Monthly Archives: March 2013

Mail 767 Sunday, March 17, 2013

Mark Steyn on Overreach

Jerry,

Mark Steyn in his piece "Axis of Torpor" starts with a sarcastic strafing pass on Hollywood international relations – "I greatly enjoy the new Hollywood genre in which dysfunctional American families fly to a foreign city and slaughter large numbers of the inhabitants as a kind of bonding experience" – but ends with something that sounds remarkably like he’s channeling you.

"As the CPAC crowd suggested, there are takers on the right for the Rand Paul position. There are many on the left for Obama’s drone-alone definition of great power. But there are ever fewer takers for a money-no-object global hegemon that spends 46 percent of the world’s military budget and can’t impress its will on a bunch of inbred goatherds. A broker America needs to learn to do more with less, and to rediscover the cold calculation of national interest rather than waging war as the world’s largest NGO. In dismissing Paul as a “wacko bird,”

John McCain and Lindsey Graham assume that the too-big-to-fail status quo is forever. It’s not; it’s already over."

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/343140

Porkypine

I suppose I have been saying things like that since this site began, and before; I hope someone has paid attention. There do not seem to be very many of us realists yet. I prefer a republic to empire. Incompetent empire is an absurdity, except, of course, for the obvious exceptions. Follow the money.

Competent empire frightens me, but I prefer it to incompetent empire. Competent empire doesn’t expend its own blood and treasure on liberating Iraq and then abandoning it. But that is another story.

The establishment Republicans seem enamoured of expending blood and treasure without favorable results.

Survival with Style — Water for More People!

Jerry,

This is very good news indeed.

<http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/03/16/lockhead-martin-throws-more-dirt-of-mathus-grave/>

"Cheap, clean water may soon be available for the whole planet. According to Reuters, defense contractor Lockheed Martin has developed a filter that will hugely reduce the amount of energy necessary to turn sea water into fresh water. The filter, which is five hundred times thinner then others currently available, lets water pass through but blocks all salt molecules. It will use almost 100 times less energy than other methods for making salt water drinkable, giving third world countries another way of expanding access to drinking water without having to create costly pumping stations…."

I remember your story about having "special ice cubes" to be used to make a point to Luddites. I always enjoy the image of them spitting out the drink after being informed the ice is made from the LA river water. Then the grand finale, "using the best filtering possible!"

Ain’t technology grand? For some things, yes, yes it is.

Regards, Charles Adams, Bellevue, NE

Technology won’t solve all problems but proper application of technology will reduce many problems to soluble multiple problems. A new source of fresh water would do that for a number of problem situations.

: Molten salt reactors

The molten salt concept is gaining in popularity as it does appear to have the passive safety and low-waste properties mentioned. Possibly even better is the LFTR (liquid flouride thorium reactor), a variant that uses thorium for the fuel instead of uranium. Thorium is much more abundant than uranium, and has the advantage of not producing any waste product that can easily be used in bombs. (This, by the way, is likely one of the reasons uranium was originally chosen over thorium). The ability to burn existing nuclear waste and to produce Pu238 (used to fuel spacecraft) are advantages the two concepts share. Another advantage is that because of the much higher melting point of the molten salt, there is no need for high-pressure vessels as in conventional reactors (the salt takes the place of water as the primary working fluid). This enormously increases the safety yet again. The main problem holding these concepts back seems to be the huge investment required for a new design.

Chris Barker

As I said in A Step Farther Out, cheap energy solves most problems; and if your philosophy is one of distribution of resources, then it helps to have a large pie to distribute. But it does require insight. The initial capital costs of Space Solar Power Satellites and a new nuclear power system are comparable. I’d prefer space solar power because the side effects are beneficial and large.

Random House eBook imprints offers contracts that would make a music executive blush

Jerry,

If you encounter aspiring writers who don’t have an agent, it’s worth noting that Random house has some eBook imprints that are trying to snare new writers with lousy contract terms. One is an SF imprint.

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2013/03/06/a-contract-from-alibi/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2013/03/06/note-to-sff-writers-random-houses-hydra-imprint-has-appallingly-bad-contract-terms/

Writers should understand that publishers want everything they can get. It is the writer’s job to see that they don’t get it.

RE: North Korea and the revealer rattling of cutlery by them to gain attention and goodies.

You often have said that you prefer a Republic, but if Empire we must, let it be Competent Empire.

I agree. However, which sort of Competent Empire? We have legions with auxiliaries and Pro-Consuls (usually inept hacks of the Bremer sort, but even Caesar had to put up with those), classic Latin Roman stuff in Afghanistan and Iraq, and most of Latin America is Classic Roman Ally sort of statecraft, down to the "poke A Stick In The Roman (Yanqui) Eye but don’t mess with Roman (Yanqui) Trade.

But then we have the OTHER Roman Empire model, the one Gibbon renamed Byzantine, though the "Byzantine" never called themselves anything other than Roman, though in Greek. Those Romans never had a problem doing the math on whether it was cheaper to Pay Off the Thugs and Barbarians rather than dispatch a Strategoi and several legions of cataphracts to crush them.

