Monthly Archives: May 2013

View 775 Tuesday, May 21, 2013

As Oklahoma digs out from under the most recent tornado, the Climate Change/Global Warming discussions heat up. Most aren’t discussions, of course; they tend to be “proof by repeated assertion”, and this applies to both sides. Weather observers will state that the Earth hasn’t been warming for the past few years; defenders of the Global Warming hypothesis will say, rightly, that a decade long cooling trend in the midst of centuries-long warming trends is to be expected, just as there were probably decade long periods of warming during the cooling between 1300 and 1800, and even during the most intensely cold period called the Little Ice Age (centered around 1500).

The result is a lot of shouting and considerable data massaging, but not many high confidence conclusions. Of course some things remain obvious. The Earth has been both warmer and colder than the present era during historical times. We can only estimate how much warmer and colder, in part because obtaining a single figure of merit to represent the annual temperature of the entire Earth is exceedingly difficult to do, and agreeing to a definition is even more so.

What we can be sure of is that during the Medieval Warm – Viking times – there were dairy farms in Greenland, grape vineyards in Scotland, longer growing seasons in Europe and in China, longer periods between the Spring Melt and the Winter Freeze of lakes, ponds, and brackish canals (many of which didn’t freeze at all), and generally indications of a noticeably warmer climate in the Northern Hemisphere; and archeologists are now discovering similar signs in South America.

We can also be certain that the Earth has been colder during historical times. In December 1776 the Hudson froze with ice thick enough to allow the guns captured by Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga (“in the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress”) to be dragged across the frozen Hudson to George Washington in Haarlem Heights, and the Thames had ice thick enough to support market stalls as late as 1835. Over the 19^th Century the climate continued to warm, and in 1896 Arrhenius estimated that cutting the CO2 in the atmosphere by 50% would probably produce a new Ice Age complete with kilometer thick glaciers in Scandinavia, which doubling the CO2 would warm the Earth by 5 or 6 degrees C. Computer models have made many other estimates since that time, but actual observations don’t fit the data observed much better, in part because CO2 isn’t really a primary warming gas; it’s the forcing effect (more water vapor in warmer air) that counts. No current computer model can take the input data from, say, 1900, and show climate trends matching the actual observed data of that period.

CO2 levels in 1800 were about 280 ppm. In 1900 they were about 300 parts per million. Current levels are about 400. The error rates are in the order of 10% for the earliest estimates, and about 3% now.

In all the controversy about Warming, it is important to note that (1) the Earth has been warming since about 1800, and (2) whether or not there is “excess” warming due to the surge in CO2 injected by the Industrial Revolution, the discussion concerns no more than about one half of one degree C in the “annual average temperature” of the Earth, which is an exceedingly complex number to come by: getting an 0.1 degree C accuracy number from thousands of measures themselves not accurate to more than 0.5 degree and some (older sea temperatures taken by hand with mercury thermometers in a bucket of water drawn from the sea) perhaps even less accurate.

What can we conclude here? CO2 levels rise with temperature (warmer seas hold less dissolved CO2) and that could have a positive feedback effect. Rising temperatures mean more heat, which probably mean larger storms – the energy has to go somewhere – meaning more roiling of the seas, which could lead to more CO2 being dissolved into the sea. We certainly can’t ignore rising CO2 levels forever; it would be prudent to invest in technology for reducing CO2 levels. (Grown lots of trees is one way of course. There are others.) But the connection between Climate Change and the Oklahoma storms is tenuous, and calls for increases in carbon taxes (http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/21/boxer-uses-okla-tornado-to-push-carbon-tax/) are not supported by any real science. The issue needs discussion, but the remedies if any are not agreed on.

For those who don’t usually read the Wall Street Journal editorial page, today there is a contribution well worth your time. “A Journalist Co_Conspirator” http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324102604578495253824175498.html begins by saying

Ok, we’ve learned our lesson. Last week we tried to give the Obama Administration the benefit of the doubt over its far-reaching secret subpoenas to the Associated Press, and now we learn that was the least of its offenses against a free press. No attempt to be generous to this crowd goes unpunished.

