Yearly Archives: 2015

Chaos Manor View, Friday, December 18, 2015

“This is the most transparent administration in history.”

Barrack Obama

Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western Civilization as it commits suicide.

“White House Declares Total Victory Over GOP in Budget Battle.” Washington Times

Republicans ‘rein in’ the IRS in new budget after years of grievances

Washington Post

The establishment Republicans have given up the power of the purse, which was the Constitution’s main check and balance mechanism against the executive power. They have been so fearful of Obama’s threat to hold his breath – shut down the government – if he does not get what he wants that they gave him “total victory”, albeit with a few bones tossed to the establishment. Despite majorities in both Houses and thus total control over spending, the Republicans have passed a budget that the White House can claim to be total victory. It’s depressing even if it was predictable.

There Will Be War Volume Ten will be on Amazon Monday. We will see where it goes from there. There is already a campaign to boycott the book on the grounds that the publisher is a scoundrel. This is apparently something to do with fan politics and awards. I can only say that it has been a pleasant experience to work with them. I have all the editorial decisions, of course including story choices, and they do all the paper work including paying the contributors. No other publisher was willing to do that. I am not involved in award politics and have not been since Lucifer’s Hammer. More importantly I am not able to handle payments to twenty people (actually far more than that; the series, twenty-five years old, was not interesting to any publishers when I got the offer to publish it again, and the first nine volumes of There Will Be War (well, the first four; the others are coming out over time) did well enough that they made an offer for me to edit a tenth volume. I find them very competent and helpful; payment from Europe has been a bit tricky but the problems seem to have been solved and the contributors received advances on non-exclusive rights, which is a bit like finding the money in the street for those whose stories have already been in print. We also have some good stuff from new authors, who apparently prefer to be in this book rather than in the traditional magazines; I’m a bit flattered. Anyway it’s done. If you like war stories you will like this book. Now on to Avalon.

Went to a neighborhood party with people we see often as we take our daily walks. One was a man we met the first day we lived here. We watched their children grow up. It involved a walk of about a block, in the dark, this being just three days before Winterset. I used the Rollator walker that I tend to use if I’m going to be out on the streets; it was my first time using it to go to a private house. Bit clumsy getting up two steps to get in and worse getting down them to get out, but all went well and we had a good time. It’s almost exactly a year since my stroke.

I need to do a full essay on IQ. I know quite a lot about it, at least what was known back when I was in graduate school, and what you can and can’t predict from individual IQ scores; and of course what you can reliably predict about groups from IQ scores. I’ve sort of stopped talking about it lately because it always starts a storm, and I’m a bit weary of the same arguments over and over again.

I learned that IQ was the best single predictor of “success” so long as you define success in any reasonable manner. You must have an objective and reliable measure of “success” (actually that would be part of my definition of rational) and you must have a reliable and well known IQ test. Lately just saying that much produces a storm of protest, but not much data; the data seem to support the validity of IQ being the best single predictor. Of course you must understand that “best” often leaves a lot of room for error, which is why IQ works so much better predicting group averages than individual performance.

Comes now Garret Jones with Hive Mind http://www.amazon.com/Hive-Mind-Your-Nation%C2%92s-Matters/dp/0804785961?tag=chaosmanor-20 . Jones is an economist and deals with numbers; he doesn’t purport to understand IQ in any professional way. The WSJ reviewer of his book says “To Fight Poverty, Raise IQ Scores” which is perhaps much like saying “to become a successful author, write a best seller”. It’s true enough but how to do it?

And that’s what I need to do an essay on; because Jones confirms what I learned in graduate school: “Smarter people, on average, are more patient and interested in saving. And indeed national savings rates correlate with IQ scores.” The reviewer, Nicholas Wade, a long time science writer, continues “There is something dismaying about the possibility that a single number, like an IQ score, could reveal anything significant about an individual’s character or potential. And maybe IQ scores don’t say much about any particular individual. But, as averages, they do measure something significant about groups of individuals, correlating quite well, for instance, with income.”

So an economist finds what psychologists have always known, and what Richard Lynn, Professor of Psychology, and Tatu Vanhanen, Professor of Political Science claimed in their hard to find and very expensive book IQ And The Wealth of Nations. IQ measures something important and you ignore it at your peril. Now I spent two years in graduate school working on that hypothesis, so I would be expected to have that conclusion; but Johnson has data.

It’s late and I have to get to bed; I’ll expand on this another time. I’m pleased to have good evidence that despite the US Courts which forbid use of IQ in most uses, it’s important , worth studying, and cannot be ignored. I knew that all along.

Still yet more on democracy…

It is said that the problem with democracy is that the people will vote themselves ever-larger government benefits and bankrupt the society. This is, of course, false. Just look at what is going on in the United States today: Wall Street is being given trillions of dollars in subsidies while little people get zero percent interest on their savings, and pensions and social security are set to be ravaged to help pay for this largesse to the plutocrats. A mandatory private health system was enacted that will radically increase the profits of for-profit insurance companies while the average person faces costs so high that they cannot actually afford to use their insurance. Trillions of dollars are spent in wars whose only obvious point is to enrich politically connected defense contractors, while roads and bridges in this country are allowed to fall apart. The borders are being thrown open to massive third-world immigration so that wages for the many can be driven down and profits for the few driven up. None of these things are happening because the people themselves want them.
No, the problem with democracy is that it is so easy for the rich to bribe elected representatives, and use the government to steal from the people. People vote for a candidate who says one thing, and after being elected, they do what they have secretly promised their wealthy patrons.
What do I think of direct ‘mob rule’ democracy? I think that it might be a good thing (Switzerland anyone?). Or at least, not as bad as rule by kleptocracy masquerading as democracy.
So why do we have a representational democracy? I think the problem is information. In a large and complex society, it is impossible for any single private citizen to be up on all the details of all the issues facing the society (especially if they have a day job). So they have to delegate political power to elected representatives, and therein begins the rot, because these representatives can be so easily bribed.. Same with the press: no single human being can evaluate all the information directly, they must have journalists to research and condense the issues for them: and these journalists can be, and increasingly are, bought and paid for by large corporate conglomerates.
And if I had a good solution for this I’d be king. I would only say that pretty near any system can be made to work, sort of, if the elites have a sense of honor and duty to the nation as a whole. And there is no system that cannot be corrupted if the elites care only for themselves.
Didn’t you once have a novel where you said that the elites had to participate in long boring formal ceremonies, to remind them of their connection with and duty to their nation? Have we lost something recently?

