Category Archives: View

Tuesday, September 27, 2016

Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for the West as it commits suicide.

James Burnham

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

“Deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Immigration without assimilation is invasion.

Well, the ophthalmologist decided that my cataract is not ripe enough. Of course she didn’t say that. That’s what they used to say in the old days, when all they could do was remove the lens, so they wanted you to wait until things were so bad that even no lens was better than you were seeing. Apparently I wasn’t complaining enough about my cataract, nor eager enough to get it removed. I did get some drops that do seem to help, or at least I thinks so. Sand my left eye is fine, so having a lot of the light blocked off in my right eye isn’t so bad.

Apparently they don’t want to see me again for six months, so we’ll drop that story until next spring. It probably wouldn’t have improved my typing anyway.

And of course I got my flu shot while I was there. The eager young nursing students administering the immunizations also insisted on checking my other shot records, but I’m up to date on pneumonia and tetanus.

It seems to me that Hillary has based her entire campaign on “Trump’s not fit to be President, no matter how much you hate me and despise Obama’s policies.” Trump’s debate strategy seems to be to make sure she claims responsibility for the situation we are in, and doesn’t denounce ObamaCare, the Iran deal, our various regulatory policies, our immigration policy – to make sure she says you’re going to get more of what we already gave you. Big government, soak the rich, free trade agreements – and lots of migrants and immigrants. A bit more bureaucracy will take care of everything.

But you have no choice, because Trump isn’t fit to be President, he isn’t even rich, this is all a con, and he believes Obama wasn’t born in the United States and he sort of supported the invasion of Iraq just like I did, and he doesn’t know how to build a wall or do anything much. And he loses it when provoked. Just you watch.

So we watched, and yes, she led him off track sometimes – after all, this was his first ever Presidential debate, and she’s done several, and she’s pretty smart – but even when he was off track a bit he kept saying things like you’ve been in power, why didn’t you do something when you were Secretary?, and generally reminding us who spent more money we don’t have than any other President in history and got us the slowest recovery from a Recession than anything since the Great Depression. And despite the goads and slights, he didn’t turn into a raging bull ready to nuke everybody. He sounded like a business man ready to take advantage of any breaks he could get, and now ready to apply those skills to the Presidency.

Scott Adams seems to have reached the same conclusion.

If Trump continues in this way : I want to fix things, I know they’re broken, and I have done pretty good for myself, let’s see what I can do for you, and no, I’m not going to nuke any baby seals nor even Moscow or Tehran, but maybe I will adjust the rules of engagement for our sailors in the Persian Gulf – if he keeps that up, looks like he might want actually to do some of the things everyone talks about, I think he wins. I’ve had about enough of this slow recovery. And I don’t think adding more taxes and regulations will help. I don’t think Trump will make taxes worse, or grow the bureaucracy, or get us into another war. I’m not so sure about Hillary. Qadaffy did everything he could to Finlandize. He’d have licked Obama’s boots or Hillary’s toes if he thought that would help.

She summarized her Libya Policy as “We came. We saw. He died.” Of course it wasn’t so long after that that our ambassador – her ambassador – died also, but that was hardly Qadaffy’s fault. He’d died.

Somehow I think any random Marine Colonel could have come up with better results in Libya than Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton.

 

Smallpox

From the CDC web sire

http://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/vaccine-basics/index.html

Smallpox vaccination can protect you from smallpox for about 3 to 5 years. After that time, its ability to protect you decreases. If you need long-term protection, you may need to get a booster vaccination. Find out who should get smallpox vaccine.

B

Yes, and they insist they have enough vaccine to immunize the entire US population. Of course it does deteriorate, so you can believe as much of that as you want to.

Miracles at Lourdes
Jerry,
Your comments about the miracles at the Lourdes Shrine sent me to google looking for more information. You comment suggested that there were several hundred such documented miracles. Perhaps that is the correct number, in total, since the founding of the shrine. But the number of recent miracles is substantially less. According to one site I consulted, prior to 1914, there were an average of 57 miracles claimed each year. Since 1947, when a medical board was created to review these claims, the total number of accepted miracles has decreased substantially: only 56 were recognized between 1947 and 1990. And since 1978, there have been but 4 recognized. It shouldn’t be surprising that the more closed these claims have been scrutinized, the fewer there are that are accepted.
The other thing that jumps out is how infrequent these miracles are relative to the number of visitors at the shrine. According to one site, approximately 5,000,000 people visit the site each year, and some 350,000 people bath in the water. So the odds on obtaining a cure from a visit are exceedingly low.

Craig

Why do you think I am surprised that we see fewer miracles as science advances? It is obvious that many old wives’ tales – blue bread mold, orange mold, spider webs – produced results for centuries before we learned what the mechanism was. I don’t expect that trend to stop, and neither does the Pope or any of the theologians I know of. They may see implications in our scientific advances that you do not see, but they certainly do not deny them. What has not happened that they have dropped to zero. I don’t recall saying that the laws of statistics are relevant here.

I said it is an act of faith to believe that there never will be any more miracles when our science is sufficiently advanced. Perhaps that deserves a stronger faith that belief that prayer can sometimes be effective, but that wasn’t my argument. Incidentally, the decline in number of miracles certified has a lot to do with the rules applied to the definition.

Persia

https://www.strategypage.com/qnd/iraq/articles/20160926.aspx

I do hope that the US politicians and military leadership are paying attention to this analysis.  I’ve been saying such since 2003.

David Couvillon
Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; 
Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; 
Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; 
Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; 
Chef de Hot Dog Excellence;  Avoider of Yard Work

So do I.

Credibility

http://warontherocks.com/2016/09/it-is-time-to-drive-a-stake-into-the-heart-of-the-american-credibility-myth/

I’m incredulous… the author is making the argument that ‘credibility’ and ‘reputation’ have no bearing on current or future diplomatic or military actions.  Therefore, promises/threats are merely rhetoric.

David Couvillon
Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; 
Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; 
Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; 
Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; 
Chef de Hot Dog Excellence;  Avoider of Yard Work

Holy carp!

Evidently we had an incoming over Australia!

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/huge-meteor-crashes-earth-flash-8917015

It could not have hit “offshore” as the article reports; we would have heard tsunami reports by now. More likely an airburst, per the reports I’m seeing. Also the reports are over a lot of different non-USA media.

‘Huge meteor’ crashes to earth as flash of light is … http://www.mirror.co.uk Hundreds of local reported seeing a “burning light” at Turkey Beach and Emerald in Queensland, Australia, followed by tremors

Stephanie Osborn

“The Interstellar Woman of Mystery”
http://www.Stephanie-Osborn.com

A book recommendation

Jerry,
Book reviews/recommendations used to be a regular feature of your Chaos Manor column. I understand you are not able to produce as much as you used to, and have had to let this slide. But in return for many interesting suggestions in the past, I would like to suggest a book to you. I feel comfortable doing so, because it was a book that Bill Gates recommended on his blog:
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Sapiens-A-Brief-History-of-Humankind

Craig

From the September 1996 Column – A Little Taste of Crow Column The book o

f the month is Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life by David Friedman (Harper Business, 1996). One doesn’t normally think of an economics book as light and pleasant reading, but David makes it seem so. He also explains most of the assumptions underlying economic theory. If you have any interest in economics at all, you’ll find this book both readable and fascinating; and I guarantee you’ll learn something from it. David analyzes such things as the length of supermarket checkout lines, whether to change lanes on a freeway, and incidentally something about money and unemployment. He’s a former King of the East in the Society for Creative Anachronism, and one of the most interesting people I know.

>From the October 1996 Column – Of Zip and Spam and NT 4_0 Column The book of the month is by Cicely Veronica Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War (Routledge). I thought I knew all I wanted to about the Defenestration of Prague , Friedrich the Winter King, Father Tilly, Cardinal Richelieu and Father Joseph “the gray eminence,” and Wallenstein, but once I opened this wonderful book, I found a wealth of details more fascinating than any novel. Part of Hitler’s popularity came from his promise to upset the Peace of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years War.

