Monthly Archives: February 2015

View from Chaos Manor, Wednesday, February 04, 2015

Thursday, February 4, 2015

Spent another day with Niven and Barnes, and we made great progress on the next book in the Avalon/Beowulf’s children series. We could not go out to lunch because we had to wait for Terminex to send out a man to remove the dead rat under the stairs: something I used to do but can’t do now, alas. Steve Barnes offered to do it, but we had already scheduled the man. I suppose we could have gone to lunch without Roberta, but that hardly seemed fair.

So we ordered pizza and salad and kept on working, resulting in many notes, several ideas for new aliens – Legacy of Heorot and the sequel Beowulf’s Children are about colonizing an extraterrestrial planet without faster than light drives, thus with limited resources and no possibility of help – and much more, but in the process I exhausted myself and didn’t get this done by Wednesday. So it goes.

Of course that phrase was used by Vonnegut and we dealt with it in Inferno, possibly a bit unfairly. Anyone who can write Harrison Bergeron was a prophetic and talented. https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Bergeron_djvu.txt or Google for better formatted text; I don’t know where you can buy it.

Anyway, I’ll try to catch up today. Start with Internet Equality, a scheme to make a few regulators very powerful and a few people rich while restricting competition.

More on Stephen Hillard, the Investor Behind Dish Network’s Spectrum Win     (journal)

• By
• Shalini Ramachandran
• •

Dish Network Corp.DISH -0.92% scored a $3.3 billion discount on spectrum at a government airwaves auction with the help of a little-known Texas investor: Stephen Hillard. The former jailhouse teacher and fantasy author played a key role in assembling the team that backed Dish’s bid, drawing on his extensive connections with Alaskan Native American groups.

Here’s more on the man who made wireless-auction magic happen:

Middle Class to Millionaire: Mr. Hillard was born in Dallas and grew up in a middle-class family in Grand Junction, Colo. He spent his summers herding sheep and trimming orchards with his grandparents in Hotchkiss. Soon after earning a law degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1976, Mr. Hillard made a spur-of-the-moment decision to move to Alaska, where he began advising Native corporations on business dealings. Eventually, he became a top executive at one of them, Cook Inlet Region Inc. And now, he runs a private-equity firm, Council Tree.

From The Wall Street Journal:

By

Kelly Ayotte And

Ajit Pai

Feb. 4, 2015 7:14 p.m. ET

Should the federal government hand out more than $3 billion from American taxpayers to a Fortune 500 company as part of a program to help small and disadvantaged businesses compete with large corporations? Of course not, but it’s about to happen.

First, some background. The Federal Communications Commission is in charge of auctioning a public asset—the nation’s wireless spectrum—for private-sector use. Last week the FCC finished auctioning spectrum for nearly $45 billion. This spectrum will now be used to deliver high-speed Internet access on mobile devices.

While most bidders put their own money on the line, some of the largest companies in the auction were using billions of taxpayer dollars. How is that possible?

The answer is the FCC’s “designated entity” program. In 1993 Congress directed the FCC to give small businesses an opportunity to compete in spectrum auctions against large corporations by providing the small companies with taxpayer-funded bidding credits. The program was supposed to work like this: A small business that lacked pockets deep enough to outbid large, established corporations would get a taxpayer-funded boost to its bid. So if a small business bid, say, $100 for a license, it would pay $75 and a federal subsidy would cover the remaining $25. It was a well-intentioned program to help the Davids compete with Goliaths.

To nobody’s surprise, the biggest competitors have figured out a way to game the system. Industry giants are claiming those taxpayer-funded discounts for themselves and using them to outbid smaller, would-be competitors.

In the latest auction, $13.3 billion worth of spectrum may soon be awarded to two companies in which Dish Network —a company with almost $14 billion in annual revenue—has an 85% interest. But those Dish-owned entities aren’t planning on paying full freight. They are counting on American taxpayers to kick in over $3 billion for their auction spending, each having sought “designated entity” status, and hence discounts, from the FCC. Dish isn’t the only beneficiary of this loophole.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/kelly-ayotte-and-ajit-pai-ending-welfare-for-telecom-giants-1423095287

Also from the Wall Street Journal:

Musicians and Kardashians may claim they can break the Internet by posting alluring photographs, but they have nothing on Tom Wheeler.

The Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission unveiled on Wednesday a plan to demolish a policy that for two decades has allowed the Internet to become the jewel of world-wide communication and commerce. His new “Open Internet” plan represents a monumental shift from open markets in favor of government control. It is a grave threat to American innovation.

***

In a piece for Wired magazine, Mr. Wheeler announced that this week he will circulate to his fellow commissioners a plan to enact what President Obama demanded in November: century-old telephone regulation for today’s broadband communications companies.

“This proposal is rooted in long-standing regulatory principles,” wrote Mr. Wheeler, and he’s right. The game plan is to apply to competitive digital networks rules originally written for monopoly railroads in the 1800’s. But don’t worry, this “common carrier” regulatory structure was modernized for telephones as recently as the summer of 1934 when Franklin Roosevelt signed the Communications Act.

The Wheeler cover story is that such antiquated rules are necessary to provide “net neutrality,” the concept that all Internet traffic should be treated equally and not blocked from reaching consumers—in other words, to allow the Internet to function pretty much as it does now.

But even if net neutrality were threatened, the Federal Trade Commission already has authority to punish companies that discriminate against consumers, and Congressional Republicans have already expressed their willingness to enact a law preventing the specific abuses Mr. Wheeler claims he wants to prevent. In any case, even the old telephone regs don’t treat all customers equally—they allow heavy-volume customers to get a better deal than mom and pop.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/washington-conquers-the-internet-1423095660

It ain’t broke but it might break, so let us have the government fix it now, at great cost, creating much corruption and crony capitalism.

