Category Archives: View

View 733 Monday, July 16, 2012

We spent the weekend worrying about Sable, but actually since about 1100 Saturday night she has been fine. By Sunday morning she was eager to eat breakfast. I made the mistake of letting her know I was trying to give her a pill, and that didn’t work out too well, but if I throw her a treat and then a pill she joyfully catches them. And her other pills go in her food dish. She’s pretty well her old self. We presume it was the tomatoes, but the vet gave her some antibiotics which we have to continue until they run out. That’s another couple of days.

But all’s well here, and today we had a normal morning complete with our daily walk.

Some commentators say the political campaign will depend on each candidate blackguarding the other. The President seems to believe so. Most of his recent campaign consists of saying that Governor Romney has too much business experience all of the wrong kind, and various other such allegations. Mr. Romney hasn’t exactly responded in kind, but after the primary campaign it’s clear he knows how. I wouldn’t advise him to do that. He will be far better off if he continues to try to focus on just what has happened in the past three years, and asking if the country wants – or can even endure – more of that. And of course debating Obamacare.

My political management experience is from a far different time, but I would not think it wise to respond to negative attacks. In general they aren’t even worth mentioning. Mr. Romney has been in the public spotlight for a long time now, and there aren’t going to be bimbo eruptions, family scandals, or other such surprises. Those who take new charges seriously aren’t likely to vote for Mr. Romney anyway. The intellectual part of this campaign is likely over: it now comes down to the ground game. If all those who prefer Mr. Romney to Mr. Obama actually get to the polls, the result is likely to be a heavy Republican victory.

The negative campaign we can now expect will be designed to induce despair, weariness, ennui, and any emotion to discourage those who might otherwise get out at vote against the President. There will a a lot of that.

“There is not a man in the country can’t make a living for himself and his family. But he can’t make a living for them and his government too, the way the government is living. What government has got to do is live as cheap as the people.” Will Rogers

I had to go to the bank today. I had a check from Amazon for my German eBook sales. You’d think that it might be in Euros, but it was drawn on an English bank in pounds. It didn’t take long for the manager to figure out what to do. It wasn’t a great amount of money, but I have to say that it was for more than I got for my German sales of print books last year. Moreover it was for the first quarter of this year, which is astonishing. Most publishers pay royalties in summer current for the half a year ending last fall – indeed, I think I have not yet got the royalties for German print book sales from the first half of 2011 (they’d come through my agent), and here’s the eBook sales for first quarter of 2012.

Amazon is revolutionizing the publishing industry. They have made author backlists valuable again, and they are paying on time, not just after a credible threat of lawsuit. The publishing industry may never recover form an innovation like that.

I also had to go to the bank to get a bank officer to sign and stamp in the appropriate box a three-page form from the French government related to my taxes on anything I earn in France. This went to my agent. I suspect the result won’t be much – for some reason I don’t sell too well in France – but the complexity of the form was revealing. Considering that we are only looking at a few hundred dollars at most, this is an awful lot of paper work. Will Rogers comment comes to mind. But the trend seems to be for America to get more government like France. Ah well.

View 732 Saturday, July 14, 2012

Happy Bastille Day

Sable came home from the vet ravenously thirsty, but when she drank water she vomited it. I became concerned about hydration and also about electrolytes. We kept her from other water sources and I began giving her small amounts of water with a pinch of salt at about hour intervals. She continued to have stomach upset until about 2300, then she settled down, and about 0300 I gave her a last drink with some electrolytes and went to bed. This morning she was much more alert, and hungry. We gave her her pills, and a bit of water, and then her breakfast. She are it all and begged for her treats. Not as vigorously as usual, but she was hungry.

We are about to take her for a short walk. She’s not her usual hyper perky self, but she’s interested in the world and eager to go out, so we’re pretty sure things are all right now.

I didn’t get a lot of sleep so I’m a bit behind, but I’ll try to catch up.

I haven’t paid such close attention as I might to the state of the nation, but it’s the silly season. Nothing much has changed. No one has made any gross mistakes unless you can call the President’s promises to fix things in three years or be a one term president a mistake, and that one was made three years ago.