We seem to follow that policy with North Korea, and not just because they have a few Hell Bombs to rattle. We followed it long before they went Plutonium on us, for all sort of reasons involving our allies in the region and the Chinese Hordes ("Hey, Sarge, just how many Hordes are there in a Chinese Platoon, anyway?").

In life consistency is the most under rated virtue. In statecraft this is true Doubled in Big Casino with Spades.

The NORKs are hooked on our bribes. Now they want more, and we are going broke.

Oh well, with any luck one of those Horrible Anti-Missile programs the current regime in DC abhors will save us. By the way, doesn’t the current Caudillo in DC have a Pied A Terre in Hawaii? Well within range of even the Kaputnik level rocketeers of the NORKS.

Want to bet there is an AEFGS vclass destroyer/cruiser just offshore from that vacation home?

Petronius

Welcome back. For those wondering about the reference to hordes, it comes from Col Fehrenbach’s excellent history of the Korean War, This Kind of War, which is up there with Cameron’s Anatomy of Military Merit as a must read book for anyone interested in military theory and why men fight.

Competent empire does know how to use bribes, but the best way is to bribe one enemy to fight another. Aetius, sometimes called the Last Roman, understood this full well, to the point at which he kept his Gothic Allies from exterminating the Huns after Chalons: he knew he would have need of the Huns another time. His Emperor decided that he didn’t need Aetius and killed him with his own hand, a deed known popularly at the time as “Caesar has cut off his right hand with his left.” The Emperor did not last much longer: his soldiers watched as another general struck him down on the Campus Martius.

None of this would make sense to our current rulers, who have read neither Gibbon nor Macauley, and probably are not aware of their existence.

Tri-focal computer glasses,

Jerry

Like you, I use tri-focals for daily wear and bifocal computer glasses when I am at my computer. Thank you for inventing the latter. I go to A.J. Pone Optical here in New Jersey, where Dave Pone has been grinding me my custom lenses for several years. In formed they were ready, today I went to pick up new glasses in updated prescriptions.

And Dave had a surprise for me. “Ed,” he says, “You’re just the man for this. I’m trying an experiment on you.” He said he received some trifocal blanks from a lens supplier, and he thought he would try something new. Given that I surf the Net at 40 inches but I like to read papers and things at a normal distance, he sent a pair of blank tri-focal lenses to “the lab” to have them ground to my prescription for the far (40 inches) and near, with the middle magnification falling between them. Coated with anti-glare and finished with a hard layer, the lab sent them back to his shop where he ground them for my frames.

Glory be! They work! I can sit back and enjoy my browsing, sit forward and type at the screen, or look down and read, with the proper magnification for each. Seems like the best ideas are those that in retrospect you say, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Thought you’d like to know of an innovation on your invention.

Ed

I should say that I can make a case for having invented “computer glasses.” I have worn bi-focal glasses for more than sixty years. After I built Ezekiel, my friend who happened to be an S-100 Buss computer, I found bi-focals to be annoying and asked my optometrist to make me a pair of glasses in my prescription with a focal length of 28 inches. This worked well, and I wrote that up in one of my BYTE columns, and I believe I called them my “computer glasses.” Later I found they were ubiquitous. It may have been simultaneous invention – anyone with bifocals might find it obvious – but I think I was the first to publish the notion; and the 28 inches came from my sitting at the computer and using a tape measure to determine the distance from my eyes to the screen.  I have experimented with other distances and found that with my prescription it isn’t critical and 28 inches continues to work.

I never suspected that my computer glasses couldn’t be improved.

Modern slavery

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

I’ve been doing some research on slavery and learned a few things that may be of interest.

I quickly learned that there are more slaves today than at any time in our history. The great majority of these are debt contracted slaves (forced to work off a debt) or sex slaves.

That rang a bell. So I researched a little more and, sure enough, found that all these evils still flourish in the US among Mexican immigrants. All the laws about minimum wage, workplace safety, health and so forth are meaningless when they are applied to workers who have no legal existence in the first place. Many of them are forced to take debts and labor in backbreaking conditions for next to nothing. Not a few are sex slaves.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/30/world/americas/mexico-sex-slavery-ring-on-border-is-broken-immigration-officials-say.html?_r=0 <http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2013%2F01%2F30%2Fworld%2Famericas%2Fmexico-sex-slavery-ring-on-border-is-broken-immigration-officials-say.html%3F_r%3D0&h=4AQHxB4Yi&s=1>

http://www2.palmbeachpost.com/moderndayslavery/

http://www.mediamouse.org/news/2006/02/the-realities-o.php

Naturally, the people who oppose this state of affairs and insist that all residents of the US should be legal and have protection of American law are dubbed "RAAAACIST!" I would have thought that demanding brown-skinned people labor as slaves for white-skinned agribusiness would be more "racist" then demanding equal protection of law for all in the US, but this is America. Up is down, black is white.