Net neutrality means that I must pay for the net access, which I use a couple of hours a day, exactly as much as the kid down the street who downloads porn and bit torrents 24 hours a day; which is to say I must subsidize his activities. And no one can offer me a lower price for what I use than they offer him for his massive use. That is known as fairness.

Note that the “auction” was won with government money. And that’s now, when in theory we don’t regulate these things.  Another column in the Journal sums up nicely the policy which drives the move to “Net Neutrality” and other “infrastructure” on the Federal level.

An Empire of Taxation

The government role in Obama’s budget looks like something last seen in 17th century Europe.

By

Daniel Henninger

Feb. 4, 2015 7:16 p.m. ET

The president’s annual budget reminds the Beltway tribes of what they do—tax the country, distribute revenues to their allies, and euphemize it as a budget. With his 2015 budget, Barack Obama at last makes clear his presidency’s reason for being: to establish an empire of taxation.

Commenting on Mr. Obama’s nearly $4 trillion budget, Jared Bernstein, a former policy adviser to Vice President Joe Biden , told the New York Times : “It’s a visionary document and basically says, ‘You’re with me or you’re not,’ and we can have big philosophical arguments about the role of government.”

He is right. For the Obama presidency that is what it has always been about: You’re with me or you’re not. The government role reflected in this budget looks less like a 21st century American institution than a system last seen in 17th century Europe, in which a leader defines national wealth by handing out dispensations, emoluments and punishments.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/dan-henninger-an-empire-of-taxation-1423095409?tesla=y

Alas, this isn’t just the goal of Obama and his friends. It is the goal of Liberalism.  Most Liberals don’t understand that this where their leaders are taking them. They think they are “liberating” people but of course the result is to create power centers. Look at where it leads: to Czars who may – may – be honest, but those with access to the Czars include many who are not. And of course we create new bureaucracies subject to the Iron Law.

Despair is a sin, but this internet neutrality stuff sure tempts me to despair.

In a piece for Wired magazine, Mr. Wheeler announced that this week he will circulate to his fellow commissioners a plan to enact what President Obama demanded in November: century-old telephone regulation for today’s broadband communications companies.

“This proposal is rooted in long-standing regulatory principles,” wrote Mr. Wheeler, and he’s right. The game plan is to apply to competitive digital networks rules originally written for monopoly railroads in the 1800s. But don’t worry, this “common carrier” regulatory structure was modernized for telephones as recently as the summer of 1934 when Franklin Roosevelt signed the Communications Act.

The Wheeler cover story is that such antiquated rules are necessary to provide “net neutrality,” the concept that all Internet traffic should be treated equally and not blocked from reaching consumers—in other words, to allow the Internet to function pretty much as it does now.

But even if net neutrality were threatened, the Federal Trade Commission already has authority to punish companies that discriminate against consumers, and Congressional Republicans have already expressed their willingness to enact a law preventing the specific abuses Mr. Wheeler claims he wants to prevent. In any case, even the old telephone regs don’t treat all customers equally—they allow heavy-volume customers to get a better deal than mom and pop. Tom Wheeler’s announcement that the FCC will regulate the Internet like a public utility. Plus, Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 vaccine-skeptic remarks and why Republicans are joining the fray, ISIS’s execution of the Jordanian pilot and more IRS drama.

Mr. Wheeler is seeking to overturn Bill Clinton ’s policy of allowing the Internet to grow as a lightly regulated “information service” because Mr. Wheeler does not want light regulation. And while the successful bipartisan policy of allowing Internet creativity to flourish was widely supported as recently as 2010, when 74 House Democrats opposed treating the Web like a telephone system, Mr. Wheeler now sees a policy opening. With 23 months left in the Obama Administration, the former lobbyist aims to make the FCC the ruler of the Internet.

In an acrobatic feat of Orwellian logic, Mr. Wheeler even implies that telephone-style regulation must come to the Net to prevent problems that existed in the old telephone network, such as the difficulty faced by entrepreneurs trying to deploy new communications devices. But unlike in the days of the old Ma Bell telephone monopoly, new devices and services are multiplying today.

But it will give great power to a few people. Which is the purpose of it.

Yes, that 3D-printed mansion is safe to live in (WP)

By Tuan C. Nguyen February 5 at 7:54 AM

Back in April, a team of Chinese construction workers used a 3D printer to construct houses. By day’s end, there were 10 standing. They were compact and fairly bare bones — nothing much to look at besides the “wow!” factor of there being as many as — count them — 10. But this time around, those same builders have taken the wraps off an achievement that’s roundly more impressive.

In Suzhou Industrial Park, adjacent to Shanghai, stands a five-story structure that the WinSun Decoration Design Engineering firm claims is “the world’s tallest 3D-printed building.” Next to it is the equally massive 3D-printed mansion, which measures 11,840 square-foot. Like the previous buildings, the walls are comprised of a mix of concrete and recycled waste materials, such as glass and steel, and formed layer by printed layer. The company stated that the total cost for the mansion was roughly $161,000.

Competition at work:

Verizon Wireless Joins the Mobile Discount Parade     nyt

By Brian X. Chen

February 4, 2015 1:24 pm February 4, 2015 1:24 pm

Verizon Wireless executives say they are confident that network quality, not price tags, will attract customers. But that hasn’t stopped the company from cutting prices.

Verizon said on Wednesday that it was trimming the costs of most of its mobile shared data plans by $10.

For example, a plan that includes one gigabyte of data now starts at $30, down from $40; a plan that includes six gigabytes now starts at $70, down from $80. (Verizon’s shared data plans separate the costs of data from the costs for each phone line, so these rates refer only to the data portion of a phone bill.)

Verizon, however, is still resisting calling these price cuts. Instead, the company says customers can pay the same amount as they used to, but now they will get more mobile data for what they pay.