The House has shown that the Republicans can repeal Obamacare if they win this November. This election really does become a plebiscite on just how much of the economy do we want to trust to the Feds.

And I am out for a walk.

Bastille Day

Dr. Pournelle:

I respectfully suggest that there’s not really much to celebrate about this day, certainly if Mr. von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s article contains much in the way of fact.

http://culturewars.com/CultureWars/Archives/Fidelity_archives/parricide.html

If anything, this day should be remembered as the start of a time of monstrous evil, by monstrous men. And a reminder that such things can happen anywhere. Even here.

Mark Schaeber

From the View for July 14, 2008 http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2008/Q3/view527.html

Bastille Day

On July 14, 1789, the Paris revolutionaries with aid of the local militia stormed the Bastille, a fortress in downtown Paris which was similar in purpose to the Tower of London. The revolutionaries freed all the prisoners held in the Bastille on royal warrants. They were all aristocrats: four forgers, two madmen, and a young man who had challenged the best swordsman in Paris to a duel, and whose father had him locked up so that the duel could not take place. The garrison consisted largely of invalid and retired French soldiers. After the surrender much of the garrison was slaughtered and their heads paraded on pikes. The four forgers vanished. The two madmen were sent to the common madhouse where they much missed the special treatment they’d had in the Bastille. The final freed prisoner joined the Revolution, became Citizen Egalite, and was later killed by guillotine in the Place de la Concorde for joining the wrong faction.

Since the fall of the Bastille France has enjoyed a number of governments including The Directorate, the Consulate, The First Empire, the Restoration, The 100 Days, The Second Restoration with several variants including the July Monarchy, the Second Republic, The Second Empire, The Commune of Paris, The Third Republic whose Constitution was framed to allow the possible return of the Monarchy, the Vichy regime, and the various permutations since the end of World War Two.

Lest we be too proud, the bloodiest war in US history was our Civil War; and while we have not had any formal changes of government since the Constitution of 1789, our Supreme Court has certainly rewritten the Constitution to the extent that we can probably boast of having at least three different forms of government since the Civil War.

=======

I have often told this story in my comments on Bastille day (e.g. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2view/view318.html) and the true story of the fall of the bastille was always a part of the seminars I taught on political theory. I was in a hurry this morning and neglected to do so.

I always have mixed emotions about this. National patriotic holidays celebrate myths and legends, and myth and legend may be more informative than the historical truth. Much of what we feel for George Washington is from a safe distance. He was a man much larger than life, and far more to be admired that most Kings designated “the Great”, but as the sad movement of ‘truth in history’ of a few years ago told us, he had bad fitting wooden false teeth, and he drank a lot of brandy although there is no evidence that he ever made any important decisions while under its influence. I would rather contemplate General Washington, whose men would have followed him to Hell, sitting in the hot summer weather of Philadelphia presiding over the Constitutional Convention than his evenings in which he tempered the misery of his separation from home and family for the delights of a Philadelphia rooming house and a bottle of brandy.

The legend of the Bastille is that the French people rose up against tyranny in the name of Liberty. Doubtless most of those who assaulted the Bastille thought they were doing so. Alas, the truth is more harsh.  But Edmund Burke dealt with all that in his Reflections on the Revolution, another of those books like Ortega’s Revolt of the Masses, The Education of Henry Adams, and The Federalist Papers that civilized people of all nations ought to read at some point in their educational process.

View 732 Friday, July 13, 2012

Sable wouldn’t eat her breakfast this morning. That’s alarming. Breakfast is her most important meal, and she has a ritual of eating it fast so she can beg PetTab vitamins and anything else she can get while we eat breakfast and read the morning papers. This morning she just wanted water.

Then she heard her friend the pool man and got up the energy to go outside, but she still didn’t eat, and we found what has to be the cause: during the night she seems to have found a number of tomatoes and managed to eat them after which she threw them up. Then she drank water and vomited that. And did that again. Clearly time for the vet. By the time we got to the vet she had done more drinking water and vomiting and had perked up a bit but she still passed her uneaten breakfast on the way out the door.