Missing Special Forces article

Hi Jerry,

FYI The Special Forces article does still exist on the originating site:

https://sofrep.com/63764/us-special-forces-sabotage-white-house-policy-gone-disastrously-wrong-with-covert-ops-in-syria/

It is a members only article which was probably ‘borrowed’ without permission by the site whose link you posted.

SOFREP appears to be a legitimate site with articles from former Special Forces members.

-Blair S.

Scott Adams on Periscope: live-streaming he debates,

Jerry

After this: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/150919416661/why-i-switched-my-endorsement-from-clinton-to

There is no other way I’ll watch/listen to the debates than –

https://www.periscope.tv/ScottAdamsSays/1zqKVVeZjvZKB

sc:bubbles]

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

Sunday, September 25, 2016

Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for the West as it commits suicide.

James Burnham

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

“Deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Immigration without assimilation is invasion.

Tomorrow I go to the ophthalmologist who will presumably schedule a cataract operation for my right eye. I’m not risking much, since my right eye adds little or nothing to my vision: indeed, I can read better with an eyepatch over it than with it. It might aid in my driving, but I don’t expect to do a lot more driving unless my vision is improved. I conclude that the upside is good and the downside if everything goes wrong is not great, and I have a lot of encouraging message from all of you as well as friends I know well: I believe you when you say that cataract surgery has improved greatly since the days when they waited for cataracts to “get ripe”, meaning get so bad that anything was better than your present condition.

Roberta didn’t make choir practice, largely because it’s up in the choir loft and she’s a bit intimidated by the stair climb, but it looks as if the internal infection was cured by the week of infusions, and the infusions took the place of the medicines causing the allergy reactions, and we’re back to the normal chaos of Chaos Manor. We seem to have her SKYPE working properly again, so all’s well there, too.

All this has made my posts here a bit thin on the ground, but that should improve too. I’ve developed a series of unpleasant but evocative exercises for when I get up, and Tuesday I should be back to the Five Tibetan Rites which have always helped in the past; I missed doing them all last week.

The election news is interesting. Peggy Noonan describes the situation well in The Year of the Reticent Voter, also in the Wall Street Journal):

The signature sentence of this election begins with the words “In a country of 320 million …” I hear it everywhere. It ends with “how’d it come down to these two?” or “why’d we get them?”

Another sentence is a now a common greeting among Republicans who haven’t seen each other in a while: “What are we gonna do?”

The most arresting sentence of the week came from a sophisticated Manhattan man friendly with all sides. I asked if he knows what he’ll do in November. “I know exactly,” he said with some spirit. “I will be one of the 40 million who will deny, the day after the election, that they voted for him. But I will.”

A high elected official, a Republican, got a faraway look when I asked what he thought was going to happen. “This is the unpollable election,” he said. People don’t want to tell you who they’re for. A lot aren’t sure. A lot don’t want to be pressed.

That’s exactly what I’ve seen the past few weeks in North Carolina, New Jersey, Tennessee and Minnesota.

She has a lot more to say, but it adds up to, nobody knows what’s going to happen. The Democrats have the best ground game, but it’s not so clear that getting out Democrat voters is the key to the election. Normally, in anything like a close election, the winning strategy is to have the best ground game. Most close elections are won by the opposition staying home, as the Republicans did in the elections of Clinton and the re-election of Obama. I do not think that will happen here, and neither do the Democrats; there are districts where getting out the vote for Democrat incumbents in the House or the Senate really getting out people who don’t much like Mr. Obama, and are really turned off by Hillary. The best ground game may not elect Mrs. Clinton, although it may cut into Republican majorities in both houses of Congress. There are even those who think this might be the best possible result.

We do live in interesting times.

I intended to write an essay on vaccination, but I’m pretty tired, so I suspect this will look more like an outline of an essay.

First, be clear: I do not oppose compulsory vaccination for those who attend public schools, or expose people to their contagious diseases. One of the triumphs of the 20^th Century was the near extermination of small pox and polio. Small pox immunization required vaccination, not just a painless inoculation or sugar cube, The vaccine serum was spread on the skin – generally the upper arm for boys and the inside of the upper thigh for girls, since it left an ugly scar – after which the vaccinator punctured the skin a dozen or more times with a vaccination needle. The sire swelled up, became inflamed, and remained painful for days: that way you knew the vaccination had “taken”, and if it did not, many were required to have another vaccination. If that didn’t take, it was usually concluded that you were already immune, and in any event you were not likely to contract small pox.

When I was young, almost everyone got vaccinated or they didn’t got to school. That included Christian Science children and members of other religious denominations who refused vaccination. If you joined the armed forces, you got another vaccination, even if you could show a vaccination scar –which I definitely could. No matter. I got another, which didn’t take, but the Army didn’t demand a second attempt. I kept my first vaccination scar into my forties, but eventually it faded away. I presume I am still immune to smallpox. If I didn’t, I’d go demand another even at my age. I knew some smallpox survivors. I sure didn’t want that, and don’t want it now.

We also got tetanus, diphtheria, and whooping cough (pertussis) inoculations. In my case, in the early thirties, it was three separate inoculations, and it wasn’t compulsory. In later years it became a DPT shot, which is what my children all got, and it was compulsory in California and Washington as I recall. Later other immunizations were added to the package, and at one time there were, as I recall, clinics giving a package immunization for some 15 to 20 diseases, including childhood diseases most of us went through: measles, mumps, that sort of thing. Some states resisted making those big package shots compulsory, but under pressure from the Federal Government threats to withhold Federal Aid To Education most states gave in.

About this time, autism, which occupied less than a week in the Ph.D. in Psychology program, became more common, and ADHD – attention deficit hyperactive disorder – which did not appear in any of my abnormal psychology or psychiatry textbooks – was invented. Astounding numbers of boys were drugged with methamphetamines, a practice continuing in some places to this day. Add Ritalin and 15 disease inoculations, and you have a witches’ brew that I doubt anyone understands; it is certainly an insult to a developing body. Whether that could make autoimmune disorders more common I haven’t the competence to declare, but I certainly would not be surprised if it did.

Leave out the Ritalin. Immunizations are intended to alter you immune system, inducing it to produce antibodies that attack invading organisms and viruses. When those diseases are often fatal and are very contagious – as smallpox and polio and diphtheria are – requiring those inoculations as a condition of living in normal society makes a great deal of sense. Add Tetanus, which is not contagious – there’s plenty of it around horse stables among other places – but easily contracted from untreated minor wounds – and inoculation is highly desirable, and one can make the argument that failure to immunize minor children is child abuse. One can make that case; do not confuse that with my accepting it. And I’ve already said I saw to it that my children all got DPT shots.

Now add the other 15 or so diseases we have discovered immunizations against. Measles. Mumps. Various other diseases, some not so easily caught. Development of the vaccines is expensive. Passing the FDA test to be allowed to market them is extremely expensive. The lobby pressures to make use of them compulsory is very high. Opposition to adding one more immunization to a growing package is low. Benefits are lower than for polio or smallpox or diphtheria. It is not good to have measles, and you can in fact inadvertently become a great danger to pregnant women if you have measles – see Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Cracked – but it is not as dangerous as smallpox. And if you get immunization as part of a package of 20 immunizations, you have no idea of what that will do to a developing immune system.

Fortunately as my children were growing up, they were discovering these new immunizations, and if the kids hadn’t had whatever they were now immunizing against, it was fine with me since it was one at a time. I would have refused to let them give any of my boys the 20-disease immunization shot, and if they made it compulsory I would have paid a private physician to do the inoculations one or two a week; or I think I would. I certainly would have wanted a lot more evidence that having a case of measles was more dangerous than a 20 disease inoculation.

California has recently passed a law making it far more difficult to object to immunizations. Most of that is pressure from migration and unimmunized migrants showing up in the public schools. The shots will probably be given in big bunch packages because that’s cheaper.

If I had small children, I would get them their shots, but spread out over weeks, not all at once – that way they will be immune to most of the 20-disease immunization which I’d try to avoid. And I’d worry about ADHD.

