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View 823 Tuesday, May 06, 2014

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

This is pledge week at KUSC, which means it is subscription drive week at Chaos Manor. This place operates on the Public Radio model: it is free to all, but it can only exist if enough people subscribe to it. Rather than constant nagging of the readers for money, I get it over with during subscription week, and I leave it to the Los Angeles Good Music station KUSC to set the times for the pledge drives. If you have never subscribed to this place now would be an excellent time to do so. If you can’t remember when you last renewed your subscription, now is a good time to do that. Thanks to those who have already responded by renewing, and thanks and welcome to our new patrons and subscribers.

We continue the discussion of Thoughtcrime.

VDH: ‘If the NBA establishes the precedent that it can force the sale of an owner’s property because of one’s illiberal speech, however odious, what now is the new standard of behavior? A sort of descending French Revolutionary justice, predicated on the sound and fury of the mob?’

<http://victorhanson.com/wordpress/?p=7286>

——-

Roland Dobbins

That expresses my concerns very well. And Sterling did not make a speech or proclaim his views to the world; he told his mistress that he did not want her consorting in public with black basketball players and particularly not with Magic Johnson. He said that in private, to her and her alone, and it was later leaked – possibly sold – to the scandal publishers. For that he was fined some $3 million and forbidden for life from attending games of a team he owns; and was told he had to sell the team, although the legal status of that particular sanction is not clear.

Had he made a public speech would it have been a different matter? That’s worth discussing, but in fact he did not. He expressed his sentiments in private. Now there is a clamor for sanctions against him. When I was in high school we were shown as a class the old black and white 1935 Ronald Colman Tale of Two Cities. The scene of revolutionary justice is well done. Of course Sterling will not face the guillotine; what he gets is a billion dollars or so to compensate him for selling his team. It’s hard to feel sorry for him, and few will; but is this a precedent for future action against those guilty of Thoughtcrime?

Thoughtcrimes and their opposite

Perhaps advances in technology will enable the detecting of overall quality of consciousness. High quality consciousness presumably would be judged by parameters such as aspirations, conscience, etc. Individuals who do well on this test could receive better treatment from society than individuals who do poorly at it.

Dan Gollub

And we can have a Ministry of Truth and Good Feelings to administer this. God save the Republic.

A new reminder that in historical times Earth’s climate has been both warmer and colder than at present.

1066, Hastings was fought on an isthmus!

Hi Dr. Pournelle,

Some years ago I wrote you regarding a discussion of the impact of the Medieval Warm Period on AGW theories. I said (after apologizing for citing a TV show as a source) that I’d seen a documentary about the battle of Hastings that claimed the battlefield was in a different location than previously supposed because the sea was much higher in the medieval period than now, which led to mistaken readings of the primary sources. At the time, I couldn’t find the name of the show or lay hands on other documentation.

Well, I recently found a similar presentation on YouTube (which, by the way, has turned into a gold mine of historical documentaries). It’s the “Time Team Special #57 (2013), 1066 – The Lost Battlefield” from the BBC.

The punch line is that area around Hastings was “…effectively islands in a sea of marshland” due to the much higher sea level. Hastings was at the end of a peninsula jutting out into the marshes, and the only way to the mainland was the modern-day Hastings Road, which crossed an isthmus just at the southern outskirts of the modern-day town of Battle. Harold established a roadblock at the neck, and the rest is history. In addition to the trivia aspect, it’s very interesting to see just how much of the English coastline was inundated at the time.

The relevant point in the program starts at 31:30 minutes. The link below should take you right to it:

http://youtu.be/Il2FEVABs4g?t=31m30s <http://youtu.be/Il2FEVABs4g?t=31m30s>

Neil

Come now. The Scientists have proven that there was no Medieval Warm period, it was just a small phase, nothing to worry about. But if the sea was in fact much higher as recently as 1066, just how much northern ice would have had to melt to cause that? The seas are rising now, but not to that extent. The eleventh Century is not well recorded, but we do have monastery crop records and planting date, and there is evidence that China had fortunate harvests in that period. And doesn’t Domesday Book have something to say about vineyards in York?