What can we do about it? Well, I’m an educator by gift so that’s what I do — go out and learn things, then pass it on to others.

But i think the first, most revolutionary thing we can do is to believe the truth and refuse to believe lies. Believing and teaching truth is ITSELF a revolutionary activity, especially since so much of the world depends on lies.

And the truth is this: Illegal immigration to the US is all about exploiting cheap labor , NOT about charity.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

There are none so blind as those who will not see. The evidence for widespread slavery in this vale of tears is pervasive. Of course in the Roman Republic debtors were free to sell themselves into slavery to relieve their debt. Laws against prostitution often result in slavery to pimps as a side effect. Good intentions need to be applied with prudence…

Cubans evade censorship by exchanging computer memory sticks, blogger says:

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/03/09/185347/cubans-evade-censorship-by-exchanging.html

“Information circulates hand to hand through this wonderful gadget known as the memory stick,” Sanchez said, “and it is difficult for the government to intercept them. I can’t imagine that they can put a police officer on every corner to see who has a flash drive and who doesn’t.”

Tag. You’re it.

Ed

Jerry,

Unfortunately, the "whole number" method as described by Mike Flynn is hardly a joke.

When the kids (and the nieces) were in school I noted that in fifth grade a wholly inappropriate amount of the math coursework was devoted to estimating the answer to math problems instead of reinforcing the ability to do addition and subtraction.

http://www.glencoe.com/sites/common_assets/mathematics/math_review/Estimate_Whole_Num.pdf

Jim

http://www.thefederalistpapers.org/founders/washington/drones-wisdom-from-our-first-commander-in-chief

Roger Miller

Thank you. Very relevant.

McGuffey Readers

This link is about life of McGuffey and his books called "Eclectic Readers".

http://www.timesdispatch.com/opinion/their-opinion/columnists-blogs/charles-f-bryan-jr/the-man-who-taught-america-to-read-mcguffey/article_f768af21-6700-5377-ad01-650476d7b811.html

Bill Moore

The McGuffey readers helped unite the nation. They were excellent for their time, and still worth finding for home schoolers. They could never be adopted in a public school today. The first words of the Soviet first grade readers were “For the joys of our childhood we thank our native land.” The McGuffey readers began with “No man can put off the law of God” which instantly disqualifies them from public adoption.

Reaffirming the Net of a Thousand Questionable "Facts"…

Dr. P,

I know you generally can trust your readers to share facts instead of innuendo, but whoever forwarded the "All European Life Died In Auschwitz" article should have done at least a cursory search to verify the claims accompanying the article. A quick Google search turned up this 2006 blog entry critiquing the copies already in circulation – a little over a year before the claimed publication date of 15 JAN 2008:

who is Sebastian Vilar Rodrigez and who cares? <http://plancksconstant.org/blog1/2006/02/who_is_sebastian_vilar_rodrige.html>

By Bernie on 27 Feb 2006

I can tell a fake when I see one. Before I go into the details let me say that about 100 blogs in the past 6 months repeated the story below and a few like vodkapundit <http://pajamasmedia.com/vodkapundit/2005/11/30/ouch-11/> rightfully had qualms about its

authenticity: ‘With some reservations, I’m posting the translation in full. If it turns out this is a fake, let’s steal a page from the MSM and call it "fake but accurate."’

Here is the post, usually prefaced by Written by Sebastian Vilar Rodrigez, Spanish Writer or "This is a translation of an article from a Spanish newspaper":

All European Life Died In Auschwitz

I walked down the street in Barcelona, and suddenly discovered a terrible truth – Europe died in Auschwitz. We killed six million Jews and replaced them with 20 million Muslims.

In Auschwitz we burned a culture, thought, creativity, talent. We destroyed the chosen people, truly chosen, because they produced great and wonderful people who changed the world. The contribution of this people is felt in all areas of life: science, art, international trade, and above all, as the conscience of the world. These are the people we burned.

And under the pretence of tolerance, and because we wanted to prove to ourselves that we were cured of the disease of racism, we opened our gates to 20 million Muslims, who brought us stupidity and ignorance, religious extremism and lack of tolerance, crime and poverty due to an unwillingness to work and support their families with pride.

They have turned our beautiful Spanish cities into the third world, drowning in filth and crime. Shut up in the apartments they receive free from the government, they plan the murder and destruction of their naïve hosts. And thus, in our misery, we have exchanged culture for fanatical hatred, creative skill for destructive skill, intelligence for backwardness and superstition.

We have exchanged the pursuit of peace of the Jews of Europe and their talent for hoping for a better future for their children, their determined clinging to life because life is holy, for those who pursue death, for people consumed by the desire for death for themselves and others, for our children and theirs.

What a terrible mistake was made by miserable Europe.

________________________________

Here are a few problems.

1. The phrasing and syntax look like they were originally written in English but as if translated.

2. I disregard any post as true unless it gives me the name of the paper and date of publication.

3. Sebastian Vilar Rodrigez only exists in these posts.

4. And most importantly – there is no European Paper with the cojones [one can take a cojones test here

<http://www.queendom.com/jff_access/the_cojones_test.htm> ] to actually publish anything this provocative against Muslims. Indeed Spain has been on a push to encourage Muslim immigration since 2004, see Jihadwatch.

