Category Archives: View

Tuesday, August 11, 2016

At Oh Dark Thirty Larry, Michelle, Alex, and our friend Michael Donahue are supposed to meet here and shortly after a limousine capable of taking all of us and our luggage to the airport will appear.  We will get there in time to get past the alert crackerjack team of TSA agents, and have breakfast in the Crown Room of Delta Airline. This is supposed to happen without incident.

I’m about to go to bed with my hearing aids on because I don’t know if I will hear the alarm clock without them.

 

I’m nominated for a Hugo, but I don’t expect to win it.  It’s for Best Editor, based on There Will Be War Volume 10, which came out last year new along with reissue of four of the original There Will Be War volumes.  Those I should have won a Hugo for; they were that good.  It wasn’t the practice to nominate anthology editors, and anyway, There Will Be War was not a popular title back then; Harry Harrison hated it so much that he rushed out an anthology called There Won’t Be War, but I think the first volume of that was the last.  The series was published when we did not know what outcome would end the Cold War; but the stories were good, some timeless, and all hold up well.  The essays were about principles, not tactics, and while most relevant to the Cold War are all important today – and their lessons are not being learned as widely as they should be.

 

 

Volume Ten contains some very good stories, essays relevant to modern problems, and continues the series nicely.  May I did deserve a Hugo for it.  It had two Hugo=nominated stories in it, one about as serious as you can get, and all very readable.

Anyway, I’m off.  They have me on many panels, so I doubt I’ll get much work done, but I am taking a ZenBook with copies of my current projects,  just in case.

 

I’ll be back next week.  Perhaps I’ll have something during the week, but no promises.

 

Fifth Force in the Universe

This is exciting:

<.>

Recent findings indicating the possible discovery of a previously unknown subatomic particle may be evidence of a fifth fundamental force of nature, according to a paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters by theoretical physicists at the University of California, Irvine.

“If true, it’s revolutionary,” said Jonathan Feng, professor of physics & astronomy. “For decades, we’ve known of four fundamental

forces: gravitation, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. If confirmed by further experiments, this discovery of a possible fifth force would completely change our understanding of the universe, with consequences for the unification of forces and dark matter.”

</>

http://phys.org/news/2016-08-physicists-discovery-nature.html#jCp

If you want the original paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.03591 ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Chaos Manor View, Sunday, August 14, 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

It’s late Sunday evening, and at o-dawn-thirty — actually well before dawn here at Chaos Manor – on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning I am off to WorldCon in Kansas City. I’ll be taking the Surface Pro as my mail system and in the off chance that I’ll have a bit of time I’ll have a ZenBook that has a keyboard I can use easily, but I doubt I’ll get any real work done. I might, but they’ve got me on a bunch of panels, I have business meetings, and lots of old friends to see, most of them for the first time since the stroke, and some I haven’t seen recovering from brain cancer. The chances of having time to work are low. I won’t be back until a week from Monday, so things may be thin here.

Worse, for this place, the preparations have eaten a lot of time. After all this is the first trip I’ve taken since the stroke. Yesterday and today was spent getting mu luggage out, emptying it of congealed lotions and other stuff that deteriorated over time, and locating what I will need on the trip. I have put in two closable garbage bags which ought to serve to contain the mountain of dirty laundry I am likely to accumulate, made up bags of pills for seven days – 14 bags, 7 morning and 7 night – and tried to anticipate any other special needs I’ll have. I’ll keep a log, and let you know if there are any adventures that ought to be shared.

We have reservations on Delta. My walker must be checked, but I can check it at the boarding gate, so I don’t need a wheelchair. I’ll manage to get on board with a cane. Alex and Michelle are coming, and Larry Niven, and Mike Donahue, so I’ve got a lot of companions, and don’t anticipate any problems.

Conservatism isn’t an ideology; Russell Kirk called his book “The Conservative Mind”, and when specifics were demanded he wrote a book for his times, A Program For Conservatives; not an ideology.

He was my mentor, but we were not in full agreement. I understand technology better than he did, and technology can be very disruptive; indeed that is my main difference with nearly all paleoconservative groups. I don’t hate technology. I welcome it. I have some sympathy for people who can only do mind-stultifying endlessly repetitive work, but I have more for those who have no choice but to do work they not only dislike, but despise. We all dislike some aspects of our work, but we should not hate it, and we we are all better off if no one is forced to spend his life at tasks he hates.  I embrace technology that liberates us from drudgery even if it robs some people of the only jobs they can do.

Example: a very long time ago I was set the task of reducing high turnover in the miniplug soldering department. Miniplugs were terribly important to airplanes – still are – and it was exacting, boring work. It took a while to train intelligent people to do the job, after which they soldered wires into plug connections. There were a lot of them on any given airplane, and hundreds of copies of each airplane were sold, each with dozens to hundreds of miniplugs. I was in human factors then, and not concerned with manufacturing, but I was also the only guy in the company with advanced psychology degrees, and someone thought of asking me to take a look at the problem, so I did.

Solved it too. The problem was that since getting the work exactly right was important, the job specification included reasonably high intelligence. It paid accordingly. But even for high pay, above average intelligent people soon got bored out of their minds doing the same meticulous task day after day. My solution was to hire retarded people. Not all of them could learn it, but most could; it wasn’t a difficult job, you just had to be meticulous, getting the right color wire soldered into the right pin or socket. Educable mentally retarded could learn it. For them it was a high paying job. It took no intelligence to get the right color to the right pin, just diligence. You could also hire EMR to be quality inspectors, and they didn’t cost much. The solderers got paid what skilled riveters did, and were proud of their work, as they should have been. They didn’t mind doing the same thing over and over again; they were proud to do it.

Of course miniplugs are soldered by robots now, and far fewer are needed because of LSIC. That’s progress, and it had to come.

I suppose you could call me a conservative who promotes high technology, but I retain a bit of nostalgia for work that the EMR can proudly do.

We will now get on with some comments on the nature of conservatism.

Ten Conservative Principles

Dear Jerry,

“I urge you to follow this link and read this. It shouldn’t take long.”   

http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2013/10/ten-conservative-principles.html

I reread them.  I was already well familiar with them, having subscribed to National Review in my late teen years in the mid-1970s.  You may recall that subscribers in those distant days received complimentary subscriptions to Dr. Kirk’s “University Bookman”

And unsubscribed from N-R in 1992 after Desert Storm when eighteen years of US Army service had already demonstrated to me that most of “Conservatism” as defined and continuously redefined by NR and WFB was arrant nonsense at best, with the remainder composed of equal portions of tawdry self-seeking careerism and cowardice.

Rereading these precepts now makes its more plain than ever they are mainly subjective and lacking in fixed anchor points.  Almost all of it could be offered without editing as a political philosophy suitable for Salafist Islam, Shi’ite Ayatollahs in Tehran or even the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah.   Here’s a good example:

“First, the conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order. That order is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent.”

Without further definition, such the New Testament, this can mean anything or nothing.  Maybe the moral order is defined by the Koran, or the Babylonian Talmud, or the Kabbalah, or the Egyptian Book of the Dead.  It certainly had and has utterly no relationship to the America of the late 1940s when this idea was being formalized.

Principle Ten in particular is so lacking in specificity that it forms an entryway through which NASA crawler-transporter size liberal programs can and have slowly rumbled like juggernauts in the decades since Dr. Kirk’s post-World War II articulation of these supposedly timeless verities.

The Conservative defeat and surrender on point Eight – “voluntary community” – has been so thorough that contemporary “conservatives” at National Review joyfully sanction anyone even daring to mention it, let alone attempting to practice it.

In response I invite the ever dwindling band of “Principled Real Conservatives” – whoever they may be and imagine themselves to be – to consider this article by Dr. Paul Gottfried:

http://www.radixjournal.com/journal/2015/9/9/the-logic-of-the-conservative-purges

Best Wishes

Mark

I would have said Judao Christian ethics myself.  When I was young nearly every public ceremony had an invocation by a protestant minister and a benediction by a catholic priest although sometimes they switched places, and important ceremonies usually had a couple of each plus a rabbi.

You may or may not be aware that Sam Francis and I corresponded amicably, I have always found Distributism and Trust Busting important, and I opposed the First desert invasion headed by my West Point classmate. Why the hell did I care which set of thuggish enemies held Kuwait? Although if April Glaspie had done her job, Saddam would still be running Iraq and pounding Iran.

Ah well.

Jerry Pournelle

“You may or may not be aware that Sam Francis and I corresponded amicably”

I wasn’t specifically aware of it but I’m not surprised, either.  The paleocons were few enough in the 1990s I’m sure most of you kept in loose contact.   The seeds Francis and others planted have since grown into the “Alt-Right”, which is the only place on the Right that shows signs of vibrant intellectual life. 