I don’t think there is much evidence to challenge that the Earth was warmer in Viking times (including 1066) than it is now, which makes the Hockey Stick an indefensible proposition, and also makes it plain that it can’t have been CO2 that caused the Viking Warming however much it contributes to the present warming trend. Which asks whether the Earth will cool and the seas fall if we don’t have the CO2…

On your recommendation

Dr Pournelle

On your recommendation, I got Fehrenbach, This Kind of War. I do not recommend the Kindle version. It is full of typos, glaring text omissions, and transposed paragraphs. Enough comes through that it makes sense, but the translation from paper to e-ink appears to have been done by a cross-eyed, drunk baboon.

Thank you.

Live long and prosper

h lynn keith

I consider Fehrenbach’s book the best available history not just of the Korean War, but of American military policy and doctrine after World War II, and I am sorry to hear that the Kindle edition is flawed. Perhaps a complaint to Amazon would help? Ted Fehrenbach died last December or I’d write him about it. He was an outstanding commentator on military history and policy, and This Kind of War ranks with the best works on why men fight.

My Kindle edition of _This Kind of War_ is just fine.

Your correspondent should delete his copy and re-download it. If the errors persist, he should complain to Amazon – I’ve been successful in getting errors in Kindle editions of novels corrected that way.

——–

Roland Dobbins

Thank you.

Mexican Army in the US

Jerry,

I suppose this is how Pakistan feels about the US conducting ops within Pakistan.

http://www.kvoa.com/news/n4t-investigators-rogue-mexican-army-troops-crossing-the-line/

Civilians getting shot, US border patrol agents getting caught up in border crossing events, and the lack of official US govt response points to a tacit under the table agreement permitting these cross-border operations. Sounds awful familiar, except this time we’re on the receiving end.

(serving officer)

You have my view of how we should react to the jailing of the Marine who inadvertently crossed the border with his firearms in the trunk of his car and was jailed rather than be allowed to return. I imagine the Pakistanis feel somewhat the same way. The relationship with Pakistan has been long and bumpy. Steve Possony always believed that Gary Francis Powers was not shot down in his U2, but downed by a bomb placed in the craft in Pakistan. Possony had good reasons including technical analysis of USSR SAM capabilities of the time. England and Russia and their Great Game make for great reading, but it is not a game that interests the United States; yet if containment was to work as a grand strategy the requirement was to commit the resources to contain the USSR…

Methuselah’s Children?

http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nm.3569.html

>>[E]xposure of an aged animal to young blood can counteract and reverse pre-existing effects of brain aging at the molecular, structural, functional and cognitive level.<<

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

Young Blood May Hold Key to Reversing Aging

From Heinlein’s Methuselah’s Children

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/05/science/young-blood-may-hold-key-to-reversing-aging.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/10807478/Vampire-therapy-could-reverse-ageing-scientists-find.html

1958:

"I still want to find out about the new rejuvenation process," insisted Master Hardy some time later.

"I think we all do," agreed King. He reached out and refilled their guest’s wine glass. "Will you tell us about it, sir?"

"I’ll try," Miles Rodney answered, "though I must ask Master Hardy to bear with me. It’s not one process, but several—one basic process and several dozen others, some of them purely cosmetic, especially for women. Nor is the basic process truly a rejuvenation process. You can arrest the progress of old age, but you can’t reverse it to any significant degree—you can’t turn a senile old man into a boy."

"Yes, yes," agreed Hardy. "Naturally—but what is the basic process?"

"It consists largely in replacing the entire blood tissue in an old person with new, young blood. Old age, so they tell me, is primarily a matter of the progressive accumulation of the waste poisons of metabolism. The blood is supposed to carry them away, but presently the blood gets so clogged with the poisons that the scavenging process doesn’t take place properly. Is that right, Doctor Hardy?"

 

Of course Methuselah’s Children had a technique for creating the young blood rather than harvesting it; it took a lot, and there would never be enough donors to supply everyone or even a large pro0portion of the population.  Which leads to the greatest inequality of all:  harvesting enough young blood to live for a very long time, at the cost of faster aging for the donors. We may be certain that Congress will have really good reasons why they should have this resource, which makes re-election all that more necessary, and changes the nature of elections considerably.  And there will be a black market, as there is in slave girls now.  Indeed it may be the same market and same customers.