TG

Cicero said that the problem with democracy was it prevented able men from rising to the top. Aristocracy was better, but the ruling families become corrupt. Monarchy puts too much power in one man. The object is to establish a Republic, which has elements of all three. The Framers in Philadelphia during that hot summer of 1787 were well aware of Cicero as well as his predecessors and successors; and attempted to build that. They left many questions to the States, They were well aware that individually they would be conquered without a national union, but it was impossible to get them to agree on a single government. Seven of them had by law established religions, with state enforcement and taxes; the First Amendment has such curious language precisely to keep Congress from disestablishing the State religions. The last one vanished by state action not long before the Civil War. E Pluribus Unum.

Adam Smith warns us that whenever capitalists get together they scheme to get the government to pass laws favoring them; in particular to make it difficult for newcomers to enter their particular business. Massive government regulation, requiring experts to tell you how to comply with the law, serve that purpose nicely. Then there are government subsidies to various industries and firms. There is regulation of prices, keeping them high. There are bunny inspectors whose job is to see that no one sells rabbits without a license – and that stage magicians have a Federal license to use rabbits in shows.

This sort of crony capitalism was precisely what the limits on Federal Power were attempting to prevent. Individual states might be corrupt, but the general government would not be; it had not enough power.

If you believe that populations will not vote themselves largesse from the public treasury I suspect your education in history has not been great. Certainly regulators are bribed all the time, but so are legislators for favoring special interest groups – including public service unions. The hostility of the teachers unions to charter schools even when it is shown that the students are generally better off by the new arrangements, is well known. At onetime school districts were small, and relatively autonomous. Some were corrupt; most were not. As districts consolidated and the federal government became involved, more money was spent, but centrally; it is a matter of debate as to whether all that money was used wisely; if indeed the students learn more now than they did in times past.

The Swiss Confederacy has retained far more power in the Cantons, but it did have one Federal Power: universal military conscription and half a lifetime in the reserve army. It is generally conceded that the Swiss system works well for the Helvetian Confederacy; whether it could be expanded to all of Europe, or transplanted to the United States, is doubtful.

Republics fall. This one has lasted longer than most. Whether it remains a Republic now can be debated.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/major-ai-advance-could-have-big-implications-for-enterprise-software/

Major AI advance could have big implications for enterprise software (ZD)

Beyond recognizing handwritten characters, the software also drew its own as part of a visual Turing Test. Most of the judges weren’t able to tell the characters were drawn by a machine.

By Chris Kanaracus for Constellation Research | December 18, 2015 — 12:41 GMT (04:41 PST) | 

Ideas advanced in an AI (artificial intelligence) program newly unveiled this week could have big implications over time for enterprise software. Here are the details from MIT’s Technology Review:

Taking inspiration from the way humans seem to learn, scientists have created AI software capable of picking up new knowledge in a far more efficient and sophisticated way.

The new AI program can recognize a handwritten character about as accurately as a human can, after seeing just a single example. The best existing machine-learning algorithms, which employ a technique called deep learning, need to see many thousands of examples of a handwritten character in order to learn the difference between an A and a Z.

The software was developed by Brendan Lake, a researcher at New York University, together with Ruslan Salakhutdinov, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Toronto, and Joshua Tenenbaum, a professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. Details of the program, and the ideas behind it, are published today in the journal Science.

The researchers used a technique they call the Bayesian program learning framework, or BPL. Essentially, the software generates a unique program for every character using strokes of an imaginary pen. A probabilistic programming technique is then used to match a program to a particular character, or to generate a new program for an unfamiliar one. The software is not mimicking the way children acquire the ability to read and write but, rather, the way adults, who already know how, learn to recognize and re-create new characters.

Humans Are Slamming Into Driverless Cars and Exposing a Key Flaw – Bloomberg Business

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-18/humans-are-slamming-into-driverless-cars-and-exposing-a-key-flaw

“If you program them to not follow the law, how much do you let them break the law?”

<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-18/humans-are-slamming-into-driverless-cars-and-exposing-a-key-flaw>

A key question for robot cars.

Dear Dr. Pournelle, 

As you have discussed, one of the difficulties in assessing climate science is properly collecting data for it; this article claims that faulty site location is exaggerating warming trends in the US.
http://dailycaller.com/2015/12/17/exclusive-noaa-relies-on-compromised-thermometers-that-inflate-u-s-warming-trend/
I present it for your perusal. Perhaps if you have some NOAA readers in the audience they might wish to clarify the matter. 

Respectfully, 

Brian P.

As a comment on an article about Google using airships to further communication in India, and the Indian Government being reluctant, (A Potential Blow to Google’s Project Loon: Indian Official Throws Water on Internet Balloons

Project Loon, Google’s pie-in-the-sky plan to blanket the globe with Internet through a chain of balloons floating in the stratosphere, is getting some traction. The Google X project recently signed deals in Sri Lanka, a small country, and Indonesia, a much larger one, for early testing. In Indonesia, the deal involved three telcos, which will share their spectrum with Loon to deliver network coverage.)

I said

One is led to wonder if baksheesh is the answer…  Of course that is a very politically incorrect thing to say.  Assume I didn’t mean it.

And got the reply

A Potential Blow to Google’s Prrecode)

Hi, Jerry —

Interesting. I wonder why Google isn’t using tried-and-true technology to accomplish the same thing. Cell towers are easy to build, and India certainly has satellite launch capability; why rely on balloons, which are vulnerable to weather change and have a tendency to snap their tethers and go wandering? And one one think people in Kashmir would be fretful about balloons or blimps over their territory. Any idea what the logic behind this is?

— Allen

I see your point, and I don’t know. Satellites are expensive and need maintenance; doubtless air ships are cheaper.  I have not taken a serious look at airship operations in decades; have you?

Rhine valley. I wouldn’t mind doing one of those.

That’s a different thing, though, from what we apparently have here, which sounds like a civilian variation on the unmanned EWS balloons that the Air Force has been experimenting with lately (like the one that snapped its tether last summer above Maryland and went drifting over the countryside before sharpshooters managed to bring it down). From a conversation I once had with a hot-air balloon pilot, I gather these things are hard to control. Once they’re aloft, even a moderate breeze can produce a pendulum effect that sends them rocking back and forth. Hardly what I’d call a stable platform for cellular communications.

Yeah, you’re right: balloons are cheaper than satellites. Maybe that’s the rationale. But hardly foolproof. Remember the scene with the lost barrage balloon in the movie Hope And Glory? (And if you’ve never seen that film, by all means, rent it and watch it…highly recommended!).