I’d also look into finding some way to get a smallpox vaccination for the young kids. Smallpox supposedly exists only in Georgia and Russia, securely contained from intruders and terrorists. Nobody kept a small sample anywhere else, and there’s none pout in a jungle somewhere. And you can believe as much of that as you want to.

Faith and Science

Dear Dr. Pournelle:
I find myself in disagreement with your comments contrasting science and faith, and especially with your statement that the rejection of miracles is a statement of faith.
You seem to distinguish between, on one hand, matters subject to scientific proof, and on the other, statements of faith; and in doing so, to treat them not only as mutually exclusive but as exhaustive, so that everything must be one or the other. And this division has been common in philosophy, including the philosophy of science, over the past century or two. But it’s not the only way of looking at the subject. There is also a view in which there are truths of reason that are not provable, because they are constitutive of reason itself. I first learned of this view from Rand, but as I learned more history of philosophy I found it, for example, in Aristotle, Aquinas, and Spinoza, among others.
Take, for example, the Law of Non-Contradiction. This is one of the basic premises of logic, relied upon in virtually every proof of anything. Any attempt to “prove” it would be circular, because in talking about “proof” we are already assuming it. But at the same time, any attempt to deny it makes no sense—because to “deny” something is to claim that it is false and THEREFORE cannot be true; but that “therefore” is just the Law of Non-Contradiction restated, and therefore the denial relies on the very Law it denies. If you really want not to rely on the Law of Non-Contradiction, I suppose you don’t have to, but then your own position implies that you can’t object when other people adhere to it; indeed, you can’t even say, “I don’t agree with you,” because disagreeing with people is once again using the same Law. (As I understand the matter, this point goes back to Aristotle.)
Now, according to Thomas Aquinas, religious beliefs include some that are pure matters of faith and revelation. But they also include “natural theology,” beliefs that, according to Aquinas, can be known by reason alone, and do not depend on faith; among these, for example, are the existence of God, the basic attributes of God, and the creation of the world by God. So Aquinas clearly holds that there are truths of reason (or of “science,” as we now say) that are not matters of faith.
Certainly Aquinas would not agree with my belief that the nonexistence and indeed the impossibility of miracles is a truth of reason, any more than I agree with his belief that the existence of God is a truth of reason. But the idea that there ARE truths of reason is more fundamental than disagreement over what specifically those truths are; it makes them subject to reasoned debate, of the kind that Aquinas engaged in at length, and not simply a matter of the clash of rival blind faiths. Joseph Schumpeter talks about this in his History of Economic Analysis, where he says that the Thomist and the scientific atheist have more in common with each other than either has with the logical positivist.
And similarly, the logical positivist and the extreme Protestant who thinks religion is a matter for faith alone, where rational justification is neither possible nor necessary, are akin to each other. I find it odd that you seem to be in this camp, given that Aquinas’s claim that part of theology is rationally knowable is a fundamental Catholic doctrine; it seems to me as if you have accepted a philosophy of science that is at odds with this.
I don’t want to take up your time with arguing over miracles. But I do believe that this is a matter of rational disagreement, on which in principle it is possible to arrive at the truth through reasoned argument, however difficult it might be in practice.

William H. Stoddard

I have no desire to get into a discussion of formal logic. I say that at Lourdes are hundreds of documented events, which, if they happened as reported, cannot be explained by any science whatever. Now you can argue that they never happened, but given the recording systems used, that is a very difficult argument.

You can argue that we just don’t understand yet, which you are welcome to do, but you must understand that is a statement of belief – a statement of faith, just as the explanation of “It was a Miracle” is a statement of faith. You may argue that yours is the more reasonable explanation, but when you look at hundreds of cases, many very different, that statement becomes less and less compelling. I have had at least one experience that Marvin Minsky, very much an Ethical Culture skep;tic, could only agree was enormously improbable. There is no calculation of probabilities that makes it less than one in 10^10 and even that requires assumptions without evidence. Just as the odds of forty million monkeys producing all the works in the British museum by chance are quite low.

Miracles

Jerry,

The discussion of reports of miracles (and by extension other so-called supernatural or paranormal activities) reminds me of a pattern I’ve observed as an administrator of virtual machines.

I know of two fundamentally different forms of VMs. The most common I think of as hypervisors, such as VMWare or Virtual Box, in which the whole virtual system is, in effect, a fully, self-contained OS, and any communication with the running VM must be done via normal server channels such as SSH or a console login.

The second is kernel-based or paravirtualization, such as Solaris Containers, in which the virtual environment is embedded in a Global Zone, and is not a self-contained OS, but generally appears as one to its users.

Importantly for this discussion, a paravirtualization environment can be viewed and changed from two distinct logical contexts, one of which is unseen by the other. An admin doing work within a Container sees the Container as a distinct running server, and has no access or visibility into the Global Zone.

An admin in the Global Zone, however, can see and alter the state of the running Container, outside the Container’s context and permissions (though within the Global Zone’s context and permissions). That admin could, for example, create or remove Container files without leaving any audit trail within the Container of who or how, whereas a user within the Container would be subject to the Container’s permissions and auditing.

Viewing a Container as a universe may be a stretch, but the analogy seems straightforward. I see scientists as users within the Container who say changes to the Container can’t possibly happen without following permissions and being subject to auditing, whereas others claim to have seen inexplicable supernatural changes, or what might be more precisely called supercontextual changes.

If we add further that not all Global Zone users have the same permissions, and some are quite limited to certain areas, it’s not too hard to come up with a “Pantheon” of Global Zone users with varying roles and motivations. 🙂

Anyway, I find it curious how stridently it seems science as a whole today rejects the possibility of anything existing beyond our context. If something exists beyond the realm of entropy, that something would be worth finding, and to me, at least, that’s the point of believing in miracles.

And if not, everything eventually resolves to maximum uniformity anyhow, no matter what we choose to do or believe or hope for, so in that case, how could believing in miracles really do any harm? Tolerance would seem to be called for, not the malicious defensiveness I’ve observed.

-Philip

And of course we know that an exploding cloud of elementary particles will eventually dance Swan Lake…

Science and Faith

Concerning something posted on your blog. ” The fact that events taking place routinely today would have been taken for miracles 100 years ago can be said to be evidence for the science eventually will explain everything hypothesis, but it is not conclusive evidence.”
I agree. Science will eventually catch up with what many faith-believing people hold to be true. Human kind’s faith in science could be seen as the mote in God’s eye (sorry for the punny reference). Our history of science shows a conflict between religion and science, yet when egos and politics are set aside we can see how they compliment each other. Do you agree?

B.A. Simmons

I echo Augustine and Aquinas: when reason and faith conflict it is reason that will prevail, and faith that will be corrected. It may be so corrected that it vanishes, but I have seen no signs of that happening yet. Perhaps in the days of the Newtonian clockwork universe?

‘When the authors protest that none of the errors really matter, it makes you realize that, in these projects, the data hardly matter at all.’

<http://andrewgelman.com/2016/09/21/what-has-happened-down-here-is-the-winds-have-changed/>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

No kidding, Mr. Holmes.

Subj: The FBI Investigation of EmailGate Was a Sham | | Observer

http://observer.com/2016/09/the-fbi-investigation-of-emailgate-was-a-sham/

Dropped by to check in and Bluehost says your web site is down.
http://box735.bluehost.com/suspended.page/disabled.cgi/jerrypournelle.com

The website you were trying to reach is temporarily unavailable.

Please check back soon.

If you are the owner of this website, please log in for additional
information or contact us as soon as possible.

Hope it gets sorted out soon. Also hope you can receive this email. I have no other route to contact you.

–Gary

We had a sort of DOS attack (attempting to use my site to spam people) but all appears to be well now.

I have a number of reports of this:

the link in ” U.S. Special Forces Sabotage White House Policy” to the article is no longer found.

Hope your cataract surgery goes well.

Sincerely

Bob Leever

I said when I posted it that I had no knowledge of the reliability of the site.

