Category Archives: View

View 809 Wednesday, February 05, 2014

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

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

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

Barrack Obama, famously.

As of Noon all our heaters are in repair, we no longer have a cesspool under our house, and both Roberta and I are slowly recovering from whatever our flu shots didn’t inoculate us against. I should be getting back to work.

The following is a ramble, but I think it gets a point across. I have written several more comprehensive essays on education, and I think my views are fairly well known. Injustice consists of treating equal people unequally – and in treating unequal people equally. Our education system is unjust. I am willing to discuss just what ought to be done about that, but it first requires admitting that the largest item in the budget of each and every state in this union is not being spent well. Our education system is a shambles. Moore’s Law makes jobs obsolete weekly. Last year more people stopped looking for work than there were new jobs created. Much of the potential middle class graduates with lifelong crushing debt. Many college graduates wait on tables – which I did in order to get a college education.

Something is wrong.

No Child Left Behind 

Dear Mr. Pournelle,

I have greatly enjoyed you writing, both in books and in your blog. Some years ago, we purchased, used and enjoyed Mrs. Pournelle’s "Uncover to Discover" reading instruction program.

It pains me to speak in favor of governmental, especially federal regulation. However, I must say something in favor of No Child Left Behind.

In the context of "America hating its bright kids" you have suggested that NCLB, by requiring more resources, at least in the form of teacher attention and time, being directed to low-performing children, makes those resources less available for bright and/or self motivated children. The implication is that schools and teachers can tell which children are brighter and stupider, and that their unimpeded freedom to direct their attentions as they see fit would lead to a better allocation of resources.

Respectfully, this is not true, and is in fact a load of horse manure. Indeed, you yourself have noted your wife’s success in teaching children who arrived at her classroom with piles of paperwork from previous "teachers" proving that these children could not be taught.

Teachers and principals, unhampered by formal accountability for the progress of every student, and insulated by modern school rules and policies from contact or observation by parents, as well as by the fact that employed, lower income mothers (& fathers) may not have the opportunity to even try to observe or be involved in school day activities, will nurture the children they choose to nurture, and ignore or neglect those they choose to neglect. Absent NCLB, or some work-alike objective test that "outs" and penalizes failure to teach, or try to teach, every child, some children will spend their days in time-outs in the hallway, or the principals vestibule, and no one who cares will even know.

I speak feelingly, because I am the parent of a very bright little girl, who tested into the kindergarten class of a magnet school for highly able children (one of the top 2 scores of the 1,200 children who took the test that year), and then spent a very large part of the year sitting in the hallway. Mostly for fidgetting in class. Also for getting a drink of water out of turn, for running (not walking) to the bathroom, for giving away her sparkly pencils, for exclaiming during Pres. Obama’s speech, talking out of turn, spilling milk, getting a paper towel without permission, removing her coat without permission, and so on. Not always good behavior, and certainly difficult, but also not outside what a teacher ought to be able to handle.

Next, we enrolled her in a Montessori school with an excellent reputation, and a large percentage of Notre Dame professors among its parents. This school, in explicit opposition to NCLB, eschewed ALL testing of any kind whatsoever. Evelyn had one very good semester there; it even undid much of the harm inflicted the previous year in kindergarten.

Then, the teacher was diagnosed with cancer, stage 4, and very rightly turned her whole attention to her own health and survival. Unfortunately, the school did not secure a regular substitute teacher for her, and the class drifted, for the balance of that year, and the entire next year, when the previously excellent teacher was back, but still ill, distracted, and functioning sub-par. We and various other parents met with the principal, individually and in groups, and we received promises and assurances which we gave too much credence.

In third grade, we had our daughter’s achievement tested by a 3rd party, and found, as we should have realized earlier, that her formal education had essentially ended at the first semester of first grade, and she would have been better off playing in her sandbox and helping me with housework the next year and a half.