— Allen

It’s an interesting topic.

Dear Dr. Pournelle, 

First of all, allow me to express my condolences for your daughter’s accident while riding a horse. I hope she recovers well! Also, congratulations on getting out “There will be war”. I look forward to reading it.  

Unfortunately, I write with bad news: It seems the “Dyson sphere” we thought we had detected was actually a comet swarm. Maybe next time! 

http://www.iflscience.com/space/there-definitely-no-intellligent-life-around-alien-megastructure-star

Respectfully, 

Brian P.

We’re all sad. Stephanie and Jim are convinced it’s comets, which is good enough for me. They would like it to be something different. Thanks for the kind words.

On War: Worth Your Time

This is a good read:

<.>

Declared war identified the enemy, brought full mobilization of all the national assets for the duration and included central command of the economy with price controls, rationing, conscription and funding through war bonds. It was old-fashioned, big war that employed the operational art, and U.S. tactics conformed to our notions of national ideals, culture and honor.

If we no longer practice big declared war, what are we doing instead and how is that working out for us? How did we devolve from old fashioned war to today’s persistent conflict? How will America use its military power in the future?

</>

http://ciceromagazine.com/opinion/war-is-extinct-and-we-miss-it-part-1-what-happened-to-war/

The more I read of this article, the more it is clear to me this country subsists with an unacceptable state of readiness and, frankly, I don’t see much use for most of the people I see on TV other than cannon fodder. What else can we do with the “campus safespace” kids who are offended by Woodrow Wilson and want a “home” rather than an “education”? What use are they in war other than cannon fodder? If they can’t be challenged intellectually, how will they ever demonstrate physical courage?

Consider the number of prescriptions from mental health drugs in this country. Consider the high school drop-out rate. Consider the obesity rates. Look at how even the slightest things offend people to the point of infantile catharsis that always seems to go viral in the schizoid collectives that indulge in these grotesque acts of self-abasement. We’re going to war with these losers? And we think we’re going to win? Yeah, nobody wants to hear it because they all know someone I’m describing and I’m an “evil” man for talking so “hurtfully” about these “unique snowflakes”, but we’re in a lot of trouble.. And if we don’t quit trying to be a bunch of creeps and get our act together, we’ll have more than hurt feelings and broken ideals to worry about.

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Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

: Secretary of the Navy issued a mid-course correction,

The Title, “SECDEF Carter Directs Navy to Cut Littoral Combat Ship Program to 40 Hulls, Single Shipbuilder” might be better phrased, “SECDEF tears the Navy a new one!”

While budget disagreements inside the Pentagon are common the tone and language of Carter’s memo directed at Mabus – who has led the Department of the Navy since 2009 – was unusually stringent.

http://news.usni.org/2015/12/16/secdef-carter-directs-navy-to-cut-littoral-combat-ship-program-to-40-hulls-single-shipbuilder

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

Chaos Manor View, Tuesday, December 15, 2015

I sent the last of There Will Be War Volume Ten off this evening; they tell me the book, which has mostly been proof-read already, will be up on Amazon perhaps as early as Friday. There are some rewards for ordering it on the first day, so watch for it. I should have more time for this place now. My priorities are, work on the Avalon novel with Niven and Barnes for at least a week, doing a pass—that is, reading everything we have, and adding what I have to to make it a coherent text. Niven then goes in and adds the magic that only he can do; I’ll have taken care of technical stuff and making sure the plot is advancing at the right pace, moving expository lumps into other scenes so that it’s more readable.

That should finish part one, and the clocks will mostly be wound. Some of it stuff I do and Niven and Barnes usually don’t, like big cast scenes; I have already told Barnes to introduce all the characters he needs, so I don’t have to do much to bring them on stage for the big cast scenes. You can’t introduce everyone at once, or you can but it’s a lot of work to keep people reading while you do, and I see I’m getting too technical here so I’ll stop. Anyway, Avalon gets my attention for a while. Before the end of the year I’ll be done; the next job is LisaBetta, a near future novel of asteroid mines and colonies, a well advanced Artificial Intelligence, and the teenage girl the AI must take care of, in an age of bureaucracy on Earth. John DeChancie has about 45,000 words; I’ll take a full pass, add text and notes, and with luck we’ll have a book by spring. And in mid January I ought to be able to get back to Mamelukes; it’s at 160,000 words, and needs a battle, and about three major scenes; I don’t know how long that takes. But I sport of know where all the major characters – there are a lot of them – will be, assuming they survive the coming battle. That may not be easy for some of them. No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

Anyway, I’m done with There Will Be War, Volume Ten, the first new anthology in that series since the early 90’s; over 120,000 words of very readable stories including a masterpiece by Poul Anderson, a Benford, a Niven, and some exciting stories by newer writers, ranging from bio warfare to piracy in the asteroids to interstellar war. There’s poetry, and articles about directed energy weapons by Doug Beeson, former Chief Scientist of Space Command; and a serious analysis of Fleet Structure for the Navy, previously published by the US Naval Institute, by Commander Phillip Pournelle. And as they say, much, much more. I am very sure you’ll like it.

 

My daughter is still in hospital following her equine accident, but she has been moved from Intensive Care, and most of the tubes have been removed. I hope to SKYPE with her next week. Her Kindle Fire was stolen recently, but she should have a new one by today, tomorrow for sure.  Now I have to think of an appropriate Christmas present. Not something having to do with horses…

I saw most of the debates. No one won. But Trump looks better; he has learned self control. One tends to forget that he’s not been in politics and this is his first political debate. Carly Fiorina came across as perhaps the best prepared, and she certainly seems to know what she’s talking about. Trump was pounded for not being specific, but that’s nuts: Presidents shouldn’t be wonks, they should know what they want. We know Trump can get very complex jobs like building resorts, office buildings, and casinos constructed and opened up; one presumes he knows how to listen to advisors, else he’s never have made the money to finance his campaign, And no, this is not an endorsement; merely an observation.

 

‘For one, most insurance policies have an exclusion that says the insurance company will not pay for claims caused by “acts of terrorism.”’

<http://securitydebrief.com/2015/12/14/calling-san-bernardino-shooting-terrorism-is-a-big-deal/>

This post is essentially self-promotion, and I don’t agree with the positive comments in re President Obama, but it contains important information about insurance exclusions for acts of terrorism – and a reminder of the insanity of not classifying the Boston Marathon bombings as terrorism.

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

So the President calling it “terrorism” (but not Islamic terrorism) is a big deal indeed.

