and fallout shelters. At one time every major Interstate Highway intersection would have a shelter built into it. The Soviet Union went mad, and declared that the US was setting itself up for a first strike on the Soviet Union, and civil defense was actually an act of aggression against the USSR. Of course the USSR had civil defense as compulsory training for all its citizens, and built and designated fallout shelters, but they didn’t talk about that much. In any event the civil defense aspects of the Interstate system were abandoned (although some “demonstration” shelters were built in various parts of the country); but the highways were a federal matter because of their national defense necessities.

That’s no longer needed. The easiest way to handle the highways is to leave them to the states, or let the states form authorities and regional compacts; leave federal taxes out of the system. Of course that won’t happen, so yes, prepare for another rotten highway bill, in which money is put into a “trust fund” and then spent on something other than highways and all will be built by Union labor (Davis Bacon Act, a primary means of financing the Democratic party) and the beat goes on. And on.

General Motors, which is now owned by the UAW having been taken from the stock and bondholders, is now about to cut pension benefits – for white collar salaried workers. The regular union workers will still get the same defined benefits pensions that drove GM into what should have been bankruptcy in the first place.

And the beat goes on.

I’ve said this often enough, but it’s still worth repeating: the easiest way to get some economic growth going is to exempt more people from the regulations that prevent small businesses from hiring more workers. Double the exemptions, and see how the economy grows. That is, if your business is exempt from various regulations because it has 10 or fewer workers, you will have powerful incentives not to hire and eleventh worker. If Congress simply make that number 20 or fewer, those at the limits of growth will very likely hire more. There are similar regulatory exemptions at other numbers of workers. Double all those numbers. Watch the economy grow.

It might even start an American economic miracle. And how much harm could it do? We’re in trouble.

Our nation’s fiscal situation is perilous. At $15.3 trillion, our national debt (as measured by the Treasury Department) has already overtaken our national economy, which at the end of 2011 came in at $14.95 trillion (according to the Congressional Budget Office). Bipartisan compromises on spending got us into this mess, and we’ll never get out of it if Republicans don’t offer a fiscally responsible alternative to the out-of-control spending that Democrats endorse.

We should devolve the federal highway program from Washington to the states. We can dramatically cut the federal gas tax to a few pennies, which would be enough to fund the limited number of highway programs that serve a clear national purpose.

In return, states could adjust their state gas taxes and make their own construction and repair decisions without costly Davis-Bacon regulations and without having to funnel the money through Washington’s wasteful bureaucracy and self-serving politicians.

In order to avert a fiscal catastrophe in the near future, we’re going to have to get a lot more serious about curtailing unnecessary federal spending. These highway bills—both Democrat and Republican—are anything but serious.

Mr. DeMint is a Republican senator from South Carolina.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204795304577223421060960612.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

I owe you some mail bags. I’ll get to them shortly. This debilitating cold/flu (Yes, I had my flu shots as did Roberta) have taken all my energy, and I don’t like doing short shrift mail with essentially no comments. I am recovering. It’s a lot slower than I thought it would be.

A day devoured by locusts.

By Jerry Pournelle | Feb 13, 2012 - 10:03 pm | Updated: February 14, 2012 - 3:11 pm | View

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View 713 Monday, February 13, 2012

A day thoroughly devoured by locusts. I woke up with the same condition I’d had – feeling as if I were recovering, but with no energy to do much. I had resolved to get through that when the locusts arrived. First I had errands and shopping. Then Roberta, having reported her symptoms to her physician, was advised to go out to the clinic. She’s got what I have but she got it a bit later than I did and it’s been pretty severe, and there seemed to be some other problems, and, anyway I put the groceries away, filled the dishwasher and turned it on, and took her out to Kaiser Urgent Care. Urgent Care was stacked – it always is on a Monday – and they decided to send her over to the Emergency Room.