Here is what I think happened: The teacher had excellent abilities, but she was sick and tired, and so she directed her limited energies towards those children who were easy, or whose parents were able to be present – or drop in unexpectedly – during the school day, and the more difficult children, which would certainly include my highly active, imaginative, and inventive daughter, spent vast amounts of time banished to the hallway, or the secretary’s office. I heard later, from other parents, that my daughter was hardly ever actually in the classroom. I wish they had told me at the time.

An annual test, such as the Iowa test used to be, would have been of great service to our family. Indeed, my greatest problem with the testing requirements of NCLB is that it does not require ENOUGH testing; a lot can be lost between 3rd and 5th grade.

Yours, Karen R. Hammond-Nash

South Bend, Indiana

I must have been singularly unclear, but I have written on this so often I thought my view was pretty well known. I must have been particularly unclear.

The problem with No Child Left Behind is that teachers have far more incentive to spend time getting students from grade D to grade C than to enable B students to learn how to get an A. This wouldn’t be all that bad if there were still some attention to the brighter kids, but in fact there usually isn’t. Yet it is the bright kids who are going to be needed in our increasingly technological society. Not everyone will be able to participate in the new technology. They need to learn useful skills; and neither our high schools nor our universities act as if they know this. The real tragedy is that the kid who struggles to get a C in today’s high school isn’t likely to have learned anything useful for his future life, for he still isn’t going to college; and he needs a job he hasn’t been trained for.

As to my wife’s experience: after about 1950 the official policy of the State of California, adopted by the State Board of Education and enforced by the Superintendent of Public Instruction was that learning phonics is not learning to read, and therefore teachers should not waste time teaching phonics. During that period most of the tenured professors of education entered the university system,. They were told to believe that phonics was useless, so they did not learn how to teach children to read. Few professors of education have actually taught anyone to read, but they are expected to teach incoming undergraduates how to teach pupils to read. The result is predictable and in fact was predicted, by me as well as many others, when all this happened. The former Superintendent has subsequently admitted he was wrong, and apologized, but the education system is still a wreck, and 60% of students reading at grade level in high school is considered a good school. Since “read at grade level” doesn’t necessarily mean they can read books other than controlled vocabulary works, you may translate that as “only 40% illiterate”. How those kids are not to be left behind is a total mystery.

The school system gets more and more expensive, but it has worse and worse results.

Very bright kids can take advantage of new technology, and while it is better to have a real education directed by teachers who care and who we know the subject matter, it is possible to learn a lot on your own: as I learned in Capleville. But when I got to Christian Brothers and had intellectually qualified teachers I learned a lot more.

“In the context of "America hating its bright kids" you have suggested that NCLB, by requiring more resources, at least in the form of teacher attention and time, being directed to low-performing children, makes those resources less available for bright and/or self motivated children. The implication is that schools and teachers can tell which children are brighter and stupider, and that their unimpeded freedom to direct their attentions as they see fit would lead to a better allocation of resources.

“Respectfully, this is not true, and is in fact a load of horse manure. Indeed, you yourself have noted your wife’s success in teaching children who arrived at her classroom with piles of paperwork from previous "teachers" proving that these children could not be taught.”

There is no need to be respectful of the view you have inferred from my writing, but I did not intend to imply it. I have never in my life indicated that I think that giving school teachers – public employees, paid by taxes extracted from the citizens – “unimpeded freedom to direct their attentions as they see fit” would be a good idea. I do not think that I should be required to pay taxes in order to allow school teachers to indulge whims.

It certainly is the case that competent teachers can and for a long time did determine which children would profit from education and which would be better to learn skills. I am not astonished that this seems incredible, but I invite your attention to the education textbooks of the first quarter of the Twentieth Century, or most of the writings on education from the Nineteenth. It was never thought likely that any large number of students would go to college or that they would profit from going there. The need to select a small minority for university prep education generated a lot of stress, and no wonder; but fortunately that isn’t today’s problem. We used to think that only a very few would profitably go to college.