The move was surprising given that just a few days ago, Verizon said on its financial earnings call that it would not compete on price. Jan Dawson, an independent telecom analyst, said it was a sign that Verizon was finally responding to price cuts happening across the wireless industry. Chief among the many deals is Sprint’s offer to cut bills in half for any Verizon or AT&T customers who switched to Sprint.

Without net neutrality regulations

F.C.C. Chief Wants to Override State Laws Curbing Community Net Services    nyt

By Steve Lohr

February 2, 2015 5:40 pm February 2, 2015 5:40 pm

The future of protecting an open Internet has been the subject of fierce debate, and potential changes to the rules by the Federal Communications Commission could impact your online experience.

Video by Natalia V. Osipova and Carrie Halperin on Publish Date May 15, 2014.

Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, will propose an order to pre-empt state laws that limit the build-out of municipal broadband Internet services, senior F.C.C. officials said on Monday.

The proposal focuses on laws in two states, North Carolina and Tennessee, but it would create a policy framework for other states. About 21 states, by the F.C.C.’s count, have laws that restrict the activities of community broadband services. The initiative by Mr. Wheeler, if endorsed by the full commission, would be the first time the F.C.C. has tried to override such state laws.

Mr. Wheeler is expected to circulate his plan to the other commissioners on Thursday, and the full commission is scheduled to vote on Feb. 26.

Interest Costs Poised to Surpass Defense and Nondefense Discretionary Spending

The party is over:

<.>

Currently, the government’s interest costs are around $200 billion a year, a sum that’s low due to the era of low interest rates.

Forecasters at the White House and Congressional Budget Office believe interest rates will gradually rise, and when that happens, the interest costs of the U.S. government are set to soar, from just over

$200 billion to nearly $800 billion a year by decade’s end.

<…>

By 2021, the government will be spending more on interest than on all national defense. according to White House forecasts. And one year later, interest costs will exceed nondefense discretionary spending–essentially every other domestic and international government program funded annually through congressional appropriations.

</>

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/02/03/the-legacy-of-debt-interest-costs-poised-to-surpass-defense-and-nondefense-discretionary-spending/?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsForth

I have nothing constructive to say at this time.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

There isn’t much encouraging to say. And we are to add new regulatory bureaucrat who must be paid for all of their lives.

As we suspected’’

Google, Microsoft and Amazon pay to get around ad blocking tool    ft

Robert Cookson, Digital Media Correspondent

Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Taboola have quietly paid the German start-up behind Adblock Plus, the world’s most popular software for blocking online advertising, to stop blocking ads on their sites.

The deals, which are confidential but whose existence has been confirmed by the Financial Times, demonstrate that some of the biggest participants in the $120bn online advertising market see the rise of ad-blocking as a material threat to their revenues.

Adblock Plus has become one of the most popular free extensions on Chrome and Firefox browsers in recent years as internet users have attempted to eliminate the interruption of advertising. Eyeo, the German company that produces the software, says it has been downloaded more than 300m times worldwide and has more than 50m monthly active users.

However many publishers that fund their operations through advertising worry that ad-blocking will undermine their business model. German media groups including RTL and ProSiebenSat.1 are seeking damages from Eyeo, while French publishers are reportedly considering whether to follow suit.

Google and Amazon declined to comment.

Dear  Jerry

I don’t understand all this  fuss about the Moties  invading Known Space:

Look at the size of the things !

http://youtu.be/zpJAnFE33w0

—                          Russell Seitz

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

View from Chaos Manor, Monday, February 02, 2015

I got Firefox spelling checker to work on the SFWA forum, but it was a lot of effort.The easiest way to explain it is that after much searching I found:

Firefox Enable Internal Spell Checker

I occasionally find a problem with Firefox where it will stop spell checking all fields. It’s a small bug, but it’s easily fixed.

Firstly, make sure you have spell checking on:

Tools > Options > Advanced > Check my spelling as I type

If that is checked then uncheck it and restart the browser, then recheck it and again restart the browser – if the spell check still doesn’t work, then once again uncheck the option, then enter about:config in the address bar.

Search for Layout.spellcheckDefault and change the setting from 0 to 1 to enable spell checking in all <textarea> fields, or make the value 2 to enable spell checking in all text input fields.

See also: Layout.spellcheckDefault – MozillaZine Knowledge Base

http://www.liamdelahunty.com/tips/firefox_enable_spelling_check.php

It told me more about Mozilla than ever I wanted to know – I just use the thing, I’m not developing it – but going through that rigmarole did the job.

Yesterday we got a lot said about air supremacy; if you are interested, scroll down. There was plenty. Alas I have had many distractions today and I am a bit tired.

“About 75% of these sorties were in Vietnam (shame we didn’t win that one, eh?). “
The United States did not lose the Vietnam war. The United States destroyed the Viet Cong, and drove the North Vietnamese Army out of South Vietnam. The United States signed a peace treaty with North Vietnam and withdrew its troops from Vietnam.
After that, North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam. The South Vietnamese request American aid to repel the Northern Invasion. Congress under the control of the Democrat Party refused to provide funds or permission for the US to aid South Vietnam, which in due course collapsed, causing the deaths of millions of innocent people in Vietnam and Cambodia.
This is an extraordinarily shameful chapter of American History. But it is about the treacherous behavior of the Democrat Party, not about any failure of the United States Armed Forces.
The leftists who run the schools and the media have created the legend of the loss of the Vietnam War, as part of their mimetic assault on patriotism, and also because they want to lie and blame others for their perfidy.

Robert Schwartz

Actually it’s worse than that: in 1972 the North invaded with 150,000 men.  Fewer than 50,000 ever got home. The Army of the Republic of Viet Nam, (ARVN) with US air support decisively defeated an invasion force the Wehrmacht would have been proud of, and it had more tanks than many WW II campaigns in Russia. ARVN won big, and there were only 650 Americans KIA in a campaign as big as Kharkov.  ARVN won big.  Then in 1975 the North sent another invasion force south, just as large, and the Congress would not allow US air support, while Russia supported its ally.  Viet Nam accordingly fell. But America was not defeated. And the tanks destroyed in 1972 were Russian and had to be replaced, with bad effects on the Soviet economy.