Bottom line she’s been left at the vet. It’s likely the tomatoes and her drinking a purging has probably taken care of much of it but she’ll spend the day there, leaving us worried as you’d imagine so don’t expect any sense from me today. We hope to pick her up this afternoon and get back to normal. And store the tomatoes in the refrigerator in future. But for now we worry.

The rumors are flying about Condoleezza Rice as a possible VP candidate with Romney. The rumor began with Drudge. Juan Williams loves the idea. Surprisingly, Sarah Palin says Ms. Rice would be a wonderful candidate. Others worry about her position on abortion, which appears to be mildly “pro choice” but is never anything she really wants to discuss.

She certainly has experience, and her foreign policy views tend to moderation, and to the conservation of American power. She comes from Stanford which has a number of liberal professors, but she’s a fellow of the Hoover Institution which was an intellectual power center for cold warriors – Possony and Richard Allen were both Hoover Fellows. It isn’t easy to characterize her. She gets along with the Republican establishment but she certainly can’t be said to be an Establishment Republican. She learned her policy trade during the Cold War but she wasn’t really a Cold Warrior.

All of which is probably not really important. Actually I would be astonished if she could be induced to leave her academic security for the political maelstrom with all the journalistic focus on every possible interpretation of every discoverable statement or action in her personal life, from her failed engagement in the seventies to her statements about abortion. She is clearly concerned about the country, and clearly feels it a duty to do what she can to assist the Republican cause; which says a lot about her opinion of the Obama Administration. I think she prefers academic life out of the spotlight, and her recent political activities show an unusual motivation; that should be significant to thoughtful people.

I don’t believe she is seriously considering running for Vice President. I do believe she will support whomever is chosen to be a candidate.

I see that academics but not politicians are beginning to notice that there are fewer workers every year, and more and more people living off entitlements. Fewer children are being born. That means that in future years more and more entitled people will live off the production of fewer and fewer workers.

This limits political alternatives. Austerity – cut entitlements, cut spending. Deficits, but the trend lines are toward more entitled vs. fewer workers, meaning a very unattractive environment to loan into. Revenue enhancement, which is more taxes, which generally lowers productivity and investment and more and more capital becoming annuities for rentier classes – unproductive rich.

There is an alternative, and everyone pays lip service to it, but few seem to take it seriously. That is: it is much easier to divide a large pie than a small one. Increase productivity, preferably by orders of magnitude. Charlie Sheffield and I gave a bit of a vision of that in HIGHER EDUCATION. Of course to divide a pie you must make a pie, and if your notion of productivity is ever more complex financial derivatives and every faster ways to move money in circles, there may come a time when people who actually make something will decide they don’t need your ‘service’ economy. For someone to have a house to live in, someone must have built that house – or at least have made the steel for a prefab. For people to eat bread, someone must grow, harvest, ship, and process grain, and someone else must bake that into bread. If the baker discovers he doesn’t need or can’t afford your financial services, you may have some problems.

I note that much productive machinery is for sale used in America, cheap. And China now makes 46% of the world’s steel. The US manufactures 6%. Contemplate those percentages in the earlier days of Communism and Capitalism.  It wasn’t all that long ago that Stalin hoped to bring Russia’s steel production up toward America’s. He chose central planning as the means to get that. The Five Year Plans would do the job.

America now seems to have adopted the Soviet system of central regulation, and while our productivity per worker is high, we aren’t so big in the world economy as we used to be. In 1950 about 10% of Americans worked in manufacturing, mining, and logging. Now it’s about 4%. Those 4% are highly productive per worker – but there are many unemployed workers, and there is a great deal of idle productivity machinery for sale in the used markets. Some try to take advantage of that but the regulatory environment isn’t what it was in 1950. It takes not only capital but non-productive compliance officers to start a manufacturing business, and the business must be able not only to pay its real expenses but also for non-productive people required by regulations. The result is that many prefer to invest their money elsewhere. In South East Asia, or in China.

Just some things to think about.

We know how to create employment and productivity. We knew that in 1950. It wasn’t five year plans. And if we had any doubts, we could observe the German Economic Miracle.