<http://www.jihadwatch.org/2004/10/spain-is-seeking-to-integrate-growing-muslim-population.html>

As to "fake but accurate"; it is undoubtedly true that almost all the sentiments expressed in this "article" reflect the Muslim reality in Europe. It is too bad that no paper actually published it.

Update: The email stating that this appeared in a Spanish Newspaper is false. It did however appear on the rightwing, pro-Israel, anti-Communist, Spanish language website Gentiuno <http://plancksconstant.org/blog1/2006/03/sebastian_vilar_rodriguez_turn.html> .

I noted that the source was unimportant; the question was whether the concept leads to any truths. It is a disturbing thought. Burnham said that liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western Civilization as it commits suicide. He said this during the Cold War. The Soviet Union imploded before the West could sink completely, but that does not mean that he was not correct.

Reaffirming the Net of a Thousand Questionable "Facts"…

Dr. P,

As an unapologetic propagandist, my focus is not on the source, it is on protecting fact-based credibility.

One of the most compelling ways to beat opponents in any public debate is to discredit them, and that can be done by showing where they have claimed something provably false. It doesn’t have to be important, it just has to be something they can’t deny saying that just ain’t so. Shifting the focus from what is right to who is telling the truth is akin to throwing dirt in someone’s eyes during a fist-fight — and usually just as effective. Death by a thousand fact-checks, as it were.

That’s why I like the blogger’s label of "fake but accurate" — I expect to find myself using that label frequently, because "apocryphal" seems to have faded from the common vocabulary.

So, when confronting folks denying that the Holocaust ever happened, I think it’s better to correct (or at least identify) known errors up front, even if it takes a little of the pungency away. Why make it easier for them to accuse you of spreading a Big Lie by passing along easily disproved little lies?

      Regards,

      William

"Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well." – John Gardner

Omnibus Bills, Madison & Goo Goos

Jerry,

I read a quote from Madison in the Federalist that is very apropos today and for the past few decades:

The internal effects of a mutable policy are still more calamitous. It poisons the blessings of liberty itself. It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood: if they be repealed or revised before they are promulg[at]ed, or undergo such incessant changes, that no man who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow.

Madison, Federalist 62

One of the more egregious examples in the last year or two is the Affordable Health Care Act–Choose your own example [even the bills for the major departments are great examples too.]

In its defense Speaker Pelosi memorably said:

"You’ve heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one or the other. But I don’t know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future, not just about health care for America, but about a healthier America, where preventive care is not something that you have to pay a deductible for or out of pocket. Prevention, prevention, prevention-it’s about diet, not diabetes. It’s going to be very, very exciting.

"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy. Furthermore, we believe that health care reform, again I said at the beginning of my remarks, that we sent the three pillars that the President’s economic stabilization and job creation initiatives were education and innovation-innovation begins in the classroom-clean energy and climate, addressing the climate issues in an innovative way to keep us number one and competitive in the world with the new technology, and the third, first among equals I may say, is health care, health insurance reform. Health insurance reform is about jobs. This legislation alone will create 4 million jobs, about 400,000 jobs very soon."

Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, at the 2010 Legislative Conference for National Association of Counties, March 9, 2010 <http://pelosi.house.gov/news/press-releases/2010/03/releases-March10-conf.shtml>

Here is a charitable report of interpretation of Speaker Pelosi’s remarks

"In the fall of the year," Pelosi said today, "the outside groups…were saying ‘it’s about abortion,’ which it never was. ‘It’s about ‘death panels,” which it never was. ‘It’s about a job-killer,’ which it creates four million. ‘It’s about increasing the deficit’; well, the main reason to pass it was to decrease the deficit." Her contention was that the Senate "didn’t have a bill." And until the Senate produced an actual piece of legislation that could be matched up and debated against what was passed by the House, no one truly knew what would be voted on. "They were still trying to woo the Republicans," Pelosi said of the Senate leadership and the White House, trying to "get that 60th vote that never was coming. That’s why [there was a] reconciliation [vote]" that required only a simple majority.

"So, that’s why I was saying we have to pass a bill so we can see so that we can show you what it is and what it isn’t," Pelosi continued. "It is none of these things. It’s not going to be any of these things." She recognized that her comment was "a good statement to take out of context." But the minority leader added, "But the fact is, until you have a bill, you can’t really, we can’t really debunk what they’re saying…."

Jonathan Capehart, Washington Post, 6/20/12, "Pelosi Defends her Infamous Health Care Remark",<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/post/pelosi-defends-her-infamous-health-care-remark/2012/06/20/gJQAqch6qV_blog.html>

Being a "good government type" (derisively described by the party regulars as a Goo Goo) I would suggest [It has been suggested before by others] to Speaker Pelosi and others of her ilk on both sides of the aisle that there be a public review period for each bill "… so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy."