That was stacked too, literally people on gurneys in the hall, but they got to her fairly soon and did a lot of tests, She got one of the last rooms before the real stack up started. And then I had to go find her something to eat and she has diet restrictions so that took some time, and everyone was busy, and then there were prescriptions, so having left the house at 3 PM after two and a half hours of shopping — well, we’re back now at 2145. Some good came out of all this.

First Roberta is all right, but she did need some attention. We have the prescriptions, All will be well. Second, I found that if I have to I can do things meaning that I need to focus a bit more will power on getting things done. I may not feel wonderful, but I am not disabled. Almost, but not quite yet, anyway.

Third, I know how to solve the American health care problem. Well, not really: the “solution “ would be to clone Kaiser often enough that everyone can get in on it. Alas, I have no idea how to do that. Kaiser is unique among bureaucracies in that I have yet to meet a typical bureaucrat there, someone more concerned with the rules than with just doing what the outfit was made for, which is to make people feel better. Sure some people are nicer and more efficient than others, but none of them seem to have that bureaucratic attitude that proclaims “I don’t care. I don’t have to.” Everyone was harried, it couldn’t have been much busier, there were lots of extraneous distractions, including us since the ER was somewhat more power care than we needed – and it would be hard for the people I met there to have been more cheerful or helpful. Of course any attempt to simply expand the organization would very likely ruin it. It ain’t broke. Don’t fix it.

I am no expert on health care systems. I have no ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’ of making other people pay for people’s health care. It seems to me that what people get free they despise, and the economic principle that there is no limit to demand of a free good holds in spades with big casino in the health care field. Kaiser’s co-payments are enough that I’d prefer not to have made them, but not so stiff I can’t afford them; seems about the right level to me.

And finally I came back to find that the subscriptions and renewals are coming in. If you haven’t subscribed, this would be a good time to do it. If you haven’t renewed in a while, this would be a good time to do that. This is Pledge Drive Week, and I won’t let you forget it.

Now I’m going to go relax. I had an In ‘N Out burger for dinner, and got the no-bread wrap version for Roberta. Good stuff.

Still recovering.

By Jerry Pournelle | Feb 13, 2012 - 12:46 am | Updated: February 13, 2012 - 12:46 am | View

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View 713 Sunday, February 12, 2012

I spent the day thinking well, I am recovering, why am I not working? But I didn’t get much done. I do think I am recovering and I hope to wake up tomorrow without the sore throat and headache and just get on with it.

Tonight’s Downton Abbey, the Masterpiece Theater George V soap opera, had an outbreak of the Spanish Flu go through the mansion just after the end of the war. At least we don’t have that here. But it has not been a cheerful weekend.

With one exception. Thanks to all of you who have responded to the Pledge Drive with new subscriptions or renewals. I talked a lot about pledges and subscriptions last night, and if you really need a sermon you can go there and read it. It is of course the same message you always get. This place operates on the KUSC Public Radio model. It’s free, but if I don’t get subscriptions and renewals it won’t stay open. I don’t talk constantly about money and subscriptions, but I reserve the right to hound you a bit during the week when KUSC, the LA good music station, is running its pledge drive, and this is the week, so you get that message. If you’ve been around a while and you’ve been meaning to subscribe but just haven’t got around to it, now would be a great time to do it. And thanks to all those who do subscribe.

The Pentagon is opening up the question of women in the military, and as usual the debate is generally over the wrong questions. It’s one thing to say that women can be at combat headquarters, and quite another to say that with current regulations women can be combat infantrymen. The current physical qualifications are different for men and women; and there’s the rub.

It takes great physical strength to carry a comrade in full kit any distance at all. It’s difficult enough for men. It’s impossible for a great number of women who have passed the women’s physical qualification tests. There are other reasons. It’s one thing to review the physical qualifications for some occupational specialties to see just are the physical requirements, and quite another to simply declare that they aren’t relevant. I don’t want to open a big can of worms here, but it seems obvious that some combat occupations simply take strength, and general infantry is one of them. I think of some artillery posts that require upper body strength as well. And while we aren’t likely to have bayonet charges in modern warfare, it’s pretty clear that women aren’t going to be as good at close combat as men.