Martin van Crevald essay recommended

Dr. Pournelle,
Martin van Crevald in _As I Please_ has begun a series of essays on the future. http://www.martin-van-creveld.com/neither-heaven-hell/
Presuming the following parts will stand up to his usual quality, I recommend that this essay be considered for inclusion in the next _There Will Be War_.
-d

sc:bubbles]

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

Chaos Manor View, Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for the West as it commits suicide.

James Burnham

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

“Deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Immigration without assimilation is invasion.

The chaos is diminishing again, and something like its normal state is settling to Chaos Manor. Roberta is recovering from her last trips to urgent care, the infusions are done, her allergies are abating. We have had a fairly calm week. Of course Monday I go to the ophthalmologist, probably to get an appointment for cataract surgery in my right eye, and while the worst that happens will be an eyepatch and very little if any degradation of my vision, while the best outcome would be a vision improvement, and I know things have improved in the last decade and there’s nothing to worry about, I don’t seem to convince that small voice in my head. Oh. Well.

The Scripture and Debate

Jerry,
On 17 September, you wrote in response to one of your correspondents:
“Sacred Texts, like miracles, fall outside the domain of science, and require different standards of debate.”
It struck me pretty quickly. Science is debatable as it deals with testable hypotheses, careful observation, and the fundamental idea that reality always rules. Sacred texts can not be debated as they deal in faith, unquestioned obedience to dogma, and the fundamental idea that scripture always rules.
It is also true that only subjects that can trace back to observable reality can be debated at all. Debate requires some standard of fact, verifiable falsifiability, and objective discourse. Sacred text claims to be beyond all such considerations, so I see no “different standards” by which debate can proceed. Without an objective framework, discourse is reduced to speculation and disagreements can be settled only by authority.

Kevin L Keegan

Science deals only with testable – falsifiable – hypotheses. Religion deals with non-repeatable observations. If you go to Lourdes and examine the data, there are large number of observations of events you cannot explain. Many call them miracles. The observations are well attested to, by both Believers and Unbelievers; if they happened as described many of them are “miraculous” in that there is no other explanation known. Of course there is always faith in the notion that one day we will have a perfectly non-miraculous observation, but that is a faith, not a scientific principle. The notion that all the universe is explicable by science is self evidently untrue at the moment; that it will be true is an act of faith.

Miracles cannot be repeated; by definition, really. The fact that events taking place routinely today would have been taken for miracles 100 years ago can be said to be evidence for the “science eventually will explain everything” hypothesis, but it is not conclusive evidence.

Sacred text is more complex, which is precisely why the Church Fathers did not urge Bible study, and even now insist on safeguards and interpretations. I do not care to extend this particular debate; it has been held many times with varying results; Martin Luther’s interpretation led to the Thirty Years War and Westphalia.

If you want a glimpse into the future of rule by elites continuing for more years, see:

Rejecting Voodoo Science in the Courtroom

The U.S. has relied on flawed forensic-evidence techniques for decades, falsely convicting many.

By

Alex Kozinski

http://www.wsj.com/articles/rejecting-voodoo-science-in-the-courtroom-1474328199

The White House will release a report Tuesday that will fundamentally change the way many criminal trials are conducted. The new study from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) examines the scientific validity of forensic-evidence techniques—DNA, fingerprint, bitemark, firearm, footwear and hair analysis. It concludes that virtually all of these methods are flawed, some irredeemably so.

Americans have long had an abiding faith in science, including forensic science. Popular TV shows like “CSI” and “Forensic Files” stoke this confidence. Yet the PCAST report will likely upend many people’s beliefs, as it should. Why trust a justice system that imprisons and even executes people based on junk science?

Only the most basic form of DNA analysis is scientifically reliable, the study indicates. Some forensic methods have significant error rates and others are rank guesswork. “The prospects of developing bitemark analysis into a scientifically valid method” are low, according to the report. In plain terms: Bitemark analysis is about as reliable as astrology. Yet many unfortunates languish in prison based on such bad science. [snip]

If you’re up to it, the report, by the Scions of Big Science, is here:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/PCAST/pcast_forensic_science_report_final.pdf

and you’ll find it fascinating if you can get through it.

The review in the Wall Street Journal is by Alex Kozinski, a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge, and Senior Advisor to the Big Science officials who wrote the report. In essence it says that most our forensic technology is terribly flawed, and it will certainly be greeted with shouts of joy by the lawyers.

Even methods valid in principle can be unreliable in practice. Forensic scientists, who are often members of the prosecution team, sometimes see their job as helping to get a conviction. This can lead them to fabricate evidence or commit perjury. Many forensic examiners are poorly trained and supervised. They sometimes overstate the strength of their conclusions by claiming that the risk of error is “vanishingly small,” “essentially zero,” or “microscopic.” The report calls such claims “scientifically indefensible,” but jurors generally take them as gospel when presented by government witnesses who are certified as scientific experts.

Thus writes an Appellate Judge and Senior Advisor to the panel who prepared the report.

Now no one wants to send innocent people to prison; and certainly there is room for argument about much forensic evidence, as there is always argument about eye witness evidence, circumstantial evidence, and just about every other kind of evidence. We already have a judicial system requiring 12 jurors to be convinced of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and one juror is enough to force a retrial, after which an Appellate Court gets to review it. We have plenty of voodoo science if the perpetrator pleads insanity: prosecution experts seldom tell the court the guy is nuts, and defense experts generally insist he is technically insane, and jurors are once again forced to decide for themselves.

No doubt we can use some improvements in our judicial system. The late Arthur Kantrowitz, one of the early leaders of the L5 Society, for years vainly tried to get a “science court” to decide technical issues, and had powerful reasons for that. But even he had no remedies for the general criminal justice courts. Nor, really, do I.

From the June, 2002 View:

The book of the month is The New World Strategy (Simon and Schuster Touchstone, 1995) by Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr. His On Strategy was about the best analysis of what happened in Vietnam, although I think he didn’t understand the strategic importance of the South East Asian War: While it appeared to be a defeat of the West, and locally it certainly was, it was a victorious campaign of attrition in the Seventy Years War, the last phase of which we call The Cold War. The U.S,. for better or worse, employed a strategy of containment, denying the Soviet Union new conquests to feed from; we held Vietnam long enough to make their victory nearly worthless while the costs to them were high. Summers’ On Strategy is a good analysis of our local defeat, but does not see the grand strategic victory.

The New World Strategy advises us to return to our roots; its most important conclusion is that there will be no great military revolution that changes everything. The principles remain. I may disagree with Summers on details, but I agree completely with that. The Strategy of Technology, by Possony and Pournelle, made that point 30 years ago. We wrote as theorists. Summers writes from military experience.

I continue to recommend Col. Summers

On Free Trade:

Free trade between equals is advantageous to both, and keeps both competitive. Free trade that ships manufacturing equipment overseas and leaves a Rust Belt or Detroit behind is not advantageous to the United States. Then there is another sort of Free Trade; see below.

It might be useful if someone paid attention to American Interests, instead of to economic theory. Perhaps we would not have made some of the agreements that resulted in Detroit.

And yes, I know, Detroit unions contributed heavily to their own demise; as did government regulations that forced them to pay attention to those demands, and did not allow the actual workers any informed opinion in the subsequent actions. There is plenty of blame all around, but the elites came out of it well.