: IC Review Finds TS Emails in Clinton’s Box

Well, the State Department tried to tell the world the Intelligence Community made a mistake in its classification procedures, and most of us scoffed. And, now we scoff again:

<.>

EXCLUSIVE: An intelligence community review has re-affirmed that two classified emails were indeed “top secret” when they hit Hillary Clinton’s unsecured personal server despite a challenge to that designation by the State Department, according to two sources familiar with the review.

The sources described the dispute over whether the two emails were classified at the highest level as a “settled matter.”

The agencies that owned and originated that intelligence – the CIA and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency or NGA – reviewed the emails to determine how they should be properly stored, as the State Department took issue with their highly classified nature. The subject matter of the messages is widely reported to be the movement of North Korean missiles and a drone strike. A top secret designation requires the highest level of security, and can include the use of an approved safe.

The sources, who were not authorized to speak on the record, told Fox News that while the emails were indeed “top secret” when they hit Clinton’s server, one of them remains “top secret” to this day — and must be handled at the highest security level. The second email is still considered classified but at the lower “secret” level because more information is publicly available about the event.

</>

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/12/15/sources-review-affirms-clinton-server-emails-were-top-secret-despite-department-challenge.html

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Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Trump must be aware of this; he said in the debates “if Hillary is allowed to run”. Others said do you mean the emails but he didn’t answer. I suspect he’s worried that she will go to jail; he’s sure he can beat her.

Democracy, Middle-Class Rule, and the Middle East

Jerry,

I’ve had a massively politically incorrect thought bouncing around in my head for a while. It seem timely. It concerns our progressive political elite’s unthinking fetish for unqualified “democracy”.

Our self-appointed betters have made a complete bloody hash of the Middle East by blindly pursuing their gross ideological misconception of what makes for stable prosperous states. Short version of their error:

A democracy is no better than its electorate.

My take is, what actually makes for the stable prosperous societies many in the West currently take WAY too much for granted is middle-class rule, not democracy per se, with “middle class” defined as those who tend to plan for their next generation, not just for their next week.

Consider the US, where the vote was originally pretty much restricted to settled property owners, and the Founders agreed “there never was a democracy that didn’t commit suicide.” We continued to do OK as the franchise was expanded for so long as this coincided with the expansion of a reasonably informed and forethoughtful middle class. Now that we’ve spent a couple generations simultaneously destroying our educational system and insisting that anyone who draws breath (and many who don’t) should vote, things are getting a bit dicey.

Or consider South Korea, which attained prosperity while ruled by various autocrats, and only became a stable democracy after it had a solid middle-class majority. I submit that what those autocrats had in common was that they largely ruled on behalf of their middle classes, fostering these to the point where they became the majority. Another example, Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore. Or Turkey, up until Erdogan…

But then there’s much of post-colonial Africa, with tiny middle classes overlaid on large tribal majorities, the birthplace of “one man, one vote – once” kleptocracies. There are fortunate competently-ruled exceptions here and there, but democracy sure hasn’t done a lot of good for most of those places.

Which brings us to the Middle East, the “Arab Spring”, and ensuing Western political-class idiocy.

The “Arab Spring” was a middle-class revolt, yes, against various local autocratic strongmen, but largely in places where the middle class was a minority. The place it worked out best was Tunisia where it started, which actually does have something resembling a middle-class majority.

In Libya and Egypt and Syria, not so much. Egypt, as you’ve pointed out, was fortunate enough to have a deeply established Army behind the strong-man we insisted step down for democratic elections, an Army to boot the majority Islamists back out afterwards and resume something with at least elements of pro middle-class rule. Libya and Syria were not so fortunate; Libya’s (unsavory, yes) ruling establishment crumbled entirely under Western pressure, and Syria’s (see Libya) partially, with results the locals – and we too – will be paying for for generations.

My take? Our primary interest in places with a majority of tribal fanatics is that they have stable governments that prevent the fanatics from organizing attacks on us. If we can then over time steer those governments toward fostering local middle-class majorities, great!

Then, and only then, start pressuring them to adopt democratic forms.

Otherwise, we end up with anything from tribal anarchic chaos (Libya) to one-man one-vote once regimes of islamists (Iran, and almost Egypt, and step-by-step Turkey) to the Islamic State’s emergence from Syria’s chaos and Iraq’s disaffected west.

“B-b-but you’re against DEMOCRACY!” they shriek in horror. Well, no, it has its place, once the locals are ready for it. Which is massively culturally judgmental, who do I think I AM, yadda yadda.

Which is, since I have plenty of other work to do without the huge distraction that vilification-fest would involve, why I sign myself

Porkypine

Democracy, Middle-Class Rule, and the Middle East

Jerry,

Did I mention “timely”? Ted Cruz, speaking today at the Heritage Foundation, just went there too regarding our progressive political elite’s disastrous fetish for democracy uber alles. Better organized and in more detail than my letter of yesterday, and with less emphasis on the long-term good of the locals involved, though he does mention that in passing. He focuses more on the immediate vital interests of the US, not unreasonable in a campaign speech for the Presidency.

The speech is up online now, at

http://www.c-span.org/video/?401882-1/radio-ted-cruz-remarks-national-security

I’ll be interested to see in the coming days if the usual suspects attack him over this, or attempt to ignore it away. This is a discussion the country very much needs to have. Listen to the speech.

Porkypine

The Framers were quite explicit: there never was a Democracy that did not commit suicide, 

: Islam, the Religion of “Peace?”

Jerry,

In the aftermath of the San Bernardino Islamic Terrorist Attack we are seeing paraphrases of Verse 5.32 of the Koran in an attempt to mislead us into believing that Islam is the Religion of “Peace.”

“Whoever kills a soul kills all humanity” was a paraphrase of 5.32 that appeared in a photo caption in the 12/14/2015 Los Angeles Times.

This paraphrase seems to be far from complete and, of course, conveniently omits the definition of what a soul might be. We should be warned that a soul in this context would be a believer in Islam and that non-believers are fair game!

Islam that follows Sharia and strict interpretation of the Koran has NO Place in the Modern World and is a mortal threat to all who do not accept it.

Any actions that are planned against ISIS need to be based on the above.

Bob Holmes

Migration with no intent to assimilate is invasion. Muslims cannot assimilate and obey Sharia; that is their dilemma.

: Decline and Fall of the Republic

Barrack Hussein Obama continues to preside over the fall of the Republic:

<.>

The American navy’s newest ship, launched with great fanfare less than a month ago, has broken down at sea and had to be towed to land.