There are no rules that prevent women from playing in the NBA, although the rules don’t let men play in the WNBA. I presume that women boxers could step up and try to participate in boxing, or professional football, and I expect that some might be as good at it as some men are now, but still –

We’ll see what happens, but I do not think that imposing some kind of entitlement strategy on the legions is a good idea.

We have had a developing situation that puts a spotlight on the Los Angeles education system. On the one hand there is incontrovertible evidence that at least one and probably several teachers in a Los Angeles grade school were involved in some very strange perversions involving third grade children. On the other we have the memory of the McMartin case and its accompanying witch hunts in Los Angeles. At one time everyone believed any child who accused any adult, to the point where, in the McMartin case, impossible events were taken as true. The way the children were questioned made it almost certain that they would accuse someone of something, since they would be hounded until they did; and no, I am not making that up. And in the McMartin case at one point there were stories of bodies being buried on the school grounds, and archeological teams went out digging. Some investigators took seriously charges that the children were transported to Forest Lawn Cemetery and made to witness burials, although the logistics of transporting an entire class, many of whom had no memory of the event, and getting them to Glendale and back to Manhattan Beach in LA traffic were never discussed, and no one could be found who actually saw the busses – except of course the children who were telling the story.

For those who don’t know about the crazy witch hunts of the 1980’s this may make no sense, but believe, me, they happened, and in those days the voodoo scientists – excuse me, child psychologists – had elaborate theories about how the children weren’t really able to make up stories like that, so there had to be grains of truth in them. There were also implanted memories. The notion that a psychologist could implant memories in young children was met with scorn until one defense psychologist showed that the child witness could actually be induced to remember being molested – by the judge, whom she had never seen before the trial began. Actually, the technique of implanting memories in young children is fairly simply and easily accomplished, although the ethical implications of implanting false memories as a means of demonstrating the technique are severe enough that few want to do it.

The problem then is that on the one hand the teachers need some protection from slander – they are after all facing professional ruin if not jail – and on the other the children need protection from pederasts who have managed to get into classrooms. In the latest LA case it gets even more complicated. It’s unlikely that some of the teachers in this one school were unaware that something strange was going on. It’s even less likely that all the teachers in that school had their suspicions.

I doubt that this mess will result in a real reform, because the LA school system is so corrupted that it almost certainly has to be abolished and rebuilt from scratch, but it may be that we will learn something from what’s going on here.

I suspect I am rambling. It hasn’t been a pleasant day.

climate, Ritalin, and other interesting stuff

By Jerry Pournelle | Feb 11, 2012 - 5:33 pm | Updated: February 11, 2012 - 5:34 pm | Mail

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Mail 712 Saturday, February 11, 2012

This is very late, and I am still in recovery from this respiratory thing that is so sever I don’t want to call it a cold, but I don’t have a better name. It leaves one filleted. It’s getting better, but most of this mail with get short shrift: not that it doesn’t deserve better, but I don’t have better to offer until I get this pounding out of my head.

Apple tells authors: All your books iBook files are belong to us

The Jobsian “We own everything” spirit is alive and well at Apple:

Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/06/apple_tweak_eula_agreement/

Apple tells authors: All your books iBook files are belong to us

But you can export them as PDFs if you want

By Anna Leach <http://forms.theregister.co.uk/mail_author/?story_url=/2012/02/06/apple_tweak_eula_agreement/>

Posted in Music and Media <http://www.theregister.co.uk/music_media/> , 6th February 2012 14:39 GMT <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/06/>

In a legal rewrite pushed out Friday, Apple has made its iBooks publishing agreement sound slightly less evil by clarifying just what you can do with the content you create on its iBook Author <http://www.apple.com/ibooks-author/> [1] software.

Yes, all iBooks are locked to the iBook store but you can export those files as PDFs.