One suggestion I like for a review period is to have a day of review for each 20 pages (I define a page as 250 words) of a bill. The Affordable Health Care Act has about 363,000 words

See <http://computationallegalstudies.com/2009/11/08/facts-about-the-length-of-h-r-3962/>

and thus would require about a 73 day review period.

I would even recommend that the bill be in "final form" so that one would not have to bounce around the US Code to following the references.

I have always been an unrepentant Goo Goo. The party regulars’ tactic has always been to outwait the Goo Goos as they generally have to go back to their life and cannot remain long in the arena thus allowing the party regulars to continue unhindered as before.

Regards, Charles Adams, Bellevue, NE

The origin of the term “goo goo” for the Good Government clubs goes back a long way. It is discussed extensively in Boss Flynn’s “You’re the Boss”, still one of the best accounts of how machine politics works. (Flynn died in 1953 so our ridiculous copyright laws decree that the book, which is long out of print, won’t be public domain for ten more years, and I suspect that my copy has long vanished into the coffers of the book borrowers. ) Flynn’s point was that the goo goos come and go, but the machine is around for the long haul.

We seem to be building a national machine. The Democratic Party had such in the South from the time I was born until the Solid South went from solidly Democrat to somewhat reliably Republican. Oddly enough the Negro vote, which would have been solidly Republican (the GOP freed the slaves) had it existed in the early part of the 20^th Century was won over by Roosevelt to be Democrat.

Of course Madison knew precisely what he was talking about: make the law so complex that no one can understand it or even know it, and you have effectively finished off the republic. This is one reason why the words of Dick the Butcher in Shakespeare’s Henry VI is so popular: “First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” Of course Dick the Butcher is a revolutionary and wants to bring chaos. On the other hand, at one time at least the Constitution of the Republic of Andorra (a small county sized micro-nation nestles in the Pyrenees between France and Spain which supports itself on smuggling and tourism had these words. “Those black robed ones whose profession is to stir disputes are forever banned from this Republic on pain of instant death.” I think they may have changed that n the last decades. Probably at the instigation of the lawyers?

John Adams considered the lawyers the aristocrats of the republic. It was an aristocracy one could enter by hard work and intellectual merit.

re: "reading education"

Jerry,

Read and pondered all of the bits and pieces on the topic in the recent stuff, set me to looking back into my own past….

My world didn’t have this current debate over method/style to educate the little ones and I can’t speak as to the effectiveness of 50’s/60’s era "Dick and Jane" books that were the norm at the time, I pretty much disregarded them as trivial. What I do know and remember quite well was that, by the time I was 4 I knew:

a) What a dictionary was

b) How to use it

c) Where in my house the thing was located And I was so massively curious that I knew full-well that, if I was to understand something unfamiliar on a printed page, that my very best friend was that honkin’ big book chock full ‘o words that I had to climb up on a chair to fetch down with both hands…..

Perhaps some thought into something so basic as teaching kids dictionary use?

Craig

Rev. C.E. Aldinger

Subj: Failure analysis: Failed steam tubes were too-perfectly manufactured!

http://atomicinsights.com/2013/03/san-onofre-steam-generators-honest-error-driven-by-search-for-perfection.html

>>At just the wrong condition – 100% steam flow – a combination of relatively dry steam, precisely manufactured anti-vibration bars (AVB), and densely packed u-tubes resulted in a few hundred (out of nearly 10,000) tubes vibrating with a large enough amplitude to make contact. The unexpected vibration and contact resulted in accelerated wear and caused one tube to fail while the steam generator was operating.

…

Surprisingly enough, the reason that the condition does not exist in Unit 2 is that the anti-vibration bars (AVB) in Unit 2 were made with enough less precision that they prevented the perfect pitch situation.

Instead of being virtually perfectly round holes through which the steam generator tubes could penetrate with tight tolerance but no contact, the AVB’s in unit 2 had enough manufacturing variation that they made contact with the penetrating tubes with an average force that was twice as high as the minor, incidental contact achieved in Unit 3.

…

That extra contact force, which was considered to be undesirable by the designers at the time they designed and manufactured the tubes, provided enough unplanned disruption to the tube bundle that the harmonic vibration could not get started and could not reach enough of an amplitude to cause tube to tube wear (TTW).

It is instructive to learn that the tighter tolerances in unit 3 were purposely chosen because the supplier was seeking continuous process improvement. MHI engineers had determined that a small change in the manufacturing process could improve the repeatability of the AVB holes.

The design team agreed that the tighter tolerances resulted in a design that was “significantly more conservative than previous designs in addressing U-bend tube vibration and wear.” (page 48 of MHI’s root cause

analysis)

Because the computer models used for the design process were not perfect fidelity reproductions of the complete environment of the steam generator, simulation runs did not reveal the potentially detrimental effect of the tighter tolerances.<<

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

Mail 766 Monday, March 11, 2013

NASA warns ‘something unexpected is happening to the Sun’ in year that is supposed to be the peak the sunspot cycle

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2290289/NASA-warns-unexpected-happening-Sun-year-supposed-peak-sunspot-cycle.html

The solar wind’s energy source has been discovered:

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/08mar_solarwind/

And the probe with the data? "After all these years, Wind is still sending us excellent data," says Szabo, the mission’s project scientist, “and it still has 60 years’ worth of fuel left in its tanks.”