The latest news, disclosed by the Washington Post on Monday, is that the Justice Department targeted a Fox News reporter as a potential "co-conspirator" in a leak probe. The feds have charged intelligence analyst Stephen Jin-Woo Kim with disclosing classified information to Fox reporter James Rosen. That’s not a surprise considering that this Administration has prosecuted more national-security cases than any in recent history.

The shock is that as part of its probe the Administration sought and obtained a warrant to search Mr. Rosen’s personal email account. And it justified such a sweeping secret search by telling the judge that Mr. Rosen was part of the conspiracy merely because he acted like a journalist.

In a May 2010 affidavit in support of obtaining the Gmail search warrant, FBI agent Reginald Reyes declared that "there is probable cause to believe that the Reporter has committed or is committing a violation" of the Espionage Act of 1917 "as an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator." The Reporter here is Mr. Rosen.

And what evidence is there to believe that Mr. Rosen is part of a spy ring? Well, declares Mr. Reyes, the reporter published a story in June 2009 saying that the U.S. knew that North Korea planned to respond to looming U.N. sanctions with another nuclear test. That U.S. knowledge was classified. But the feds almost never prosecute a journalist for disclosing classified information, not least because reporters can’t be sure what’s classified and what isn’t.

Of course they weren’t looking for evidence to prosecute Mr. Rosen. They got  what they wanted: a fishing expedition through Mr. Rosen’s personal email. They found some. He was looking for evidence to "expose muddle-headed policy when we see it—or force the administration’s hand to go in the right direction, if possible."

The Journal concludes

On the evidence of five years in office that isn’t possible, but trying isn’t a criminal motive. And if working with a source who uses an alias is now a crime, we’ve come a long way from the celebration of Bob Woodward and "Deep Throat."

Indeed.

At what point will North Korea have the capability to destroy America as we know it?  I ask that seriously. From everything I have studied about EMP effects, it would not take more than one or two nuclear explosions at about 90 miles altitude above the US to cause serious disruption of our electrical grid, which would have cascading effects on our civilization. For a worst case scenario see Lloyd Tackitt’s A Distant Eden http://www.amazon.com/A-Distant-Eden-ebook/dp/B007ODDGUC, which is a sort of cross between a novel and an introduction to modern survivalism. It’s well written and quite readable.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has more on the subject of North Korea’s capabilities. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324482504578455451910706908.html?mod=googlenews_wsj The article is by James Woolsey, former CIA Director under Clinton (I can testify that Newt Gingrich thought highly of him) and Peter Fry, who advised Congress on EMP. Read it for details; the conclusion is that it won’t be long before North Korea can do it do us.  It’s a frightening scenario.  Yes, we could kill them back. But I grew up in a MAD – Mutual Assured Destruction – deterrence world, and one reason I worked hard for strategic defense was that I’d rather intercept missiles than avenge them. The current administration has no defense against a FOBS – Fractional Orbital Ballistic missile System – coming from the South Pole.  Of course many countries, China and the USSR for that matter France and England – have the ability to mount an Enhanced Radiation weapon and launch it southward into a polar orbit, and detonate it when it is in position over the United States (which it inevitably will be if not on the first orbit then several orbits later). Of course advanced nations have good reason not to risk the devastation they would provoke, and their leaders are not stark raving mad.  We assume that the leadership of North Korea is crazy like a fox, not stark raving mad. MAD preserved us during the Cold War, but it was an ugly policy, and many of us recommended SDI as the alternative. 

The phrase “would it not be better to intercept those missiles than to avenge them?” came from Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars speech; it was inserted into our Council Report by the editor after it was proposed by Jim Baen, and apparently Mr. Reagan chose to use it in his speech. (Jim Baen was fond of saying “I preen.”) It remains true enough. To fully shield the US against a rain of ICBM’s is technically very difficult, but to defend against a smaller attack certainly is possible with current technology. Herman Kahn discussed this in the scenario “The Mad General with a Missile”. Of course we don’t do much thinking about the unthinkable now. Perhaps we should do so again. Apparently the current President does not.

