Monthly Archives: October 2015

Chaos Manor View, Monday, October 5, 2015

It’s bedtime. I’ve worked on Mamelukes and sort of tended to mail, but I’ve pretty well neglected this place. I’ll get back to it shortly, but I’m on a fiction roll just now.

There are a few things to notice.

LENR Status

Hello Jerry,

A presentation on the current LENR state of play by a PhD Physicist from my old department at NSWC Dahlgren:

http://www.lenr-forum.com/forum/index.php/Attachment/386-IEEE-brief-DeChiaro-9-2015-pdf/

Short, not much detail, but there is apparently growing evidence that there is really a ‘there’ there.

Of course I’ll be convinced when I can by one at Lowe’s to heat my house or a subset thereof (or as one outfit proposes, buy a car with a 30 kmile ‘LENR tank’), but in the meantime I continue to HOPE real hard.

Bob Ludwick

If there’s even a small chance of a 30,000 mile car – 30k on one filling – there are plenty of investors who will want to get in on it. And I note that the Office of Naval Research has never given up on LENR. And that most research centers are leery of press conferences; next time it won’t leave any doubts. But, as you say, the evidence that something is to be found piles up, and we can hope.

OS X El Capitan and MS Office 2011 / 2016

Dear Dr Pournelle,

A word of warning to your readers: If you use Office 2011 or OS 2016 on OS X Yosemite, you may wish to wait before upgrading to OS X El Capitan.

OS X El Capitan breaks Outlook 2011 and almost all of Office 2016. Just about everything refuses to start or crashes repeatedly. I have experienced problems myself and they are also well documented at http://www.macrumors.com/2015/10/05/microsoft-office-2016-el-capitan-bugs/

Microsoft is working on it, apparently.

Best wishes,

Simon Woodworth BSc MSc PhD.

Thank you.

Snowden Drama

This whole Snowden Affair looks more like a soap opera now; not that it changes anything revealed but the characters and activities are getting strange. I wonder if things aren’t so good in Moscow anymore?

Maybe his recent criticism of Russian policy wasn’t a good idea?

<.>

Edward Snowden says he has offered to return to the United States and go to jail for leaking details of National Security Agency programs to intercept electronic communications data on a vast scale.

The former NSA contractor flew to Moscow two years ago after revealing information about the previously secret eavesdropping powers, and faces U.S. charges that could land him in prison for up to 30 years.

Snowden told the BBC that he’d “volunteered to go to prison with the government many times,” but had not received a formal plea-deal offer.

He said that “so far they’ve said they won’t torture me, which is a start, I think. But we haven’t gotten much further than that.”

</>

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_BRITAIN_EDWARD_SNOWDEN?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2015-10-05-13-50-39

Normally, if you’re a guest in someone’s home you abide by their behavior and if you cannot bear it then you leave. You do not tell others how to live in their own home. Is this fallout from that?

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

There is some probability that rational decision is not the governing phenomenon here.

Tactics, strategy, and politics

This article is worth most people’s time. While I presume you have a keen grasp of the subject matter contained herein, a past contributor

— whose name escapes me at the moment — mentioned the difference between doctrine and weapons systems. If I were at my PC I run a Google search on your site and name the contributor because the point was apt. However, I’m on my mobile phone and lack the time to do it so I respectfully request allowances in this matter.

Having said that, this article touches upon that point in more detail and applies that point not only in the military sense but also stretches into its implication for the body politic. the article mentions essays and statements by other people commented on the matter and you may find it interesting even if you’re already abreast with the substance of the discussion.

@WarOnTheRocks: If one cannot tell the difference between task and purpose, how can one become a strategist? http://ow.ly/T1xI9

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Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Actually, the necessity for doctrines is discussed in The Strategy of Technology by Stefan T. Possony, Jerry Pournelle, and Francis X. Kane. Of course most of the examples in that 1970 book are from the Cold War.

“These results demonstrate for the first time that, regardless of potential radiation effects on individual animals, the Chernobyl exclusion zone supports an abundant mammal community after nearly three decades of chronic radiation exposure.”