If it is true that you can stay young – or younger – by replacing your blood with that of a younger person of your blood type, the social implications will be enormous. And of course the army will learn…

When you go by the Via Flaminia, by the legions’ road to Gaul,
Remember the luck of the soldier, who rose to be master of all.
He carried the sword and the buckler, he mounted his turn on The Wall,
And the Legions elected him Caesar, and he rose to be master of all!

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/trips/rome1.html leads to my decade old report on a walk through modern Rome, with pictures.  Click on a picture to expand it.  The text has nothing to do with Methuselah’s Children, but Rome should remind you that not long ago it elevated Il Duce; you still see many monuments and public works marked with tributes to Umberto, Rex; Benito Mussolini, Duce.  Had we known that young blood can preserve youth in those days–

All this is new and has not had time to ferment through the culture.

If anyone knows enough about nanotechnology to say with authority whether nanotechnology is getting close to the capability of produce – synthesizing – young blood in quantities, please tell me.  I am particularly interested in (1) is it possible, and (2) how long will that take? If all this is true we may be in a race between finding the technology to synthesize young blood, and an ugly social situation.  And there is already a slave market in young people.  You can buy two hundred or so young school girls in Nigeria this afternoon…  http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/05/world/africa/nigeria-abducted-girls/ 

Do not forget that it remains Pledge Week at Chaos Manor.  This place operates like public radio. It is free to all, but if not enough subscribe it will not stay open.  If you have not subscribed, this would be a great time to do that.  If you subscribed but don’t remember when you renewed your subscription, then surely it is time.  And to our patrons and platinum subscribers I can only say Thank You.  I also thank all those who have recently renewed.  http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html

Gary Francis Powers himself became convinced that it was a bomb that brought down his U-2.

He was originally skeptical because the security at Peshawar was very tight, but seems to have come around to the conclusion that it was an insider job – e.g., a bad actor who’d wormed his way inside, or who was paid, placed a bomb in the aircraft.

Powers discussed this on a radio talk-show not long before he had his fatal helicopter accident. The conspiracy theorists have made great hay of this, of course, claiming that Powers’ helicopter was sabotaged. I doubt that, personally – there are far surer ways of getting rid of someone and still making it look like an accident.

———–

Roland Dobbins

Interesting.  About a year before he was killed in what I am sure was an accident, I explained Possony’s views to him.  He’d heard it before and wasn’t at all convinced. We were not close and I didn’t see him in the months before his crash, and I was unaware that he had come around to Steve’s views.  I am quite convinced Possony was right.  The Soviet surface to air systems just weren’t good enough to have done that job, particularly where it happened.  I worked out some of the math for Possony, and it all added up to a high probability of a bomb, including the reported damage to the ship and the fact that Powers got out of it alive.

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

View 823 Monday, May 05, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

Last week had more locusts to devour my time. They seem to come in flocks lately. To make it worse, this week is Pledge Week for KUSC, meaning that it’s subscriber appeal time at Chaos Manor, and this at a time when things have been a bit less active than usual. Nothing I can do about that. This place takes a certain amount of time and costs and energy to keep going, and unless I get enough subscriptions I can’t keep it open. As most of you know, we operate on the Public Radio model – hence the coupling of subscription drives to the schedule of KUSC the Los Angele Good Music Station – and it’s always free to all but it won’t stay open without subscribers. We’ve run this way for years, good years and not so good, and we’re still here.

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html

Well, the LA Clippers last night made another $100 million dollars for Mr. Sterling, their owner, who is guilty of having told his mistress, presumably in private, that he wished she would not appear in public at Clipper basketball games accompanied by black players, and particularly not with Magic Johnson. Somehow a recording of him saying that to her has gone public. One suspicion is that this was a boggled blackmail attempt, but she denies that. The NBA Commissioner immediately fines the billionaire Sterling several million dollars and forbids him to have anything to do with the management of the team he owns (how that is to be accomplished without letting him appoint a manager is not clear), or even to enter the building they are in at practice or to attend Clipper games. How this is to be enforced isn’t so clear. One presumes his mistress can continue to attend Clippers games, with or without accompaniment of her choosing.

The National Basketball Association also said that Sterling would be forced to sell the Clippers, but he hasn’t the authority to do that; he can only ask that 2/3 of the owners of the other teams vote to require him to sell. Sterling says the team is not for sale, and the other owners haven’t voted yet. Sterling paid some $12 ½ Million for the team many years ago. As of the opening of this year’s basketball season the team was worth more than $100 Million, but then came the team’s best season ever, bringing the value of the team up to about $800 million. Then Saturday night the Clippers beat the Warriors in a last minute rally, probably raising the value of the team another $100 million. If they win this series with Oklahoma that starts tonight the team will easily be worth $1 Billion, no small sum.