On Apple, which pays $6 billion a year in income tax, leaving overseas profits overseas (which is quite legal):

"Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as
possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the
treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one’s taxes.
Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister
in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone
does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any
public duty to pay more than the law demands."

Learned Hand

I would think that both correct and definitive.

The food machine for astronauts

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/nasa-awards-grant-3d-food-printer-could-end-194050661.html

End world hunger with food printing machines…

View 774 Friday, May 17, 2013

E-book sales are up 43%, but that’s still a ‘slowdown’

After three years of triple-digit increases, the number of e-books sold last year grew by only 43%.

And that’s enough of a difference in the annual growth rate to have publishers talking about an e-book "slowdown," even as digital books remain the fastest-growing part of the market. They now account for about 20% of all book sales reported by publishers.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2013/05/15/e-book-sales/2159117/

Only 43% growth, and that’s a slowdown. You may interpret that any way you wish. I think it’s print publisher spin. In another conference science fact writer Jeff Hecht says

As with so much other reporting about the ebook market, you have to

wonder how they’re defining "books" and "the market", especially when

they are trying to do statistics without good numbers on paperbacks. Are

they counting textbooks, professional books, children’s books, and so

on? Are they counting the sales of ebooks in the 10,000- to 30,000 word

format, which essentially are not published in paper format?

Sales growth has to slow down as ebooks gain share of market — it’s a

lot easier to double market share when you start at 1% than when you

start at 20%. I’m starting to hear of people who have gone back to paper

after buying or being given an ereader.

My own experience is that backlist sales in eBook format are growing a lot less slowly than 40%, but they are growing; backlists have become an important part of an author’s income, and almost all backlist sales are in eBook format now. Obviously used print book sales bring to income to an author.

A discussion in another conference brought this to my attention. Charles Murray, one sociologist I have great respect for, has published in National Review On Line an important essay on the decline of rational discussion, along with an appeal to all readers to make an effort to do more of it. He reminds us of the important American intellectual tradition of defending the right to say the unpopular, as portrayed in great films such as Inherit the Wind, and how the American Civil Liberties Union defended the right of the Nazi Party to march through a Jewish section of Chicago, and he says:

Few remnants of those American themes survive. We too seldom engage our adversaries’ arguments in good faith. Often, we don’t even bother to find out what they are, attacking instead what we want them to be. When we don’t like what someone else thinks, we troll the Internet relentlessly until we find something with which to destroy that person professionally or personally — one is as good as the other. Hollywood still does films about lonely voices standing up against evil corporations or racist sheriffs, but never about lonely voices standing up against intellectual orthodoxy.

I’m sick of it. I also have no idea how to fix it. But we can light candles. Here is what I undertake to do, and I invite you to join me: Look for opportunities to praise people with whom you disagree but who have made an argument that deserves to be taken seriously. Look for opportunities to criticize allies who have used crimethink tactics against your adversaries. Identify yourself not just with those who agree with you, but with all those who stand for something and play fair.

In Defense of Jason Richwine
His resignation is emblematic of a corruption that has spread throughout American intellectual discourse.

By Charles Murray

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/348323/defense-jason-richwine/page/0/1

He does this in defense of Jason Richwine in a matter of considerable concern that we will address another time; it’s part of the long time controversy about IQ, race, Nature and Nurture, and other such complicated matters, and that’s all important and must be discussed; but Murray’s appeal hit me just as I had finished reading a defense of the Cincinnati IRS agents involved in the tax exemption application scandal. We’ll get to that in the next section.

Yesterday’s Los Angeles Times had story “Scandal born of vague IRS laws” by Matea Gold that present the IRS side of the tax scandal. There had been an enormous increase in applications for tax exempt status of semi-political organizations, and there had never been any rules established for how to deal with them.