Brazil
Oh, all the work on the second floor is off-shored to Brazil. I’m honestly not even sure what they do.
Ah! Brazil! So now they are bringing them here now?
I was in Telecom, last gig was the biggest bank in New England that became a big, fat target of downsizing. From a crew of ten, our presence shrunk to one. Me. Sitting alone in a seven room office as the contract ran down.
But, Brazil; they cut out the local project manager mid way through and afterward all the conferences became phoning into a conference bridge. Had to phone in since the new PM was in Brazil. His English was spotty and his emails and project reports had (obviously) been run through a translation program. We learned to ditch the technical jargon early on since if the Boy from Brazil didn’t understand anything, we had to stop and explain it to him. After he got his new Smartphone he liked to join the conference from the beach in Rio, occasionally interrupting the flow with phone-shots of brown bottoms in bikinis (he apparently liked bottoms, male & female). This, while two experienced and competent PM’s were within three subway stops.
I suppose since we were dismantling something, not building anything, in the end it didn’t make any difference. When the job ended we would also be gone. Taking longer was a feature of the new method, not a bug.
After getting laid off, I was offered one other contract that involved downsizing and shutting down. But once was enough.
At the Boston bank I once got a call from a department head in the building. She and her team came in one Monday and their phones and computers were all dead. She spent the morning trying to open trouble tickets but no one came and nothing worked. They were all trying to get by as best they could with cell phones and laptops. Tuesday she called me, as she knew I was the Legacy engineer in the building. I went up to her floor and tried to tell her she needed to stop trying to fix it and call her own supervisor instead, I said I wasn’t allowed to tell her why, but there was something important she needed to hear. I think that at that point she guessed. Her entire department, most of a floor, had been downsized, laid off. But someone didn’t inform them of that before the disconnect orders for their equipment went through.
I’ve heard a lot about American workers being tasked with training their own foreign replacements. I didn’t see any of that directly, but the tech equivalent was perfecting ‘Expert Systems’ for the computer workstations that distilled the essence of the experiences of the old workforce into a set of on-screen prompts that allowed new (and cheaper) operators to respond just the way the old ones did. MaBell did a lot of that.
If I were getting started today, instead of forty years ago, I can’t see anything of the career path I followed. I have no idea where I’d be ending up forty years from now. I can’t see where this country is going to end up, seems the economy is running on inertia with more dead weight being loaded on every year.

John The River

Perhaps not so uncommon a story as you think.

cataract surgery
Best of luck on your cataract surgery Dr. Pournelle. I think you’ll be amazed at the results. My mother had hers removed a couple of years ago and she went from not being able to read subtitles on the TV with her glasses to being able to read them easily with no glasses at all practically overnight.
I’m looking forward to your new book!
thanks,
Scott Morton
Toronto, Canada

Thanks. I will let yours stand for a large number of similar messages of both good will and predictions of a good outcome. I have no intellectual doubt that all will be well.

‘Perhaps my training as a Russian specialist distorts my judgment, but as I contemplate the ideas spreading from the academy through society, I fear, a century after the Russian Revolution, a tyranny greater than Stalin’s.’

<http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-house-is-on-fire–8466>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

Police caught discussing charges to fabricate

… when they discover that the protestor they stopped had a permit for his pistol.

http://www.aol.com/article/news/2016/09/20/police-accidentally-record-themselves-fabricating-criminal-charg/21475789/?icid=maing-grid7%7Cmain5%7Cdl20%7Csec1_lnk2%26pLid%3D-1053988942_htmlws-sb-bb

It happens. It is the price we pay for hiring protectors rather than standing watch ourselves: which would likely result in other and possibly worse abuses.

Prince of Sparta – More Fact Than Fiction? In Prince of Sparta, Prince Lysander makes a comment;
“Hell, without the CoDo shoveling their human refuse on our heads, there wouldn’t be any Helots.”
This made me think of the recent terrorist attacks in New York, New Jersey and Minnesota, and Obama’s policy of “shoveling” Middle East refugees into the US.
It strikes me that the same sentiment could be said of Obama and his policies.

Cam

I think I should not comment on this…

Czar Vlad I

Dr. Pournelle,
Ref previous correspondence about Putin, George Will writes about putting the Pravda back into history: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/putin-goes-full-orwell/2016/09/14/d5f0bb50-79da-11e6-bd86-b7bbd53d2b5d_story.html
-d

I think Putin’s motives as a Russian Nationalist and Pan-Slavic protector are obvious to anyone who will look. The notion that Russia would give away its naval base forever is absurd; the conquest of Crimea was inevitable. We forced Russia out of the Balkans; we ringed then with NATO allies; and we wonder at Putin’s suspicions?

KGB Coming Back!

Mr. Putin has been busy. He’s cleaned out his security services — he no longer trusted them. He created his own personal guard, just before an assassination attempt by a car. This personal guard is loyal only to him. Even as he began looking more and more like Tsar Putin, he did this:

<.>

Russia plans effectively to revive the KGB under a massive shake-up of its security forces, a respected business daily has reported.

A State Security Ministry, or MGB, would be created from the current Federal Security Service (FSB) , and would incorporate the foreign intelligence service (SVR) and the state guard service (FSO), under the plans. It would be handed all-encompassing powers once possessed by the KGB, the Kommersant newspaper said, citing security service sources.

Like the much-feared KGB, it would also oversee the prosecutions of Kremlin critics, a task currently undertaken by the Investigative Committee, headed by Alexander Bastrykin, a former university classmate of President Putin. The Kremlin has not commented.

</>

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/19/russia-to-reinstate-the-kgb-under-plan-to-combine-security-force/

Why not? After all, we both won the Cold War. It is said we bled the Soviet Union through the 1979 Afghan Campaign. Well, if we can credit Reagan with that, why can’t I credit “active measures” (ideological

subversion) with the corruption of our universities and the Democratic Party? If we can entertain this notion, we see our mutual doom.

The Soviet Union died, and so has the Republic. Putin keeps playing a bad hand well as we continue to throw the game. From the ashes, rises a phoenix that appears to be a double-headed eagle. Let us hope Former Deputy Director Morrell is correct when he says that Putin is a tactician and not a strategist; he has no long term plans and won’t succeed in the marathon. I’m not so sure.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

His goals are Russian Nationalism and Pan Slavic ideology in that order. I do not know how good a strategist he is, but his choices are limited; he dare not take advantage of the mistakes of his self-declared enemies, precisely because he has so few choices.

sc:bubbles]

U.S. Special Forces Sabotage White House Policy

Sir:
This might be of interest.
http://fortunascorner.com/2016/09/15/u-s-special-forces-sabotage-white-house-policy-gone-disastrously-wrong-with-covert-ops-in-syria/
Best,
Ralph

Interesting. I do not know of this.

Scriptural Appreciation

     Dear Dr. Pournelle:
     You were kind enough to reprint my scriptural-cherrypicking-is-inevitable letter; and then to comment:
     “Sacred Texts, like miracles, fall outside the domain of science, and require different standards of debate.”
     Differing in vigor and rigor. The difference between art-appreciation and art-creation applies not only to sacred texts, but also to other art-works. A concert-goer pays to be swept away by musical glory; the composer, to earn his keep, must appreciate the tune but also analyze it. No doubt you, as a fiction writer, have been at both ends of this transaction.
     Part of the difference between critical analysis and passionate belief is that the former makes predictions that the latter denies, such as:
     1)    Eternal Truth is a century old;
     2)    Infinite Wisdom stops at the border;
     3)    Black becomes white when necessary;
     4)    It doth not profit a prophet to be too specific
     But both agree that these snarks well describe thy neighbor’s faith.
     And as for miracles… I think that miracles in scripture are like special effects in the movies. Both are convenient for the writer but detrimental to the text; for they both make the writing too easy. Both miracles and special effects tend to cover up wooden characters, dumb dialog, shoddy background, idiot plotting, and vile values. Their purpose is to distract the audience from the failures of the artist. 
     I say that good writing is the only miracle that the movies need, and the only special effect that scripture should desire.
     Sincerely,
     Nathaniel Hellerstein
     paradoctor

My remarks above apply here as well. I can show you records of well documented “miracles” that cannot be explained by modern science, as well as examples of situations in which nearly everyone would agree a miracle was appropriate, but none emerged. The observations are as real as any observations we have – have you ever seen a Higgs Boson? The hypothesis that they aren’t really miracles and one day will be explicable and routine cannot be proved, and falsifying it might take eternity, which I, at least, don’t have.

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

Chaos Manor View, Saturday, September 17, 2016

Revision and additions, Sunday, 18 September

 

Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for the West as it commits suicide.

James Burnham

 

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

 

Deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

 

Immigration without assimilation is invasion.