<http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/chernobyl-disaster-exclusion-zone-around-plant-has-become-wildlife-haven-on-par-with-nature-reserves-a6680396.html>

Hiroshima and Nagasaki support abundant bipedal mammal communities, too.

Kind of puts paid to the Union of Confused Scientists, doesn’t it?

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

As opposed to coal mine tailings and other fossil fuel sites… With sufficient energy you can deal with any chemical wastes. And Chernobyl was a weapons reactor, not a power reactor; no positive void reactors can be licensed in the US; that’s fundamental atomic law, written into the Atomic Energy Act by Edward Teller.

‘Cyber banging’ drives new generation of gang violence

Jerry

This is happening just south of you:

http://www.latimes.com/local/crime/la-me-1003-banks-lapd-gang-shootings-20151003-column.html

“Many of the people who were shot this summer seem like inexplicable targets, neither robbery victims nor gang-involved. “Somebody just drives to where the person is, walks up, shoots them, gets back in the car and drives off,” Harris-Dawson said.

“We’re used to people beefing in public,” he said. “Now the whole conflict is happening on social media. And all of us — interventionists, police, the community — are in over our heads on that.”

I’ve stayed off of social media for professional reasons, so I’ve missed all that. And really, this seems to be as much of a time-waster as television. “We’re dealing with a different generation and we’re going to have to evolve,”

Inevitable, wasn’t it?

Dear Dr. Pournelle, 

It appears that Russia is making a play to become the new international arbiter of the Middle East. 

http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/09/28/leave-it-to-vlad-and-the-supreme-leader-obama-iraq-iran-middle-east/

Foreign Policy’s correspondents are divided as to whether this blindsided the administration, or if this is the administration’s real plan for the Middle East — to abandon it to the Russians while we concentrate on our own domestic issues. 

Certainly the author of the piece believes the second is more likely, as Putin evidently did tell President Obama face-to-face that he was planning on escalating pressure on ISIS.  
The scope of the Pentagon’s Anti-ISIS training effort — all 60 recruits — does not project confidence in the effort.
http://thehill.com/policy/defense/247060-pentagon-only-training-60-syrian-rebels-against-isis

Huffington Post suggests that there are other “black” operations under way in larger numbers 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/four-five-fighters-pentagon-syria_55f9ad27e4b0d6492d63ed49
but, if so, they have neither been effective at containing ISIS or convincing the Russians of our seriousness. 
It seems that we are abandoning influence in a region we have considered of utmost importance since 1945. Regaining it will probably not happen without bloodshed. 
Respectfully, 

Brian P.

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

Chaos Manor View, Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Thursday, October 01, 2015

The week has been enjoyably consumed by family matters, with three of our four boys in town. Wednesday I had a good story conference with Niven and Barnes and Jack Cohen by Skype from England, and lunch after that. All’s well, but as usual I have been falling behind.

Nice walk this morning with Frank, my number two son, after dinner with Alex (1), Frank (2), and Richard (4), lacking Phillip (3) who is still a career Navy officer. Now Frank and Richard have gone home, and we’ll try to get back to what passes for routine at Chaos Manor. It was all complicated by a dead rat who expired Monday behind the walls in the downstairs office, rendering the place unusable with the smell. The exterminators are due in hours, but the smell was so awful that I cajoled Frank into clearing access to an access door, where, Lo! he found and extracted the corpse, so I am able to write this; it’s hot outside, but we have all the windows open, and I prefer hot with a fan to the alternative as normal chaos returns…

And it’s lunch time.

The big news is Climate Models: they have left out an important factor in cloud formation. The expensive climate models we depend on for climate predictions cannot predict the present from the past, and cannot explain the past fifteen years of virtually no warming at all: they predicted a monotonic temperature rise that failed to happen.