At the heart of the issue is the murky role occupied by nonprofit "social welfare" organizations, set up under Section 501(c)4 of the tax code, which are allowed under IRS regulations to engage in a certain amount of campaign activity, as long as politics is not their "primary" purpose. The groups pay no tax on the money they bring in. They can accept unlimited donations and, unlike political committees, can keep their contributors secret.

That status became especially valuable three years ago with the Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case, which lifted the ban on direct campaign spending by corporations, including many nonprofit groups. The ruling triggered the boost of applicants to the IRS.

The stepped-up role of tax-exempt groups in politics has stymied the Federal Election Commission, which has deadlocked on questions about how much disclosure is required of advocacy organizations that engage in elections.

That has left much of their regulation in the hands of the IRS, which has never clearly defined how much political activity is allowed for social welfare organizations.

Faced with hundreds of applications, the civil service bureaucrats sought to find a formula to winnow out the easy cases with were unambiguously within the intent of the law, and the political organizations seeking tax exempt status for what were, in effect, political advocates. They came up with a formula, “tea party” which identified the political advocates, and those got set aside, and

The problem with this is that while every word is true, the words “social responsibility” or “progressive” would generally get the same results, and those weren’t used. It wasn’t that there were rules applied that made no sense: they made all too much sense in a time sensitive situation. I’m perfectly willing to listen to the IRS arguments but I don’t have to believe them. Oh, I can believe there are those who never thought about “social responsibility” advocates as political advocates. But that is yet another argument.

What needs debating is just how much tax exemption there ought to be for political advocates?

View 774 Thursday, May 16, 2013

Interesting. President Obama today told the press that he had never heard of the Treasury Inspector General report on IRS involvement in selective examinations of tax exempt status applications, given green light treatment to those professing “progressive” or “Social responsibility” goals, but putting primary hampers on those who mentioned “swollen government”, “too big government”, “tea party” and other conservative notions. http://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2013reports/201310053fr.pdf

The report wasn’t issued until May 14, but early copies were circulated well before that, and surely something of that importance – its public appearance caused the forced resignation of the Acting Director of the IRS – would have been known to any competent political advisors, and surely one of them would have leaked the information to the candidate. I understand the impetus to keep certain campaign knowledge from the candidate, and every political manager must deal with it: What the bosses don’t know can’t hurt them, they can deny it with good conscience. I don’t suppose there has ever been a political campaign without some such incidents. But once the campaign is over, and particularly when word of the shenanigan gets out to investigative reporters, there’s always a frantic scramble to cover things up, and at some point the top campaign managers must be told, and one of them has to tell the politician. The boss is, after all, the boss.

Now there was an Iron Law of Bureaucracy incentive in spades with big casino here: enemies of Big Government are by definition personal enemies of IRS bureaucrats. Pournelle’s Iron Law states that in every bureaucracy there will be two major factions, one dedicated to the goals for which the organization was formed (class room teachers who want the kids to learn as an easy example) and the other faction dedicated to the organization itself (teacher’s union executives); and the second faction always gains control of the organization. This is true of every bureaucracy, including the IRS, the FBI, the AFL-CIO, the General Services Administration, NASA, your local police force, your local fire department, the local PTA, and almost anything else you can think of, and if you think of a bureaucracy that doesn’t fit, wait a bit. So to any IRS bureaucrat organizations that say that the government is too big will be the enemy, and while Type One bureaucrats would resist the temptation to get out the red tape, Type Two bureaucrats would order a barrel full with some gusto.