The GI Bill changed that notion when it was found that far more than a small elite group could profit from education, and for a while the University system in the United States was open to everyone, not just the rich and the super bright. I am a product of that era; between the Korean GI Bill, my willingness to wait tables for my food, and my high school curiosity about electronics that let me get an undergraduate assistantship in my senior year, I managed quite well, as did many others who would otherwise never have become college graduates.

But alas, that does not mean that everyone can or should attempt a world class university prep education. Bill Gates once said that every child deserved a world class university prep education, and it was a great mistake. A world class university prep education doesn’t prepare students for a lot else; and although the GI Bill experiment demonstrated that a large portion of the population ought to go to college than had been traditional before World War II, it also generated enough results to let us infer that while more than 10% ought to go to college and “get an education”, that was by no means true of all. It also indicated that the universities hadn’t been optimum in their allocation of resources. Traditionally universities had turned out “educated people”, but also others; the professions, which were not quite the same. No one expected a doctor to be “educated” in the traditional sense, nor a lawyer either. Then came engineers and technologists. The result was C P Snow” Two Cultures and then the Voodoo Sciences. We’ve been over that in the past.

The public school system was not originally designed to give everyone a world class university prep education; in fact it wasn’t really intended to give that to anyone. The school system is supposed to be an investment in the future, preparing future citizens to be productive and responsible members of the community. At the same time the universities were not designed to accept huge portions of the population, many of them uninterested “an education” as traditionally understood. They wanted to learn how to get good jobs and make a good living and be productive and responsible citizens – precisely what the high schools had been designed to do.

But the high schools were doing it because they were more and more being pressured to turn out students with a world class college prep education – even though at least half of them could not possible profit from a world class university education, at least not what the world class universities were capable of providing.

And there we stand. At least half the kids in most high schools aren’t learning much that will help them in their future life. If they happen to be in a class that is disrupted by lack of discipline because the school had mainstreamed someone who ought to be somewhere else, the result is predictable – but inevitable. No one gets any education at all.

The problem is that all the kids are not equal. Does that mean that potential engineers or physicists or chip designers or computer programmers – those who are good at manipulating abstract symbols and doing mathematics – are “better” than those whose talents lie more in salesmanship, both being “better” than those destined for factory jobs or clerical work or, home management?

I don’t disagree that schools ought to insist that teachers actually teach something. My solution to that would be to return the real control of the schools to locally elected school boards who represent the taxpayers who have to pay the teachers and the rent on the buildings and the administrators and all the frills and necessities. If need be subsidize the poorer districts, and supervise them even more heavily to assure that the money spent buys worthwhile teachers.

But I will insist again: unless those who have the ability to learn the prerequisites of technology are caught early and given the skills to learn, the society is not getting a proper return on its education investment. It would be great if we could pick out which, among the bright kids, will be the future Steve Jobs, and which will be philosophers and statesmen, but we can’t do that. Fortunately we don’t have to. But we damned well do need to decide who should get a world class university prep education, and who ought to learn a lot about manual arts. And yes we provide bridges from one track to the other, and we will not always get it right; but we can sure do better than schools with 60% reading at grade level.

And that’s no horse manure. Nor bull manure for that matter.

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

View 809 Tuesday, February 04, 2014

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

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

The locusts have returned and we still do not have our heating system fixed, although yesterday we did get the heat turned back on in one room. Not having internal heat in California is not the disaster it is for those in the Northeast and Midwest. The coldest nights only require another set of covers or another dog on the bed. But it is annoying, and to make things more annoying I seem to be having an energy-consuming relapse, complete with more aches and pains and chills; I am trying to ignore all that.