And then there is the next one: “Solar Probe Plus, scheduled for launch in 2018, will plunge so far into the sun’s atmosphere that the sun will appear as much as 23 times wider than it does in the skies of Earth. At closest approach, about 7 million km from the sun’s surface, Solar Probe Plus must withstand temperatures greater than 1400 deg. C and survive blasts of radiation at levels not experienced by any previous spacecraft. The mission’s goal is to sample the sun’s plasma and magnetic field at the very source of the solar wind.”

"With Solar Probe Plus we’ll be able to conduct specific tests of the ion cyclotron theory using sensors far more advanced than the ones on the Wind spacecraft," says Kasper. "This should give us a much deeper understanding of the solar wind’s energy source."

Ed

Maunder Minimum approaching

This is a year old but I managed to miss it (possibly by milliseconds) when I was working on it last January.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/25/first-estimate-of-solar-cycle-25-amplitudesmallest-in-over-300-years/

The expected peak sunspot level of the next solar cycle is a monthly average of Wolf Number (SSN) of 7.

Note that since the SSN is calculated to have a minimum value of 11 (10 x number of sunspot groups + number of observed distinct spots), this means that a "typical" peak month will have at least 10 spotless days.

These are definitely Maunder Minimum – Little Ice Age numbers.

Jim

And we continue to learn more about the energy economy of the solar system, while pretending that our current models of earth’s energy exchanges are accurate.

Dr. Pournelle, this is my favorite example of security nonsense.

In November of last year I was going to fly to LA and, among other things, meet a model there for some photography. She’s a big comic book fan and so we planned some shoots around comic book characters and concepts. As part of this, I put a plastic but semi-realistic toy gun in my luggage. While turning it in to the airline, I informed them there was a plastic toy gun in the luggage and they should so inform the TSA so they could confirm it was harmless. Naturally a half hour later I was paged to report to the front and was told that I had to be escorted into the TSA area so they could speak with me about my luggage. Once back there I was informed that I couldn’t fly unless I either got rid of the toy or cleared it so they could see there were no real cartridges in the "weapon." I pointed out that it wouldn’t matter, it was not going to be in the cabin, so I’d have no access, I couldn’t fire it by telekinesis and if the nonexistant cartridges did fire in a plastic chamber before a plastic barrel, they’d break both and have no noticable forward thrust to be dangerous. The guards and the policeman on site agreed with all of this, but it couldn’t be resolved without a set of tools so we could take the thing apart and verify there was nothing in there other than a spring. I’d have thought the x-ray machines could have told them that. All concerned knew it was nonsense, so why were we trapped into that waste of time?

A couple said that they’d be interested in seeing the shots afterwards. Naturally, once I got to LA the model called in sick…Good thing I had other projects planned.

I’m not convinced it is possible to be hard enough on the TSA, much less "piling on."

Graves

Domesticated Dogs

Hi Jerry,

I didn’t think it was "piling on" to ask why TSA picked 2.36 inches, I just wanted to know.

However, if there is going to be a TSA pile-on I’d be happy to make time to join it. Not so much because I have been selected several times for pat-down screenings, but because at the Minneapolis airport the TSO thought it would be funny to begin by explaining, "I’m going to give you a full-body massage," an innuendo that made it even more unpleasant than usual.

On a more worthwhile topic, I always enjoy reading discussions about dogs on Chaos Manor, so I am sending along this news item —

http://news.yahoo.com/dogs-domesticated-33-000-years-ago-skull-suggests-220437160.html

A canine skull found in the Altai Mountains of Siberia is more closely related to modern domestic dogs than to wolves, a new DNA analysis reveals.

The findings could indicate that dogs were domesticated <http://www.livescience.com/20480-dog-domestication-mystery.html> around 33,000 years ago. The point at which wolves went from wild to man’s best friend is hotly contested, though dogs were well-established in human societies by about 10,000 years ago. Dogs and humans were buried together in Germany about 14,000 years ago, a strong hint of domestication, but genetic studies have pinpointed the origin of dog domestication in both China and the Middle East.

–Mike

I fly every week (and opt-out from the body scanners), and am absolutely sure that the recent policy changes make no material impact on airplane security. Someone at the TSA probably made the judgment that if an incident occurs, it would be better if the policy allowed it, than if the security screenings failed (which of course, they do for items like this).

Now that may seem cynical, but I believe it also is designed to protect the traveling public from even more onerous screening requirements. Now if something happens, they just re-introduce the ban. If something had happened with the ban in place, the searches and restrictions would have reached untenable levels due to political and media pressure to ‘do something’.