Thus it’s hardly astonishing that people who want to control the growth of government would receive extra scrutiny from the IRS career civil servants. It’s even less astonishing that the political campaign workers (alas, with the gutting of the Hatch Act there is now considerable overlap) would simply smile and say nothing when they observed this sort of thing. But I would find it astonishing if no word of this reached the higher ranks of the President’s political campaign management within a year or more. Someone in the White House staff knew. The question is, how high up did the knowledge go? There is no evidence that Nixon knew everything or even very much about the machinations of Dean, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Colson in their “plumber squad” operations; the point is that he should have. He should have had in his top entourage at least one who would tell him what was being done in his name. Every CEO needs information sources other than the chain of command. Of course this President has little experience at management at any level.

I am not involved in breaking news stories, but as the facts become clear it’s important to understand them; there is more than politics involved here.

The original Hatch Act (upheld more than once by the Supreme Court) forbade civil service employees from engaging in political activities, and was usually interpreted as forbidding government workers who were “Hatched” from even being asked for political donations by anyone else. Of course the original theory of a civil services was to divorce it from politics while retaining responsibility to the public. That is a very narrow path to follow: if the public doesn’t like what a bureaucracy is doing, how can that be changed? The answer is supposed to be to change the political control, but if the bureaucrats are protected from political management stalemate takes place. This is easily observed in a great many places at all levels of government. An example is our usual example of a needless government activity, Department of Agriculture Inspectors who attend stage magic presentations to be sure that if the magician uses a rabbit in the performance, he has a Federal license to do so. There is probably no political appointee in the Department of Agriculture or anywhere else in the Federal Government who would defend this as a necessary activity during times of deficit financing; but the practice has continued for years, and likely will continue forever because there is no simple mechanism for ending it.

The Hatch Act worked fairly well for decades. The theory was that the civil service protections were strong, and accepting them required the civil servant to essentially give up political activity: you’re paid to implement policies, not to advocate for them. For younger readers this may seem like an astonishing statement, but that used to be the case, and every campaign manager knew it and acted accordingly.

Perhaps restoring the Hatch Act to its original intent and even strengthening it is order.

It’s time for lunch. Here’s something else to think about.

SUBJ: More on the the FBI’s Martha Stewart tactic

http://reason.com/blog/2013/05/14/fbi-well-decide-when-you-are-lying-to-us

Another example of the Iron Law at work. Most FBI special agents are precisely what they appear to be and what most of us grew up to expect of G-men; but the Iron Law continues to move in favor of gathering more power.

Cannibalism in Syria

Just in case anyone in your audience had any illusions about the war there.

http://world.time.com/2013/05/14/we-will-slaughter-all-of-them-an-interview-with-the-man-behind-the-syrian-atrocity-video/

http://world.time.com/2013/05/12/atrocities-will-be-televised-they-syrian-war-takes-a-turn-for-the-worse/

Of course, before one judges the man too harshly one must consider this fact about his victim:

"In an interview conducted via Skype in the early hours of May 14, al-Hamad explained to TIME what caused him to cut out the soldier’s organs: “We opened his cell phone, and I found a clip of a woman and her two daughters fully naked and he was humiliating them, and sticking a stick here and there.”

The upshot is that it appears that humans on both sides have been made into monsters by the war. And that raises a problem: When this orgy of killing, murder, and cannibalism finally subsides, the people who fought in this won’t instantly turn into civilized saints and go back to pumping gas or selling cars. No, I suspect that when the war in Syria is over the barbarized winners will make trouble elsewhere in the middle east as well. At this point I suspect it doesn’t matter who wins — whatever comes out is going to be horrible.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