Meanwhile, I have this:

The Exhausted US Economy, and a Lesson for Republicans

Jerry

In a piece on The Exhausted US Economy, and a Lesson for Republicans, Spengler says, “We no longer have high-tech companies: we have instead aging monopolies run by patent lawyers:”

The Exhausted U.S. Economy, and a Lesson for Republicans

http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2014/02/04/the-exhausted-us-economy-and-a-lesson-for-republicans/

In highlighting “The problem now is obstacles to investment: the highest corporate tax rate in the world, onerous regulation, the crazy quilt uncertainty of Obamacare” he seems to be echoing you.

The whole piece is worth reading.

Ed

I have always thought The Great Recession was far from over, and thus I agree with most of his conclusions, including the Republican strategy advice. When more people left the work force than jobs were created, it did not seem to me much of a recovery. And, as I keep insisting, the abysmal state of the American education system is doing nothing to help long term problems. The only engine we have for creating new jobs is small business, but new regulations make it harder and harder to start a small business.

My remedy would be that of General Lucius Dubignon Clay, our proconsul in Germany after World War II when he allowed Erhard to go on the air and proclaim the end of economic regulations and virtually an unrestrained capitalistic market economy. The result was the German Economic Miracle, which was so successful that even after its termination – the German economy is certainly regulated now – West Germany, although bombed flat in the war (a bit worse than a Recession) grew so rapidly that she was able to absorb the economically failed Eastern Germany after the USSR collapsed and Germany was allowed to unify.

Failing that – politically I don’t suppose it’s possible, although if things get bad enough it may yet happen under martial law – I have long suggested doubling the exception numbers: that is, regulation that apply to all employers of more than ten will not apply until there are twenty, fifty (when Obamacare becomes mandatory) becomes 100, etc. This will not free the engines of freedom, but it will give them a chance to operate better than they do now. Coupled with the rise of the new technology, new industries will arise. Capital is easy to come by just now: the problem is what to do with it. At the moment it is absorbed by institutions like the universities, who raise their prices to capture the increased resources thrown at them, and of course by government.

Long ago Possony and I, working on The Strategy of Progress, concluded that the natural course of government is bureaucracy, and the natural course of bureaucracy it so convert its output into structure, until there is so much structure that change is nearly impossible. Sometimes events happen so fast that the Bureaucracy can’t keep up. The New World is discovered, and there is a flood of new capital. There is a rapid rise in productivity, and for a while there is freedom. Eventually the bureaucracy catches up, regulations are crafted, and the structure grows again. Comes the Industrial Revolution there is another period of freedom and productivity. Of course each of these produces a new ruling class; these events correspond to Pareto’s “circulation of elites”.

The Computer Revolution with Moore’s Law produced that brief period of freedom again, but it is getting to be well under control now. I confess I once saw the small computer as The Great Equalizer, giving power to the competent, and to some extent it does; but the structure is growing again. We escaped Net Neutrality but the regulations creep forward.

Between Obamacare and the nationalization of student debt the entire middle class has been subjected to rarely escaped bondage; that that trend will continue. There are ways to escape, but the best way would be through an economic miracle. Alas, few in the establishment want such a revolution. If you were among the rulers, would you?

For more on The Strategy of Progress, see http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2011/Q1/view662.html#progress; there is also “How to make a weak economy worse http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2010/Q1/view608.html. And there’s http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2010/Q1/view611.html#Wednesday.

Finally, if you’re still curious, there is http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2view/view432.html#Iron which looks at another example.

I am sure this was recommended to me but I seem to have lost the message. It is well thought out, and a good statement from one of the descendants of colonialism.

The myth of Neo-colonialism

By Tunde Obadina

http://www.afbis.com/analysis/neo-colonialism.html#top

His conclusion seems irrefutable on both logical and empirical grounds: the existence of Western Civilization will always, by its nature, have a devastating impact on African traditional civilization, in ways that the coming of Islam never did. Those who do not understand this are doomed. And of course Marx saw this a long time ago.

Aviation pioneer in Africa

As former member of the aviation industry, you’ll certainly appreciate the sheer genius of this guy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVqQKF7xgTQ&feature=youtu.be

Guaranteed to bring a smile. Certainly gives one a new appreciation of Obama’s Kenyan heritage.