The USS Milwaukee, a vast, futuristic-looking beast, suffered an engineering problem while en route from Halifax, Canada, to Mayport in Florida. From Florida it was due to travel on to its home port of San Diego.

But the ship, commissioned on November 21, suffered problems on Friday.

The Navy Times said that initial reports suggest fine metal debris collected in the lube oil filter, causing the system to shut down.

“Reporting of a complete loss of propulsion on USS Milwaukee is deeply alarming, particularly given this ship was commissioned just 20 days ago,” said John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

</>

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/12050630/Americas-newest-battleship-breaks-down-at-sea-after-20-days.html

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Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

That is bad management, and you would hope the President can improve it, but can you really blame it on the President? The Senate had to approve his officials…

Today’s little oddity

And an oddity for today:

http://www.covergirl.com/cosmetics/starwars-collection

Featuring:

STAR WARS LIMITED EDITION SUPER SIZER MASCARA – THE DARK SIDE

STAR WARS LIMITED EDITION SUPER SIZER WATERPROOF MASCARA – THE LIGHT SIDE

Product placement gone WAAY too far.

Jim

Re: Why are Apple MacBooks more reliable? (ZD)

I detest Apple’s politics, I dislike their walled-garden approach to software, I wouldn’t use their bookstore if someone else was paying for the books…

…but in the years since I switched from Windows systems to the first OSX Mac systems, I have lost my writing ONCE.

And that was when my Mac copy of Word crashed, and the Mac asked me if I would like to save the file—and because I was brand new to the OS, I clicked NO before realizing I should have clicked YES.

Compare that to all my many years on Windows systems (multiple makers, multiple versions, only one constant) where my hands did a nervous, involuntary CTRL-S twitch every couple of minutes because the Blue Screen of Death was my constant companion. And where I routinely lost work. Sometimes whole chapters. Once, a whole short story. Always, the second I let my guard down, something.

I don’t care about souping up my machines, I have no interest in digging into their innards. All I want from my computers is that they get out of my way and let me work—and don’t destroy what I’ve done.

For that, only Apple delivers.

Holly

I’ve never lost text with Mac or PC since the S-100 buss, and I write a lot; but I will agree, Macs are reliable.  At least until the battery swells up, as happened to my Air.  And I loved that Air…

 

running Windows

One option for running some version of Windows is to invest in Parallels. They provide a quite functional emulator that you can run on a Mac, so that it will pretend to be a PC, and then you can install Windows on the virtual PC. One of my copy editing clients needs me to run a TeX compiler that’s been customized in a Windows environment, so my Mac Mini (a few years old) has Parallels and a version of Windows€”I think 8, but Parallels claims to be compatible with the newer OSs, and I don’t see any reason to doubt them. It’s given me good service for several years, without any irritations other than those inherent in Windows. And it’s cheaper than having both a PC and a Mac.

William H. Stoddard

I’m all in…

…as soon as they add the fifty cal and Gen Savage is flying.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/14/aviation/windspeed-skydeck-seats-on-top-of-aircraft/index.html

Bob

http://www.zdnet.com/article/elon-musk-tech-behemoths-invest-1bn-in-open-source-ai-research/

Elon Musk, tech behemoths invest $1bn in open-source AI research (ZD)

Can open-source artificial intelligence technologies work for the greater good of humanity?

As Karl Popper showed in “The Poverty of Historicism,” you can’t predict what you’re going to know tomorrow–because if you did, you’d know it today. 

jd

Russia Flight Tests Anti-Satellite Missile – Washington Free Beacon

http://freebeacon.com/national-security/russia-conducts-successful-flight-test-of-anti-satellite-missile/

SUBJ: Hans-Ulrich Rudel helped design the A-10

Continuing in your recent posts on the A-10. Did you know the A-10 was designed with input from Hans-Ulrich Rudel

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Ulrich_Rudel) the legendary WW2 tank-buster, the “deadliest warrior in history” (according to Jeff

Cooper) and most-decorated pilot in the Luftwaffe?

Jeff Cooper’s short story on Rudel “Kriegoberst” is a _mind-blowing_ read, but I can’t find an on-line copy to link to, dammit. It’s included in Cooper’s book _Fireworks_ for those interested.

In the 1970’s, Pierre Sprey The man who wrote the detailed specifications for the proposed A-X project (which would result in the

A-10) required all those associated with the program to read Rudel’s book _Stuka Pilot_. Later, Fairchild-Republic’s A-10 project manager flew Rudel from Germany to Fairchild-Republic’s headquarters to chair a seminar for the design team. The result speaks for itself.

See: “Luftwaffe Ace Causing Problems” By MICHAEL GETLER, “The Washington Post, BONN, West Germany, 11 Nov 1976

“A World War II German flying ace whose postwar neo-Nazi activities have landed him in the midst of a bitter political controversy here, visited Washington last month to participate with U. S. generals in the assessment of a new American jet fighter. The German officer, former Col. Hans-Ulrich Rudel, said that he went to the United States at the invitation of the U. S. Air Force to help assess the A-10, an antitank aircraft manufactured by Fairchild Industries.”

http://acesofww2.com/germany/aces/rudel/

It is no wonder the “Devil’s Cross” (as the Soviets call it) is such a deadly platform. It contains a bit of the spirit of the greatest tank killer ever.

The zoomies, as other have stated, would be happy to kill the A-10 and anything else stinking of the “A-” prefix. But a schlacht-vogel like the A-10 comes along only once in a great while. I, for one, would love to see the Army and the Marine Corps take over the Warthog. They would give the bird a better home and its drivers a better career path.

“Soldiers hate warriors. Warriors hate soldiers.” from _Once An Eagle_ by Anton Myrer

Cordially,

John

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

Chaos Manor View, Sunday, December 13, 2015

I’ve been devoured in trying to get There Will Be War Vol 10 out the door, but as I was about to finish my daughter was involved in an equestrian accident and ended in hospital and a great number of family, housing maintenance, and other things ate up all my time and energy. Nothing that a younger and more spry guy couldn’t have handled quickly, but I’m not what I used to be. I haven’t quite finished the book.

As part of it I did an interview with Larry Niven, and found that an ancient MacBook Pro – vintage, I got it before the brain cancer treatment in 2008 – with QuickTime and the built in microphone, laid on a coffee table in my living room with Niven and I sitting comfortably across from each other, recorded the interview well enough that I think I can edit it into a short audio to be used in promoting the book.