“I have always found Distributism and Trust Busting important”

Distributism is far more practical now than when Belloc and Chesterton were articulating it in the very early 20th Century.  The trend of technology a century ago still greatly favored massive centralization of industrial and economic structures.  They were definitely far ahead of their time in some senses.  Hilaire Belloc’s “The Servile State” is a much underrated classic.  Its freely available online at Gutenberg and elsewhere.  Belloc foresaw our time far more clearly than virtually any of his contemporaries.  He joins a handful of far seers like Alexis de Tocqueville, who also clearly foresaw the dim outlines of the USSR ninety years in advance in the mid 1830s.  The raconteur and impoverished nobleman Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn was over a century late in his statement that “Democracy” in no way precluded a totalitarian dictatorship.  de Tocqueville clearly stated this in “Democracy in America” in 1836.

However, Distributism was never popular with the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy and it never will be.

Kirk probably reflected some influence from Belloc and Chesterton.  Unfortunately Distributism never occupied his and Conservatism’s central attention the way it should have. 

“For a nation is no stronger than the numerous little communities of which it is composed.”

This is an axiom.  The same thing is true of armies.  Unfortunately 20th Century “Conservatism” was almost content-free on means by which “numerous little communities” could be sustained and strengthened.

I didn’t know Russell Kirk, of course.  My perception at several removes is of a real “Christian gentleman” with aspirations to petty nobility.  An “eccentric antiquarian” who apparently hated automobiles, “electronic computers”, mega scaled universities and almost all other manifestations of the 20th Century would be another description.  He appears to have thought he would have been happier living in the early 18th Century, probably in one of the Habsburg dominions in central Europe.

Kirk’s home base on “Piety Hill” in the village of Mecosta Michigan is an area I know well.  The summers of my youth were spent in that latitude about 70 miles west around Ludington, Michigan, and also further north around Traverse Bay, Grayling, and the UP.  It is or ought to be impossible to virtually tour these towns on Google Street without a deep sense of mourning for the stasis and slow decay to which “Free Trade” and the media monopolies have subjected them and wide swaths of the Midwest. 

Your friend Greg Cochran (and the rest of the Alt-Right) are precisely correct.  The 21st Century is about clan, tribe and identity.  The Neocons, more accurately labeled NeoCohens, never lost sight of this.   I think anyone who refuses to deal with this will be well advised to catch the next trip back to 1985 or 1955 on Doc Brown’s DeLorean Time Machine. 

Mark

Russell and I disagreed on technology; I argued that as its advance was inevitable, and with that advance came military power, we had no choice but to embrace it. But of course I was an associate of Possony and coauthor of Strategy of Technology and I took the Cold War very seriously.

I think Marx was right in saying that capitalism inevitably concentrates more and more wealth into fewer and fewer hands, and David McCord Wright was correct in his analysis of the importance of trust busting rather that building bureaucracies to control that. But then I am not an ideologue, just an old operations research man.

 

Dear Jerry,

First, I don’t expect you to publish any of this.  The “Purge” of professional writers that Paul Gottfried documents is very real, and extends well past “Conservatism” to any professionally published writer who strays off the strictly defined reservation of acceptable thought.  I know you know this.  I think you are hoping that your oeuvre will provide Mrs. Pournelle and your other heirs with some continuing income.

Nor do I think it matters in the Big Scheme of things.  The “USA” is already as dead as door nail and merely awaits interment, decent or otherwise.  And I’m also grateful to God that I grasped the essential outlines of this well before 9-11-01.  Grasped well enough to begin a non-stop lecture to three then middle school aged kids on 9-12-01:  “Not your war!”  “Not your people!”  “Stay out!!”  “Follow the example of the Clinton and Bush daughters (ouch)”.

I have no regrets whatsoever.  In the alternative I offer Col Andrew Bacevich, US Army Retired.  He kept his respectibilities.  And as a consequence of this lieutenant son has been stone cold dead for 13 years now.  “Wasted” as they used to say in Vietnam.  The Colonel himself wanders from internet pillar to post in ashes and sackcloth attempting penance and expiation.  None of which will ever return his son to life.  No thanks.  I prefer my way, determined in advance of the event.

So mostly I’m doing this for my own edification.  I ceased thinking of myself as a “Conservative” in the mid 1990s when I terminated my NR subscription and switched my registration from Republican to Independent.  If you find any value in it, good enough.  My present beliefs are an amalgam of “Alt-Right”, Jeffersonian-Jacksonian ideas on yeomanry and the economic ideas of the Catholic Distributists like Hilare Belloc and E.F. Schumacher.  Plus a component of white separatism or white nationalism.  So no, I don’t despair.  I ceased to despair for the USA when I said “goodbye to all that” a long time ago.  And I’m even somewhat optimistic for my family.  “God and family”.  So-called “country” fell out along the way.

My remaining purpose is to begin a post-mortem on an intellectual Movement that has utterly failed the nominal Base to which it was directed in 1953.   I don’t even propose to debate the fact of this epic failure.  The present condition of the Supreme Court and the enduring revolution that will occur there should Hillary enter the White House are enough evidence in themselves.  The dwindling number of Brian P’s can continue to “double down” on Free Trade and Minority Outreach until they’re cleaned out by the rigged casino they’re playing in, a bustout that will occur very soon now. 

http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2013/10/ten-conservative-principles.html

“Perhaps it would be well, most of the time, to use this word “conservative” as an adjective chiefly. For there exists no Model Conservative, and conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.  The attitude we call conservatism is sustained by a body of sentiments, rather than by a system of ideological dogmata. It is almost true that a conservative may be defined as a person who thinks himself such. The conservative movement or body of opinion can accommodate a considerable diversity of views on a good many subjects, there being no Test Act or Thirty-Nine Articles of the conservative creed.”

Translated into action “where the rubber hits the road”, this broadly means we can have pro-abortion and anti-abortion “conservatives” (hereinafter “Cons”); pro and anti Hate Speech Code Cons, pro and anti Sodomite Liberation Cons, pro and anti gun control or even outright gun ban Cons, pro and anti Israel Uber Alles Cons (an idea however denied by ‘Neocons’ like David Frum), pro and anti racial discrimination directed exclusively against whites, pro and anti Free Trade cons, etc etc.  This in fact is the position that Jonah Goldberg at National Review maintains and which prevails in the GOPe.   Examined at the root source it increasingly appears that modern post World War II Conservatism was always about “whom”, not “what”.  This is confirmed by the essentially policy free Republican primaries we’ve experienced from 1968 until roughly this year.

Those rank and file “Conservatives” upset by their never ending betrayal by GOPe types and “RINOs” on subjects like abortion, gun control and immigration need look no further than here for the source explanation.  Alternately they can “double down”, which a great many of the ever diminishing numbers of True Believers do.

“In essence, the conservative person is simply one who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night. (Yet conservatives know, with Burke,”

Burke.  i.e. Edmund Burke, Anglo-Irish Tory and likely crypto-Catholic.  This is one of the biggest ‘foreign parts’ I alluded to previously.  I have found zero point zero evidence that Burke exerted the slightest influence on any of the “Founding Fathers”, roughly defined as the signatories of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  On the contrary, it is known that Edmund Burke redistributed in London pamphlets authored by Thomas Jefferson.  Influence was clearly running the opposite direction!  The sources of Kirk’s and modern Conservatism’s Edmund Burke Fetish is therefore a topic of some interest.  Perhaps it arose from Russell Kirk’s doctoral studies at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.  Perhaps it arose from cosmopolitan William F Buckley own lack of connection to flyover country in his youth.  

Equally mysterious is Conservatism’s general suppression of Thomas Jefferson.  At least mysterious until Jefferson is actually read.

that healthy “change is the means of our preservation.”) A people’s historic continuity of experience, says the conservative, offers a guide to policy far better than the abstract designs of coffee-house philosophers. But of course there is more to the conservative persuasion than this general attitude.

At this point in history we can therefore describe as “Conservative” a Big Government Liberal who absolutely hates working class white people and loves the barely disguised Clausus Numerous enacted against all white people under the rubric of Affirmative Action, and thinks it should continue until the white birth rate drops to zero.  This is likely why repellent white hating creatures like the grotesquely obese Kevin Williamson thrive at National Review.   Such a person clearly wants to preserve the present ‘permanent’ order.

“First, the conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order. That order is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent.”

This is almost directly contradictory to Kirk’s introduction.  But as George Orwell had already explained in 1948 in “1984”, all Goodthinkers must learn to master the art of Doublethink.  And in the absence of any absolute definition of that Moral Order – which Kirk never provides in this essay –  this is just as relative as everything else before and after.  One is left to pick and choose which Holy Writ one subscribes to, or simply reject them all and believe in nothing.  This surely explains the easy editorial cohabitation at National Review of the many Catholics, Jews, atheists and agnostics who populated its editorial ranks, lightly salted with a few lapsing Protestants enroute to their own Catholic conversions.  Russell Kirk himself, for example.