Cordially,

John

I found this informative. Thank you.

Economics by the Shovelful (Comment on a message at the bottom of last night’s mail)

The high school economics exercise mentioned by Karl (a different Karl) has an easy solution on the surface. It may be harder to convince people to implement because the apparent costs are so low.

Person A can shovel 10% faster than person B. (Does 1.1 jobs in the time it takes person B to do 1 job.)

Shovel 1 can move 10% more stuff than shovel 2. (Moves 1.1 times the amount of material per shoveling than shovel 2.)

If we give person A shovel 1, he produces at the rate of 1.1 X 1.1 = 1.21 jobs per unit time.

Person B has shovel 2, producing 1 X 1 = 1 job per unit time.

Total number of jobs per unit time = 2.21.

Now we switch shovels.

Person A has shovel 2 and does 1.1 X 1 = 1.1 jobs per unit time.

Person B has shovel 1 and does 1 X 1.1 = 1.1 job per unit time.

Total number of jobs per unit time = 2.2

(This ignores interaction effects between person and shovel, along with a host of possible real-world effects on productivity.)

If productivity is the goal, we give the better shovel to the better worker.

If fairness is the goal, we switch the shovels.

Now the difference is tiny: 10/12 of a percent. With a difference this small, we can usually afford to be fair. In most cases, it gets lost in the noise, and we can say, to a good approximation, there is no cost to being fair.

However, over the long run*, or in cases where the difference between the best and the worst is larger**, it can wind up costing us a great deal, and we might never spot it if we’ve convinced ourselves not to look anymore.

* If productivity is somehow compounded, at the end of 100 time periods, the more productive arrangement will have out-produced the less productive one by a 130%

** If we bump the numbers up to where A is 50% faster and shovel 1 is 50% better, the difference in productivity increases tenfold.

………………..Karl

Thank you for the more complete analysis.

And that should be enough for the day.

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

View 808 Friday, January 31, 2014

Another day consumed by locusts, but things are developing for the good. It’s a long story. The past few days have been grist for the writing mill, but not of a science fiction writer. More like a noir writer.

It all started when my wife smelled gas in her bathroom. We called the gas company. They came out, and we thought they had inspected the floor furnace under our house. In any event they stuck a red danger sticker on the thermostat and the cutoff valve to that floor furnace.

We called our furnace man, who is very reliable – he has kept the 70 year old floor furnaces in our 80+ year old house going, converting them from pilot lights to electronic ignition, replacing old valves, and the like, for years and years. He looked at everything inside, went outside, and came back to say there was no way under the house. Surely, I told him, that isn’t true. “You’ve been down there before, you were the one who put in the electric replacement for the pilot light.”

“No way down there now.”

I went out to look. Sure enough, somehow the cap to the inspection port in the sewer had vanished. It had not come off, for it was nowhere to be seen under or around it; but since the access port was installed in exactly the place where the access to the underground would make it easy to look at, and it was on the side, not the top, of the sewer pipe, a major portion of the outflow from the back bathroom had deposited itself under the house just where you’d have to crawl through to get at the floor furnace, and no one in his right mind was going to crawl through there. And it looked bad.

Meanwhile Roberta’s reading glasses had broken and she couldn’t read anything: newspapers, computer messages, nothing. So there was nothing for it but for me to go out to Kaiser to get them fixed, which in fact they did, but it was getting late when I came back. I picked up a gluten free dinner on the way home.

We were trying to figure out what to do. We certainly couldn’t let raw sewage sit under the house. We thought it must be about two years’ worth of output from the back bathroom, which isn’t used as often as the other bathrooms but still, it’s used a good bit…. And of course my head is not working very well and Roberta caught her cold later than me, so she’s in worse shape.