Monday, September 19, is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. There are a number of Perks.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/nation-now/2016/09/16/arrr-free-doughnuts-talk-like-pirate-day/90511324/ 

 

http://www.ljsilvers.com/tlap

 

http://talklikeapirate.com/wordpress/

 

 

If you’ve been wondering why I’ve been invisible, there’s been another acute rise in the level of chaos here, and my week was devoured by locusts. I won’t describe all of it. [ Sunday, 18 September, 1330]  It is beginning to resettle. We were able to go to our weekly brunch without incident.  I still cannot type a sentence without at least one error, generally from hitting two keys at once, but you can’t have everything.

Last Monday I went out to Kaiser, to the optometrist. It seemed to me that my glasses were getting much less effective, and since they hadn’t been renewed since before the stroke, it was time to get that done. My former optometrist, who had been the father of at least one of my Boy Scouts back when Niven and I used to take the Scouts up into the High Sierra – back in the days before cell phones and GPS for hikers – had retired, and this was a new chap. He had new equipment, too. The eye exam was much more thorough but shorter and more efficient.

When it ended, he said “You preferred the lenses you already have, in both eyes, eye at a time. You don’t need new glasses.”

He let that sink in a bit, and added, “You’ve got the same vision in your left eye that you had the last time you were here.”

I closed my right eye, and my vision improved slightly. I let that sink in. “You’re saying I don’t need new glasses, I need a new right eye. Or at least to have the cataracts removed from it.”

Of course that was what he’d been telling me. I’ve been avoiding this for years. I don’t dictate we’ll, and I doubt I could do much dictating. I told him that, and added that I understand everything is a lot easier and more successful now, and I have had friends get their cataracts fixed in an hour with no problems at all. “And since I don’t get much good out of my right eye anyway, might as well start with it, no?”

The upshot being that I have an ophthalmology appointment – two of them, actually – in the afternoon a week from next Monday. Whether I get the operation then or just another examination I don’t know. I know I can’t lose: I actually can read slightly better with an eye patch over my right eye than without the patch – but that message doesn’t seem to get across to whatever controls my emotions, so I continue to suppress terror. That used up part of the week including some of every day.

Then there have been some time demands from SFWA. I can think all right on almost any subject, but I don’t change subjects easily – after an interruption it takes time it focus on whatever interrupted me, then more to get focused on what I was doing – and my telephone number, although unlisted, seem to be in the hands of everyone I ever gave money to, and a lot of people I never heard of but think I might give them money, and they don’t much care when they call. It’s actually easier if they call during meals; I don’t have trouble getting focused on eating again.

The remedy to that is the Monk’s Cell, where I have an ASUS computer with an excellent keyboard for hunt and peck typists, but no telephone, and I can’t hear the doorbell. Alas, Roberta has been getting infusion therapy at home from some really competent Armenian and Philippine Registered Nurses, and I’ve had to be ready to let them in. Fortunately she’s done with that, and with luck we’re over her infection and returning to normal, so next week I may get some work done. We can hope so.

I would like to write an essay on this subject, but these two pieces say it pretty well. Both are old, and I’ve been saving them to cite, but I doubt that Ill get to it, so I call your attention to:

How Global Elites Forsake Their Countrymen

Those in power see people at the bottom as aliens whose bizarre emotions they must try to manage.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-global-elites-forsake-their-countrymen-1470959258

By

Peggy Noonan

Aug. 11, 2016 7:47 p.m. ET

1797 COMMENTS

This is about distance, and detachment, and a kind of historic decoupling between the top and the bottom in the West that did not, in more moderate recent times, exist.

Recently I spoke with an acquaintance of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and the conversation quickly turned, as conversations about Ms. Merkel now always do, to her decisions on immigration. Last summer when Europe was engulfed with increasing waves of migrants and refugees from Muslim countries, Ms. Merkel, moving unilaterally, announced that Germany would take in an astounding 800,000. Naturally this was taken as an invitation, and more than a million came. The result has been widespread public furor over crime, cultural dissimilation and fears of terrorism. From such a sturdy, grounded character as Ms. Merkel the decision was puzzling—uncharacteristically romantic about people, how they live their lives, and history itself, which is more charnel house than settlement house. [snip]

Her entire essay is worth your time, and helps explain the crisis in America as well as Germany.

Then comes a site I do not know, but this article is in the theme and is worth your reading:

Guanabara Knocking

https://kakistocracyblog.wordpress.com/2016/08/14/guanabara-knocking/

Porter / August 14, 2016

A couple of years ago I was touring an American corporate campus when my perky docent said something odd:

In the East Building we have HR and the cafeteria on the first floor, the second floor is Brazil, and on the third is accounting…

Wait, what do you mean by ‘Brazil’ on the second?

Oh, all the work on the second floor is off-shored to Brazil. I’m honestly not even sure what they do.

What is directly in my field of vision has been off-shored to Brazil? I think most people have a familiar facial countenance that emerges when it suddenly occurs they are speaking to a lunatic. With this expression probably unmistakable, I conceded my skepticism that the ‘off-shoring’ initiative had been flawlessly executed.

Chuckling in response, my escort explained that ‘Brazil’ meant the people not the place (was this a Kakistocracy reader?) and that the entire floor was occupied strictly by that country’s nationals. Whether they were imported en masse by a contractor or materialized as the result of focused internal hiring is a matter I didn’t pursue. [snip]

I have a good bit more to say about H-1B Visas – they are sometimes a good idea, particularly for recent graduates already in the United States and seeking to stay here. I do not believe there ought to be a green card stapled to every technical degree, but there are some subjects that ought automatically to rate a green card on graduation with honors. But the article is worth reading, and you may enjoy the comments.

We have reached the point where the elites simply do not interact with most of the populace. Charles Murray saw this coming many years ago, but the intellectuals were so consumed with denouncing The Bell Curve without reading it – literally; I was present as a reporter at a AAAS session hastily put together to “discuss” The Bell Curve, and the session leader proudly announced he had not read and would not read the book – to pay any attention to its conclusions, or those of any other book Dr. Murray might write. This is the essence of the modern intellectual: some truths simply cannot be questioned, while others must not be stated, else you are no true scientist or intellectual.

websites and video

Jerry,

I find auto run video on websites annoying. I can’t believe I’m that much different than most people. Why would web designers think that immediately playing video as soon as you reach their page would be effective? I used to use flash blockers to give me a play button, but now the websites are using JavaScript.

I find the written word much more effective at transferring information than video. Video is great for a demonstration of what you’re reading about, but to me that’s all.

Using Pocket to download just the text for later viewing helps with most sites, but not all.

I don’t know if you would recognize silicon valley anymore. People wandering around everywhere stepping into intersections with their heads buried in smart phones just assuming no one will hit them. Many people ridding bicycles in the middle of traffic inches from sudden death from a collision with an automobile. The political movement is to make bikes the equal of cars.

We are invaded not only with illegal immigrants, but with legal ones from all over the world who are not assimilated. There is no melting going on. They are bringing their little European countries with them, or Indian, or the pacific rim.

—

Phil

 

Bezos in space

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/09/15/jeff-bezos-on-nuclear-reactors-in-space-the-lack-of-bacon-on-mars-and-humanitys-destiny-in-the-solar-system/

As Blue Origin moves toward its goal of having “millions of people living and working in space,” the company has launched and landed the same rocket four times in a row, an unprecedented feat aimed at ultimately lowering the cost of space travel. By 2018, it plans to soon fly tourists on short jaunts past the edge of space in capsules designed with large windows. And earlier this week, Bezos announced plans to fly a new massive rocket, capable of getting to orbit, by the end of the decade.

See also https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/09/12/jeff-bezos-just-unveiled-his-new-rocket-and-its-a-monster/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/09/15/jeff-bezos-on-nuclear-reactors-in-space-the-lack-of-bacon-on-mars-and-humanitys-destiny-in-the-solar-system/

Then there is:

“I know how to get the U.S. permanently into space. Write me a check for a billion dollars, give me a letter of credit for a second billion I probably won’t have to spend, and get out of the way. I’ll take the money and vanish into the Mojave desert, China Lake for preference, Edwards Air Force Base if I must; and in about four years I’ll have a Single Stage to Orbit savable as well as recoverable and reusable spacecraft capable of putting about ten thousand pounds into orbit at costs of about five times the cost of the fuel the flight takes.”