Not everyone in the TSA is an idiot – many good people are trapped by a flawed system under immense political pressure to have impossible perfect security. Congress shoulders far more blame than the TSA. =

Americans on American soil

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

I’ve seen the stuff going around the blogosphere claiming that the president reserves the right to kill Americans on American soil. Here is, so far as I can tell, the actual position:

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/03/05/eric-holder-yes-in-extraordinary-circumstances-the-president-can-order-americans-killed-on-americans-soil/

"

As members of this administration have previously indicated, the US government has not carried out drone strikes in the United States and has no intention of doing so. As a policy matter moreover, we reject the use of military force where well-established law enforcement authorities in this country provide the best means for incapacitating a terrorist threat. We have a long history of using the criminal justice system to incapacitate individuals located in our country who pose a threat to the United States and its interests abroad. Hundreds of individuals have been arrested and convicted of terrorism-related offenses in our federal courts.

The question you have posed is therefore entirely hypothetical, unlikely to occur, and one we hope no president will ever have to confront. It is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the Constitution and applicable laws of the United States for the President to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States. For example, the president could conceivably have no choice but to authorize the military to use such force if necessary to protect the homeland in the circumstances like a catastrophic attack like the ones suffered on December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001."

So, if I’m reading this right, what he’s saying is that the President can order American fighters to shoot down another hijacked airliner even if it still has American civilians aboard.

That’s not exactly controversial, is it? The President has had the power to act in emergencies since Washington suppressed the Whiskey Rebellion. Congress has the power to not fund his actions (Lincoln didn’t have to ask them to authorize him to reassert the lawful authority of the US in 1861, but he DID have to ask them for money, volunteers, conscription et al) and Congress has the power to impeach him if he exceeds his authority.

So I think this is a tempest in a teapot, where conservatives are trying to find a club to beat the President with. There are sufficient legitimate clubs to beat him with, so there is no need to resort to imaginary ones.

Still, it does raise a question. Assasssination of military targets is legitimate in wartime. I don’t think anyone is going to argue shooting down Yamamoto was any violation of the laws of war. Problem: Our enemies in the war on terror don’t wear uniforms. Often, we are dependent for targeting on the same intelligence agencies which reassured us Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. You can see why I would not find this reassuring.

The other problem is that the war on terror is never going to end. "Terror" is not one single organization that can be brought to terms on the battleship Missouri. It’s a tactic used by many different groups, and it’s one we’re going to have to deal with for the foreseeable future.

Which means war powers and wartime emergencies are not adequate for combatting terror. Terror is now part of the normal world. Which means we need normal peacetime protocols for dealing with it.

Which means we need some way to apply Magna Carta’s principles to drone strikes.

The question I have … and this is serious, not rhetorical .. is how do we do this and maintain a free society? The closest historical analog I can think of is the Protestant hunting of Jesuit priests as infiltrators back in the days of Elizabeth. I’m not convinced that’s necessarily a model we want to follow, but I’m at a loss to think of a better one at this time.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

I would have thought that interception of an enemy admiral in time of war was not controversial; but execution of American citizens without trial certainly is. Ex parte Milligan settled that, or I would have thought so. There is a difference between actions against terrorists, citizens or not, when they are are not subject to arrest and detention; but on American soil while the courts of law still exist and the authorities retain power, the army is not permitted to try and execute citizens even when taken in actions against the United States. Arrest and detain, yes, but not execute. This goes to the heart of the power of the state. We may have an inherent right to pass an ultimate decree, but that has not been done here. The Nazi saboteurs landed on Long Island in WW II were executed (at least some of them were) after trial by a military tribunal, but they were not shot down like dogs on the court house steps.

Inter armes, silent leges; but that is not the case in America in this year of grace 2013.

Chickens

Jerry,

Your post on the gleaming chicken processing plant in Iraq reminded me of the TV series "The Walltons" where Ike Godsey decided to buy all those refrigerators for the folks on Walton Mountain, none of whom had electricity at the time. That brilliant move resulted in John Walton re-mortgaging his home he had just paid off to bail out Ike and Cora Beth. Classic…

Regards,

Gnawbone Jack

Jack Collingsworth

HMS Friday: The Legend of Hugh Williams.

<http://thescuttlefish.com/2010/12/hms-friday-the-legend-of-hugh-williams/>

Roland Dobbins

A very strange story indeed. And of course we want to find things like this…

And within an hour of posting this, I got

Jerry: The Hugh Williams Shipwreck Coincidence tale doesn’t stand up to scrutiny: July 16, 2012

<http://open.salon.com/blog/rick_spilman/2012/07/16/the_unsinkable_hugh_williams_truth_behind_the_legend>

LTM

which I suspected from the start; but people want to believe stories like this. That includes me.  Ah well.

TSA exposé…

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/confessions_of_tsa_agent_we_re_bunch_OhxHeGd0RR9UVGzfypjnLO

Charles Brumbelow

Frack the Chinese

Dear Jerry –

From http://www.cnbc.com/id/100531212?__source=xfinity|mod&ticket=ST-100688-wOANG9T1fBrrjnhpFfM7pb52ESm2kQELAvA-20&rememberMe=null

"With oil production at a twenty year high and predictions of a manufacturing renaissance for the U.S. economy, one of the world’s largest investment banks has detailed how the "shale revolution" will negatively affect emerging markets such as China."