Tracy

In other words Apple owns anything formatted in the iStore format while it is in that format, but not the content and doesn’t claim the right to reformat it. This is a very strange policy, and is not likely to stand.

Buh-bye spare tire

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

The iron law strikes again!

http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2012/01/31/aaa-warns-that-spare-tires-are-going-extinct/

The new fuel efficiency requirements are best met by reducing the weight of the vehicle. Because the new requirements are so strict, manufacterers are ditching the spare tire, whether donut or full-size, in the latest models.

Arrgghhh…

Respectfully,

Brian P.

This is been inevitable since the gas mileage mandates began.

About ADHD in kids: it is unnatural for most kids to sit still for hours at a time. Once upon a time, our teachers let us run off that energy by sending us outside for recess two or three times a day. No one gives kids time to take the air and air their minds anymore. Somehow, years back, kids learned more and learned it better such breaks in their school day. Going home for lunch helped, too. There were still kids whose minds wandered during dull topics. I was one of those, too.

When my children were small, the third one was one of those and was going to drive some poor kindergarten teacher crazy. I looked into home schooling options. Realizing what I could do, we kept all three boys home and I taught them with a packaged curriculum from Calvert School, designed for use in the mission field. My wiggler would work on school at his own pace. Some days that meant he was interested in some aspect of his schoolwork and plow ahead in a subject doing a week’s work, perhaps, at a sitting. Some days were all about schoolwork and some days weren’t at all. He was five years old; I let him go play when he wanted. He built with Legos and Construx, mostly building "weapons" and might spend whole days like that, his only "school" when I would read aloud; he could listen and build. On his good days, he would do his own work and attend while I taught the older boys. On his bad days he was banished to the basement or yard to play alone. On those days, school was what he might do when he was bored with play. He finished the kindergarten curriculum in the first week of May. I had to invent schoolwork for him on days he wanted it. I wish I could say every following year was as successful, but this has always been a struggle. I just couldn’t see drugging a child.

I teach at a community college, now. Kids tell me they have been taught how to think; they are no longer taught a lot of facts because they can just look stuff up. As a result, they don’t know anything. Some do, but some had more old-fashioned teachers. Most don’t and it is such a pity. All their days spent working on good classroom behavior and learning so little. What a waste.

Kate Pitrone

Thank you for the observations. My own experience is that one needs to know enough facts to have a framework: for history, for example, a few dozen dates like 1755 (Lisbon earthquake that made Voltaire doubt the goodness of God), 1776 and 1787, 1528 (Suleiman the Magnificent and the siege of Vienna), 1648 (the year they killed the king in England; end of the Thirty Years War), 1066 and all that, 1215 and Runnymede, to take a few at random. It’s easy to learn what was going on in the world in those years, and that gives a frame in which to insert new events and facts.

Similarly, learning the addition and multiplication tables in the first three grades makes all of arithmetic, algebra, and higher mathematics much easier to learn; it’s a small investment in rote memory that lasts the rest of your life.

In this modem education age when all facts are available to anyone, it’s still required to know SOMETHING so that there’s a frame to hold the new stuff. But then you know that and I am rambling.

Kids do seem now to believe they are entitled to be educated without their having to learn. I don’t know how that will be accomplished, although something of the sort does happen in my novel Starswarm.

Ritalin

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

I posted your ritalin comments on my facebook page. I see many of your other posters agree with me — that it is grossly over-prescribed and usually unnecessary. I personally was prescribed ritalin for ADHD in school. I palmed the pill under my tongue and spit it out when no one was looking. They discontinued the drug after a few months, since it seemed to have no benefit. I went on to graduate high school with advanced courses and 9 units of college credit.

However, I posted a link to your story on my facebook page and I got a response from a pair of single moms, one of whom is an RN. They give the other side of the story, which I think must be heard.

Since I do not have permission to use their names, I must withhold those.