This quote from sci-fi author and aerospace industry veteran Jerry Pournelle dates to the early days of what would later become the DC-X. Pournelle was one of many space enthusiasts actively lobbying for a small SSTO project with minimal organizational oversight. As seen in Part 2, the DC-X project found it’s ‘Skunk Works’ home in the Strategic Defence Initiative Organisation (SDIO), but Pournelle’s words turned out to be prophetic – they would just take a while to happen and the innovators behind these projects would be able to write their own billion dollar cheques…

https://thehighfrontier.wordpress.com/tag/jeff-bezos/

The quote is from my Step Farther Out, which is being revised and updated by scholars on the Isle of Mann.

Unbelievable

Why is the Navy’s largest shipbuilder looking for a subcontractor in China?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/josh-rogin/wp/2016/09/15/why-is-the-navys-largest-shipbuilder-looking-for-a-subcontractor-in-china/?wpisrc=nl_popns&wpmm=1

—

Robert K. Kawaratani
瓦谷ロバート孝一

I do not know, but it might be worth finding out.

Robots will eliminate 6% of all US jobs by 2021, report says | Technology | The Guardian

I envision a future where fast food joints initially shrink to 3 employees and we all place our orders on our phones. Eventually said joints have no employees; just contracted delivery and cleaning services (which are also mostly robotic.)

Its not just entry level jobs going away though. Just as manufacturing jobs started being lost to automation 20 years ago (and never came back) now we see that  services jobs are next.

“By 2021, robots will have eliminated 6% of all jobs in the US, starting with customer service representatives and eventually truck and taxi drivers. That’s just one cheery takeaway from a report released by market research company Forrester this week.

These robots, or intelligent agents, represent a set of AI-powered systems that can understand human behavior and make decisions on our behalf. “

…

“These robots can be helpful for companies looking to cut costs, but not so good if you’re an employee working in a simple-to-automate field.”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/13/artificial-intelligence-robots-threat-jobs-forrester-report

John Harlow

I remain convinced that before 2024, 50% of those presently employed will be working at jobs that can be done by a robot costing no more than a year’s salary of the present jobholder. The robot will have a useful life of at least ten years, and 20 of them can be supervised by one human.

What choice but to cherrypick?

Dear Dr. Pournelle:
One of your correspondents chastised you for quoting Galatians 3:28 as an example of universalism. He pointed to neighboring verses as proving that the passage is not universalistic, exactly; really it’s tribalism for a new, bigger tribe. I agree that this is the normal course of universalism. It turns out that universal principles are as politically manipulable as tribal identity.
Your correspondent went on to mock “that favorite pass time of using the Bible to justify their personal positions”. There, I think, he went too far. Opportunistic cherry-picking of scripture is as normal as tribalized universalism, or cut-and-paste tribalism.
And why not? What alternative is there to cherry-picking? Original intent? That’s a fine theory; but in practice originalism tends to be about the original interpretations of the originalist rather than the original intent of the author.
And in the case of the New Testament, who is that original author? There are two theories: documentarian and revelatory. According to the documentary hypothesis, the New Testament was written by a committee of 2nd century Hellenized Jews. According to the revelatory hypothesis, the New Testament is the Word of God, an immortal being of infinite wisdom. Both hypotheses are troublesome for the originalist.
For if the documentary hypothesis is true, then the originalist must try to know the mind of someone from 1900 years ago. This is possible but difficult, for we know little about people from that long ago. Worse, gaining such a perspective would be of limited value to us; for they knew even less about us than we do about them.
And if the revelatory hypothesis is true, then knowing the mind of the Author would be valuable – indeed, _infinitely_ valuable – but for that very reason it would be impossible. What chance have you or I to read the mind of God? Even to claim to know infinite wisdom is folly. I know better than that; and no doubt you do too.
So the scriptural originalist must either work hard for limited value, or pine after limitless value in vain. In neither case is originalism worth the effort. Whereas opportunistic cherry-picking is simple, easy, useful and open to all. That is why cherry-picking prevails.
So scripture presents itself as a message, but in practice it is a medium. It’s a language, not a statement; you can say whatever you want to in its terms. There’s a verse for war and a verse for peace; a verse to build up and a verse to break down; a verse to laugh and a verse to weep; a verse to cast away stone and a verse to gather stones together. Scripture is more like a piano than a tune; the sound it makes depends upon the skill and intent of the player.
That too is normal. Holy texts naturally evolve towards interpretational flexibility. They survive by justifying the personal positions of the believer.
Sincerely,
Nathaniel Hellerstein
paradoctor

Sacred Texts, like miracles, fall outside the domain of science, and require different standards of debate.

sideways, sort of?
Dr. Pournelle,
XKCD is getting a lot of praise from the global warming crowd for an earth temperature chart, and it is quite well drawn as well as humorous to the normal standard. http://xkcd.com/1732/
To me, drawing a hockey stick with the x and y vertices transposed doesn’t make the chart any more factual than if presented in, say, a power point slide show by a political has been. It doesn’t credit any of the data, the model, or the prediction, and doesn’t plot any atmospheric pollution or other factor. It doesn’t validate the concept of a value for a world temperature. It also misses out on including several contrarian historical observations. It fails to point out the logical impossibility between the claimed cause-and-effect and the never specifies the types of drastic and immediate action to correct the perceived problem (if it indeed represents reality, then the chart is still a Trek-style Kobayashi Maru — a lost cause, with no James Kirk, or even a Gene Roddenberry in view to game the system).
Of course, I am an ignorant and probably micro-aggressive and uncultured denier for actually writing this, and will probably be interned for re-education shortly, if the guillotine is to be avoided.
For me, Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy were the best anti-group-think writers on the “denier” side of literature. I hope there are others out there: XKCD’s style of satire is pretty effective but terribly misguided.
-d

Modern science need not explain data, but it does have to adjust the data until it is explicable. Why that is better than the old scientific method taught is school – “If you can’t tell someone how to repeat your experiment it isn’t science” – is not clear to me. I studied Philosophy of Science under Gustav Bergmann many years ago, and perhaps was contaminated with the Weiner Kreiss philosophy, but I hope I have recovered; and I was also taught that with three parameters of adjustment I could explain anything. Apparently modern intellectuals know more, now, but they keep it well hidden from me.

Russia may rise to super power status again following US deal over Syria | The Independent

Not the path we expected, but perhaps the start of he CoDominion?

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/deal-for-joint-military-action-with-us-in-syria-could-elevate-russia-as-well-as-defeat-isis-a7237256.html

Stephen

—

Please excuse brevity. Typed with one finger on a sheet of glass.=

It may yet be.

Illegal Immigration

I wrote the following several years ago. I work in an industry that is directly impacted by illegals. I’m a master cabinetmaker. I used to live in the Baltimore, MD area (Pikesville)…and left in December of 2014 after I couldn’t find work. Here’s a link to a post from 2011 (not looking for click bait as I’m going to include my proposal to end illegal immigration here).
http://thevailspot.blogspot.com/2011/11/how-to-end-illegal-immigration.html
There is constant argument on how to eliminate the huge problem we have with illegal immigrants in this country. This post stems from a comment on made on a Daily Caller article. You want to end illegal immigration? There are five simple steps to do so:
1. One year manadatory jail term and $10,000.00 fine for each illegal worker who is found in your employment.
2. Revoke business license for 1 year for each illegal worker who is found in your employ
3. On third violation…seize all property owned by that company…
4. Eliminate the “anchor baby” citizenship loophole…by stating that those children born to parents who are here illegally do not have citizenship.
5. Eliminate ALL federal funding to municipalities and counties that are “sanctuary” areas. (If you don’t wish to enforce federal laws…then you don’t get federal dollars.).
Those five simple steps would eliminate any and all incentives for hiring illegal workers.
I firmly believe that if our nation did the above…jobs for illegals would dry up over night (well nearly so)…because the cost of hiring illegals would be far higher than most business would be willing to pay.
Just my 2 cents.
Rich Vail

A Description of a Hillary Clinton Presidency

Dear Jerry,

Russian language media columnists – in Russia – are now analogizing Hillary Clinton to Leonid Brezhnev. What they mean by this is:
a) a sclerotic and rapidly aging person who is steadily sliding into dementia;
and,
b) while presiding over a reactionary regime of careerist mediocrities ruling over a stagnated and failing political economy and society.
I think this is an extremely accurate preview of a Hillary Clinton Presidency, should one occur.  
Best Wishes,
Mark

Debunking more Darwinian myths

Dear Jerry:

Yesterday (9/11) you posted a link to Fred’s discourse on evolution.