Which means that pricey as Macs are, you need to think about how long they are useful. I recently went to an Apple store and looked at the new MacBook Pro, and they are gorgeous. They are also fast; but really my old pre-2008 MacBook Pro is still good enough for most of what I use a Mac for. The new ones will do one thing, though: apparently you can record both sides of a SKYPE call quite smoothly with that gorgeous screen, and quickly edit that into an interview podcast. I don’t know if I’ll ever do that, but it’s tempting.

If you do much business you probably need Windows, and Eric is building us a new high performance Windows 10, but I admit I am tempted by the newest MacBook Pro as well. That screen is gorgeous.

Learning to use the MacBook Pro to record was itself interesting: the last time I did interviews, and it doesn’t seem that long age, I used a good quality tape recorder and expensive ,microphone; all that is upstairs where I can’t go without an expedition, and I wasn’t sure I could find it all anyway. So I Googled audio recording on a Mac. It seemed simple enough but the screens I was shown were very similar to the ones I got on the MacBook Pro, but not identical. KI knew that on a Mac everything was either very simple or impossible, and there certainly had to be a simple way to do this, and eventually I found that I just wasn’t seeing a couple of option icons on the QuickTime control (rather tiny) screen; when I realized they were there and did what the F1 Help screen said they did, even if the icon the Help showed wasn’t what I was looking at, it became simple. Moral: Macs really are simple, but you need some grounding in the Mac philosophy, and faith that with a Mac everything is very simple or impossible; and Macs pretty well do everything you expect them to; you just have to figure out the simple approach. Also, Mac Help screens actually have a use; unlike some that are there to prove they told you how but only if you already knew…

Anyway, I didn’t get much accomplished over the weekend, but I at least didn’t pile up more work. Sand I got a lot of the Christmas stuff done, on line. Sorry I have neglected this place.

Meanwhile, Eric has discovered that if you tell the ASUS Motherboard that you have liquid cooling, that makes the board think you are overclocking, and the least you can get away with is 12% overclock. Since we don’t want any overclocking at all, that’s important to know. If you use ASUS and do not want to overclock, do not tell the board that you have liquid cooling; at least that’s my interpretation. Full report from Eric coming up.

 

It’s late, I don’t have time to do comments, but here are some things to think about.

Think about this:

Microsoft’s tough love

                Apparently Microsoft really, really wants everybody using Live Mail 2012 to stop and use either the inadequate Mail app or Outlook. Early this afternoon I received this:

Dear user,

In a few weeks, we will be making some changes to our email services that might impact your @outlook.com, @hotmail, @live, or @msn email account. Those changes will prevent your email from being delivered to the Windows Live Mail 2012 application you use.

In order to continue using Windows Live Mail 2012 to send and receive email for your account, you need to install the latest update published here.

If you use Windows Live Mail 2012 on Windows 8, Windows 8.1 or Windows 10, we recommend that you switch to the built in Mail app in Windows to stay connected and get the latest feature updates on Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10.

Windows Live Essentials 2009 and 2011 are not supported anymore, and you will need to update to Windows 8/8.1 or Windows 10 and use the Mail app, or use www.outlook.com. To learn more about the Mail app, please click here.

We also recommend all Windows Live Mail users on Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 to upgrade to Windows 10 and use the built in Mail application to stay connected and get the latest feature updates.

We suggest saving this email so you can refer to it later.

Thanks for your understanding and continued use.

Sincerely, The Outlook team

                I very compliantly followed the link and obtained the update. I ran it and lost the use of Live Mail 2012. Upon startup Windows would announce the program had stopped must be closed. After some frustration including a repair install I checked out the Mail app. It’s far better than it was when first introduced with Windows 8. Then it was pathetic. Now it is merely limited, more so than is acceptable for a full PC. It would be somewhat acceptable on a phone or tablet but would be a good target for a paid competitor.

                So I headed off to Outlook. My main desktop has Office 2013 but I’ve always regarded Outlook as overkill for my needs and thus drawing more resources than I cared to give it. OTOH, The average desktop is now a lot more machine for the money and Outlook hasn’t gotten all that more resource hungry. But there was a problem. Outlook 2013 doesn’t know how to import Live Mail messages. I checked the older PC on my desk’s KVM. It has Office 2010 but it too lacked the import functionality. What madness was this? Live Mails was still actively developed when that generation of Office launched. Did they not want people to move up to Outlook as they had in the past?

                I noticed that this wasn’t the first time I’d run into the lack of import options in recent Outlook generations. That Outlook 2010 had a third party utility for adding the needed import option installed but it was really clunky. Handling all of the folders would be a long tedious task. Then something occurred to me. Live Mail 2012 didn’t actually crash. Not entirely. Just the part that pulls down new messages and other items like calendar data. But the primary UI was still usable so long as you didn’t click the CLOSE button on the error box. As it turned out I could retrieve all of the account setup info and even export to a PST file. Score one for the Live Mail team, wherever they are now.

Eric Pobirs

Bandow: ‘An American who values individual liberty and advocates limited government should oppose further inflating the Washington Leviathan to “do good” elsewhere.’

<http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/no-libertarian-case-for-empire/>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

How Microsoft Created a Revolution [heh] in Soviet Computing.

<http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-microsoft-created-a-revolution-in-soviet-computing>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

 

: Roy Spencer, PhD

http://www.drroyspencer.com/

Greenpeace RICO investigation and  the satellite data trend (4 posts)

 

From Mike Glyer’s File 770

 

SITH STATUARY. The BBC profile “The Man Who Turned Lenin Into Darth Vader” tells about Ukranian sculptor Alexander Milov, who got the Odessa city council to allow him to turn a Lenin statue they were threatening to melt down into a Darth Vader statue. It even has free Wi-Fi!

To create his new sculpture, Milov strengthened the original structure and added a helmet and cape made out of titanium alloy – he also inserted a Wi-Fi router in Vader’s head. Despite the statue’s apparent glibness, it serves as a reminder that we can’t control which memories last and which don’t. “I wanted to make a symbol of American pop culture which appears to be more durable than the Soviet ideal.”

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

Chaos Manor View, Wednesday, December 09, 2015

Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western Civilization as it commits suicide.

From a March 28, 1786, letter written by John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who were American diplomats at the time, to U.S. Secretary of Foreign Affairs John Jay reporting on their conversation in London with the ambassador from Tripoli regarding piracy by the Barbary States:

We took the liberty to make some enquiries concerning the ground of their pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation.

The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of their Prophet; that it was written in their Koran; that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners; that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners; and that every Mussulman [Muslim] who was slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

(Wall Street Journal)

The Caliphate would make the same reply today. You can buy a truce – never peace – by paying tribute; but they are always at war with the infidels, and have no choice in the matter, for it is commanded.