Magic Johnson is rumored to be one of those interested in owning the Clippers. He hasn’t the money, but he could front for those who do.

It is not clear who will get the money from the fines. It is not clear whether the mistress will be able to keep her multi-million dollar condo – Sterling’s wife is suing her to recover gifts that the wife contends ought to have gone to her – but I doubt we will see her sleeping under a Freeway overpass any time soon. And so it goes.

My concern is that Sterling is guilty only of Thoughtcrime. I covered that previously.

Lese de Marque

Dear Dr. Pournelle:

What Donald Sterling is guilty of is not thought-crime, exactly: it’s brand-injury. "Lese de marque." He’s a showman, an impresario, a dealer in images; and these images must be maintained for the financial health of the company. Many of his workers and customers are black men; it just wouldn’t do for the team’s owner to insult them; therefore Sterling had to go.

So the Market has ruled. You object that this has a whiff of tyranny about it. Very well then; the Market can be tyrannical. The Customer is King, not Prime Minister.

He was a showman, and the two of them put on a show. Rich old jerk vs. scheming gold-digger is a fine comedy; it always draws a crowd. Hand me some popcorn.

Count your blessings, it could be worse. Sterling was obnoxious but not frightening. Remember that audio playlet, that went viral on the Web in the summer of 2010, starring Mel Gibson as the Psycho Boyfriend and Oksana Grigorieva as the Desperate Mistress? That too was solid entertainment; but it was a much darker script than this.

Sincerely,

paradoctor

We are not in disagreement: this is the way the market ought to work, and Sterling, despite all his previous efforts, has no moral or legal right to the good opinions of mankind. If you want to own a basketball team, it would be better if you had no prejudices against blacks; if you do have any it is absolutely essential that you keep them to yourself and let not hint of that get out to the public, because you will need highly competent players. And indeed Sterling took strenuous steps to give a different impression of his sympathies, winning two Lifetime Achievement Awards from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He was careful to say nothing in public that would tarnish his image as a philanthropist who supported the NAACP among many other causes. Now that the story has come out there are many coming forward to say it was all a sham; indeed the President of the local chapter of the NAACP, who was about to give Sterling another award, has just resigned because he wasn’t telepathic and didn’t discern the true thoughts of Don Sterling.

And yet, isn’t that a bit disturbing? The tradition in Western law has been toward requiring an act – or at least a public speech – to establish that a crime has been committed; that is, over time, we moved from punishing beliefs to punishing acts. Thoughts and beliefs, heresies, remained outside the realm of the state. Even conspiracy – an intent — requires an overt act in aid of the planned crime before wanting to commit a crime becomes punishable. The Constitution of the United States requires an overt act witnessed by two before treason can be charged. Heresy is a Thoughtcrime – unacceptable belief – and the Inquisition used various means to extract confessions of that. Modern ideological warfare seems to be reviving the practice. You must not only act right but think right. A hundred years of freedom of thought is reversed.  This year racism is a Thoughtcrime.  How many years until sexist beliefs become Thoughtcrimes?  Can Jimmy Carter be prosecuted after all these years for lusting in his heart?

Die Gedanken sind frei, but not for Mr. Sterling, and indeed it seems to depend on the thought. Some crimes like racism are so terrible that no good act can compensate for such evil thoughts. And so it goes. Sterling is not going to be harmed. He’ll get his $Billion out of this. There will be a Kabuki act in which he will insist the team is not for sale, the Association will insist it is, an auction will be arranged, and just before the bidding starts someone will offer him a billion, and lo! the sale is concluded. And Sterling will have to compensate himself with something other than ownership of a basketball team – which, if he really is contemptuous of blacks, couldn’t possibly give him much pleasure of ownership anyway since it is pretty well impossible to put together a winning NBA team with only non-black players, even if it were legally or socially possible to do that in the first place.