Among the original Founding Fathers (signers of the Declaration of Independence or Constitution who numbered 56 + 39) I’ve found exactly three Catholics.  Two were members of the Carroll family of Maryland, plus Thomas Fitzsimmons.  There were no Jews, no avowed atheists and no Muslims. 

Second, the conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity. It is old custom that enables people to live together peaceably; the destroyers of custom demolish more than they know or desire. It is through convention—a word much abused in our time—that we contrive to avoid perpetual disputes about rights and duties: law at base is a body of conventions. Continuity is the means of linking generation to generation; it matters as much for society as it does for the individual; without it, life is meaningless. When successful revolutionaries have effaced old customs, derided old conventions, and broken the continuity of social institutions—why, presently they discover the necessity of establishing fresh customs, conventions, and continuity; but that process is painful and slow; and the new social order that eventually emerges may be much inferior to the old order that radicals overthrew in their zeal for the Earthly Paradise.

Conservatives are champions of custom, convention, and continuity because they prefer the devil they know to the devil they don’t know. Order and justice and freedom,

In practice in the Year of Our Lord 2016 this means no change in: 1) the present system of higher education (a position being actively advocated by a “conservative” here: http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2016/08/lie-student-debt-crisis.html), 2) untrammeled Free Trade irregardless of the demonstrated destructiveness of this ,3)  the open subversion of the immigration laws in an effort to “elect a new people”, 4) codified anti-white racial discrimination in the form of Affirmative Action and other measures, 5) the rapacious anti-white male hate expressed in contemporary family law, 6) our present military deployments,  etc etc etc

Fifth, conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety. They feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems. For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality.

No Real Conservative anywhere has any remaining reason to complain of the Diversity of having hordes of illiterate Somalian migrants injected into their communities.  Or of other similar methods by which anti-white race haters are “rubbing their faces in it”, as the British Labor activists said of their immigration surge.

“Eighth, conservatives uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism.”

If this means anything it means the right to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin and gender in one’s personal, professional and commercial relations.  But all of Modern Conservatism long ago ran away from this principle.  Conservatism now enthusiastically joins “the Left” in instinctively persecuting anyone taking this matter up.  In the interests of intellectual honesty “Eighth” should  be replaced with <deleted>

“For a nation is no stronger than the numerous little communities of which it is composed.”

There no longer is any ‘nation’, which the Bible and I both define as groups of genetically related people of reasonable closeness.  There are simply regions of increasingly atomized Walmart consumers going to and fro as they trundle cheaply made Free Trade goods back to their Federal Reserve System mortgage crushed “homes”.   These cannot be described as “communities” by any stretch unless this word’s definition is devalued to only mean an area where residential dwellings stand in close proximity to each other.   Nor is this is accidental in my view.  “Divid et impera” is an ancient and effective practice for neutralizing potential political opposition to one’s activities and goals.

But I absolutely subscribe to this idea in general.  This is why I’m now a Jeffersonian-Jacksonian Distributist rather than a “conservative”.  And I’m also favorable to aspects of E.F. Schumacher’s “Small is Beautiful”.  On this account I have a question.  Had you read this book at the time you condemned it in “A Step Further Out”?  It wasn’t until later that I discovered E.F. Schumacher’s brother-in-law was Werner von Heisenberg. 

Best Wishes,

Mark

I reject Schumacher as an ideologue; I embrace technology. I also understand that it cam be disruptive, particularly if unrestrained, one of my many objections to Free Trade as we practice it. Technological progress should be used properly which means it should not be an instrument of blind and unrestrained “progress.”

At the same time I reject Federal Regulation as a means of focusing technology. Building a powerful bureaucracy is almost never the answer, even though bureaucracy is the only tool governments have in many situations. I prefer many bureaucracies to one Federal one. Which means I would leave many regulatory matters to the States; let them compete. Some will prefer unrestricted growth, but others will not, and stability at least has a chance in that situation.

Actually. I would leave a great many matters to the states, including “growth”. We are obsessed with growth, when many people would prefer a bit more stability; companies that make high quality goods and sell them at a small profit, and don’t try to grow at super rapid sates. But this was once a nation of states.

But that’s another discussion, as is distributism (as opposed to growing state bureaucracies with high taxes as a means of diminishing inequalities). Again a matter for another time.

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

Chaos Manor View, Monday, August 8, 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

It has been a busy day, mostly making progress on fiction, and in the exercises that are turning me back from vegetation. The news is bizarre and I’ve ignored it. Trump didn’t throw a supporter with a crying baby out of his rally, although the fair and neutral news reported that he had, after which the news debate seemed to be, is a man who threw a crying baby out of a political rally fit to be president? Now if they asked, did he encourage bully boys to make Hillary supporters drink Castor Oil, while his opponents jumped up and down on police cars, bullied Trump supporters with fists and sign, and looted a few stores because it was easy to do, that might be interesting. The right wing opponents of Mussolini used clubs; his socialist Black Shirts preferred Castor Oil. The press could debate which was worse. But Trump’s people have used neither clubs nor laxatives on their opponents, much to the disappointment of the press, so we can’t have that discussion.

I did work hard most of the day, some in computer stuff and some in fiction.

A New Explanation for One of the Strangest Occurrences in Nature: Ball Lightning.

Tesla could generate ball lightning upon demand.

<http://nautil.us/blog/a-new-explanation-for-one-of-the-strangest-occurrences-in-nature-ball-lightning>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

 

I always wondered why the Orlando killer was able to kill so many.

On 7/23/2016 4:34 PM, Jerry Pournelle wrote:

> And really, we still don’t know

Dear Jerry,

Well now we damned well do. And it turns out those (of us!) who deduced the (lack of) police response was the major factor in the body count were right.

And alas, your dismissal of the Orlando PD culpability was erroneous.

And premature.

http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2016/08/robert-farago/jon-wayne-taylor-what-went-wrong-with-the-police-response-to-the-orlando-pulse-nightclub-massacre/

***********************************

One money quote:

Mr. Voss again sheds some light on that decision making process: “This is not military combat where there are acceptable casualties on both sides. Law enforcement doesn’t have that conversation. No casualties are acceptable.”

The two sides he is speaking of are the shooter and law enforcement. The unacceptable casualty rate is for law enforcement. The conversation that law enforcement doesn’t have is how many law enforcement casualties are acceptable. Who’s missing from that equation? The victims. The dying.

Those are the “acceptable” casualties

***********************************

This article links to the WaPo article on the subject which includes a very revealing graphic on the club layout and the timeline of the action.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/orlando-shooting/

Two pieces of goodthink in the articles deserve special attention:

“According to their chief, _these men followed their training_.”

(emphasis mine) – i.e. the Kop Kultur’s Nuremberg Defense. The magic words LEO’s have been taught to regurgitate over and over to make anything they do wrong go away. They get away with it FAR too often.

The Puppycide epidemic comes to mind.

“Let’s not second-guess the cops.” – The Kop Apologist’s mantra #2.

Effectively a blank check for any police blunder. You NEVER hear this attempted in culpable misconduct in any other profession. Ever.

Jerry I’m a long-time fan of your blog. Please know I don’t denigrate you personally for so abruptly absolving the Orlando PD’s conduct. Your reasons for doing so are your own.

Indeed many of us conservatives were raised to believe that to support the Rule Of Law, you have to support the Kop Kultur. Perhaps there was a time that was valid. But now such an attitude is naive at best and suicidal at worst.

But you are a significant opinion leader of (us!) freedom-loving folk. I do request and advise that you apply the same level of skeptical and critical thinking toward the Kop Kulture that you do toward the bunny inspectors and climate-change hacks.

Much depends upon it.

God save the Republic.

Very cordially (still),

John

Alas I can’t do everything no matter how hard I try; but I do try.

More adventures in computing; this is a journal, and I don’t yet have a happy ending to this story, so it won’t yet go into Chaos Manor Reviews until I do. Eventually a final copy will go there.

(I note that Microsoft Word in its new campaign to see just how much misery users will tolerate, has changed the way I insert the link to Chaos Manor Reviews. Until a week or so ago, it was simple: mark Chaos Manor Reviews or whatever text I wanted to be the link title, choose Insert in the list of menu items listed across the screen at the top of the ribbon, and lo! A list of items would appear, one being a big icon labeled Hyperlink. Click that, paste in the hyperlink address, and it’s done. You could even use control-f1 to collapse the ribbon; the Insert menu item was still up there and easy to find, and little work was involved. Alas, no more. The Hyperlink icon is gone. Eventually you may notice a world icon and the label “Links”. Click that and you get a menu, one item of which is Hyperlinks. Isn’t that a clever improvement? The team responsible for that deserve exciting new careers in concrete breaking. This was a major interruption in my work on this daybook; we’ll get to that later.)