All right, we won’t try the German Economic Miracle of simply ignoring the regulations and encouraging people to hire anyone willing to work and go make money. Could we at least try increasing the small business exemptions? It would take about a week for Congress to say that in all federal regulations, exemptions that now apply to businesses with x or fewer employees now apply to businesses with x + y% employees. I’d make y 100%, which is to say the exemption is now 2x: if you are exempt from a regulation by dint of having 10 or fewer employees, it is now 20 or fewer; if 40 it is now 80; if 50 it is now 100. And so forth. Easy to understand, no complicated language needed – and it would result in a lot of companies buying some of that used manufacturing equipment and hiring people to use it; it would result in making a bigger pie. Perhaps it would result in less need for regulators, but most of them are aging and will be pensioned soon enough anyway.

And we’d have a bigger pie.

I don’t expect anyone to pay attention to this. But I have never heard a good argument against it.

View 732 Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Apologies for being so long without saying something. Combination of hot weather here, and a myriad of distractions, all fairly minor but all time consuming – and, alas, of thinking I had put up something I hadn’t.

I set this following up to be published Monday afternoon, got distracted, and thought I had done it when I hadn’t. Back in the days when I did all this in Front Page and posted things directly from it it was a lot easier. Ah well.

And we had what I thought was a flap about Amazon, but that turned out to be my own fault, and there was no problem.

I have a lot of mail on several subjects, and I am selecting out the best to present arguments.

Thanks to all those kind enough to worry about me.

I do not normally post press releases, but this one is significant:

XCOR Aerospace and Midland Development Corporation Announce Establishment of XCOR’s New Commercial Spaceflight R&D Headquarters

<http://ih.constantcontact.com/fs046/1102502633005/img/80.jpg>

XCOR Chief Test Pilot Richard Searfoss shows Texas Governor Rick Perry a full sized Lynx model unveiled during a ceremony held at the Midland

International Airport, where XCOR will open a new R&D headquarters.

Midland, Texas, July 9, 2012 – The Midland Development Corporation (MDC) and XCOR Aerospace jointly announced today the establishment of XCOR’s new Commercial Space Research and Development Center Headquarters that will be created over the next eighteen (18) months. XCOR manufactures reusable rocket engines for major aerospace prime contractors and is the designer, manufacturer and operator of the Lynx, a winged fully reusable, high performance suborbital space vehicle that is designed to safely carry two persons or scientific experiments to the edge of space and back up to four times per day.

"This is a great day for Midland and a huge step forward for the State of Texas. Visionary companies, like XCOR, continue to choose Texas because they know that innovation is fueled by freedom," Gov. Perry said. "Whether on the cutting edge of biotech, communications, commerce or privatized efforts to serve the needs of the next generation of space explorers, you can find Texas at the forefront of the movement."

XCOR will be establishing their new R&D center on the flight line at Midland International Airport (MAF) in a newly renovated 60,000-square-foot hangar, which will include office space and a test facility. The renovation is expected to commence in early 2013, and be completed by the late autumn.

"XCOR will be upgrading an existing hangar at Midland International Airport," stated Marv Esterly, director of airports at MAF. "This new R&D facility has the potential to open the door to even more economic development at our airport and for our community."

<http://ih.constantcontact.com/fs046/1102502633005/img/81.jpg>

XCOR will be expanding into a 60,000 sq ft hangar, pictured here, at the Midland Intenational Airport in Midland, TX.

"We are pleased to be establishing our R&D Center in Midland, Texas, where the weather, surrounding landscape, the airport, and the local & state government environment are ideally situated for the future growth and the ultimate realization of a fully reusable orbital system," said Andrew Nelson, chief operating officer of XCOR Aerospace. "With future suborbital operational sites on the East and West Coasts of the United States and around the world, plus a manufacturing and test facility geographically separate from our R&D facility, Midland will truly be at the heart of XCOR’s innovation engine."

"The decision to establish XCOR’s Research and Development Center Headquarters in Midland came after intense competition from other locations," stated Pam Welch, executive director of MDC, "once the technical and operational needs of XCOR were met, the final factors influencing the decision to locate R&D to Midland included the friendly business climate, a predictable regulatory environment, and the State of Texas tort reform initiatives. These factors allowed XCOR to see a long term future happening in Midland."