We could have won the Viet Nam War, but Congress did not want to.

I do not say our air support in Viet Nam was not effective, even though we did not have many USAF planes designed for that mission – the Navy and Marines were better.  USAF did a good job when they had to. But we need better ground support against ISIS.

: The End of Mutually Assured Destruction?

This article is worth your time; it covers how changes in ballistic missile accuracy undermine the assumptions necessary for Mutually Assured Destruction; to wit, second strike capabilities and the relatively haphazard nature of nuclear weapons.

Matt at 1913Intel.com wrote a small commentary about this article that presses the point:

<.>

Changes in missile accuracy in effect force the other side to act earlier. They lower the threshold for a bolt-out-of-the-blue preemptive nuclear strike </> http://www.1913intel.com/2015/02/01/the-5-most-dangerous-nuclear-threats-no-one-is-talking-about-the-national-interest/

The crux of the article is here:

<.>

However, after modeling a prospective first strike against Russia’s strategic forces, Lieber and Press concluded that the U.S. could execute a successful first strike with a high degree of probability against even Moscow’s massive nuclear arsenal. In fact, they claimed that U.S. policy makers had actually constructed America’s strategic forces with the goal of strategic primacy (defined as “the ability to use nuclear weapons to destroy the strategic forces of any other

country”) in mind. Furthermore, they later concluded that this effort extended beyond nuclear weapons. As they explained in 2013, “the effort to neutralize adversary strategic forces—that is, achieve strategic primacy—spans nearly every realm of warfare: for example, ballistic missile defense, anti-submarine warfare, intelligence surveillance-and-reconnaissance systems, offensive cyber warfare, conventional precision strike, and long-range precision strike, in addition to nuclear strike capabilities.”

</>

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-5-most-dangerous-nuclear-threats-no-one-talking-about-12160?page=show

This is most interesting and it almost forces Russia to keep pace, develop it’s own methods of primacy, and — perhaps as Matt points out

— act while they have the advantage. And, what about China?

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

We have seen the increasing accuracy of ICBM’s coming on since the 60’s, although I doubt anyone anticipated Moore’s Law then; I certainly did not when I was editor of Project 75 in 1964, We knew technology was advancing on an s curve. See the Strategy of Technology by Possony and Pournelle. And in my International Stability Study for the Air Council I noted that the stabilizer power needs escalation dominance at the high end. That remains true – but we have given up SAC. Nuclear stability requires a Force that is always ready but if successful will never be used. That is an elite force, hard to build, and USAF has let it go. It’s more fun to zoom around.

We sow the wind.

How long is Australia’s history with Jihad?

Now, that’s not a question I expect many people to be able to answer. As it turns out Australia imported a number of “Ghans” in 1860. While that’s short for Afghan the group included Muslims from many places around the world.

In 1914 the Ottoman ruler issued a jihad fatwa.

===8<— quote

The Ottoman fatwa declared that it was a religious duty “for all the Muslims in all countries, whether young or old, infantry or cavalry, to resort to jihad with all their properties and lives, as required by the Quranic verse of enfiru.” The verse of enfiru (Arabic ‘go forth’) is a reference to Sura 9:38:

===8<— quote

You who believe! What is the matter with you, that, when ye are asked to go forth in the path of Allah, you cling heavily to the earth? Do you prefer the life of this world to the Hereafter? But little is the comfort of this life, as compared with the Hereafter. Unless you go forth, He will punish you with a grievous penalty, and put others in your place…

===8<— end quote

===8<— end quote

“From Broken Hill to Martin Place: A Tale of Two Jihad Assaults in Australia a Century Apart”

http://www.islam-watch.org/authors/89-other-authors/1600-from-broken-hill-to-martin-place-a-tale-of-two-jihad-assaults-in-australia-a-century-apart.html

You’d think people would have learned by now that Jihad is built into Islam.

True believers must answer calls to Jihad.

The saving grace is that such calls can only be issued by a real Caliph, a ruler over the entire (or a very substantial portion of) the Islams in the world. So today, nobody is authorized to issue the call to Jihad. This is why ISIS and all the others try so hard to pass themselves off as setting up a Caliphate. Then their calls must be obeyed by all observant Muslims.

Another saving grace is that most Muslims really do not understand or know the Qur’an or Sunnah. The Sunnah is the way of life for Muslims derived from Mohammed’s words and actions. The Qur’an, by contrast, is supposedly revealed to Mohammed by the angel Gabriel and is Allah’s actual words, despite how utterly clumsy they appear.

So Australia has had 100 years to have figured out that regardless of how many Muslims adopt the strict Islamic way of life, terrorism, violence, and destruction follow Muslims as they migrate.

I wonder when WE will figure out what Thomas Jefferson had figured out when he sent the Marines to visit Tripoli et al.

{^_^}

This email is from a Marine who’s in Afghanistan; his buddy Jordan provides many of the details.
No politics here; just a Marine with a bird’s eye view opinion.

US Weapons:

1) The M-16 rifle: Thumbs down. Chronic jamming problems with the talcum powder like sand over there. The sand is everywhere. Jordan says you feel filthy 2 minutes after coming out of the shower. The M-4 carbine version is more popular because it’s lighter and shorter, but it has jamming problems also. They lack the ability to mount the various optical gun sights and weapons lights on the picatinny rails, but the weapon itself is not great in a desert environment.
They all hate the 5.56mm (.223) round. Poor penetration on the cinder block structure common over there and even torso hits can’t be reliably counted on to put the enemy down.