If true, it’s still a ways off, but it’s an interesting projection.

As for the title, I just couldn’t help myself. No biscuit for me.

Regards,

Jim Martin

Energy is the key ‘element’ in modern world history.

Sowell: ‘And public alarm is what can get budget cuts restored.’

<http://washingtonexaminer.com/will-obama-turn-the-united-states-into-the-worlds-largest-banana-republic/article/2523217>

Roland Dobbins

‘Like Martel’s campaigns before them, the Crusades were defensive actions designed to stave off Muslim aggression.’

<http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/03/we_might_be_muslim_today_if.html>

Roland Dobbins

The siege of Vienna in 1529 was a major turning point in history. It could have gone the other way. Fletcher Pratt calls it “The failure to compete the crescent,” and makes it one of the key battles that changed history. Another was Las Navas de Teloso, in 1212. Those not familiar with Pratt’s Battles That Changed History are unfortunate; it is one of the best summary histories of Western Civilization that I know of.

Lengthy but interesting…

…report considering psychiatric medicines and school violence. Includes a number of references to specific situations.

http://www.fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/psychiatric-meds-prescription-for-murder/37091/

Charles Brumbelow

Army tuition assistance suspended

To they whom joined for the college money:

<.>

The Army announced Friday it is suspending its tuition assistance program for soldiers newly enrolling in classes due to sequestration and other budgetary pressures.

“This suspension is necessary given the significant budget execution challenges caused by the combined effects of a possible year-long continuing resolution and sequestration,” Paul Prince, an army personnel spokesman at the Pentagon, wrote in an email to Stars and Stripes. “The Army understands the impacts of this action and will re-evaluate should the budgetary situation improve.”

The Army’s announcement follows a similar move by the Marine Corps.

The Army’s tuition assistance program was available for troops to complete a high school diploma, certificate program or college or master’s degree. Under the program, the Army paid 100 percent of the tuition and authorized fees charged by a school up to established limits of $250 per semester hour or credit hour or up to $4,500 per fiscal year.

</>

http://www.stripes.com/news/army-suspends-tuition-assistance-program-for-troops-1.210999

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Of course one could argue that given the economy we do not need more incentives to fill a volunteer military – at least in the army. Career navy enlisted may be a bit harder to come by. It depends…

Sunstone.

<http://www.gadling.com/2013/03/07/fabled-sunstone-discovered-in-english-shipwreck/>

Roland Dobbins

Interesting UAV drone RPA article

Jerry,

This article is from last year and it focuses more on RAF Reaper flying than USAF, but it’s a pretty good read and given the political discussion of the week, it’s timely.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/9552547/The-air-force-men-who-fly-drones-in-Afghanistan-by-remote-control.html

Sean

– near-term reliable fusion

Jerry,

I haven’t seen this in your blog, and think it is a reliable competent group (skunk works) that seems to be on to a better way to get to fusion affordably in the near term.

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-02/fusion-power-could-happen-sooner-you-think

r/Spike

One can hope, but I do not think we are much closer to economically useful fusion energy than we were thirty years ago.

Holocaust Memorial Museum is not on the National Mall

Jerry:

It has been many years since I visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, but I don’t remember it being on the National Mall. Rather it is on 14th Street south of Independence Avenue, which is the southern boundary of the Mall in that area as I read Google Maps (see below) and the Wikipedia article about the Mall. That article describes the Museum as a nearby attraction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Mall

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Mall> Emacs!

Best regards,

–Harry M.

Indeed. I have visited the Holocaust museum but long enough ago that my memories are confused on the location.

In your March 6, 2013 mail you reprinted an e-mail from someone that includes what purports to be a long article published in a Spanish newspaper in 2008 by one Sebastian Villar Rodriguez.

One thing that should make you immediately suspicious is that there is no source given for the article despite the claim of an exact date of publication. Almost always claims of this type are false in my experience.

The simplest search will pull up tons of claims regarding this article over the past decade.

This one may or may not be the original from 2004. I don’t remember enough Spanish from high school (it was a long time ago) to say much about it.

http://www.gentiuno.com/articulo.asp?articulo=1865

I have not found any earlier posts about it.

The e-mail you posted includes other statements that have circulated in other e-mails for some years.

Researching the truth and original sources for the myriad claims are left as an exercise for the reader (as they used to tell us in school.)

Best regards,

–Harry M.

The lists of accomplishments have circulated for many years because so far as I know they are true. It may well be that the source is not; I found the subject matter worth thinking about. Since I do not know who Sebastian Villar Rodriguez is I wouldn’t regard him as an authority to begin with. Sometime it is not the source but the subject matter that I find worth contemplating.

And do note that I do not necessarily approve every statement made in mail. I publish what I think is owrth thinking about, or is amusing, or which just struck my fancy at the time. And I very much invite people to do their own research.