Laura Roman, MDC chairman, stated "Today we celebrate the economic diversity that XCOR’s Research and Development Center Headquarters will bring to Midland along with the $12,000,000 of new payroll and capital investment over the next five years to our community with an estimated average annual wage of over $60,000 per job."

In parallel with the XCOR facility renovation, the City of Midland is applying to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for a Commercial Space Launch Site designation for MAF, an estimated 12 to 18 months process. Upon completion of the licensing process and the hangar renovation, the XCOR presence will begin to ramp up.

The FAA spaceport designation will also be an important economic development tool because of the potential growth in the commercial space sector as NASA relies more on commercial service providers for launch capability and the space tourism market evolves. Marv Esterly, noted, "When our application is approved, the MAF will be the first "Primary Commercial Service Airport" to be granted this designation, and the combination of the two makes Midland attractive to other commercial space companies."

# # #

XCOR Aerospace is in the business of developing and producing safe, reliable and reusable rocket powered vehicles, propulsion systems, advanced non-flammable composites and other enabling technologies. XCOR is working with aerospace prime contractors and government customers on major propulsion systems, and concurrently building the Lynx, a piloted, two-seat, fully reusable, liquid rocket powered suborbital vehicle that takes off and lands horizontally and serves research & scientific missions and private spaceflight. The Lynx production models (designated Lynx Mark II) are designed to be robust, multi-mission commercial vehicles capable of flying to 100+ km in altitude up to four times per day and are being offered on a wet lease basis. www.xcor.com.

The Midland Development Corporation (MDC) promotes business expansion in the greater Midland, Texas area by building a strong and diversified economy through job creation and capital investment. The Midland Development Corporation has the ability to structure incentive packages to qualified new and existing employers who create and retain jobs for the community.

Midland International Airport (MAF) is an historic aviation center and home to many unique aviation and aerospace assets. The Pliska Aeroplane, the first aircraft built and flown in Texas was a 1911 vintage aircraft constructed by local blacksmith John Pliska and auto mechanic Gray Coggin. They modeled the aircraft after the Wright Flyer II owned by Robert G Fowler, who was passing through Midland. The original aircraft now hangs in the MAF main terminal. MAF was also the site of the US Army Air Corps Bombardier School during WWII, where numerous pilots were trained on the use of the famous Norden bombsight on the remote plains and reaches of West Texas. In the 1960’s and 1970’s MAF served as the R&D and flight test center for the first all composite aircraft built and licensed in the United States, the Windecker Eagle. And MAF is the current home to the Commemorative Air Force, the premier historic aircraft restoration and flying museum for military aircraft.

The Midland International Airport is ranked ninth in Texas for primary commercial service airports. Owned and operated by the City of Midland, the airport has over twenty daily departures with non-stop service to DFW, Dallas Love Field, Houston Intercontinental, Houston Hobby, Las Vegas and Denver. Currently, the airport is served by Southwest, American Eagle and United Express Airlines."

Media Contacts:

Sean Wilson

Griffin Communications Group

On behalf of Midland Development Corporation

sean@griffincg.com

California’s anti-business environment takes its toll on the future. Mojave was once a prime candidate for a space industry, but this may change things.

And if you have not seen this delightful review of Lucifer’s Hammer, recommend it to anyone you know who hasn’t bought the book recently. http://guerillabookworm.com/

Re. Lucifer’s Hammer Review

Dr. Pournelle,

I’d suggest using the permalink to the particular review, <http://guerillabookworm.com/?p=979>, rather than the link to the Guerrilla Bookworm home page that you put on <https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=8442>.

And that reminds me: it’s time to reread Lucifer’s Hammer; it’s been so long since last I read the book that I’m not recognizing a scene reference.