Person 1:

"Ritalin was a wonder drug for my son. I could tell by his handwriting if he’d remembered to take it that day or not. So as much as I hate the way it’s over-prescribed, and the way boys tend to be treated as having a pathology just for being boys, let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. Ritalin can and does help SOME children. What we need is for doctors, parents, and schools to treat it as the serious drug it is and prescribe it cautiously."

Person 2 / RN:

"Of course they don’t work long term. They don’t claim too. Just as if u stop taking Bo media your BP will go back up. But some kids need it. Not all who get it do but some actually do. I hated it – but wouldn’t have passed high school with out.

Agreed it is grossly over prescribed but having worked with special needs kids and having taken it also i *know* some kids really do need it.

ADHD more often noticed in boys as they are more prone to combined type where girls can get lost in the cracks because more often have inattentive type. Autism is not the same. We are born how we are born. Brain function and neuro transmitters function as they do. Out side family issues can agitate some symptoms partly because it takes a whole treatment plan including behavior modification at home ect and when not treated on a whole then not as effective – but it doesn’t cause it.

This is a hotttttt topic for me too. I have worked with kids for YEARS I am ADD [son] is ADHD there is autism in my family. Ect…..

[Son] being a child who shocked drs at a young age with his abundant wildness I think I have handled better alone (till this yr) than many do together.

[Son] can’t sit still no matter how hard he tries. He soooo wants to please. He is ridiculously intelligent – but he stands at his desk to do work.

ut no matter what we do or say or how we punish – it doesn’t change how the neurons fire. No spence in swatting a kid for something they physically can’t help. But no allowing it to be used as an excuse to do whatever either. Raising a child with any type of special needs is a challenge and takes trial & error "

————-

So there’s the other side of the story. The RN above pretty much agreed that a lot more people were prescribed it than needed it, but every once in awhile you have a special needs child who really needs it.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

I doubt we will settle the matter here, but I start with this principle: it is far better than children learn to control themselves than that they be controlled by drugs. That comes to some extent from my education in psychology at a time before chemical psychiatry had achieved many of the results it now boasts; in the days of my undergraduate and early graduate education, before I specialized in mathematics and human factors and branched out into engineering, there were many debates between the “talk therapy” psychologists and the “shock treatment” medico psychiatrists.

That debate has in my judgment never really be resolved. Psychiatric drugs often have much the same effect that locking people up in a madhouse as incurably insane have, and they are much cheaper. I can completely agree that some are incurably insane, and society has to be protected from them. Others are a bloody nuisance and we prefer they be either drugged or locked away so they do not annoy us. These are matters often brought up in novels, stage plays, and movies, and old Law and Order episodes, often very well done with some accuracy.

I don’t have a final solution to any of this.

But I have not changed my view: we drug too many kids, and bright kids who don’t learn to control themselves are lost, and that lost is severe for all of us.

I think we are trying too hard to nationalize these matters. Leave them to the states. Stop trying for a federal policy. Federal policies don’t work. Perhaps state policies don’t work either, but at least there is room for experiment there.

Thanks.

Home Owner Associations (https://jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?page_id=14)

From your reader feedback, I would guess that none of them have actually been involved with a Home Owners’ Association. Although I have thus far avoiding serving on the board, I regularly attend the monthly meetings. And I am usually the only resident there that isn’t on the board! I live in an unincorporated area so that association is very necessary to maintaining my community. I live near Houston and they are necessary to our area because Houston does not have Zoning! Can you imagine a large city in which bureaucrats don’t decide what you can do with your land? Without my HOA, there wouldn’t be anyone to pay for the street lights, operate the swimming pool, and mow the common areas. An occasional letter telling me to mow my lawn is the price I pay to have someone that can tell my neighbors that they cannot hold a garage sale every single weekend!

The benefits of an HOA cost money! Getting every home owner to pay is probably the single biggest headache that board members face. I have witnessed the lengths that board members have gone through to avoid a foreclosure. After a while, there just isn’t another choice. Nothing in the cited example says the association didn’t do the things Mike Powers says should have been done.