As most of you know, I had a stroke in December. 2014, spent much time in the Providence rehab facility in San Fernando, and have been recovering for the past 18 months. It’s working. My head still works, and I get around in a walker or with a cane, and while I have no sense of balance I do manage. I can drive, although by preference I do not drive at night or on freeways, or often for that matter. Everything takes a bit longer, but most of my problems are physical and can be overcome; all except one and we’ll get to that in a bit.

My primary mental problem is that it takes longer to change the subject. I seem to focus well on one thing at a time, and it isn’t really changing the subject to follow notions to things related to them; in other words, I still think in an orderly manner, and I have some evidence for still having that ability. The big problem is interruptions. This has always been a problem for writers, and some are notorious for their tantrums when interrupted for dinner or to take the garbage out; but for me after the stroke it is a serious concern. Even minor problems with typing or computer problems tend to yank me out of what I was doing to make me think about them, and once I do it takes a while to get back into the previous task.

In particular, I am no longer a touch typist. It used to be that I would look at the screen while typing, and I was fast and accurate enough to keep up with my thoughts. No more. Now I type with two fingers and stare at the keyboard while I do it. Thus it’s important to have the right keyboard, because I am a bloody sloppy typist now and often hit multiple keys. One frequent mistake is to hit alt and the spacebar at the same time. It turns out that alt-spacebar starts a command sequence that can do strange things. Also, imbedding ; or [ into words does odd things to the spell checker. There can be many other problems.

When I first started back to work using my old setups with Microsoft Comfort Curve keyboards, I would have typos in every word, and I’d often lose all my text to some obscure sequence of keys hit after I managed to hit alt-space. It was all discouraging, and I would try to avoid writing, which is not something a writer can do and stay happy.

I spent a year trying for a technical solution and I found one: the ASUS 15” ZenBook desktop has a keyboard designed for me; the keys are large and while not as well separated as I wish they were, does have some spacing between keys. The keyboard is illuminated. The screen is large enough that I can see it without looking very far up, and thus often observe the appearance of the wavy red line indicating an error. Add to that a big BENQ LED high resolution monitor with HDMI input and I have a winning combination. I can look up and edit on that screen, then go back to productive writing. It is no longer so painful that I hate to write and try to avoid it.

I keep that setup in what I call the Monk’s Cell, upstairs away from the telephone, and I’ve been turning out fiction on it, as well as writing some of this day book.

 

Monk’s Cell

I like it so much that I bought a second ZenBook with the notion of using it as the key input device downstairs in the front office where I do everything but production writing. Expensive investment, but in my experience anything that aids productivity pays off quickly.

There have been problems. In particular, I could not – still have not been able to – install Outlook on ZEN, the upstairs ZenBook. It just won’t install. Neither will LiveWriter, which is what I use to post the daybook writings onto the web site. This is not fatal. The internal network at Chaos Manor works quite well, and I can write up here then send stuff out from a downstairs machine. Still, it was annoying that I could not install Outlook, so Saturday afternoon I tried installing it on the downstairs ZenBook which for various reasons I named Grasshopper. There was already an Outlook 2016 icon in the all programs task list, and clicking on that invoked an install wizard that seemed to do the job. Pretty soon I was looking at what appeared to be an up to date mailbox, with all the mail jammed into the Input box. Over on the main machine I noted a test email to myself.

Next thing would be to import some of the subfolders from the main system. I mildly wondered if the difference here was that Grasshopper is on the local Ethernet, while ZEN is wireless only; there was, after all, a lot of mail to be transmitted. Then things went all to hell. I tried to send/receive on Zen. He trundled forever and the program was no longer responding. Use Task Manager to stop Outlook. Outlook wouldn’t restart. Try again. Box comes up, Outlook didn’t start properly, want to try safe mode? Sure, try that – and up it came, but the latest mail it had was an hour or more old. Fuss about with it a bit more, decide that’s enough, shut Grasshopper down.

Sunday afternoon – my birthday – I asked Alex to look at it. He spent a lot of time updating systems and drivers; the systems were on auto update but Microsoft seemed to have new updates; and the drivers needed attention. Did that, updating all the machines. Eventually Outlook came up on Grasshopper; latest mail was a day old. Send/receive produced endless trundling. Worse. Over on my main desktop/ send/receive produced lengthy trundling and enormous downloads, with not much indication of what files were downloading.

[draft continues but there are details to be added, and following is a summary]

Eventually Alex discovered that ZEN was on as an IMAP, not a POP3 account. He supposed that Eugene, the main machine, and Precious the Surface Pro were also IMAP. Not so, I asserted. I have never installed anything but POP3 on anything in twenty years. Except yesterday I must have. I recalled that the installation wizard never asked or told me about IMAP or about POP3, and must have chosen IMAP.

Meanwhile Outlook on Eugene, and now on Precious, was behaving strangely. Understand we had changed nothing on them; the only change was the addition of Grasshopper which Alex determined was using IMAP. Yet they were downloading old files in big chunks.

Since having some machine properly run Outlook is vital to Chaos Manor, something had to be done. As it was not obvious how to change Grasshopper from IMAC to POP3, the solution was to uninstall Outlook on Grasshopper. That worked. Outlook began behaving properly on Eugene and the Surface pro.

And that’s where we are. I suspected Blue Host, but my advisors have convinced me that was an unfounded suspicion. I note that when I go to WorldCon I can take the Surface Pro to handle email. It won’t be comfortable because the screen and keyboard are small, but technically it will work and I don’t expect to be online a lot there anyway. They have me on six panels, and there are lots of dinner engagements, and friends I have not seen in years. I may not do anything else until I get back home.

Eventually, I will get everything I do running on ASUS ZenBooks, and have stations with big screens above then; everything networked. I am finding the new Microsoft OneDrive to be very useful, both for collaborating with myself, and working with Niven and Barnes. The master copy of our book resides on Steve Barnes’s MacBook Air on his OneDrive, to which Niven and I also have access. I open Word, open the current copy on his OneDrive (obviously I need a high speed Internet connection, but ZEN is only connected by wireless and has no problem with it), and start editing or writing new text. It magically appears on Barnes’s machine.

Eventually I do “Save As” and save a local copy on a hard drive, and because I started back in the old days of “save early and often” I do another ‘save as’ onto a thumb drive so that I have local copies, but I have never had to retrieve one. The Master Copy is always there, even if Steve is in Atlanta with his machine turned off. Kudos to Microsoft for One Drive. I started with suspicions, but I can hardly live without it now.

I note that Microsoft has changed archiving and added an archive icon to the Outlook ribbon; it works fast and efficiently but I only found it by accident. There was no trouble in figuring out how to use it. Select one or more files in a folder (control-a will select them all, even megabytes) and click the Archive icon. Within seconds the files vanish into whatever archive file you’re saving to now. There are ways to change archive files or create new ones, but I will leave you to figure that out for yourself; it’s quite logical. I have been using it all morning, and that button plus compacting the pst files has noticeably improved outlook efficiency on Eugene.

I am developing this into a Chaos Manor Reviews column; it will continue when I have a happy ending. I see that life is still interesting for users…

The So-Called Alien Megastructure Just Got Even More Mysterious The So-Called Alien Megastructure Just Got Even More Mysterious

Last fall, a little-known star called KIC 8462852 became our planetary obsession when astronomers said that its erratic flickering could be the result of an alien megastructure. Further observation of Tabby’s Star yielded no signs of aliens, but the sudden dips in luminosity continue to defy explanation. Now, things just got a bit weirder.

http://gizmodo.com/the-so-called-alien-megastructure-just-got-even-more-my-1784883811?utm_campaign=socialflow_gizmodo_facebook&utm_source=gizmodo_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

Lee King

 

Endgame Turkey

What does the Turkish president care if Daesh overruns his country since his family is buying their oil anyway?

<.>

Meanwhile, images on social media of conscripts’ being slapped and taunted have shocked a country that venerates the common soldier, as haveallegations by Amnesty International that military detainees have been tortured.

“With its main pillar, the military, broken, the Turkish state will no longer be able to check a divided society or effectively counter security threats,” said Halil Karaveli, a senior fellow at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute and Silk Road Studies Program.

That is a blow, not only to the country, but also to NATO, of which Turkey is a member. The Turkish military is a crucial ally in fighting terrorism, reining in the Islamic State, and in controlling the migrant tide that has overwhelmed Europe. Chaos within the military symbolizes not only its waning power in the country — and the rise of the police, which Mr. Erdogan built up as a bulwark to the military — but its diminished reliability as a partner to the West.