Fun fact:
1) Random autopsies on dead insurgents show a high level of opiate use.

2) The M243 SAW (squad assault weapon): .223 cal. Drum fed light machine gun. Big thumbs down. Universally considered a piece of shit. Chronic jamming problems, most of which require partial disassembly (that’s fun in the middle of a firefight).

3) The M9 Beretta 9mm: Mixed bag. Good gun performs well in desert environment; but they all hate the 9mm cartridge. The use of handguns for self-defense is actually fairly common. Same old story on the 9mm: Bad guys hit multiple times and still in the fight.

4) Mossberg 12 ga. Military shotgun : Works well, used frequently for clearing houses to good effect. (Great weapon – I used these when transporting prisoners).
5)The M240 Machine Gun: 7.62 NATO (.308) cal . belt fed machine gun, developed to replace the old M-60 (what a beautiful weapon that was!) Thumbs up.Accurate, reliable, and the 7.62 round puts ’em down. Originally developed as a vehicle mounted weapon, more and more are being dismounted and taken into the field by infantry. The 7.62 round chews up the structure over there.
6) The M2 .50 cal heavy machine gun : Thumbs way, way up. “Ma Deuce” is still worth her considerable weight in gold. The ultimate fight stopper – puts their dicks in the dirt every time. The most coveted weapon in-theater.
7) The .45 pistol: Thumbs up. Still the best pistol around out there. Everybody authorized to carry a sidearm is trying to get their hands on one. With few exceptions, one can reliably be expected to put ’em down with a torso hit. The special ops guys (who are doing most of the pistol work) use the HK military model and supposedly love it. The old government model .45’s are being re-issued en masse.
8) The M-14: Thumbs up. They are being re-issued in bulk, mostly in a modified version to special ops guys. Modifications include lightweight Kevlar stocks and low power red dot or ACOG sights. Very reliable in the sandy environment, and they love the 7.62 round.
9) The Barrett .50 cal sniper rifle: Thumbs way up. Spectacular range and accuracy and hits like a freight train. Used frequently to take out vehicle suicide bombers (we actually stop a lot of them) and barricaded enemy. It is definitely here to stay.

10) The M24 sniper rifle: Thumbs up. Mostly in .308 but some in 300 win mag. Heavily modified Remington 700’s. Great performance. Snipers have been used heavily to great effect. Rumor has it a marine sniper on his third tour in Anbar province has actually exceeded Carlos Hathcock’s record for confirmed kills with OVER 100.

11) The new body armor: Thumbs up. Relatively light at approx. 6 lbs. and can reliably be expected to soak up small shrapnel and even will stop an AK-47 round.
The bad news: Hot as hell to wear, almost unbearable in the summer heat (which averages over 120 degrees). Also, the enemy now goes for head shots whenever possible. All the bullshit about the “old” body armor making our guys vulnerable to the IED’s was a non-starter. The IED explosions are enormous and body armor doesn’t make any difference at all in most cases.

12) Night Vision and Infrared Equipment: Thumbs way up. Spectacular performance. Our guys see in the dark and own the night, period. Very little enemy action after evening prayers. More and more enemy being whacked at night during movement by our hunter-killer teams. We’ve all seen the videos.

13) Lights: Thumbs up. Most of the weapon mounted and personal lights are Surefires, and the troops love them. Invaluable for night urban operations. Jordan carried a $34 Surefire G2 on a neck lanyard and loved it. I can’t help but notice that most of the good fighting weapons and ordnance are 50 or more years old! With all our technology, it’s the WWII and Vietnam era weapons that everybody wants! The infantry fighting is frequent, up close and brutal. No quarter is given or shown.

Bad guy weapons:
1) Mostly AK47s: The entire country is an arsenal. Works better in the desert than the M16 and the .308 Russian round kills reliably. PKM belt fed light machine guns are also common and effective. Luckily, the enemy mostly shoots like shit. Undisciplined “spray and pray” type fire. However, they are seeing more and more precision weapons, especially sniper rifles. ( Iran, again)

2) The RPG: Probably the infantry weapon most feared by our guys. Simple, reliable and as common as dogshit. The enemy responded to our up-armored Humvees by aiming at the windshields, often at point blank range. Still killing a lot of our guys.

3) The IED: The biggest killer of all. Can be anything from old Soviet anti-armor mines to jury rigged artillery shells. A lot found in Jordan’s area were in abandoned cars. The enemy would take 2 or 3 155 mmartillery shells and wire them together. Most were detonated by cell phone and the explosions are enormous. You’re not safe in any vehicle, even an M1 tank. Driving is by far the most dangerous thing our guys do over there. Lately, they are much more sophisticated “shape charges” (Iranian) specifically designed to penetrate armor.
Fact: Most of the ready made IEDs are supplied by Iran, who is also providing terrorists (Hezbollah types) to train the insurgents in their use and tactics. That’s why the attacks have been so deadly lately. Their concealment methods are ingenious, the latest being shape charges, in Styrofoam containers spray painted to look like the cinderblocks that litter all Iraqi roads. We find about 40% before they detonate, and the bomb disposal guys are unsung heroes of this war.

4) Mortars and rockets: Very prevalent. The soviet era 122 mm rockets (with an 18 km range) are becoming more prevalent. One of Jordan’s NCO’s lost a leg to one. These weapons cause a lot of damage “inside the wire.” Jordan’s base was hit almost daily his entire time there by mortar and rocket fire, often at night to disrupt sleep patterns and cause fatigue (It did.). More of a psychological weapon than anything else. The enemy mortar teams would jump out of vehicles, fire a few rounds, and then haul ass in a matter of seconds.

Fun fact: Captured enemy have apparently marveled at the marksmanship of our guys and how hard they fight. They are apparently told in Jihad school that the Americans rely solely on technology, and can be easily beaten in close quarters combat for their lack of toughness. Let’s just say they know better now.