The Caliphate – ISIL as the President seems fond of calling it – accepts the command. It gives as a sign of legitimacy that it rules lands and in those lands applies the Law of the Koran; this demonstrates its legitimacy in the eyes of God. All Muslims must give it allegiance, for it rules by the will of Allah. And so long as it can make this claim of legitimacy, it grows, as more and more Muslims, including middle class citizens of the United States find they have no choice but to render it obedience. This not “radicalizing”; this is obedience to the fundamental marching orders that have prevailed since the Prophet returned to Mecca. To those who have accepted the Caliphate – ISIL – they have seen the sign, and they accept its commands.

The Caliphate grows daily. It must someday be defeated. It grows stronger daily. It is far more difficult and costly to defeat today than it was a year ago when the President of the United States pronounced it contained and called it the junior varsity. And it will never be easier to defeat than now.

However, the Caliphate is not our only enemy in the region. Iran has repeatedly declared a “state of hatred” with the United States. That does not have the legal implications of a state of war—indeed we negotiate with them and relieve sanctions so that they will become richer—but it is a declaration of intent, and we would be foolish not to believe the current regime, which is even now testing missiles capable of carrying nuclear war heads, does not mean it. So long as Iraq was held by Sunni or Baathist elements we could count on Iraq to be the enemy of our enemy, but we eliminated the Baathists and turned the Iraqi Sunni over to the tender mercies of the long persecuted Shiite majority. We then proceeded to withdraw. It should hardly have been a surprise when the Shiites turned to Shiite Iran, the ill trained “unity” army ran from the Caliphate, and the Sunni in the region did not fight the invading Sunni forces, even though they would have preferred to be liberated from invading Caliphate forces by Sunni Jordan (with which they were briefly federated in the United Arab Kingdom in the times of Egyptian Nasser). That not being possible, they saw the incoming Caliphate as preferable to the Shiite Iraqi government Obama left in place. For Obama, Clinton, and Both Bushes there is plenty of blame to go around.

If we destroy the Caliphate, we destroy an enemy of Iran. If we are not prepared to exert the power of the Republic in stabilizing the area, is this wise?

Whatever we do, it cannot be done with airpower alone. You can bomb the land, you can fly over the land, but you do not own the land until you can stand an 18 year old with a rifle on it. Ted Fehrenbach reminded us of that many years ago; and it remains true. Once you stand your own soldiers on the land, you can invite others in. In some places like Mosul, the answer is obvious. Invite the Kurds.

Alas, aiding the Kurds is not acceptable to Turkey, which fears a Kurdistan as much as it fears Persia. (Of course, Iran fears Kurdistan and the Turks. This is a complicated place with a long history.) The Kurds are the only reliable allies we have other than Israel.

Then there is Syria, which can not be a nation unless ruled by minority Shiites; the Syrian Sunni tend to come down hard on Shiites, Christians, Druze, Turkmen, Kurds, and any other minority they can find. The only way to pacify Syria is to make it a federation of states and sort populations into them so that each is more or less ruled by consent of the governed. Or an odd constitutional government such as Lebanon enjoyed when Beirut was the Pearl of the Mediterranean; but that fell, and Syrian attempts to impose stability were not successful.

And we have refugees, who are better settled somewhere in the Middle East – even if we have to conquer a homeland for them. And we have our more or less allies, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Add to this mix a President who knows so little of the situation that he actually thought his speech in Cairo – remember that, the President of the United State with great entourage going to Cairo to talk to the Muslim World and thinking his speech would change things?

We were told Sunday night to stay the course. The President bas it all under control. The Junior Varsity will not prevail

Sleep well.

Is it unconstitutional to ask those seeking admission to the US if they consider it their religious duty to make war on us, or if they belong to a religion that considers it self at war with us?  Is it fair to ask them their definition of Jihad?

Are you now or have you ever been a member of an organization dedicated to the overthrow of the government of the United States by force and violence? Surely this is a constitutional question; God knows I had to answer it often enough in my aerospace days.

 

: I believe I’ve been saying this for the last decade.

For about the last decade it’s been painfully obvious to me that the Muslims who are the most dangerous to you and I are those who are well educated. Oxford has committed a study recently which now make this official. Graduates of technical colleges are the best candidates for radicalization in Islam. And they think they have put a finger on why. So the next time somebody, such as our current execrable POTUS, tries to tell you it’s those who are poor with pointless lives who are dangerous and all we have to do is pay them better for being poor scream back at them using this Oxford study as your evidence. (Obviously data you can dig up for yourself out of the Qur’an, Haddiths, quotes used by so-called Islamists, and a serious observation of the news surrounding terror attacks means nothing.)

Study Shows Technical College Degrees Make Ideal Terrorists http://www.foxbusiness.com/industries/2015/12/09/study-shows-technical-college-degrees-make-ideal-terrorists/?intcmp=hplnws

I’m not particularly brilliant as brilliance goes. And I was able to spot this trend over a decade ago. It’s a shame it is taking the academic world so long to catch on.

{^_^}

If a religion requires you to war against the United States, surely the constitution – which is not a suicide pact – allows us to know it?  And lying about that when entering is surely grounds for expulsion?

I will announce this again tomorrow:

 

The move to SSL for the www.jerrypournelle.com site may require adjustment of reader’s links/bookmarks/RSS feeds. Although some of the adjustments have been done (geeky-note: htaccess file adjustments), others are being fixed as they occur.

Here’s some useful links:

Jerry’s main site : https://jerrypournelle.com

Chaos Manor: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/

Chaos Manor RSS feed: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/feed/

Jerry’s long-suffering web guy will be monitoring issues that are noted via the Chaos Manor contact form. At the moment, though (5pm PST Wednesday 12/9) he is stuck using a wi-fi connection at a Taco Bell in Woodland Washington due to a mudslide on I-5 north preventing him from returning home. He’ll keep an eye on things, and will make more adjustments when he gets back home to his comfortable computing chair.

Rick Hellewell

 

Bandow: ‘An American who values individual liberty and advocates limited government should oppose further inflating the Washington Leviathan to “do good” elsewhere.’