Coincidentally I have been reading and laughing my way through Tom Wolfe’s “The Kingdom of Speech” and thought some of your readers might be interested in what that book has to say. Here’s my review:

Darwinism is an easy target for ridicule. It is a pretentious faith whose doctrines claim that it answers all questions about how life arose from a few damp chemicals and arrived eventually at me writing and you reading this review on incredibly complex electronic devices.

There is remarkable little evidence to support Darwinism’s claims.

The faith conflicts with the geological record, fails to account for the origin of life, and cannot explain the origin of information stored in our DNA. Most importantly, Darwinism cannot account for the origin of the many traits that distinguish man from other animals.

Many Darwinists, in despair of ever answering the challenges to their faith coming from discoveries in molecular biology, have fallen back to spouting vehement invective. Others bring lawsuits to prevent discussion and teaching about the failures of Darwinism. Still others engage in the politics of personal destruction in hopes of silencing those scientists who try to publish scientific results that conflict with the Darwinist faith.

These failures are sometimes recognized by prominent Darwinists. Most famous, perhaps, is the late Stephen Jay Gould. He compared Darwinian explanations to Kipling’s just-so stories. Wolfe explores that branch of critical thinking along with many others.

Is it worthwhile to read yet another book deconstructing Darwinian myths? In this case, yes. Tom Wolfe adds to the rich literature debunking Darwinism by examining Darwinist explanations of the origin of human speech.

Wolfe starts at the dawn of the Darwinian Age when world-renowned linguist Max Muller pointed out that Darwinism had no explanation for human language. Muller was arrogant and joyfully sarcastic, so he enjoyed ridiculing the origin stories invented by Darwinists. Many others through the years have continued this tradition. Wolfe ultimately arrives at a recent paper by world-renowned linguist Noam Chomsky, et. al. in which today’s most distinguished linguists conclude that 150 years of research have provided no Darwinian explanation for the origin of language.

Along the way Wolfe tells engaging, frightening, and very funny stories about scientific presumptions being overturned by individuals who actually go out into the field to gather evidence concerning those presumptions. Those who stay home at their desks and merely think about how things “must have happened” simply cannot compete in the realm of ideas.

I fault the book for lacking a table of contents and an index. Such features are vital for those of us who want to return to useful parts of the book. I also think the price of $16.25 was rather high for so few pages with so little text on each page. Then again, I am reminded that Saint Thomas Aquinas followed the reasoning of Saint Augustine and Albert us Magnus. He concluded that a just price is determined by the buyer’s willingness to pay as well as by the seller’s reluctance to sell. Readers are more willing to pay more for a Tom Wolfe essay than for one written by someone of lesser talent. At any rate, I note that Amazon has already reduced the price by 65 cents since I bought it 10 days ago, reflecting either Amazon’s recognition of buyers’

reluctance or their desire for greater sales.

Other enjoyable books deconstructing Darwinian myths about what it means to be human include G. K. Chesterton’s “The Everlasting Man”

and David Stove’s “Darwinian Fairytales”. Both are available, of course, from Amazon.

Best regards,

–Harry M.

assimilation

Dr. Pournelle,
You’ve had as a banner on your blog the sentence “Migration without assimilation is invasion.” Just FYI, I mentioned the blog and the quote to an acquaintance who is of the Tohono Oldham nation. He agreed completely, and asked if Trump wins, when would I be deported to Ireland?
Considering how the EU is recently dictating Irish tax law, I told him I might just insist on Scotland as an alternative.
-d

Dr. Pournelle,
I’m no longer wasting unrecoverable life time apologizing for failed spell checker auto-correction in my outbound messages and text, but I must attempt to correct an apparent example of same in a previous contact message which you printed on 17 September 2016. The Native American name of the Southern Arizona tribe I mentioned is Anglicized as Tohono O’odham, not “Oldham,” as I apparently sent.
Of possible interest, as with a few other “tribal” areas, the “reservation” for the Tohono O’odham actually is split by the U.S. border with Mexico. Perhaps remarkably, neither the Nation nor the U.S. Border Patrol report any significant illegal cross border traffic within the borders of the Nation: little such traffic occurs on the reservation, whose residents, I am told, transit the international border freely within the borders of the reservation. Long-time, non-native residents with adjoining ranch property on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border can no longer transit on their own property, even where it is un-fenced, and many have stopped using the land on one or the other sides. If verified, I’m curious to find out why this might be true. What might the Native Americans be doing differently than the U.S. government to control undesired smuggling and human trafficking?
-d

Sunday,18 September

Noonan,Globalization, Detachment, Dehumanization

I am not sure if you read LTC Grossman’s work On Killing. I learned about the Stanford University Prison Experiments and the Milgram Obedience Experiments through him — I’ve since acquired several of Milgrams books.

LTC Grossman theorized that several factors allowed the United States Army to increase the rate at which soldiers would kill. These factors included, but were not limited to, group absolution, demands of authority, symbols of authority, and certain forms of distance e.g.

physical, social, cultural, mechanical. The further away or the more obscured a person is, the easier it is to deny their humanity and kill them according to Grossman’s framework. They are not people, they are “the enemy”. This is not a person, this is “the patient”. Or, this is not a citizen, this is an “emotional cripple” and not worthy of living since we’re better than him or her.

As Mister Lapham put it in the documentary/musical The American Ruling Class — standing outside the doors to the Council on Foreign Relations — and I’ll paraphrase but use quotation marks for ease of

reading: “many of the people inside these doors would not consider you fully human unless you make 250,000 per year.” I believe dehumanizing citizens has grave consequences, especially when this is done by a ruling class that….well…Teddy Roosevelt said it better than me:

“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today.” ― Theodore Roosevelt

But, what if I’m part of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” against someone or other? Let’s look to the left:

“Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the U.S., in the field of commerce and manufacturing, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.” ― Woodrow Wilson

And then we have Eisenhower’s farewell speech, which I am confident you’re familiar with and need no reminder. I’ve studied this all my life and that’s not an exaggeration. I noticed something was very wrong before I was a teenager and I looked and found a few things and kept digging. I suppose I thought I was going to save the world or something, somehow, but now I’m older and I realize that Americans have no effect on policy according to the Princeton study I forwarded to you previously.

I realize a small group of 240 corporations and less than 20 banks — essentially — “control” the world economy, according to a scholarly paper “The Global Network of Corporate Control” by some Swiss researchers. This was in Forbes Magazine and I got the article from Cornell University after reading about it in Forbes:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1107.5728

So, now what? Well, my plan was to talk about it and everyone would wake up and things would change. That hasn’t happened and I decided to skip the whole idealism, frustration, despondency — or worse radicalization — disease Johnson outlined. I’m not sure where we go from here but I know one thing, I remain, and I will press on with the faith that others have lived through similar circumstances. Maybe one of our overlords will take pity on me and pull me out of the slime or maybe I’ll remain here with the hostages. This is what it means to be human.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

It is not always true that elections have no effect. Gingrich with the Contract with America had a profound effect. Alas, his personal behavior resulted in the Old Establishment retaking control. We once had balanced budgets, and were paying down the Debt, in a coalition of Mr. Gingrich and President Bill Clinton. That ended when Mr. Gingrich departed as Speaker and the Establishment regained and reconsolidated control.

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