It was, of course, inevitable.  George Washington warned us against getting involved in the territorial disputes of Europe, and from entering into entangling alliances. Our strategy of Containment required that we have alliances and that we become involved in territorial disputes; if you are going to contain communism, you have to contain it, and sometimes that involves sending Americans to Korea and Viet Nam. The problem with containment is that it is a form of attrition, and strategies of attrition work much better against democracies than against one-party systems. The rulers of a one-party system don’t feel the effects so very much, while the costs are shared in a democracy. After 1980 the US added a strategy of technology to accompany Containment, and it all worked extraordinarily well: in 1986 there was still evidence that we were headed for a CoDominium with the USSR surviving well into the 21st Century, but that didn’t happen. Once the Soviets understood that we would not disarm ourselves with “Arms Control” but were dedicated to neutralizing their most expensive weapons, things rapidly came apart over there. Arthur Koestler had long before said that a sufficient condition for the collapse of a totalitarian state would be the free exchange of ideas within it.  That might have been an overstatement but it contained much truth, and the small computer revolution faced the Soviet leadership with an impossible dilemma: forfeit the technology race, which was clearly military suicide (clear after the Falkland Islands War) or open up the society to free discussion. Gorbachev tried Glasnost while maintaining communism, the Old Guard tried to eject him by force, and the short insurrection that followed ended the USSR as such. The Seventy Years War aka the Cold War was ended.

Alas, the US had become addicted to projecting power overseas. The USSR, having won (by default when the US withdrew after Watergate) Viet Nam tried for Afghanistan; the result of that action was instructive to those who study war. It was not instructive to the leaders of the United States, who decided to exert the power of this Republic to restore the “legitimate” government of Kuwait after this artificial Kingdom was seized by Saddam Hussein. Then after 9/11 we intervened again into Middle Eastern affairs.  Quick Victory in Afghanistan was followed by an inane decade of “nation building”.  The Baathists were turned out in Iraq but we could find no one to take over, and the artificial of Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish Nationalists broke into pieces, with barbarism taking over in much of the area.

There have been other events in the Middle East, and US attempts to exert power in order to preserve civilization in them. They have not been notably successful. We projected power into the Balkans with the less than favorable results. A side result was to earn the thorough dislike of the Russians whose long history of dedication to Slavic interests seems to have escaped the geniuses of the State Department. We intervened in Egypt and in Libya. In all cases we didn’t do much: the lesson of Iraq was that we couldn’t afford to exert the power of the republic. The cost was too high. We do not have a generation of soldiers to send overseas.  But of course that was predictable.

Stephen Vincent Benet was a pacifist. His pacifism was shaken by Hitler and World War II, and he wrote in intellectual defense of opposing Germany. He did not live to see the peace after the war.

His view was that war never led to good results. This is not true, and he realized it before he died, but his vision of the consequences of war was never one of rosy optimism. There may be reasons to seek out and destroy dragons, but such actions have consequences. Sometimes it no longer matters much who wins.  Here is Benet on war, published in 1935.

Nightmare With Angels

An angel came to me and stood by my bedside,
Remarking in a professional-historical-economic and  irritated voice,
"If the Romans had only invented a decent explosion-engine!
Not even the best, not even a Ford V-8
But, say, a Model-T or even an early Napier,
They’d have built good enough roads for it (they knew how to build roads)
From Cape Wrath to Cape St. Vincent, Susa, Babylon and Moscow.
And the motorized legions never would have fallen,
And Peace, in the shape of a giant eagle, would brood over the entire Western World!"

He changed his expression, looking now like a combination of
Gilbert Murray, Hilaire Belloc,
and a dozen other scientists, writers,  and prophets,
And continued, in angelic tones,
"If the Greeks had known how to cooperate, if there’d never  been a Reformation,
If Sparta had not been Sparta, and the Church had been the Church  of the saints,
The Argive peace like a free-blooming olive-tree, the peace of Christ (who loved peace)
like a great, beautiful vine enwrapping the spinning earth!