But the board may have had no choice. I know of no cases where the board is directly responsible for enforcement; they hire a management company for that. Board members are unpaid and are usually amateurs. Hiring a management company can be perilous! After the compelling sales pitch, they have to read the long and tedious contract. My HOA just went through a process of looking at new management companies; they decided to keep our current one. Of particular interest to me was the diligence of one board member in actually reading the contract. Some of the clauses buried in these contracts were real doozies! As I recall, one contract had all late fees and interest going to the management company as well as they handled collections.

Greg Brewer

I have to agree on much of what you said; I succumbed to first emotions in that report about the Association foreclosing on a man’s home because he had not paid his dues. My suspicion is that the publicity has caused everyone involved to rethink the situation and that it has been resolved; such things usually are.

I tend to agree that voluntary associations are a major part of self government. Thank you.

Unemployment

Have you ever been unemployed? I held views similar to yours until I actually experience unemployment a couple of times. My first time was a year after my divorce. The divorce totally wiped out my meager savings. That unemployment check did not cover my bills and it was very alarming to what my account dwindle as I desperately searched for a new job. I seem to recall a post that pointed out that a certain number of months of unemployment equal the amount of time necessary to get a 2 year degree. The notion does not match the reality of unemployment. Number 1 is the cost. Number 2 is that you do not know how long you will be unemployed; it is hard to make a commitment when you are hoping to have a job next month. Number 3 is that it assumes that you don’t already have a degree. Number 4 is availability; before cell phones, I spent the day near the phone waiting for that important phone call. Number 5 is mental. Your worried, depressed. It is very hard to concentrate on anything other than finding a new job.

There is also a problem when one has obsolete job skills. Let us say that you have worked in an industry for 8 years and then you lost your job when it was outsourced to India. Okay, you start looking for a new job but all the other employers are outsourcing the jobs you are qualified for. What few that are left have a long line of applicants for the 1 job. Obviously, you need to change your career. Best case, you have skill sets and interests that can be adapted to another industry. But you are going on a job interview with no actually industry training or experience; you are probably not high their “hire” list. Then there is the problem of salary; you are unlikely to get offered as much as you were making. The potential employer is going to have to consider that you will only stay until you get a job offer in your old industry at your old salary.

And every month, my mortgage payment and car payment and utilities and taxes and child support keep needing to be paid.

Greg Brewer

What you have not shown here is why your needs must be met by compulsory collections from someone else. It is easy to show that people deserve better than they are getting. Novelists do it all the time, but there is plenty in real life to support the plausibility. The question is, how do others acquire the obligation to do something about it?

And even if you can show that the deserving poor have a right to have the tax collector despoil others of their property to ameliorate the plight of those who, through no fault of their own, are now in desperate need, is it not reasonable to discuss just what limits may be put on what is given to them? Surely there are limits. What are they and who gets to set them?

And we still have not discussed the undeserving poor. They exist. Of course we include those who simply scam the system, but then there are those offered a job they think beneath them: how long should they be supported while the continue to look for something more to their liking? Who has the obligation to give them that support?

Not I am not discussing charity here, although the charities used to have such discussions. Charity is not a legal obligation. Of course if the view is that property is theft and thus no one is really entitled to anything at all, and what we call ownership is really just a concession on the part of the many to allow those who ‘own’ temporary possession of their houses and other property, then we are in a different world. That took place in Russia after Lenin arrived at the Finland station, and later Dr. Zhivago returned to find his house occupied by workers, and had to apply to the soviet in charge of the property for a room; but surely you are not advocating that.

I don’t mean to be mocking: I do mean to say that these matters have been discussed for millennia, and most of the arguments are lost in the miasma that modern education has become.

It is easier to come to some conclusion on what entitlements people deserve than it is to determine who must pay for them – and whence came the obligation to pay.

off the wall question

Dear Mr. Pournelle,

Sorry to intrude on your privacy, but I have to ask a question. What do you think about Hollywood movies being re-made for the nth time as if there is no other material left to produce? Especially in the Science Fiction form, there has to be a half century of material in your work alone, and if you add in Larry Niven’s material (pre-Ringworld Throne – just my preference) there are decades of enthralling material I would love to see on the screen before I start drooling (in the day time that is), which doesn’t seem far off now. Doesn’t anyone approach you with this?

