Category Archives: View

View 803 Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Merry Christmas

We’re going out for Christmas dinner. Roberta sang at Midnight Mass last night, and we’ve had a good day, with SKYPE to the grandchildren in Washington DC, and a visit from Alex, our oldest, who will come to dinner with us.

And we have Sable. After her cancer diagnosis a year ago in November I was certain that last year was her last Christmas. That was not so. She remains a happy dog, and we just returned from our walk. She even put up with being combed, since it is spring outside and she is shedding. The mocking birds have decided that it is spring and are building nests, so they will be glad of the wolf fur.   It has been a good day.

O ye, beneath life’s crushing load,

whose forms are bending low,
Who toil along the climbing way
with painful steps and slow,

Look now! For glad and golden hours
come swiftly on the wing:
O rest beside the weary road,
and hear the angels sing!

Yet with the woes of sin and strife,
the world has suffered long
Beneath the heavenly strain have rolled
two thousand years of wrong;

And man, at war with man, hears not
the tidings that they bring;
O hush the noise, ye men of strife,
and hear the angels sing!

And to all a good night.

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

View 803 Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Christmas Eve

Earthrise

Forty Five Years Ago: http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/nasa-releases-new-earthrise-simulation-video/#.UrnzkbT9m4I

Jerry:
It’s not clear to me why you quote from Matthew 7:1-6 about judgment while writing about Charlie Sheen and Duck Dynasty at the bottom of your post at
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/bureaucracy-and-the-laws-of-physics-health-care-mandates-delayed-duck-dynasty/
People frequently quote these verses at other people when they wish to shut down a discussion, leaving unexamined the moral implications of human behaviors. They are saying that people should not make any judgments at all about the behavior of others, that all behaviors are acceptable, perhaps even to be celebrated, as we manifest that ultimate virtue known as tolerance.
I have always thought that making judgments is among the highest callings of mankind, perhaps second only to getting wisdom (both being subordinate to loving the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and your neighbor as yourself.)
There are myriad discussions of these verses on the web. One I came across recently is at
http://myburg.blogspot.com/2013/11/should-church-be-non-judgmental.html
where the author concludes:

"But ongoing and healthy judgment means that the church — by regular application of the Word and the ministry of the Holy Spirit — sees truth ever more clearly, exposing the lies we believe, walking in the light rather than darkness, and pursuing goodness rather than evil. 

"The term "non-judgmental" is really not very useful.  It may lead to the conclusion that sin is no big deal."

"Catholic Answers Magazine" says at
http://www.catholic.com/magazine/articles/judge-not

"Jesus then explains how to judge rightly: "First take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye." Much to the point of this article, there can be no doubt that those final words­"take the speck out of your brother’s eye"­are, indeed, permission to judge so long as it is done rightly.

"Other Bible passages which seem on the surface to indicate a condemnation of judging others’ behavior may be treated similarly in their full context. The idea of rightly judging the behavior of others can be found throughout the New Testament."

Responsible citizens must constantly make judgments about the behavior of celebrities, teachers, media personalities, and even our neighbors in order to protect our children and grandchildren from the evils others seek to teach them.
Best regards,
–Harry M.

I have no power to designate nor to forgive except as it applies to me, and I am instructed that my own forgiveness is contingent on my forgiveness of those who have offended against me. Recently the head of the Church of England issued a posthumous pardon to Alan Turing. I know of nothing that Turing has done that harmed me, and much that he did which benefitted me.

My views on gay marriage are derived from my views of the Constitution and limited government, but for more than fifty years I have supported laws that would require domestic partnership contracts to convey the rights and duties of marriage. When I was growing up we all learned to despise and behave despicably toward ‘queers’, but I was never taught that by the teachers I most admired, nor do I believe I am commanded to do so now. I would not have agreed with the law under which Turing was prosecuted, nor the punishment decreed for him.  I suspect that all of us including Phil Robertson could agree at least that much, and probably a great deal more.

About repealing the laws of physics

Regarding the letter you posted about a meeting of automotive engineers with a team from the Obama administration, where the Obama minions wanted to change the laws of physics… Funny. Delicious. Marvelous. And for those of us with government sector experience and some knowledge of the hard sciences, quite believable! Sadly, not true, or at least wrongly attributed.

http://www.factcheck.org/2009/06/obamas-auto-team-the-laws-of-physics/

–Gary P.