Bad guy technology: Simple yet effective. Most communication is by cell and satellite phones and also by email on laptops. They use handheld GPS units for navigation and “Google Earth” for overhead views of our positions. Their weapons are good, if not fancy, and prevalent. Their explosives and bomb technology is TOP OF THE LINE. Night vision is rare. They are very careless with their equipment and the GPS units and laptops are treasure troves of Intel when captured.

Who are the bad guys? These are mostly “foreigners,” non-Afghan Jihadists from all over the Muslim world (and Europe). Some are virtually untrained young Jihadists that often end up as suicide bombers or in various “sacrifice squads.” Most, however, are hard core terrorists from all the usual suspects (Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas etc.). These are the guys running around murdering civilians en masse and cutting heads off.
The Chechens (many of whom are Caucasian) are supposedly the most ruthless and the best fighters. They have been fighting the Russians for years. The terrorists have been very adept at infiltrating the Afghan local government, the police forces, and the Army. They have had a spy and agitator network there since the Iran-Iraq war in the early 80s.

Bad Guy Tactics: When they are engaged on an infantry level they get their asses kicked every time! Brave, but stupid. Suicidal Banzai-type charges were very common earlier in the war and still occur. They will literally sacrifice 8-10 man teams in suicide squads by sending them screaming and firing AKs and RPGs directly at our bases just to probe the defenses. They get mowed down like grass every time (see the M2 and M240 above). Jordan’s base was hit like this often. When engaged, they have a tendency to flee to the same building, probably for what they think will be a glorious last stand. Instead, we call in air and that’s the end of that more often than not. These hole-ups are referred to as Alpha Whiskey Romeos (Allah’s Waiting Room).
We have the laser guided ground-air thing down to a science. The fast movers, mostly Marine F-18s, are taking an ever increasing toll on the enemy. When caught out in the open, the helicopter gunships and AC-130 Spectre Gunships cut them to ribbons with cannon and rocket fire, especially at night. Interestingly, artillery is hardly used at all.

Fun facts: The enemy death toll is supposedly between 45-50 thousand. That is why we’re seeing less and less infantry attacks and more IED, suicide bomber shit. The new strategy is just simple attrition. The insurgent tactic most frustrating is their use of civilian non-combatants as cover. They know we do all we can to avoid civilian casualties and therefore schools, hospitals and especially Mosques are locations where they meet, stage for attacks, cache weapons, and ammo and flee to when engaged. They have absolutely no regard whatsoever for inflicting civilian casualties. They will terrorize locals and murder without hesitation anyone believed to be sympathetic to the Americans. Kidnapping of family members, especially children, is common to influence people they are trying to influence but can’t reach, such as local govt. officials, clerics, tribal leaders, etc. The first thing our guys are told is “don’t get captured.” They know that if captured they will be tortured and beheaded on the internet. They openly offer bounties for anyone who brings in a live American serviceman. This motivates the criminal element who otherwise don’t give a shit about the war. A lot of the beheading victims were actually kidnapped by common criminals and sold to them. As such, for our guys, every fight is to the death. Surrender is not an option. The Afghanis are a mixed bag. Some fight well; others aren’t worth a damn. Most do okay with American support.

Finding leaders is hard, but they are getting better. Many Afghanis were galvanized and the caliber of recruits in the Army and the police forces went right up, along with their motivation. It also led to an exponential increase in good intel because the Afghanis are sick of the insurgent attacks against civilians.
Morale: According to Jordan, morale among our guys is very high. They not only believe that they are winning, but that they are winning decisively. They are stunned and dismayed by what they see in the American press, whom they almost universally view as against them. The embedded reporters are despised and distrusted. Our guys are inflicting casualties at a rate of 20-1 and then see lies like “Are we losing in Iraq” on TV and the print media. For the most part, our guys are satisfied with their equipment, food, and leadership. Bottom line though, and they all say this, is that there are not enough guys there to drive the final stake through the heart of the insurgency, primarily because there aren’t enough troops in-theater to shut down the borders with Afghanisan and Pakistan. The Iranians and the Syrians just can’t stand the thought of Afganistan being an American ally (with, of course, permanent US bases there).
Anyway, that’s it, hope you found this interesting.

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

View from Chaos Manor, Sunday, February 01, 2015

Hatred is a sin, so I must be content with despising the Microsoft team that designed the user interface for Office 10; but despise them I do since they despise users. Things that you could find easily in Office 2007, once you got used to the ribbon, have sunk into a long train of subfolders which make sense only to the despicable designers. Yes, the Ribbon was hard to learn and was itself badly designed for Office 2003 users; but it had a kind of logic, and had not the team that writes Microsoft Help been recruited from an asylum for the mentally challenged it would have been learnable, without much effort; and indeed I learned it although as usual Help was no Help at all.

Now there is another odd logic to learn, and they were clever in removing redundancy so they did not leave the old ways in for those who made the effort to learn them.

I remember when Microsoft had a team of Human Factors engineers who studied how people USED Office; observing volunteers from working offices and other places where Office is used. Those seem now to have been replaced with a team of not very bright sadists. I wonder if they are cheaper?

Jerry,

There is only one thing you need to remember about Microsoft.

They are The Government of Windows and MS Office Applications. Their treatment of Users follows naturally from that.

Bob Holmes

I think I may have stimulated some debate over uses of air power and organization to achieve it, which is what I set out to do. We have a few more comments to publish before we can draw conclusions.