Sincerely,

Mark Knebel

PS No I don’t do screen plays or claim to have any talent of the literary or film type – just a Science fiction junkie

Well, I can hardly disagree that some of my stuff would make better movies than many of those that get made. Mr. Cameron paid me a generous amount for an option on BIRTH OF FIRE which was to have been his next work, but he decided instead to go with AVATAR. I can hardly argue with him about it…

I think Hollywood is not in the entertainment business: it’s in the business of making money by investing in entertainment. That’s not quite the same thing.

Tabloid Climate Science

Dear Jerry;

Nothing corrodes scientific credibility faster than suffering misrepresentation lightly.

You have recently repeated reports in the London tabloid press denying the continuing warming trend of the last century and asserting that solar cycle 25 will plunge us into a new ice age.

Contradicting the evidence of <i> The Daly Mail</i> ‘s Page 3, customarily adorned with ladies whose degree of undress suggests alarming levels of warmth, the UK’s Ministry of Defense has issued the following Meteorology Office bulletin :

"Met Office in the Media: 29 January 2012

Today the Mail on Sunday published a story written by David Rose entitled “Forget global warming – it’s Cycle 25 we need to worry about”.

This article includes numerous errors in the reporting of published peer reviewed science undertaken by the Met Office Hadley Centre and for Mr.

Rose to suggest that the latest global temperatures available show no warming in the last 15 years is entirely misleading.

Despite the Met Office having spoken to David Rose ahead of the publication of the story, he has chosen to not fully include the answers we gave him to questions around decadal projections produced by the Met Office or his belief that we have seen no warming since 1997.

For clarity I have included our full response to David Rose below:A spokesman for the Met Office said: “The ten year projection remains groundbreaking science. The complete period for the original projection is not over yet and these projections are regularly updated to take account of the most recent data.

“The projections are probabilistic in nature, and no individual forecast should be taken in isolation. Instead, several decades of data will be needed to assess the robustness of the projections.

“However, what is absolutely clear is that we have continued to see a trend of warming, with the decade of 2000-2009 being clearly the warmest in the instrumental record going back to 1850. Depending on which temperature records you use, 2010 was the warmest year on record for NOAA NCDC and NASA GISS, and the second warmest on record in HadCRUT3.”

Global average temperatures from 1850 to 2011 from the three individual global temperature datasets (Met Office/UEA HadCRUT3, NASA GISS and NOAA NCDC

Furthermore despite criticism of a paper published by the Met Office he chose not to ask us to respond to his misconceptions. The study in question, supported by many others, provides an insight into the sensitivity of our climate to changes in the output of the sun.

It confirmed that although solar output is likely to reduce over the next

90 years this will not substantially delay expected increases in global temperatures caused by greenhouse gases.

The study found that the expected decrease in solar activity would only most likely cause a reduction in global temperatures of 0.08 °C. This compares to an expected warming of about 2.5 °C over the same period due to greenhouse gases (according to the IPCC’s B2 scenario for greenhouse gas emissions that does not involve efforts to mitigate emissions). In addition the study also showed that if solar output reduced below that seen in the Maunder Minimum – a period between 1645 and 1715 when solar activity was at its lowest observed level – the global temperature reduction would be 0.13C."

Russell Seitz

Fellow of the Department of Physics

Harvard University

Russell, you study this stuff a lot more than I do; my conclusion is that no one knows what is happening. The data aren’t good enough. I will go back to what I have always said: the Earth has been warmer in historical times, and is has been colder in historical times, and we know that it has been a lot colder not all that long ago when glaciers covered northern Europe and northern North America. I do not know what halted the advance of the ice and made Europe habitable, but I do know I prefer warm to cold.