We dealt with this yesterday: as I noted, the real story is not that the incident didn’t happen as indicated, but that anyone would believe that well educated senior members of government might have said such things, and needed to turn to some debunking web site or another to confirm that it had not happened. When I was a lad I would never have supposed this anything but a tall tale generated to make a political point. Alas, I encountered Gus Speth, President Carter’s chosen leader of the Presidential Environmental Council, at a Boston AAAS meeting during the Carter Administration, and my faith in such matters was shaken, as I said in my Galaxy Column at the time. Speth was concerned about storage of nuclear waste – that it not be dispersed across the land by the return of the Glaciers. It was not his expectation of Glaciation that concerned me: nearly everyone in the large room of this meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science expected Fimbulwinter. As I said to him at the time, “Mr. Presidential Advisor, if my house is under a hundred feet of ice, do you expect me to worry much about much else?”

A rational discussion of the issue would have involved the pattern of decay of radioactive waste – after about 600 years what is left is actinides, and the whole mess is no more dangerous than the ores that the fuel pellets came from – but he wasn’t aware of that. He just knew because Gothman had told him so that no nukes is good nukes, and all nukes are bad nukes, and all radiation is bad except some is worse. What else did he need to know? The notion that we might need the energy to prevent the glaciations did not interest him.

It’s a pity that we have to believe it possible that it could have happened.

re laws of physics Message

the guy making the snide comments re your quoting the David Cole story was way off base. the Snopes story ends with this– supports the story in large part, I think.

We asked Dr. Cole directly about this anecdote, and his response was that it had been garbled: He said that although he did once encounter, in a meeting with members of Congress, the suggestion that a "law of physics" should be legislatively amended, that meeting took place several years ago and did not involve representatives of the Obama administration (with whom Dr. Cole has never met):

I have not met personally with the Obama Auto Task Force. The comments related to the "laws of physics" came from a discussion I had a number of years ago with several congressmen who said that we should pass a new 2nd law of thermodynamics.

All the Congressmen I have known would be joking if they said that, and in fact a couple of them have said it with regard to getting anything done. I seldom consult Snopes.

My thanks:

Apollo 8 Earthrise

Jerry,

I first saw it on Chuck Wood’s LPOD wiki

http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/nasa-releases-new-earthrise-simulation-video/>

Apollo 8 pictures, transcripts, Earth data, and LRO data synched up.

Quite the recreation

And we remain in Hiatus, 887 days since wheel stop on Atlantis.

Regards, Charles Adams, Bellevue, NE

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

View 803 Monday, December 23, 2013

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

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

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

Barrack Obama, famously.

President Obama has by executive decree without so far as I can see any legal authority to do so postponed the enforcement of various provisions of the Affordable Health Care Act. A few months ago he shut down the government to prevent Congress from giving him a mandate to do that.

Meanwhile, leading by example, on the last day of the enrollment period the President symbolically signed up for a health care policy under the Affordable Care Act. It will be of no effect since the military provides health care for the President and his family while he is in office, and there are provisions for providing this care for the rest of his life, so he hardly needed the policy; still, it sets a good example since his premium payment will buck up the system.

Two reactions to a mail note last night:

While the Cole story is amusing, it turns out it’s a little too good to be true:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/physics.asp

It’s fairly believable when you consider the alleged science coming out of the Obama administration (particularly, but not exclusively, the EPA).

Literally ONE SECOND of googling debunked the ‘A Forwarded Letter" you propagated via your list.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/physics.asp

Do you feel that simply because you are reposting something, you have no duty to even the most cursory of fact checking? Or is it your intent to undermine the confidence in the Government by spreading known lies?

One of the advantages of being me is that if I do find something amusing and probably too good to be true, someone will tell me, and it is easy enough to correct: and in doing so often provides something else to comment on.

In this case several comments are too obvious to be needed.

Of course the major lesson is that such a story needed to be declared false. When I was a lad the notion that any executives of the United States Government would believe that they could get a law of physics repealed would have been automatically thought to be a joke. I fear that I continue to have that prejudice. I find it hard to believe that any adult can reach that level of naiveté. Alas, reality tempts me to different conclusions, but I generally find that it isn’t being naïve but protecting self interests that generate many seeming gaffes by government officials.