USAF ground support

“I think you confuse effort with work: number of sorties looks good, but what they accomplished is a better measure.”
Not at all. I wanted to address the issue of effort, because the claim was that the Air Force hadn’t made much effort to support the Army because they regarded the CAS mission with contempt. In fact, the Air Force made a major – indeed, staggering – effort to support the Army since 1945. It is hard to see what more the USAF could possibly have done.
As for what the Air Force accomplished, we should ask the shades of countless thousands of German, North Korean, Chinese, North Vietnamese, Iraqi, and Taliban troops who were annihilated by American airpower before they ever had a chance to raise their weapons and aim at an American soldier.
In Korea, USAF air support was lavish and as effective as it could be within the limits of early 1950s technology. CAS came faster and in higher quantities than during WW2. Airpower played a decisive role at several points, e.g. stopping the North Korean assault on the Pusan perimeter and covering the UN retreat after the Chinese attacked. Sure, the Army wanted more CAS and wanted it faster, but that’s always true. Believe me, I sympathize — if bad guys were shooting at me, I’d want all the USAF to send all its planes at once. But in the real world we’d never be able to build the number of aircraft the Army would like to have to support it.

James Perry

That is the point: the aircraft are not designed for the mission. What makes a good air superiority plane does not do the sort of work that the Stuka did in the Fall of France, to use a very old example. And of course a good ground support craft is not much use in dogfights, although in its time the P-47 was in fact able to do multiple missions, interdiction, recce-strike, and air supremacy both in ground strikes and supply interruption and interception and dogfights. But the P-51 turned out to be the escort plane (once it got the super-Rolls engine).

I was part of the Boeing design team for the TFX; we tried to design a multi mission ship, but it was my job to write a paper saying you couldn’t do it: you would end up with a craft that was second place in air to air combat, and there are few prizes for second place. The TFX – also known as the LBJ after 11 military boards chose Boeing but a Texas firm got the contract – became the FB-111, and was a very good recce/strike craft in Viet Nam, but it was not an air superiority ship. Of course the egregious McNamara wanted to make it a strategic bomber too: one weapon fits all. This is treated at length in Strategy of Technology by Possony and Pournelle (1970).

Of course we cannot build all the aircraft the Army wants. We can’t build all the guns and tanks they would like to have. But USAF wants to get rid of the best ground support and recce/strike birds we already have. There is a solution to this, give ground support to the Army and let the Air Force concentrate on strategic bombing, air supremacy, and supply; but USAF has rejected that.

Get the dog out of the manger; if need be get another dog. The nature of war is changing and we face ISIS and others like them; the Army can learn air supremacy, but USAF refuses even to think about supporting the field army, except it is adamant about keeping the mission.

= = = =

Anent Air Power

Dr. Pournelle

re: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/air-power-and-other-matters/

I see you have returned to one of your favorite rants: Let’s abolish the Air Force!

I will not engage on that subject for a number of reasons, none of which really matter. I was Air Force and wore the blue proudly, even if it did make me look like a trumped up train conductor. After all, I did not get pride from the uniform. I got it from the blue brotherhood, enlisted and officer, that I served with.

When I was in the Air Force, I said repeatedly in seminars and such that our mission was to support some 19-year-old kid on the ground with an M-16. This made me something of a pariah and may have contributed to the decision to move me out of the cockpit and into engineering.

Anyway, air power is important. I think we agree on that. Whether the USAF or the USAAF does it, the US needs it done.

The US has at least four air forces: the Air Force, the Army air forces (mostly rotary wing), the Navy air forces, and the Marine air forces.

Air forces have five missions: 1) recce, 2) artillery spotting, 3) munitions delivery, 4) transport, and 5) air supremacy. If you know different, please educate me.

To me, the question is not whether the Air Force should be a separate service. The question is how our air forces get those missions done. Like, should we use a manned airplane or an RPV?

Do we need flattops? Can the air missions be performed without big flattops? (The first mission of a carrier air group is to protect its landing field. All else is secondary.)

I liked the A-10, although I never flew one. Had UPT classmates who drove Hogs. Sadly, they were not of my tribe, and I kinda lost touch. But given what PGMs can do launched from drones, do we need to put a man over the battlefield to deliver ordinance on target?

IMO these are things worth thinking about.

To end this missive, again IMO, the only purpose the F-35 serves is to transfer money from the national treasury to Lockheed-Martin. The Marines may have a role for one version, but I do not believe the Air Force model or the Navy model can be justified. Harkens back to McNamara’s statement: ‘Build one airplane and let both the Air Force and the Navy fly it.’ We know how that turned out.

Live long and prosper

h lynn keith

Well, what you call recce and artillery spotting we called recce/strike, and I don’t see Interdiction – isolating the battle area – in your list, but it will do.

You do know USAF is not going to give up manned aircraft everywhere?

And note McNamara wanted one plane to do all missions. But see Strategy of Technology. Your story of being thought odd because you believe the primary mission is to stand an 18 year old kid with a rifle on the other guy’s command post says it all: the Air Force has lost sight of that. It is true that air supremacy is vital, and the Army does not always understand (until they lose it). We must have that capability; but air supremacy accomplishes nothing if the field army does not advance. We must retake Iraq from ISIS and we cannot do it with F-35’s or with 10,000 drones. And USAF does not get that.

How do we get the modern equivalent of the Stuka in France 1940 back? USAF doesn’t want it, and will not let the Army have it.

USAF Priorities

Jerry,

Good to see you, glad to see you recovering. The amount of your energy budget being taken up by recovery must be annoying the hell out of you – my impression is you’ve been used to getting ungodly amounts of productive time out of a day by disdaining layabout indulgences like naps. Me, absent deadline/crisis adrenalin, I’ve always run out of steam after a few hours then set up for the next round with a nap. I recommend the habit highly for anyone not gifted with the metabolism to routinely just power through. Post-lunch, doubly so. With luck, for you, just a temporary expedient while repairs are underway… For me, it’s a way of life. Anyway, back to the point I was wandering toward when you got tired:

Regarding USAF priorities, General George Kenney’s time running the Southwest Pacific air forces for MacArthur in WW II is instructive.