</>

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/29/world/europe/turkey-military-coup.html?_r=0

The West is diminished! The operative phrase here is: “That is a blow, not only to the country, but also to NATO..” of which the United States is a member! Hasn’t anyone else noticed most of our other “allies” are either not paying their fair share or have decided they no longer care for their own sovereignty? Has any major country in NATO not been hit with Daesh terrorist attacks?

Does anyone really think any of these countries are worth half a turd in combat? The English and the French could not initiate and sustain a war on their own even if they wanted to do so! Neither has a complete navy. Germany didn’t even have small arms sufficient to train with in a comparatively recent NATO exercise.

I said it when I was a kid and my Dad explained the concept of alliances and told me who our allies are. I said, “But those countries are all bad; they all would have lost without us. What do we get from them? If we need them, they can’t help us. Why do we help them?” He had no answer; nobody has ever had an answer. They either remain silent or stare at me in disgust. My position on alliances has not changed; if we’re not getting something, what is the point?

I wasn’t born to save the maladjusted foreigners from themselves any more than I was born to save the manatees or cry about the dodo. I’ve got my own maladjusted citizens to work with and I’m starting to wonder if the number of potential mental health referrals is larger than I estimated.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

 

It is certainly the end of the Timocratic system built by Kemal Ataturk to modernize Turkey and encourage tolerance and adherence to the Constitution. I mourn it.

 

Diversity Continues

<.>

But when students return to campus next month, the lounge’s women’s-only status will be gone, replaced by a gender neutral space open to all students. It’s a change that’s upset students who say the lounge was a “safe place” free of male hostility.

“If I felt like I was being harassed or scared, I could go there and I would be safe,” said Elizabeth Dziedzic, a sophomore who visited the lounge about once a week during her freshman year.

“Women need a safe place to go, and sometimes dorms aren’t even the safest place.”

</>

What we can’t have “male hostility” in the new “diversity” movement?

So what do you want exactly, special rights for anyone who isn’t a white male? In other words, they want to discriminate against white males as if white males are the source of all their maladjustments?

Women need a safe space? Yeah, it’s called a domicile. We buy or rent those in this country. Get one and keep your ideological madness to yourself. What’s next are these clowns going to get on bicycles and carry about some big blue book with an equal sign on it and ask me if I have time to talk about “Diversity” today?

Are we going to have little churches where we hold hands and sing and talk about the a great achievement of every single class of human recognized by that religion so everyone can “feel included” and “special” in our “safe space”?

It’s like a bunch of folks broke out of a nut house and took over the country.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

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

Chaos Manor View, Saturday, August 6, 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

1830: partial, to be continued tomorrow.

 

The wall is done, the bricks are hauled away, and all is well at Chaos Manor. Of course I typed akk rather than all. I also told autocorrect to always correct that, which meant it was a certain amount of work to get the incorrect form in this text.

August 3 was my oldest son, Alex’s birthday. Tomorrow is my birthday, but we don’t have anything planned. I already bought myself some new computers and paid my way to the WorldCon in two weeks, so I don’t need presents. We may go eat out, and it’s barely possible that my second son Frank and his partner Tiger will show up unexpectedly, which would be very nice. Progress is being made on the novels I am working on, particularly the Interstellar Colony series novel with Niven and Barnes.

Of course something always goes wrong. This wouldn’t be Chaos Manor if everything went right. First thing I noticed is that the floor lamp that illuminates the keyboard up here in the Monk’s Cell was not working. I don’t suppose I have ever changed the bulb and I think I started working up here on Starswarm, so I guess it’s about time, but I have painfully to go back downstairs, hunt up a bulb, and climb back up to fix that, so I haven’t done it yet: I did order some more bulbs, which of course cost more for less light since the improvements, but at least they come in Amazon Prime so I won’t pay for shipping.

Microsoft has improved Outlook and Word, so I am having problems getting my work done; I had to shut down Word with Task Manager after I attempted to save this in the TempWork file I keep on my OneDrive; it just trundled endlessly and I thought I’d lost the work I had done because it was still trundling minutes after the Save As – overwrite existing copy maneuver. So I used task manager to stop it, and started Word again. It wouldn’t start, did I want it started in safe mode? I said yes, let it start, closed it without any further activity, started it again, and not only did it come up, it asked if I wanted TempWork restored. When I told it yes, up came the file that I had attempted to save, and all’s well. Cost some time, but Microsoft is like that. It usually just works, but then they improve it. I wish they’d make fewer improvements.

But all this taught me that I need that lamp illumination of the ASUS 15” ZenBook keyboard that I use for more and more of my work now. I’d do even more on it, but I can’t install LiveWriter, and I can’t seem to get Outlook to install. That latter may be because I don’t have Ethernet up here, only good wireless, and Microsoft downloads are big and take a long time; it’s also barely possible that LiveWriter won’t install unless you have Outlook going. All I know is that I go through all the hoops, and when I’m finished I get the helpful message that LiveWriter couldn’t install for unknown reasons. OK? But I couldn’t get the system to install Outlook. I have another ASUS ZenBook downstairs – I’ll get to why in a moment – and I did get Outlook running, but when I told it to send/receive to update the Inbox it trundled for minutes and said it could not connect to the server. Since the other machines on Outlook saw the test message that the installer saw and there were a lot of Inbox messages on there up to about the time I tried to install it, it’s pretty clearly a Microsoft problem. Anyway I wasted enough time on that, and came up here.

I have a ton of mail I need to deal with. We have a very good discussion of Free Trade, and I’ll try to draw some conclusions after presenting it. It’s very clear that Free Trade can be beneficial under some conditions – and it is also clear that the US lost a lot of good manufacturing jobs and manufacturing ability in the past few decades, and Free Trade was responsible for some of that. We’ll have a discussion.

Jo Anne has been doing her usual research on women in Muslim land, and has come up with some facts about Captain Kahn’s father. I generally rely on her to be meticulous about facts; of course she makes no secret of her opinions.

I have two ASUS ZenBooks because the ASUS keyboard is far and away the best I have found for my typing situation. Before my stroke I was a very fast and not too sloppy touch typist, and I wrote while looking at the monitor so that I saw what I was writing as I typed it. Since the stroke I am a two finger typist and I must stare at the keyboard. In the old days I preferred the Microsoft Comfort Curve keyboard, but I can’t use that for two finger typing. The keys are far too close together, and I always hit more than one. When I type a line and then look up all I see is a line of nonsense I must painfully edit into text; by the time I have done that I will have forgotten what I was going to write next. Writing is painful. With the ZenBook the keys are separated by a fair distance, and are large, while the screen is close enough that I can sometimes see my mistakes at a glance. I have a good LED monitor above where the monitor has always been in the Monk’s Cell — it’s a new BENQ Eric got at a sale at Fry’s and I find it more than satisfactory so I can look up at the screen and edit using the mouse after I finish a paragraph, which typically will have no more than one typo in each line, rather than at least one in every word.

I can’t get the ASUS 15” ZenBook keyboard separate from the ZenBook. I now have one up here, where I do quantity work, and I love it; and I am experimenting with the notion of using laptops to control more powerful computers. The ZenBooks I have are very fast so there’s not a lot I need more speed for, but sometimes I need the speed and enormous disk space. More on that as time goes on.

It’s close enough to dinner that I’ll go post this – I can’t get LiveWriter to install on this ZenBook so I will have to go downstairs and use a desktop. Thanks a lot, Microsoft. Eventually I’ll get something new to use to post my journal with. As you surmise, I’m writing this in Word and saving it on OneDrive so it’s already on all my downstairs machines. Incidentally, Barnes, Niven, and I are working together on a master copy that resides on Steve Barnes’s OneDrive. I open it in Word on this ZenBook and just write. It works like a charm, and I’m using my own Word with my dictionaries and autocorrect. For that improvement I heartily thank Microsoft.

 

  

A safety reminder: take heed.

Another hacking approach…Dropbox

Yesterday I received an email from a Yahoo group of which I am a member. The email included something purporting to be a Dropbox item, which I should open.

This seemed unusual so I inquired about it with the credited sender. He responded that he had been hacked and I should not open the Dropbox item. So I didn’t.

Charles Brumbelow

I urge you to follow this link and read this. It shouldn’t take long.             

http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2013/10/ten-conservative-principles.html

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

As you probably know, I was a student and protégé of Russell Kirk, and he stood as Godfather to one of my sons. He was my colleague at Pepperdine for a year.

If you are concerned with the question of what is conservatism, this may be enlightening. Understand, conservatism, at least as seen by Burke and Kirk is not an ideology nor is it exactly a movement. It’s more a way of looking at the world. I would call it a kind of realism, but that may not be an acceptable definition to you. This may help define it for you.