Example: California in a fit of absence of mind voted for bonds for a high speed railway from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Unlike bullet trains in Japan which go through earthquake country but do so on relatively flat ground, getting from LA to SF requires going over mountains and repeated crossing of major fault lines. The initiative which created the bonds had some specific provisions on date of start and cost limits. It was clear from the day it passed that it could not meet the conditions of the bond due to physical limitations. There was also a provision that the high speed rail had to meet its own operating costs, something extremely unlikely due again to the elevations changes and the need to compete with already operating airlines which have driven the cost of LA to Bay Area travel down to a bare minimum.

Nevertheless California engineers and draughtsman and economists and managers have worked on this project for years, spent billions of dollars, and have built not one mile of railroad. They insist on starting the project, in one case on a route in the Central Valley from a place no one wants to go from a place no one is in. They almost built that dozen or so miles before a sane judge put a stop to it. They continue to plan and propose and to demand more and more money since the initiative provided less than ten billion and the project will cost at least $50 billion and probably several multiples of that – moot because it will never be built, but we can expect billions more to be spent anyway.

I cannot believe that anyone in the California bureaucracy believes that they can actually build an economically viable high speed passenger railway from LA to SF that would be declared safe to operate, or indeed that any rational person with any exposure to the truths of physics and engineering could believe that. There are too many mountains in the way, and one of the ranges is named, appropriately, the Temblor Range. This is one of those cases not adequately explained by incompetence.

Everyone knows there will never be such a railway, but the bureaucrats continue to spend money, mostly on their own six figure salaries.

As was easily predicted, the Robertson Clan has said they cannot conceive of the Duck Dynasty series continuing without their patriarch remaining on the show.

When I was growing up in the Old South, the official position of the largest church in the area, Southern Baptists, was that I was going to Hell: first as a Unitarian, which was the religion of my parents, and then as a Catholic (converted by the Christian Brothers when I got to CBC high school). There was no doubt in their minds that I needed a new conversion. (I got one, to High Church Anglican, but after decades returned to Rome.)  As a result I didn’t have many Baptist friends, but then as a geek who started first grade at age five — birthday in August, and I even had a stint on the Whiz Kids – I had a strange collection of friends anyway. A couple of them were Southern Baptists, who were concerned about my religion, but were less concerned about my conviction that the law ought to be color blind and our legally segregated society was wrong. After all, we were all God’s children, and heck, I might even see the light and go get a real baptism. Incidentally I encountered some of the same sentiments among the Campbellite faculty members at Pepperdine, who were genuine friends but were convinced that I was doomed. Pity, but there it is. [Note: Wikipedia states that Campbellite is a “mildly pejorative” term, and that the Churches of Christ have the same objection that some Lutherans have to the description Lutheran; I didn’t and don’t intend anything more than a reference to origin.)

It will be interesting to see if A&E is willing to abandon 11 million viewers a week plus the large number of viewers of the reruns.

Charlie Sheen said

"hey Mallard brained
Phil Robertso!
you have offended and hurt so many dear friends of mine,
who DO NOT have the voice or the outreach that I do. ….

your statements were and are
abhorrently and mendaciously unforgivable.
the idea that you have a job
outside of dirt-clod stacking is a miracle.
the only ‘Dynasty’ you are attached to might be the
re-runs of that dated show."

Of course Sheen had a few viewers himself, but that didn’t save his show from his off screen comments and activities. Unlike the Robertson clan, though, the cast of Two and a Half Men chose to continue the show without him.

The Sermon on the Mount tells us:

Judge not, that ye be not judged.

For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?

Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.

We continue to be under construction, sort of, https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/under-construction-sort-of/ and I invite comments on the site, particularly suggestions, but also complaints. I’m not a web designer.

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

View 803 Sunday, December 22, 2013

MERRY CHRISTMAS

We are making changes to the web site to make life better for tablet and smartphone readers, and some of the features got in the way. The bright guys who help me keep this place going are aware, and they‘re fixing it, and all will shortly be well, and thanks to all who sent me notes in the past half hour on the subject. We’re getting there.

Please use the "Contact Jerry" tab to send information about any site errors. My web guys will get automatically get a copy of that contact message. Please include details on the issue so they can try to duplicate the problem.

And with luck I’ll have a bit more to say on other subjects tonight. THERE IS A BIG NEW MAIL below.  Plenty to read.

Merry Christmas to all!

Late: I have updated the LiveWriter to understand the blog editor theme, and perhaps that will solve a minor problem I have had.  Everyone else can ignore this comment.

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