Which by the way, is another story: Could the sewage exposure, just under the breakfast room, have anything to do with the odd respiratory disorder which I got and Roberta apparently got from me? What if it wasn’t flu? We’ve both had our flu shots. And no one quite knows what we have. Anyway, we are slowly recovering from it, but the emphasis is on slowly.

At which point enter my son Alex, who got here late enough that it was sort of dark, too dark to see what all was going on under the breakfast room, but it was painfully obvious from a glance that no one was going down into that until it was cleaned up. So he called USAA.

USAA has been my insurance company since Mr. Heinlein told me about it in the 1970’s, and over time all my sons have inherited membership and they use the company too, and we don’t among us have any complaints at all. So USAA said they would have an inspector call us and see what they could do.

Came morning, and Alex also called Mike Diamond, the plumbing company that installed the modernization inserts into our 80 year old clay sewer pipes. That has all worked well. It cost a good bit, but no one was going to do it for cheap, and we were very satisfied. But they were the last people to work on that sewer piping, and since the inspection cap hadn’t come off but was plumb gone, it seemed reasonable that it had been taken off for inspection, the work was done from the front end of the house (and impressive it was, too; really high tech) and a new inspection port was put in up there, that was all finished, and no one went back to put the cap on the port in back. That seemed reasonable, but it was only a supposition: the truth was that I had not the faintest notion of how that port came to go missing its cap.

Mike Diamond sent a plumber. He looked at it, was pleasant (and smelled good), and called for a manager. The manager came out, said our supposition was reasonable, but there was no evidence for it, and didn’t think they were liable even though the work was done three years ago and there is a five year warranty – but he’d check with his boss. A few minutes later the door bell rang. It was Mike Diamond’s manager: he had talked to headquarters, to Mike Diamond himself, and they decided that they’d take responsibility for this and had arranged for a “Restoration Company” to come clean out the poop and sterilize the place.

A few minutes later USAA called and we told them all this, and we agreed they could stand down until the Restoration Company had done its work, and probably there was nothing for USAA to do, but if there were, they assured me they stood ready to do it.

Which is where we stand now. We’re waiting for the restoration people to call or come out; they are said to be coming before the end of the day. We also looked more closely at the overflow, and it appears that we don’t have two years of sewage from the back bathroom although there’s a lot of toilet paper under there. The inspection port is high enough that with an ordinary flow from a toilet flush nothing happens. As far as I can make out, what it took to cause an overflow would be the washing machine sending in a lot of water not long after a toilet flush. This would raise the level above the bottom of the inspection port, and there being no cap on it, out would come whatever was in the pipe, which is just about level anyway so it always has something standing in it. This is grim, but it’s not as bad as having two years’ worth of sewage under the house.

All of which is relieving. Once the restoration people are finished I’ll have my own people go under the house just to be sure there aren’t termites or any kind of water damage to the foundations, neither of which seems likely, but it’s best to be sure. When all that is done, our reliable and dependable floor furnace guy will be able to get the heater in my wife’s bathroom working, and meanwhile she has an electric heater. The Restoration people called a moment ago and said they expected to be here before the end of the day.

And maybe I can get back to work on something, having watched the locusts, most of them, go on to bug someone else. Of course there may be Army Worms on the way, but so far I haven’t seen them. And my head is clearing out a bit.

Thanks for your patience.

My thanks to all of you who have renewed your subscriptions during this period of sturm und drang. You make it possible for me to devote my energies to something worth thinking about rather than mere worrying.

23:15 Friday.  The locusts are mostly gone.

Earlier this afternoon about 1630 Emergency Services Restoration called to say they were finishing a job in Westlake Village, and they’d be here in an hour or so. They called again at 1700 to say they’d be here at 1630. We had planned to go out to dinner, but I wanted to be sure someone would be here when they got here – if they got here, I suppose I was thinking – so I went out to a local Italian place that has recently been offering a gluten free pizza.  I got one for Roberta and a Large one to share with Alex, along with salads.  I also noted that traffic was really heavy.  We had dinner – I had forgotten just how big a Large pizza is, so never mind the salad, I’ll be eating pizza for a couple of days and still have salad if I haven’t eaten all that too.  I can predict my culinary future.