<http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/no-libertarian-case-for-empire/>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

Lamarckianism is getting a scientific test

Jerry,
It is important to understand completely what these findings are and what they are not. The environmental stresses experienced by the parents that affect their offspring do not alter the parents DNA, their genes, but only how that DNA is expressed in the offspring. Studies on maternal epigenetics show that the altered activation patterns in the DNA will persist for up to three generations if the environmental stresses do not persist. After the third generation, the pattern of gene activation reverts to “normal” for that maternal lineage.
It is not surprising that paternal epigenetics works as well. After all, males produce sperm daily, so it is easy to see how epigenetic markers could be altered. To me, it is more interesting that maternal epigenetics works: females make all of their eggs before they are born, so altering the epigenetic markers on the eggs is more difficult. It likely happens as the egg follicle matures.
Epigenetics is a way for the parents of the offspring to tailor the genetic recipe for their young to match transient environment conditions — periods of higher predation, drought, food shortages, etc. It is a blunt instrument compared to changing the genes themselves. From a human standpoint, epigenetics gives us a chance to identify all of the genes that influence a given trait, like obesity, in a single go. Simply overfeed a rat and see which genes get turned on and turned off in their germ cells.
Epigenetics in not, however, Lamarck’s theory of evolution. Cutting off the tails of the rats or stretching the necks of the gazelles will not produce a new generation of short tailed rat or a new species of giraffe.

Kevin L Keegan

Surely this test goes beyond cutting the tails off mice?  Genetic engineering is not Darwinian evolution; for that matter, animal husbandry is not.

 

Jerkmeter

Hi, Jerry:
I was reading a story in one of your THERE WILL BE WAR anthologies, and came across a reference to a “jerkmeter.” I once did a lot of work with accelerometers, for missile guidance. I know lots of ways to measure acceleration. Apply a restraining force – electrical, electromagnetic, mechanical, whatever – to a test mass m to offset the force from acceleration. Measure the restraining force, and a = f/m. However, there is no physical relationship involving jerk in the same way there is a relationship among force, mass, and acceleration. Hence a direct measurement of jerk is not possible.
I figure I could cobble up a jerkmeter by continuously measuring acceleration and calculating a derivative. However, since the calculation would be based only on past data, the device would always lag behind the instantaneous value. That may be good enough, and it could be done.
Anyway, it was an interesting mental exercise.

Joseph P. Martino

Actually I did measure “jolt” which is the second derivative, using a BOEING Engineering Analog Computer (BEAC), or actually an array of them (each being a programmable op-amp).  But that was long ago.  I must have thought about that when I edited the story, but I have forgotten it.

We are all just stories in the end

Hi, Jerry,

A friend sent this to me today. Written by a WWII bomber pilot. As I have aged and lost many friends and relatives I find it strangely haunting. It does not pay to outlast everyone you have known.

“I don’t know if any of this is true. Everything happened that I have said happened, but it’s memory now, the shadow of things.

The truth lies in its own time; recall is not the reality of the past. When friends depart, one remembers them but they are changed; we hold only the fragment of them that touched us.

Their reality is gone, intact but irretrievable, in another place through which we passed but can never enter again.

I cannot go back nor can I bring them to me, so I must pursue the shadows of some middle ground, for 1 am strangely bound to all that happened then.

We broke hard bread together and I cannot forget Breslau, Styr, Regensburg, Ploesti, Vienna, Munich, Graz, and all the others, not cities, but battlegrounds five miles above where we made our brotherhood.

It’s gone now and long ago, swept clean by the wind. Part of me still lives there, tracing a course through all the names.

I linger now, looking back for them, the best ones…”

My friend’s frequently used signature line is, “We are all just stories in the end.”

Maybe so, but if I am going to end up as a story I can try to make it a good one.

Sorry about the Darwin Awards. My last job before I retired was editing a newspaper and I usually check these but my contributor was a “usually reliable source”, so I didn’t track them down. It was a good story, though. When I have checked them I usually find a basis in fact that has been, well .. embroidered a bit in the retelling. No point in letting a good story go to waste. If nothing else they are cautionary tales – a moments thought keeps you from becoming a story prematurely.

I’m glad you liked the Longfellow pieces – they have become favorites of mine, downloaded into my video library.

I came across another one you might enjoy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgavsCv0_iY

“The Holly and the Ivy” has always been a favorite and this is a magnificent arrangement, a characteristic of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

 

 

The geography of Antarctica’s underside | Newsroom | Washington University in St. Louis

https://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/Antarctic-seismic-survey.aspx#.Vmd5PEiy9-k.email

On Owned Power

Dear Dr. Pournelle:
You have said that we don’t have a water problem or a waste problem; instead we have an energy problem. Given enough energy, those other problems can be solved.
I say that’s almost right. We don’t just need energy: we need a reliable stream of energy. A fixed quantity of joules won’t do, because any given quantity of joules we must use up to solve problems; what we need is a _flow_ of joules, because the problems aren’t a fixed quantity, they’re a flow. So what we need are _joules_per_second_; that is, _watts_; which measures the physical quantity called “power”.
What’s more, that wattage should be something under our control, something that we have, that we don’t need to buy from anyone else. We need to _own_ that power.
Therefore what’s usually called “renewable energy” I prefer to call “owned power”. A hydro plant, a sun-farm, a wind-farm, a geothermal tap; all these, once built, are owned power; whereas an oil plant, needing fuel bought from abroad, provides only rented power.
For obvious political reasons, it’s better to own your power than to rent it.
Sincerely,
paradoctor

 

I must have been unclear; I thought I meant sustained energy as the energy problem to be solved. In any event   burning coal in fireplaces in London produced unacceptable fogs…

I find these questions have been with us for some time, as I found in looking for something else: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2view/view376.html#madness 

Cruelty of Healing

         an Underfable, by Nathaniel Hellerstein

Once upon a time, the Bluebird of Happiness pecked at a Widow’s window. It chirped, “I’m here! I’m here! Let me in!”

The Widow opened the window and said, “Go away!”

The Bluebird hopped onto the windowsill and looked left, right, up, down into the gloom of the room. It chirped, “I’m back!”

The Widow said, “You left when he did.”

The Bluebird chirped, “Forever!”

“Yes,” said the Widow. “I had been happy with him.”

The Bluebird chirped, “Forever!”

“Yes,” said the Widow, “or so it seemed.”

“Forever is over! Come with me!”

“You mean, just leave him behind?”

“Yes!”

“You are vain, cruel and selfish!”

“Yes! Come out, come out, come out!” And it flew away.

The Widow ran to the front door, undid three locks, and pushed hard. The front door was stuck shut from long disuse, so she pushed harder, and it cracked open. She flung the door wide open, then ran out into the bright sunlight and the fresh breeze.

Panting, she stopped. She looked up. Through streaming eyes she saw a sky the exact same color as the Bluebird’s wings.

Moral: Forever never lasts.

 

Paradoctor

 

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