Trump on Russia

Well this is interesting:

<.>

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is suggesting the U.S.

accept Russia’s annexation of Crimea if it would lead to better relations with Moscow and stronger cooperation in fighting Islamic State militants.

</>

https://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/trump-says-us-should/2016/07/31/id/741400/

Maybe Mister Trump doesn’t understand geopolitics but the United States accepts Russian annexation of Crimea; clearly, the United States can do nothing but accept the annexation of Crimea. If the United States did not accept this, we would see actual conflict as opposed to pressures and levers that were looking for an excuse to be applied because of Russia’s economic war against us.

All they did was give us an excuse to crush their economy and discourage their non-linear war. I hope it was “worth it” for Putin.

But, I too would prefer better relations with Russia so why not put some language around this and chant a little bit and see what sort of public perceptions we can conjure? And then we can see what cooperation is possible. So, perhaps Mister Trump approaches this in the sense of a negotiation and maybe he’s a better geopolitical player than he appears at first glance?

We know that Hillary Clinton lost her cool and went after an old man who blew up a plan decades ago, only to tear down the wall between the terrorists and Europe while helping flood Europe with refugees and terrorists. Regardless of all the other nonsense surrounding Benghazi, the only point of geopolitical significance is the one I just mentioned, and — strangely enough — Qaddafi himself warned us that this would happen if we killed him and said we would be stupid to do it and he would laugh.

I suppose, in this country, if Qaddafi says orange juice is made from oranges then I must denounce his statement to remain a “good American”

or whatever, and Qaddafi was a jerk who committed human rights abuses but none of that stops him from being correct.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Putin’s Russia is considerably improved from the rapacious 1990’s which so dismayed him. His objectives are pretty well those of traditional Russia, some of which are in opposition to the interests of the United States, and some not.

The fertility rate is growing, the middle class is growing, and life is much better for the average Russian than it was under communism; that was not true until recently. Russia’s goals are the absorption of Russians, then pan-Slavism. Neither of these goals threatens us. There are many common interests to negotiate. Obama’s attempt at reset was a good idea but unskillfully executed and of course Mr. Clinton inadvertently fostered enmity with Pan-Slavic Russia by choosing the anti-Slav side in the Balkan Wars in which we had no interest other than stability. There was no clearly morally superior side in the Balkan Wars. When we ruined the economy of the Lower Danube by dropping bridges and making that key waterway impassable, we made few friends in Bulgaria and Rumania, who weren’t even in the war.

Russia has reason to fear us. We have no way to defend the nations surrounding Russia which we have guaranteed in NATO except “massive retaliation at a time and place of our choosing.” We certainly do not have conventional forces capable of keeping the Russians from getting to Warsaw in days or even hours. Whether we have the forces for massive retaliation is of course a highly classified secret, but it is not secret that we no longer have SAC. Still, the threat remains.

I suspect a lot of good for us could come from skillful and serious negotiations with Putin, if conducted by someone he respects.

The ruler of Libya did all that the United States asked of him. It was not enough. Libya is no longer stable, and has become a base for a power that is in a declared war with the United States. No person is more responsible for this situation than was the then Secretary of State of the United States.

Russia is not our traditional enemy.

New Russian Tank is Significant

This could unbalance much:

<.>

“We discovered that no matter how skillful the crew, the tank would get up to ten hits,” Pukhov said during a luncheon at the Center for the National Interest in Washington, D.C.—which is the foreign policy think-tank that publishes The National Interest—on July 26. “Even if you have perfect armor—active, passive. In one case it will save you from one hit, in another case from two hits, but you’ll still get five hits and you’re done.

<.>

Pukhov cited a particular battle in Eastern Ukraine where—even when operating under ideal conditions—a tank force fighting under the banner of Kremlin-backed separatist forces was all but annihilated by rocket-propelled grenades. If even a small force of anti-tank missile-equipped infantry could decimate a tank column, the take-away for the Russians was that they needed to rethink the entire concept of the tank.

<.>

If and when the Terminator is ultimately fielded, the vehicle would be able to engage large groups of massed infantry in built-up areas with a combination of missiles and automatic cannon fire. “We need it badly,” Pukhov said. “Believe it or not, we’re not going to project force, we need to protect our territory.”

</>

http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/russia-about-make-tanks-we-know-them-obsolete-17158

Wow! When the article said “engage large groups of massed infantry in built-up areas with a combination of missiles and automatic cannon fire”, after thinking about our men, I thought about Chinese infantry.

This seems well suited to China.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

 

A strategy of technology would not let Russia or anyone else have better weapons systems than the United States. Apparently this lesson is no longer taught in the Academies. Alas. We had the largest stimulus bill in our history – Barrack Hussein Obama was able to spend more on economic stimulus than all the previous presidents in US history combined – but apparently none was used to pursue our interests in military technology. We sow the wind.

 

 

 

Free Trade

Let me begin by reminding everyone that while unrestricted Capitalism and absolutely free markets are the best known way of producing the most and cheapest stuff, they inevitably lead to the sale of human flesh in the market place. If you do not think that having cheap stuff and baby parts for sale in the public markets is a desirable goal, then you put some value ahead of unrestricted free markets. How much restriction is needed is what we are discussing.

Comparative advantage doesn’t exist?

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

One or another of your correspondents recently made the rather breathtaking announcement that, other than having a lot of farmland, there is no such thing in international trade as “comparative advantage”, and thus the term should be abolished.

I commend the correspondent on the bravura and dash with which he managed to say something silly and make it seem the height of considered wisdom, but style don’t make it so.

So a country with a boatload of iron ore and coal has no comparative advantage in making steel over a nation with lesser quantities and/or grades of cola band iron ore?

So my little pocket Swiss Army knife that I have used for twenty-five years, and is still as sharp as when purchased though never sharpened is as good as it is due to the skill of the Swiss craftsmen who designed and manufactured it, and their skill came from the superb schools and high standards of their national work ethic, while the Look Alike pocket knife I once bought for a dollar, which was made in China, was so dull it literally would not cut paper, and the steel was of such a low quality that the “file” would not even effectively wear down a ragged fingernail was the product of the Chinese work ethic and school system producing workers who knew how to make it “look The Same” while not being able to do anything like the same job is in no way evidence of a comparative advantage for the Swiss in the production of such multi-tools?

Switzerland has no comparative advantage because of their educational system and culture?

Bahahahahaha…

And we thought there was no comedy on Chaos Manor!

May your wall soon be up again, your drains clear, and your typing flow like Niagara!

Comparative advantage is a theoretical concept. Sometimes, as in the examples you give, the advantages are obvious. The United States with its splendid public education system through the first half of the Twentieth Century possessed an advantage over nearly everyone else for a very long time. The “Protestant Ethic” that was pretty universal didn’t hurt either.

However, comparative advantage can tricky; a freely mobile population, with no roots, and willing to work for not much can have an enormous advantage, and offer goods at low prices; but if you must ship them the machinery and furnish them the capital to build the plants that let them compete with you, who is served? Certainly lower priced goods benefit everyone, but now you must support the workers who can no longer earn the higher wages they were getting. They may have to be bailed out of mortgages. If they lose their jobs they must be supported, somehow, and a bureaucracy of people whose job it is to take care of welfare for the unemployed; it is in their interest that there be as many unemployed as possible. The capitalists who financed shipping the manufacturing equipment to the lower wage country now lobbies for continuing that process. You need to be sure your schools are up to snuff, but there is now a group whose income depends on not having educated workers. And so forth.

The country that competes with the low wage competitor faces problems it has not seen before; and if it doesn’t understand the situation – as who, really does – it can lose any comparative advantages it once had. Comparative advantage works well in theories, but it assumes conditions that do not always apply and may not be desirable. To that extent – assuming labor mobility and placing no value on community stability – Free Trade is a radical rather than a conservative idea.

“What, precisely, is being conserved here?”” /

Dear Jerry,

I enjoyed our diversion into so-called “Free Trade.”  This topic is one of the two missing sections in Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart”.  Immigration is the other one.  But as is well known, Murray’s neocon paymasters at the American Enterprise Institute are two fisted Free Traders and open borders loons (except where  the Zionist State of Israel is concerned).

I think your organizing question there – “What, precisely, is being conserved here?” –  is an excellent analytic premise to use in approaching all aspects of post-WWII “American Conservatism”.

For myself I long ago came to the conclusion the reason this Conservatism construct failed to thrive was it fundamentally lacked genuine roots in the original historical America, a now already extinct polity.  Put another way, its foreign parts content from the very beginning was always too high.