—Joel

For another interesting literary review, see http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/06/the-author-of-the-civil-war/ on the role of Sir Walter Scott on attitudes toward war. I will have to admit being influenced by Scott and by Robert Louis Stevenson at an early age. The Capleville school library had some of Stevenson’s novels (in addition to Treasure Island which we read in 7th Grade as an assignment) and also several of Scott’s Waverly novels (Quentin Durward for one, and of course Ivanhoe). It also has some Jack London who used language I wasn’t used to hearing…

And I have this on Climate Change

Tree ring studies show cooling 

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

Just in case you’ve not yet seen this:

> Tree-rings prove climate was WARMER in Roman and Medieval times than

> it is now – and world has been cooling for 2,000 years.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2171973/Tree-ring-study-proves-climate-WARMER-Roman-Medieval-times-modern-industrial-age.html

Of course this is the Daily Mail, but then my usual view of that paper’s biases would lead me to expect to see them denouncing Deniers. The graph is interesting.

Of course we have all of us known from childhood that it was warmer in Viking times – Medieval times if you like – than it is now. We all were taught about Leif the Lucky and the Greenland colonies, and about Vinland and the skraelings and wine grapes in Nova Scotia; and if we cared to look further at history between 800 to about 1300 AD we find that everyone recorded good weather, long growing seasons, earlier springs and later winters. This seems universal in the Northern hemisphere from Iceland to the Orient, in China and Japan, and so far as we can tell, people thrived in the Southern hemisphere also, they just didn’t keep written records that survived. One of the charges leveled against the ‘hockey stick’ model makers is that they sought to erase the Medieval Warm from human records. 

We don’t have so much on the Roman Warm period but we can infer some of it from published histories, length of time it took olive trees to mature, and such like. We know that crops failed more often and land production fell during the wandering period, but that could be decivilization rather than climate. 

I have seen very little evidence showing that the Earth has not been warmer in historical times than it is now.  We also know that it has been considerably colder than it is now following the last cooling that began in the first half of the 14th Century.

Any model that seeks to predict future climates must, I would think, take account of the Roman and Medieval Warm periods and since none of the current very expensive models of climactic doom can account for them (other than to wish they would go away) I have never had much confidence in these many parameter art forms.

We have also, all of us, known since childhood that Earth went through really significant Ice Ages, and that we are supposedly in an Interglacial Period. That’s one reason why there was so much concern back not all that many years ago (mid 1970’s) when there was talk of a Genesis Strategy and the Coming Ice Age.

Stephen Schneider, in those days  said the climate future was unpredictable, not definitely Ice, but since climate variation usually means food production uncertainties we ought, as Joseph advised Pharaoh, to put away surpluses during fat years to guard against coming families. That’s still not terrible advice. I can think of a number of catastrophes that might make us wish we had more than a few days’ food stored up and ready to distribute. Come to that, given what we’re spending on measures to affect climate when we don’t in fact know which way things are going, we probably could have full granaries from these fat years just in case there are lean years.  But that wouldn’t enrich the Global Warming True Believers with grants and study subsidies, and there’s a lot of money to be made out of Cap and Trade if you’re the speculator rather than producer kind.  Pardon my bitterness.

I don’t suppose this latest study will convince many who aren’t already Deniers; after all, those who paid attention to world history in grade school already pretty well know all this; but then modern attention span isn’t very long, so who knows?

Incidentally the Great Global Warming Hysteria suggests the inadvisability of rule by bureaucratic meritocracy as well as the undesirability of rule by plebiscitary democracy; but then Franklin, who speculated on the cause of Ice Ages, knew that as did most of the other Framers.

If you lay a straight edge along the solid line on that curve so that you just touch the four highest peaks including the last one, you will see a trend that is not what the Global Warming people believe in. Of course that depends on the quality of the raw data, but then we’ve all been saying that all along.  If I had to bet whether 2099 would be warmer or colder than 2015 I think I would take “about the same” were that offered as a choice.  But if I were asked do I prefer warmer or colder I’d emphatically choose warmer even though I am sweltering a an office without air conditioning just at the moment. 

==

It’s not just the Daily Mail

Jerry:

I admit The Daily Mail can make it difficult to separate good science from reports of Tom Cruise’s ability to teleport.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2171741/Tom-Cruise-believed-telekinetic-telepathic-powers-according-Scientologists.html

But the Daily Mail’s report of the tree ring study you mentioned on July 11 is reported more reliably at http://www.uni-mainz.de/eng/15491.php

and

http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1589.html

A good source for following climate reports is

http://www.climatedepot.com/

Best regards,

–Harry M.