Kenney was very good at what he did and also got along with MacArthur without being a yes-man (facts possibly related given the disastrous nature of MacArthur’s air efforts before Kenney’s arrival.) (See “MacArthur’s Airman”, Thomas Griffith for the full story.)

Short version: the Southwest Pacific theatre was explicitly a low priority for the US; Europe came first. It was also at the far end of a supply chain that ran across the Pacific the long way. Where Europe saw hundreds then thousands of airplanes, Southwest Pacific saw dozens, eventually hundreds, and had to make do.

Fortunately the Japanese in the theater had similar problems, a long supply chain and other competing priorities. (They also had a problem with not knowing their codes had been broken, alluded to in Neal Stephenson’s wonderful novel Cryptonomicon and covered thoroughly in a book called “MacArthur’s Ultra” by IIRC Edward Drea.) Nevertheless, their air and ground forces were a match (and sometimes more) for what the Allies had and it was a close-run thing well into 1943.

General Kenney focused on two things: Establishing air supremacy, and interdicting Japanese supply lines, particularly seaborne supply. He did both very effectively – ongoing aerial attrition aside, he famously caught hundreds of Japanese aircraft massed on the ground at Hollandia, and the Battle of the Bismark Sea was one of the better-known occasions when he destroyed Japanese shipping – in that case, his Fifth Air Force sank the entire convoy carrying a Japanese infantry division bound for New Guinea. (This incident also showed up in Cryptonomicon.)

Kenney had his priorities: close air support was an afterthought, something you might use your planes for once you’d run out of aerial opposition and the enemy had stopped even trying to send in supplies and reinforcements. He was quite explicit about this: close support of Army formations was the job of artillery, as airplanes were a far more expensive way of delivering explosives than cannon and he didn’t have enough airplanes as it was.

They really did not do close air support in SW Pacific. I asked my uncle, an artillery forward observer officer with the 31st Division at Driniumor River, Wakde, Morotai, and Mindanao, what their procedures were for coordinating close air support, and his answer was, they didn’t have any procedures because it was understood they’d never get close air support. The one mention I’ve found of close air support happening in the theater before the Japanese ran out of airplanes in the region in

’45 involved P-39 pilots of the 35th Group figuring out the night before how best to dive-bomb with their airplanes, then the next day taking out a particularly troublesome mountaintop artillery emplacement under direction from the divisional general on the ground – obviously not a standard procedure.

My point here is not that General Kenney was wrong. Under his circumstances, given his limited theater resources, his priorities look to me to have been correct. His approach led directly to MacArthur’s ability to leapfrog powerful Japanese forces that had been isolated and starved into impotence, arguably shortening the campaign by a year or more and saving a lot of soldiers’ lives.

But Kenney was vastly influential in the direction USAAF then USAF took after the war. (He went on to become the first head of SAC.)

My point is that modern day USAF still has the same priorities and reacts the same way: If there’s a resource shortage, air supremacy and deep interdiction come first, and close air support gets cut to pay for them.

Only the resource shortage is now an organizational artifact, not a theater supply reality. USAF is unable to control costs on new air supremacy/interdiction fighters – $200 million for an F-22? $300 million and climbing for an F-35? *Really*? The result is that hundreds of A-10’s get retired to pay for a couple more F-35’s.

This is insanely organizationally dysfunctional, but I think the solution is obvious: Give the close air support mission and aircraft to the Army, which can better protect the CAS budget from raids by the tactical fighter establishment. Meanwhile, tell USAF that their mission is air supremacy when and where required, that their budget is set, and that they can either produce what’s required or have their bureaucracy gone through with fire and sword till results improve.

Henry

Accepting your analysis, what must be done? USAF will always retire hundreds of Warthog to buy another F-35. Always, so long as it exists. And it will never give up a mission. And it even gave up SAC. I worked for USAF most of my high tech career, I admire their people , but I cannot accept their choices.

The Strategic Implications of Iran’s STD Epidemic

by David P. Goldman

Asia Times Online

January 30, 2015

http://www.meforum.org/5000/strategic-implications-iran-std

“In the 5th Century BC, the “Persian disease” noted by Hippocrates probably was bubonic plague; in 8th-century Japan, it meant the measles. Today it well might mean chlamydia. Standout levels of infertility among Iranian couples, a major cause of the country’s falling birth rate, coincide with epidemic levels of sexually transmitted disease. Both reflect deep-seated social pathologies. Iran has become a country radically different from the vision of its theocratic rulers, with prevailing social pathologies quite at odds with the self-image of radical Islam.

“In the 5th Century BC, the “Persian disease” noted by Hippocrates probably was bubonic plague; in 8th-century Japan, it meant the measles. Today it well might mean chlamydia. Standout levels of infertility among Iranian couples, a major cause of the country’s falling birth rate, coincide with epidemic levels of sexually transmitted disease. Both reflect deep-seated social pathologies. Iran has become a country radically different from the vision of its theocratic rulers, with prevailing social pathologies quite at odds with the self-image of radical Islam.

Unremovable supercookies, 

Jerry

Some readers will be interested in this:

http://www.extremetech.com/mobile/197646-verizon-partner-wont-stop-using-undeletable-tracking-cookies-refuses-to-honor-its-own-opt-out-requests

It’s about unremovable ‘supercookies.’ It looks like Verizon takes the concept of unchecked capitalism’s peddling human flesh on the street to heart.

Such lovelies.

Ed

Interplanetary Climate Change NASA’s Hottest Secret. A clip from David Wilcock – YouTube

Jerry

All nine planets are warming up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqOkMaaYaAs&feature=youtu.be

I know nothing about this guy, but I remember reading years ago that other planets are experiencing global warming. Consider this a follow-up.

Ed

Just how does CO2 on Earth warm Mars? Yet we find it there, and other planets are warming. We see warming all over the solar system.  I remarked on the brightness changes ten years ago, but climate change is “science.”

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