Best Wishes,

Mark

free trade

I’m not a professional economist, and even less an economic statistician; please take these comments as those of an interested amateur, and as suggestions for the kinds of things that may be worth looking at, in terms of making a case for not interfering with free trade.
It looks to me as if this is a classic Bastiatian case of “what is seen and what is not seen.” Take your American made car that would cost you $5000 more. Not everyone can afford that; there would be people who put off buying a new car. But when you do, there’s $5000 that you WON’T be spending on buying any other goods or services; you have to give those purchases up to pay the cost of a more expensive car. Add up a lot of people like you, and that’s a possibly substantial hit diffused through the whole US economy in such a way that it’s not acutely visible anywhere.
There’s also the economic impact of your not buying products made elsewhere. Right now, China is the country everyone looks at as taking away American jobs. But, for example, the US exports something like $29 billion dollars’ worth of soybeans; and a look at a recent table showed China as buying 890 million bushels, much more than the rest of the top five buyers together. They’re largely using their exports to the US to pay for that. If they can’t export to us, they can’t buy soybeans either; and there goes a big share of $29 billion worth of American jobs and farms. The same presumably applies to other goods China buys from us; I looked up soybeans because I knew about them.
One of the key ideas of classical economics was Say’s Law, which says that a general glut (general overproduction that makes goods unsalable) is impossible. Kaynes based his economics on a rejection of it; but Keynes’s phrasing of it was “supply creates its own demand,” which is not what Say said and is obviously absurd (if I make mud pies, that doesn’t create a demand for mud pies). What Say said was that the actual demand for one commodity is necessarily the supply of one or more other commodities. If you have only one commodity (as Keynes’ wording suggests), you can’t meaningfully speak of supply and demand; once you have two, they can’t both be in oversupply, and the extension to a larger economy is just mathematical induction. What you have, instead, is oversupply of some products (and the forms of labor that produce them) and a need to shift to other forms of production in particular, to invoke a different classical economist, the ones where you have a comparative advantage. The US clearly does have a comparative advantage in some areas; consider, for example, that China imports a huge quantity of soybeans from us!
It doesn’t help make those adjustments, though, when you set up frictions to labor shifting to new parts of the economy, or when you subsidize the immobility of labor. The US isn’t as far gone as, say, Germany, where (or so I have read) letting an employee go requires a year’s notice and a year’s severance pay. But we have a lot of benefits for those who don’t work; and I’ve seen at first hand how those make it really hard for people to make themselves economically productive.
I myself have been a freelancer since my copy editing job was outsourced to India. And it’s reduced my income, and is continuing to do so. On the other hand, I’m typing this on a Mac Mini that cost me less than $1000. How much would I have to pay for a computer if all the labor of making computers were done in the US, and if we had protective tariffs to keep it so? Would we even have a computer industry if those costs had to be paid? There are entries on both sides of the balance sheet. I personally would rather have creative destruction; but then, I’m a capitalist and not a conservative, so we may disagree.

William H. Stoddard

I expect that Mac would cost you 1200, but that’s a guess. We would also have the in-country capability of making them if China didn’t – or couldn’t – trade with us any more. But that is a guess. Certainly Apple seems to be convinced that it is better to have their workforce in China. It is obvious that regulations concerning employment raise the cost of labor, and thus provide an incentive to have macs and sweat sox made somewhere the Department of Labor can’t go; and this lets US companies escape those regulations.

 

Detroit

Dr. Pournelle,
I write about cars, mostly automotive history, and I’m a native Detroiter. Tariffs and similar protections for the American auto industry would have been a disincentive to improving their products and being more competitive. The changes to the industry and to this city have been wrenching, but today Ford, GM and Chrysler make the best products they’ve ever made. I doubt that would be the case had protectionist tariffs been in place.
I want Americans to have access to the best products in the world. Tariffs hinder domestic economic development because they provide barriers to American businesses buying what they need. If the tariffs are high enough, some products will not be manufactured here because their producers can’t afford imported equipment and supplies.
Ronnie Schreiber

I fear I am unable to infer any rules from this. I presume you would, as would my friend David Friedman, be in favor of unrestricted free trade.

Interstellar Colonization

“Well, if it is impossible to build a thriving economy isolated from everyone, then of course interstellar colonies are impossible; and surely that is not true?”
The subject makes a nice diversion from current national politics and world events.
Based on lunchtime napkin doodling, I figure colonization for interactive economies is impossible unless we: (A) discover FTL travel, or (B) significantly increase human longevity by at least several multiples, or (C) establish multi-generational supply trains between habitable star systems.
Right now, faster than light travel is still barely theoretical; not even as potentially feasible as commercial hot fusion. Increases in human longevity are becoming possible, although as greater than whole multiples is still questionable; so being able to run a multi-decade trade exchange is not going to be easily conceptualized by predominantly short-term thinking humans. And multi-generational supply trains are not going to be at all reactive to changes in the market. What good is “A Gift From Earth” when a colony has raced past the level of Earth technology? Or for that matter, what good is a 20-year supply train of interstellar petroleum shipped from Alpha Centauri when we’ve discovered a cheaper means of mass producing it, or a better lubricant, here on Earth?
The transmission of ideas and information between worlds may be of value, but it seems to me that the value of such is going to be one-sided in almost all cases. A workable economy begs for a relatively equal exchange of value, a quid pro quo, to exist.
The only current justification for the establishment of slower-than-light interstellar colonies is for lebenstraum for the colonists who can afford to go, assuming they survive to get there, or their children if multi-generational. There’s no benefit to any other socio-political organizations short of expansion and continuation of the baseline human species. (Which if I remember correctly, was the justification for the National Geographic Society colony to Tau Ceti in your novel.) While I consider that to me a very moral justification (in the spirit of Mr. Heinlein’s definition of morality); actually selling that to people to pony up blood and treasure for it seems rather problematical.

Michael Houst

You must know things I do not. I have no problem at all believing that enough people could be found who would man an interstellar colony ship. I think a generation ship (with rotation to provide gravity I would have to assume) would be less attractive than cold sleep, but still I think a population could be found.

First, of course, we would have to have colonies off Terra; I suggest the first would be a Moon Colony; and I know we could find volunteers for that.

isolated economies –

You said:

“Well, if it is impossible to build a thriving economy isolated from everyone, then of course interstellar colonies are impossible; and surely that is not true?”

If interstellar colonies did exist and throve in isolation, then presumably they would thrive because of the isolation.  Otherwise, what would be the attraction? 

Nations which are earth-bound, on the other hand, must exist in competition with other earthly nations.  Even if we do not wish to acknowledge the competition, it still exists.  The modern history of China (and Japan as well) is an excellent case study of the consequences of long-term isolation.

Neil

More Free Trade ()

Dear Dr. Pournelle.

First of all, congratulations on getting your wall built! Second, I’d like to thank you for reposting my thoughts. I’d like to respond to your comments, if I may.

“Well, if it is impossible to build a thriving economy isolated from everyone, then of course interstellar colonies are impossible; and surely that is not true?”

I would argue that the opposite is true: If interstellar trade is

not possible, neither are interstellar colonies.

Consider the original thirteen colonies: Most of them were charter

or proprietary with the explicit purpose of making money for the investors in the UK. It required a tremendous infusion of venture capital to start one, and the payoff came via a captive market for manufactured goods, and a source of cheaper raw materials. Thus, I contend that it is market forces, which will drive the eventual colonization of the stars. And who’s going to launch all that capital away in a rocket if there’s no vessel to carry stuff back and recoup the investment?

Thus, just as the US was not possible before sailing ships made transatlantic trade possible, so we will need a mechanism capable of interstellar trade before there can be interstellar colonies.

The old Technocracy organization once tried to analyze economies and determined that North America could have a thriving high tech economy with no foreign trade … but do you really think that the United States could not survive without foreign trade?”

And this is why I asked my serious question: Theory aside, has this ever been done successfully?

So far, the first example that comes to mind is China. It successfully walled itself off to become a Heavenly Kingdom for hundreds of years.

It worked very well, until it didn’t. Competition, trade, and innovation flourished in Europe until they were eventually able to catch up and surpass the Chinese. Then the Heavenly Kingdom became prostrate before the European powers, with various settlements and bits chopped off in places like Canton, Macao, and Hong Kong. It would take them fifty years to gain their independence — and when they became prosperous, it was through trade.

So I would answer that the US could be self sufficient if we really could launch into space and leave all the other nations of the earth behind. As it is, our isolation would allow the other nations of the world to surpass us technologically, and eventually suffer China’s fate. China had all the resources of a high-tech civilization also, but because they weren’t trading, they weren’t able to leverage them to best effect.

There’s also the small fact that isolating ourselves from the rest of the world is easier said than done; thanks to the internet, air travel, and all other modern technology it becomes harder and harder to keep outside influences out. The US is a centerpiece of trade, and not just for the upper class. Visit a Walmart; a majority of everything on those shelves is from some other country. Stopping that by force and stimulating home grown industry would be no easy feat; the term “planned economy” comes uncomfortably to mind.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

And yet I think there will be interstellar colonies and the first attempt will be made in this millennium.