About the time we finished the Emergency Services Restoration crew arrived. It was already dark. They started right in, unloading a bunch of specialized equipment, put on coveralls, and started filling bags with dirty dirt or soiled soil or whatever euphemism you like. It was cold and crowded out there, so we went in; and about three hours later they hade done more than restore the area under the house. It was disinfected and covered with an absorbent material that also sanitizes – a kind of kitty litter, I guess.  You should put a tarp over it to crawl over it, but the area is sterile and safe, and our heater guy will have no problems getting to the floor furnace. It’s remarkable how much better I feel now that this isn’t hanging over my head.

There was no bill.  Mike Diamond is paying them for their evening work.  I did come up with a few bucks for them to buy themselves something to eat on the way home. And I’d sure call them again if I needed anything like that done.

All’s well that ends well, I guess.  Roberta is feeling a lot better and I’m sure the stress relief is helping her get over this flu like thing. So am I.  The residual disinfectant smell has vanished from the rest of the house, the underneath is sealed away, and all is well indeed.

And I have probably told you more than you really wanted to know.  My thanks again to all those who have renewed subscriptions.

When I get suggestions in mail, or find an article I think worth your time, I tend to open a Firefox Tab. Usually I keep up with them, but the past several weeks have been a ghastly dance with locusts and army worms devouring my time. (When I was a lad on a farm outside Capleville Tennessee during World War II, one year we had Army Worms.  Suddenly millions of them hatched and they spread across the countryside eating everything green they encountered.  I have never forgotten them.) Anyway, I now have so many open tabs on Firefox that I will have to close some. So, in no particular order, I’ll list them here. I’ve read all these and kept them with the intention of mentioning them with a few comments, but they’ll get short shrift now.

COMPANY MAN: THIRTY YEARS OF CONTROVERSY AND CRISIS IN THE CIA

By John Rizzo

 http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jan/20/a-self-licking-ice-cream-cone/

Book Review. I have ordered the book.

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2011/Q2/view674.html#Monday

A past View week that had several things worth thinking about again.

Capturing Solar Energy in Space for the World’s Remotest Region

http://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/2013/09/19/capturing-solar-energy-in-space-for-world-remotest-regions/?intcmp=fbfeatures

Science has lost its way, at a big cost to humanity

Researchers are rewarded for splashy findings, not for double-checking accuracy. So many scientists looking for cures to diseases have been building on ideas that aren’t even true.

October 27, 2013|Michael Hiltzik

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/oct/27/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20131027

A few years ago, scientists at the Thousand Oaks biotech firm Amgen set out to double-check the results of 53 landmark papers in their fields of cancer research and blood biology.

The idea was to make sure that research on which Amgen was spending millions of development dollars still held up. They figured that a few of the studies would fail the test — that the original results couldn’t be reproduced because the findings were especially novel or described fresh therapeutic approaches.

But what they found was startling: Of the 53 landmark papers, only six could be proved valid.

Perhaps we need to rethink how we allocate research funds.

The Rise of Missile Carriers

Commander Phillip Pournelle

http://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2013-05/rise-missile-carriers

I am sure I have mentioned that one before but it’s a good paper.

October 24, 2013 12:00 AM

Early Skirmishes in a Race War
Officials and media aren’t being honest about the violence.

By Thomas Sowell

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/362030/early-skirmishes-race-war-thomas-sowell

Alas I have many more, but those will do for now.  Good night. I am sure I will sleep well.

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

View 808: Thursday, 30 January, 2014

Another day devoured by locusts, on this one involves house problems that may be expensive, and threatens to consume even more days.  My apologies to subscribers. I am dancing about as fast as I can just now.

More tomorrow.

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Friday, Noon:  It looks as if there’s a happy ending.  Or at least not a tragic one.