I also do not know what to do about CO2 but I am darned sure that if every North American coal plant shut down the effect on CO2 levels would not be all that great – while the economic effect would be tremendous. A rich North America can invest in research to change things, everything from painting roofs white to your bubble schemes to plankton blooms, and surely other stuff I never thought of; and a broke North America is going to go back to burning things to stay warm in winter. We don’t understand the climate, our models are not much good, and to assume that people will simply freeze in the dark is not sensible.

I don’t know if it’s getting warmer or colder. I do know it hasn’t changed all that much from the days of my youth. Ponds still freeze in Memphis, but not very often and certainly not every winter. That’s the way is was when I was a kid with ice skates.

Contraception

Jerry,

Now Obama wants the Insurance Companies to provide Contraception "Services" at "No Charge," what comes next, Mandatory Contraception? This would, of course, save the Insurance Companies considerable costs.

I am really intrigued by Obama’s ideas about free goods and services. Seems to be a good deal like Perpetual Motion in an economic sense.

Bob Holmes

It does make one ask, if he can mandate that entitlement to be paid by private insurance companies, what others can be given free? Sex change operations? Face lifts to make one feel better? Cosmetic surgery in general? It is difficult to conceive of something that would not be included in entitlements. Which means that the insurance companies go out of business. Which means nationalized health care, which is probably the objective in the first place.

My parents brought me up to believe the police were the good guys and only the guilty had something to hide. As you can well imagine, this is no longer a viewpoint I share.

And we have this

http://www.okgazette.com/oklahoma/article-3959-former-da-bob-macy-ex-forensic-chemist-joyce-gilchrist-settle-case.html

B

I was similarly brought up. I lost some of that one night when a teenaged friend and I were out in a large vacant field smoking. Apparently we had been talking louder than we thought since some neighbor perhaps forty or fifty yards away called the police. When the police came we went up to them to see if there was something wrong – and were accused of mischief. Of course we were guilty, we had been off in a vacant lot smoking White Owl cigars, but we didn’t expect to be called punks and gangsters. We were after all thoroughly law abiding young middle class kids, my friend’s father being a Memphis State College teacher, and mine being the manager of a Memphis radio station. We could easily have simply walked away – the fields were in were large and unroaded, and we hadn’t been seen — when we saw the police car arrive, but instead we went up to ask what was going on.

I doubt that the officer involved knows just how much he contributed to my education and attitude toward the police as a result of that encounter. I haven’t thought about that in a long time. Of course in those days (about 1947) Memphis was a very peaceful place, at least in the part where I lived.

SUBJECT: A Swarm of Nano Quadrotors

Hi Jerry.

Some fun and interesting technology here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQIMGV5vtd4

Cheers,

Mike Casey

How America made its children crazy,

Jerry

Spengler tells us How America made its children crazy:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/NA31Dj01.html

“American children do not read; they surf. They do not write; they text. And when they fail to concentrate, we prescribe drugs that only harm them – drugs can’t be found in pharmacies in China, where perseverance and classical music are the order of the day. If China replaces the US as the pre-eminent world power, America will only have itself to blame for handing kids over to quacks and computers.”

And that’s just his summary.

Ed

We’re going to Hell in a handbasket. But then we were when I was a kid, too. At least I have more teeth than my parents did at my age. And I survived brain cancer.

Costa Concordia Shipwreck and "women and children first"

Unlike the Titanic shipwreck, the Costa Concordia was in easy swimming distance of the shore. From the satellite photographs, the distance from the ship to the nearest beach is between 250 and 500 feet depending on where you swim from the ship. Plus the fact that the ship grounded. It wasn’t going to head for the bottom 3 miles down. While I was not on the ship, in this instance, it seems to me that intestinal fortitude should have been easy to come by. Which makes the captain’s conduct even more contemptible.

Michael D. Houst

How sexist of you.

To stand and be still to the Birkenhead Drill is a damn tough bullet to chew…