So he gets his billion (he already has one, apparently, but everyone can use another billion), the NBA can have a five minute hate for Sterling before every game until he sells, and who knows, perhaps some good will come of all this. And nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

My friend Steve Sailer has an interesting but unprovable theory on all this. I don’t share it but it is amusing. http://isteve.blogspot.com/2014/04/magic-johnson-ultimate-cleanser-sports.html

Climate Change arguments with a new twist: Caleb Rossiter’s Sacrificing Africa for Climate Change, raises an argument I made back in the days of “The Limits To Growth” and “Small is Beautiful”: the third world will say “We understand this movement. Now that we get a piece of the action the game is over.” Now that Africa can get rich without living off charity, they will have to do it without coal and oil and other fossil fuels, and since they haven’t the capital to do that, they will remain in economic bondage to the West. Well, and to China: China has ignored all this “go green” and “Stop global Warming NOW” stuff, and cheerfully builds coal and oil fired electric plants as well as big dams and a lot of nuclear power plants, and can now profit by keeping Africa in an exploitable state.

Sacrificing Africa for Climate Change

Western policies seem more interested in carbon-dioxide levels than in life expectancy.

By

Caleb S. Rossiter

Every year environmental groups celebrate a night when institutions in developed countries (including my own university) turn off their lights as a protest against fossil fuels. They say their goal is to get America and Europe to look from space like Africa: dark, because of minimal energy use.

But that is the opposite of what’s desired by Africans I know. They want Africa at night to look like the developed world, with lights in every little village and with healthy people, living longer lives, sitting by those lights. Real years added to real lives should trump the minimal impact that African carbon emissions could have on a theoretical catastrophe.

* * *

The left wants to stop industrialization—even if the hypothesis of catastrophic, man-made global warming is false. John Feffer, my colleague at the Institute for Policy Studies, wrote in the Dec. 8, 2009, Huffington Post that "even if the mercury weren’t rising" we should bring "the developing world into the postindustrial age in a sustainable manner." He sees the "climate crisis [as] precisely the giant lever with which we can, following Archimedes, move the world in a greener, more equitable direction."

I started to suspect that the climate-change data were dubious a decade ago while teaching statistics. Computer models used by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to determine the cause of the six-tenths of one degree Fahrenheit rise in global temperature from 1980 to 2000 could not statistically separate fossil-fueled and natural trends.

Then, as now, the computer models simply built in the assumption that fossil fuels are the culprit when temperatures rise, even though a similar warming took place from 1900 to 1940, before fossil fuels could have caused it. The IPCC also claims that the warming, whatever its cause, has slightly increased the length of droughts, the frequency of floods, the intensity of storms, and the rising of sea levels, projecting that these impacts will accelerate disastrously. Yet even the IPCC acknowledges that the average global temperature today remains unchanged since 2000, and did not rise one degree as the models predicted.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303380004579521791400395288?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702303380004579521791400395288.html

There is considerably more. The evidence for the man made global warming theory gets shakier and the costs of pretending that it is true are rising. Of course there is money to be made from pretending its truth.

Caleb Rossiter is the son of Clinton Rossiter, whose books on the late Roman Republic and constitutional crisis I discovered as an undergraduate, and his 1787 remains one of the best accounts of the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 you will ever find. I prefer Wilmore Kendall’s Introduction to the Federalist Papers to Rossiter’s, but not by much, and one cannot be harmed by reading both. Of course The Federalist is no longer standard fare in liberal arts history courses now. Pity.

The Mexicans have arrested a US Marine who was moving and had all his possessions in his car, wandered over the border, and while trying to get back to the US was arrested by the Mexican authorities for having a rifle, and shotgun, and a handgun in his car. He found himself past the last freeway exit before the border, and went into Mexico and turned around, and whammo. He is said to have been wounded by other prisoners in a Mexican jail. The Mexicans seem glad to have a US prisoner. This is a nation that has armed cartels running riot but wants to jail a US Marine who had firearms in his trunk, and he wants to go home. He’s been there a month and has been injured.

I fear my solution to this were I president would be to tell the Commandant at Camp Pendleton to send a battalion of this Marine’s comrades down to escort him home, and THEN telephone the Governor of North Baja that they are coming; he will come home, and with all his possessions. It would be better if neither he nor his escorts meet any interference, but he WILL come home. The Marines have their instructions on how to respond if their weapons are demanded. Hint: We learned that from Leonidas a long time ago. You do not want to hear them say it. Have a nice day.