Take it nearer home," he said.
Take these Mayans and their star-clocks, their carvings and their  great cities.
Who sacked them out of their cities, drowned the cities with a   green jungle?
A plague? A change of climate? A queer migration?
Certainly they were skillful, certainly they created.
And in Tenochtitlan, the dark obsidian knife and the smoking heart on 
  the stone but a fair city,
And the Incas had it worked out beautifully til Pizarro smashed them.
The collectivist state was there, and the ladies very agreeable.
They lacked steel, alphabet, and gunpowder
  and they had to get  married when the government said so.
They also lacked unemployment and overproduction.
For that matter," he said, "take the Cro-Magnons,
The fellows with the big skills, the handsome folk, the excellent
  scribers of mammoths,
Physical gods and yet with sensitive brain (they drew the fine, running reindeer).
What stopped them? What kept us all from being Apollos and Aphrodites
Only with a new taste to the nectar,
The laughing gods, not the cruel, the gods of song, not of war?
Supposing Aurelius, Confucious, Napoleon, Plato, Gautama, Alexander –
Just to name half a dozen –
Had ever realized and stabilized the full dream?
How long, O Lord God in the highest? How long, what now, perturbed spirit?"

He turned blue at the wingtips and disappeared as another angel approached me.
This one was quietly but appropriately dressed in cellophane, synthetic rubber and stainless steel,
But his mask was the blind mask of Ares, snouted for gasmasks.
He was neither soldier, sailor, farmer, dictator, nor munitions-manufacturer.
Nor did he have much conversation, except to say,
"You will not be saved by General Motors or the prefabricated house.
You will not be saved by dialectic materialism or the Lambeth Conference.
You will not be saved by Vitamin D or the expanding universe.
In Fact, you will not be saved."
In his hand was a woven, wire basket, full of seeds, small metallic and shining like the seeds of portulaca;
Where he sowed them, the green vine withered, and the smoke and armies sprang up.

Stephen Vincent Benet

As I expect all of you know, I am no pacifist; but I am a student of history. And when we send our armies out to remake the world, I cannot help but be reminded of Ortega y Gasset, and his tale of the story of Napoleon reviewing his troops. “See my soldiers, how splendid, how the light glistens on their bayonets.”  To which Talleyrand replied, “Sire you can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it.” Once the bayonets have destroyed the firm seat, restoring a new one may be more difficult than supposed. There was a good reason for John Quincy Adams to say that America is the friend of liberty everywhere but the guardian only of our own. He understood that he who defends everything defends nothing, and those who undertake to defend the rights of all the people in the world may end by finding the coast was their own liberty. We can break things and kill people. Rebuilding is a more difficult job, and we learned the wrong lesson from our accomplishments with Germany and Japan after World War Two. We cannot rescue everyone and when we find what the cost has been, who rescues us? It is no small thing to be a free society and defend that freedom. The thing about defending our own liberty is that it generally increases our power. When we go out to slay foreign dragons, the cost can be far greater than we think – and we may not be the ones who pay it.

Mike Flynn calls my attention to this:

New system could predict solar flares, give advance warning

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Researchers may have discovered a new method to predict solar flares more than a day before they occur, providing advance warning to help protect satellites, power grids and astronauts from potentially dangerous radiation.

The system works by measuring differences in gamma radiation emitted when atoms in radioactive elements "decay," or lose energy. This rate of decay is widely believed to be constant, but recent findings challenge that long-accepted rule.

The new detection technique is based on a hypothesis that radioactive decay rates are influenced by solar activity, possibly streams of subatomic particles called solar neutrinos. This influence can wax and wane due to seasonal changes in the Earth’s distance from the sun and also during solar flares, according to the hypothesis, which is supported with data published in a dozen research papers since it was proposed in 2006, said Ephraim Fischbach, a Purdue University professor of physics.

http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2012/Q3/new-system-could-predict-solar-flares,-give-advance-warning.html

Of course the notion of variable decay rates in radioactive substances is startling to those of us brought up on the notion that it is invariable. So we have neutrinos, which no one can find, changing the decay rates that can’t be changed; but if all that works we may be able to have some advance warning of events that may destroy our civilization. A brave new world.

And to end the day on a cheerful note, our galaxy won’t collide with Andromeda for about a billion years. But here’s the picture of the day.

Galaxy Collisions: Simulation vs Observations, 

Jerry

APOD: 2013 May 14 – Galaxy Collisions: Simulation vs Observations:

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130514.html

It is very cool.

Ed