MASSIVE GLOBAL COOLING process discovered as Paris climate deal looms • The Register

Thought y’all might be interested in this. Credit belongs to Jim W., but he doesn’t have your emails on his smartphone, which is all he has access to right now.
Stephanie Osborn

“The Interstellar Woman of Mystery”
http://www.Stephanie-Osborn.com

“Sometimes you gotta say what’s in your heart… And you have to stand for what you believe. No matter what.”
~’Dr. Michael C. Anders,’ Burnout: The mystery of Space Shuttle STS-281

Date: Thu, 1 Oct 2015 12:09:36 -0500
Subject: MASSIVE GLOBAL COOLING process discovered as Paris climate deal looms • The Register
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/30/massive_global_cooling_factor_discovered_ahead_of_paris_climate_talks/

A team of top-level atmospheric chemistry boffins from France and Germany say they have identified a new process by which vast amounts of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are emitted into the atmosphere from the sea – a process which was unknown until now, meaning that existing climate models do not take account of it.

The effect of VOCs in the air is to cool the climate down, and thus climate models used today predict more warming than can actually be expected. Indeed, global temperatures have actually been stable for more than fifteen years, a circumstance which was not predicted by climate models and which climate science is still struggling to assimilate.

In essence, the new research shows that a key VOC, isoprene, is not only produced by living organisms (for instance plants and trees on land and plankton in the sea) as had previously been assumed. It is also produced in the “microlayer” at the top of the ocean by the action of sunlight on floating chemicals – no life being necessary. And it is produced in this way in very large amounts.

The standard climate models have never been very good on clouds and cloud formation; this is known, and many of the ad hoc corrections usually applied to the models’ predictions have involved clouds, their formation, and their effects. This new discovery will be an important correction to the models. Obviously, C02 increases facilitate more growth of plants on land, which may increase VOC production – a negative feedback.

It is also reasonable to assume that increased ocean temperatures will increase formation of VOC’s, and cloud reflectivity over the ocean may have some effect on el Nino events, which we do not understand. None of this affects the influence of C02 on warming, of course, but the negative feedback mechanisms may explain why the models have been so unsuccessful in explaining the actual climate behavior.

The situation in Syria is serious, and we have an incompetent Secretary of State and a President not educated in foreign policy, and not gifted with natural talent in that subject.

Meanwhile ISIS, The Caliphate, thrives having declared war on the United States while openly calling for terrorist attacks on the West in general and the US in particular. It suffers little punishment for these acts, and the President’s responses to the televised brutality of the ISIS regime have not been effective.

The United States, by pronouncement of the President and the Secretary of State, has a policy demanding regime change in Syria without specifying what regime it should change to. President Obama has also designated ISIS as “the junior varsity” and also demanded its end, but ISIS has continued to grow; it presumably is not the President’s designated successor to the Baathist regime of Western educated Syrian President Assad. Now that the US has cooperated in the regime change in Libya, ISIS has colonies there as well.  So long as ISIS has territories to rule by its version of Islamic Law, it will continue to attract recruits as it claims to be the legitimate Caliphate: if effect The Return of the King.

Baathists put Arab unity as a primary goal; this means toleration of both Sunni and Shiite Arabs, and also toleration of other Arabs including Christian and Druze. When the American Press speaks of “moderate Arabs” it generally means Baathists although it does not seem to realize this. The Baathist Party has generally thrived in Arab nations with Sunni majorities, although Baathist party members are often Shiite. Baathist regimes tend to be one-party despotates ruling by force.

The President does not seem to understand that majority rule democracy in the Middle East equates to legalizing persecution of minorities; and this is generally inevitable. Lebanon had a multi-party multi-religion multi-ethnic regime at one time, but the US support was slowly withdrawn, and the tolerant regime has pretty well vanished. Lebanon was not a majoritarian democracy, but it was constitutional with offices reserved for Marionites, Shiites, Sunni, and Druze.  It worked at one time, but generally the only tolerant regimes have not been democracies. We will except Israel, but it is very much an exception.

Now Putin has offered cooperation and has been rebuffed. I foresee interesting times as Russian warplanes attack the Caliphate and Obama worries that they will also strike “moderate Muslims” whom Obama approves of – if he can find any. Interesting times.

Perhaps it is time to leave Syria to the Russians and Assad, and concentrate on shoring up the Kurds, who are the only real friends we have in the region?

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