And this just in:

World Class Lie

At the press conference the NBA commissioner may have told a world-class lie:

Q. What kind of authority do they have to force a sale?

ADAM SILVER: The owners have the authority subject to three quarters vote of the ownership group, of the partners, to remove him as an owner.

If this reading of the bylaws is correct, what he said is patently false:

http://msn.foxsports.com/college-football/outkick-the-coverage/nba-lacks-the-authority-to-force-donald-sterling-to-sell-the-clippers-050114

Which should make things even more interesting.  Incidentally, the Clippers won against Oklahoma tonight so they come back to LA for two at-home games having won one of the four they need to get past this stage.  They played very well.  Doc Rivers is getting a lot out of his players, and coordinates them well.

It is Pledge Time at KUSC meaning that it is time to subscribe to this site.  If you have never subscribed this is the right time. If you can’t remember when you subscribed, this would be a great time to renew.  This site is free, but it remains open only if paid for. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html

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

View 822 Tuesday, April 29, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

I have been depressed all day. The news channels are full of the story: Mr. Donald Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, has been banned from attending any game played by the team he owns, or having anything to do with its management; and the commissioner will recommend that the owners require him to sell the team. They haven’t voted yet, but apparently the vote is certain.

I’m not depressed about the outcome. From everything I have heard Mr. Sterling is an unsavory person I would not care to meet, and the Clippers are far better off without him.

But Sterling has been tried and convicted in camera by the Commissioner. The charge is racism. The specification is that he was recorded by his mistress as having said that he did not want her associating in public with black people. Apparently it wasn’t that she consorted with Magic Johnson and other black celebrities, but that she did so publicly and got into the news for doing so, and that upset Sterling. He wanted her to stop doing that, and told her so. In private, not public, in circumstances in which he had every right to expect privacy.

Prior to that he is said to have made other racist remarks not now given in evidence; but he is also the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the NAACP, and was scheduled to receive another in a few weeks. The awards were presumably given mostly for his financial contributions, but surely there was at least some investigation of his hiring practices and other public behavior before they were given. There appears to have been no public reason to denounce him until his mistress brought forth a recording of the conversation.

His mistress is of mixed parentage, African and Latino. The head coach of the Clippers is Doc Rivers, a black man whose house was burned down in 1997 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/28/doc-rivers-son-jeremiah-tweets-sterling_n_5224187.html) (http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/sports/rivers-burns-article-1.776410 ) . Like all NBA teams, many of the stars of the Clippers are black. Whatever Donald Sterling’s inner opinions of African Americans may be, his public image was not one of refusing to associate with blacks, and indeed was good enough to get him NAACP Awards. If he has unsavory views they are not made public.

Or were not made public until his mistress, apparently in a blackmail attempt that went very awry, taped his remarks about his wishing she would not publicly associate with black people and released the tapes. And now Sterling’s racist views, or something that can be interpreted as racist views, are public.

And thus Sterling is revealed as a clandestine racist, and must be stripped of his ownership of the team just as it has gone from being a sort of joke to an actual contender for the NBA championship. He is forbidden to attend any of the Clipper games. (Aside: is that actually enforceable? I’d hate to be the LAPD cop charged with forbidding the team’s owner from going inside the building!) he is guilty of racism, not publicly espousing racism, not of any crimes against black people, not of refusing to associate with black people such as his mistress, but of being an inner racist at heart. There is a name for this: it’s called Thoughtcrime. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime

And that is frightening.

I understand that as a practical matter no one strongly suspected of the racist Thoughtcrime can be the owner of an NBA team. Teams are teams, and the players rightly stand up for each other. If the owner is resented by the black players – whether all or only a significant number of them – all the players are going to be against the owner, quite possibly to the extreme of refusing to play, and it would be hard to say why this is not a proper response, and impossible to prevent. Once that recording came out, Sterling’s ownership of the Clippers was inevitably doomed.

And from everything I have heard about Mr. Sterling he is not a person I would care to meet. Were I a lawyer I would not want to defend him. I understand that his wife is suing his mistress to required her to give over various presents that he has given to the mistress. He is said to have refused to rent apartments in his Korea Town apartment buildings to non-Koreans – which is an act, a behavior, not a thought. But that was not listed in the reasons for forbidding Mr. Sterling from attending any Clippers games, including the one they just won tonight.

Sports stars, and sports team owners, come in all social flavors. Some are model citizens, pillars of their community, with stable families and admirable reputations. Others seem determined to have intercourse with almost any creature they encounter, a few not being restrained by having to obtain the consent of the potential parent of the liaison. Some have sexually transmitted diseases, and at least a few seem not to have reported this until it came out some other way. Some have exemplary family lives, but many do not.

Of course sports celebrities are hardly the only group for which this is true. The motion picture industry notoriously covered up similar acts, particularly in the era of Studio domination. Over time, though, few bother to cover up their wild lives, and some exploit them as an asset. Then there are drug activities. But of course the sports world is not immune to drug use, although the temptation there is for a different variety of drug.

I suppose the bottom line is that in future it will no longer be sufficient to keep your Thoughtcrime to yourself. As technology improves it will become easier and easier to record everything you say without your knowledge, and anyone who thinks he or she can profit from making your inner thoughts public will be able to do so. And as technology improves again, perhaps you won’t need to speak your thoughts: they can be recorded as you think them.

I’m not depressed in sympathy with Mr. Sterling. For I have none. But I am depressed that we move closer to the reality of legal punishment for Thoughtcrime.

Incidentally, one outcome of this mess has been the admirable way Doc Rivers responded to it all.

The US Supreme Court is currently hearing a case to decide whether police may routinely search your cell phone if they have any reason to arrest you, such as a traffic stop. The argument is that if you carry something on your person and come to the attention of the police, it’s fair game: as a result you may be prosecuted for possession of child pornography, the possession being discovered after a traffic stop. Or perhaps you have a message implying you are selling drugs. Other scenarios come to mind.

When thinking about the advance of technology and the movement toward Thoughtcrime, you might keep this in mind as well.

Niven’s Pesky Belters’ Torchships

Jerry,

I noticed your comment about belter singleships being able to destroy the world.

https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/the-future-of-work-continued-2/

Given a fusion rocket with plausible EV of 1/10 Cee and a plausible mass ratio of perhaps 2.7 (yes, e), then impact velocity is about 1/10 Cee and impact energy is about 4.5eex14 Joules or 1/10 Megaton yield per Kilogram. Assuming that the pesky belters’ torch ships mass about as much as two semi trucks or 100 tons or 1eex5 Kg, then impact energy is on the order of 4eex19 Joules or 10,000 Megaton or One Million Hiroshimas. However; given the 1/3 power scaling law for blast effects, then the lethal radius would be about 100 miles. This would be rather unpleasant for the impact vicinity, but it is no LUCIFER’s HAMMER. An assumption that I always made while reading Niven’s stories is that the UN and belter governments had some capability to intercept ships on high velocity impact trajectories (launching lasers), but the primary defense was the autodocs that kept everyone narcotized and conditioned.

My quibbling aside, you make an excellent point about the future of a society that allows the least successful people to breed unimpeded. Perhaps the CoDo raised Borloi on Tanith because it was not only a highly addictive narcotic, it was a highly addictive contraceptive?

James Crawford=

I remember now I had come to much the same conclusion regarding the lethal radius of a single ship accelerating from Ceres to Earth, but I didn’t keep the notes and it was long enough ago that I forgot the numbers I came up with Thank you for the reminder. Of course the secondary effects are not so easily calculated. The conclusion remains that Earth in Known Space is not likely to be a stable civilization; at least that is haunting enough that I have trouble writing in it. I do agree that “destroying the Earth” is conceding to the Belters considerably more power than they have. Still, a hundred miles centered on Washington DC or Silicon Valley would be a pretty severe event.

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

View 822 Monday, April 28, 2014

But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it away from the fog of the controversy.

Nancy Pelosi. Former Speaker of the House of Representatives

Referring to the Affordable Health Care Act

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

“…the only thing that can save us is if Kerry wins the Nobel Prize and leaves us alone.”

Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon

I have run into a flurry of distractions, and I seem to be coming down with the ache all over ye gods I feel awful stuff that appears to be creeping about in California – perhaps elsewhere?

We continue the discussion of the future of work:

Work etc.

Jerry,

Regarding your 26APR View, https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/the-future-of-work-continued/

two "reminders" come to mind:

Jim Hogan’s novel Voyage from Yesteryear, whereby the original robotics-supported settlers of the planet Charon had developed a political economy based on self-reliance and making meaningful artistic and scientific contributions over and above what the robots so plentifully supplied.

Stanley Schmidt’s essay wherein he suggested that the solution to the Fermi paradox was that any society that reaches the point where one madman (madbeing?) can command or leverage the energy (nuclear) or material (biological) resources to destroy the society in total will of necessity perish in that manner.

The former suggests that a society of plenty will eventually evolve into a society of scientists, artists/entertainers (which invites Spider Robinson’s "Melancholy Elephants"), and art critics (which invites Mr. Heinlein’s "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag"). The latter suggests that a significant fraction of the population will comprise threats to the lives and livelihoods of the rest; and significant, if not increasing, efforts will continue to be poured into controlling malcontents and attempting to block the activities of the madmen when they acquire their command or leverage of resources, or at least of those who wish to preserve their current power structure with its perks and control even when it flies in the face of the new system (which is basically how Voyage ends).

And then there is UN’s Agenda 21 with its stated assumption that the society of plenty will only be possible if the world population is corrected back to 18th Century levels, with most of the survivors living highly regimented lives in "sustainable" arcologies to support the relatively few elites who will actually enjoy the perks of the society of plenty.

Viewed that way, much of what is happening in the world today is rebellion against the evolving status quo, with the present societal elites (in all cultures but by different means – the Agenda 21/envirofascist "true believers," Putin, the Ayatollahs, the Chinese leadership, the Soros/Buffet/Bloomberg oligarchs and their foreign equivalents and international puppets – the new "feudal lords", the DemoRINO axis, etc.) trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle so as to maintain their own power and perks.

For what it’s worth….

J.

But of course a society of pleasant people who are satisfied with what they have presents no serious problem; how likely is that? The American welfare system provides a Middle Class Income (middle class = those who possess the goods of fortune in moderation; Aristotle) for everywhere in the world but the United States – for that matter Poverty in the United States sounds like riches to most of the world – but our cities are not islands of pleasantry, peace, and order. Yes, they are more peaceful than some places have been, but TV series like SOUTHLAND and The Shield show a different situation, as does the daily press. We have free schools, although most of us try to keep our children out of them – as do most teachers who can afford to do so. I know some LAUSD teachers who would rather stay home with the children, but who need the benefits and income so that their children can go to private or religious schools. And the results of the Catholic school system seem to be better than the results of LAUSD by a lot, despite LAUSD’s lavish spending per pupil.

Perhaps if we can limit the population through selection of those who area allowed to have children? Niven’s ARM series errs in that it shows overcrowding as the reason for the search for unlicensed children – you’re not approved for reproduction – but perhaps it is not overcrowding at all we need to avoid. Just don’t let criminals breed.

That hasn’t worked out all that well for China, but perhaps with American bureaucrats we can bring it off?

I pointed out to Niven that his single ships owned by the asteroid miners were each capable of destroying the earth if someone were angry enough to do that, and defense against that would take a lot more effort than is devoted to that job in the Known Space series; it’s one reason we don’t write in that universe when we work together. I have no solution to the problem of the mad scientist who wants to rule the world or destroy it – and who may have the means to do that. Captain Marvel was the solution to the problem of Dr. Sivana, but that is not a practical solution.

My Co-Dominium series tried to address some of these problems, but that wasn’t the emphasis of the stories, and I never did much with the theme. Now, with 3-d printers and cheap energy and Moore’s Law working inexorably it seems reasonable that just about any society with enough order and capital can provide a large part of the population with the means to live as Middle Class – without any work. We do not know if that will be stable.

We do suspect that Nothing is beyond the dreams of avarice.

And then there is UN’s Agenda 21 with its stated assumption that the society of plenty will only be possible if the world population is corrected back to 18th Century levels, with most of the survivors living highly regimented lives in "sustainable" arcologies to support the relatively few elites who will actually enjoy the perks of the society of plenty.

At least we know there will always be jobs for good soldiers. How we get them may not be as simple as most usually think. “Gold will not get you good soldiers, but good soldiers can always get you gold,” said Machiavelli. “See my armies, see how their bayonets gleam,” Napoleon said to Talleyrand. “Sire, you can do anything with a bayonet except sit upon it.” And as Ortega y Gasset observes, rule is not a matter of the iron hand, but the firm seat.

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