Tariffs < >

Dr. Pournelle 

If  Brian P. can argue for Free Trade with an historical example, I can argue against with an historical example. 

The United States became the greatest industrial power in the world with tariffs in place. Did the poor survive those tariffs? 

Live long and prosper 

h lynn keith

 

 

Sunday Night 2350

 

 

Trump

Dear Mr. Pournelle;
I note with some dismay recent mutterings regarding Mr. Khan. Assume for the moment his imperfection: so what? He is not running for president. I am not being asked to vote for him.

We are being asked to vote for Donald Trump. What have we here? A high-profile, abrasive candidate who is indeed running for president. He is criticized by a Gold Star parent. (None of whose comments, as far as I can tell, were false.) Any candidate with class would have simply been silent. It is, I believe, still part of our consensus that the parents of a fallen soldier deserve respect. Let it be. Move on.

Donald Trump’s response was an immediate demand for an apology, and a claim that Mr. Khan had “viciously attacked” him. Mr. Trump, of course, being known for his courtesy and respect for others. (Heavy sarcasm.) Not content with this, he gratuitously attempted to mock Mrs. Khan; who had to that point said nothing whatever about him. And he dragged this out for days.

Now we get the opposition research; against Mr. Khan, a private citizen. So much for “Donald Trump, Defender of the Little Guy.”
Comments upon Mr. Khan are at this point irrelevant. Once again, he’s not running for anything. The only this pertinent to this election is what we have learned from this episode about the character of Donald Trump.
Yours,
Allan E. Johnson

 

So far as I know, no aspersions have been made about Captain Khan, who died years ago upholding and defending the Constitution of the United States.  It is his father that Mr. Trump has issues with. His father, however, apparently does not accept the Construction, and prefers the Moslem Brotherhood and Sharia law. I have no evidence you don’t have regarding Captain Kahn’s convictions on those matters, but I do know the oath of allegiance he had to take to obtain a commission as an officer of the United States, and that he freely took that oath swearing that he had no mental reservations, so I presume he did not approve of the Muslim Brotherhood, nor did he prefer Sharia Law. But it is of little matter when considering which of the two candidates to choose for president; and the fact is that a vote for anyone other than Trump is a vote for Mrs. Clinton and the Clinton Foundation.

I would not advise Mr. Trump to say anything about the senior Mr. Kahn, but that is hardly the point.  I would not have voted for Andy Jackson of Tennessee in his election running against John Quincy Adams; but I certainly would have voted for Jackson had he been running against Aaron Burr. Jackson said many rather appalling things, but the Republic survived. Mr. Trump has said he will appoint a conservative legal scholar to the Supreme Court. We know that his opponent will appoint a liberal.  Mr. Trump wants to shrink government; we know that his opponent has been a party to its growth. I could continue with a list of things the Obama Administration has done, and we can reasonably conclude that a Clinton Administration will continue them.

We are afraid Trump might do some things we disapprove of.  He probably will. We know that Mrs. Clinton has done many things that I, at least, disapprove of. We can be quite certain that she will do many more if elected.

http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/08/01/clinton-cash-khizr-khans-deep-legal-financial-connections-saudi-arabia-hillarys-clinton-foundation-connect-terror-immigration-email-scandals/

 

Khizr Khan, Humayun Khan, and all the others

Humayun Khan stood up and defended the United States of America. His father, Khizr, has been here for a long time, at DC law firms and such with strong financial links to Saudi Arabia, the source for much of the financial backing for global Jihad. Breitbart reports here:

Clinton Cash: Khizr Khan’s Deep Legal, Financial Connections to Saudi Arabia, Hillary’s Clinton Foundation Tie Terror, Immigration, Email Scandals Together

“http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/08/01/clinton-cash-khizr-khans-deep-legal-financial-connections-saudi-arabia-hillarys-clinton-foundation-connect-terror-immigration-email-scandals/”

And Jihadwatch amplifies on this here with some interesting sources from the umma:

Robert Spencer in FrontPage: Khizr Khan, Servant of the Global Umma

“https://www.jihadwatch.org/2016/08/robert-spencer-in-frontpage-khizr-khan-servant-of-the-global-umma”

Khizr had decades to stand up and declare his anti-terror stance in vigorous terms. Silence. Khizr had nearly 15 years since 9/11 to stand up to loudly and unambiguously declare his anti-terror stance. Silence. Now, in support of his darling Hillary Clinton he lies to us about Islam and the Qur’an. What else can I call it in the face of the quotes from Islamic scriptures provided by Mr.

Spencer other than a flat direct lie?

{^_^}

 

 

And finally we kill off the last shreds of Khizr Khan’s credibility

He does NOT believe in our Constitution. He believes in Sharia law and has stated so on the record. Sharia law is the antithesis of our Constitution.

Khizr Khan Believes the Constitution ‘Must Always Be Subordinated to the Sharia’

http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2016/08/02/khizr-khan-constitution-sharia/

And just think, Hillary supports him. Should we support Hillary? H-e-double toothpicks no!

{^_^}

The news media  seems not to have carried all of the story.  I would prefer that Mr. Trump not get involved in such matters, but I do share his concern that bringing in more people who reject the Constitution and prefer Sharia Law to Western Tradition and our version of the Common Law is not wise. Captain Kahn accepted an Army commission and died in defense of the Constitution; we were fortunate to have him.  I cannot believe we were fortunate to have his father here.

 

 

Free Trade – Counter-example for Brian

Dear Dr Pournelle,
I remember raising the issue of the folly of Free Trade on your website over ten years ago, which result in much interesting debate. However, I think that this dogma of free trade has been having fundamental effects, that go beyond economics and that overtime directly threaten the security and stability of the developed world.
Firstly, I would like to directly address the issues in Brian P Grand Economic Theory email:
1) Global innovators can out-compete local industries – Yes, but this is not the result of innovation (New designs, concepts etc.), but lower standards for employment, product standards and access to cheap funding from state sponsored financial institutions. If I am wrong, then it should be possible for others to provide a number of examples of innovation to demonstrate my error.
2) Trade Tariffs impact the low paid disproportionately“ True but why are the numbers of low paid jobs increasing, whilst those in middle to high income roles declining in the US and elsewhere in the developed world. The impact of exporting high value/high wage jobs has reduced the US to a two tier economy, the vast majority being either under-employed or employed in low value/low paid jobs and with an ever shrink proportion of population in highly paid positions, often generating little or negative value (The Finance Sector being a prime example). This is not just a recipe for economic failure and the death of the founding concept of the American dream – Work hard and anyone can succeed – but is sowing the seeds of revolution as the success of Bernie Saunders and the rising in the belief in Socialism amongst millennials shows.
3) Tariff protect business from the need for innovation – There is perhaps some truth to this, but what level of innovation has been demonstrated by Chinese or other developing nations. New ideas and concepts still flow from Developed nations (Particularly the US) and are at most refined by developing nation businesses and at worst stolen and produced in low cost and low regulation economies.
As in many economic theories Free Trade ignores the real world impact of human behaviour. Developing nations circumvent WTO trade rules and automatically stabilising factors by providing cheap finance (Directly and indirectly by cross subsidization), impose non-tariff barriers such as control on ownership, restricted market access (India) and by currency manipulation. This is not a good approach for the Developed World and I would strongly suggest it is also failing the developing world too where average incomes have increased by a fraction compared to the growth in income of their own elites.
Does any of this matter?
Yes, it does! The first order impact is physical, the decline of industrial strength which is a key, if not the key factor and measure of national strength and security. The secondary, but perhaps more significant effect can best be described as a “morale” effect.
“Physical Effect”
Industrial strength in the modern world IS the measure of a nations power and the most important factor in national security. If anyone doubts that in a prolonged conventional conflict that China would now prevail against the US and its Allies I suggest they look at production figures in any area, but the comparative figures for steel, ship building and chip production are particularly shocking. The US is being out produced by at least an order of magnitude in every area.
Yes, the US currently enjoys a technological superiority, but we all know the efforts being made to negate this advantage and that of all secrets, military ones are the most fleeting. Also, quantity has a quality all of its own. German equipment was superior in almost every area during WW2, but didn’t €™t effect the outcome. Yes it took 5 Sherman’s to knock out a Tiger, but it made no difference if Shermans were built at 50 time the rate of Tigers.
“Morale Effect”
I would contend that no democracy, republic or state can survive without a strong middle class and I would be happy to cite examples from Sparta to Venice to support this.
At last I think that I understand why this is the case. The middle class acts as the link and conduit between the Elite and the vast majority of the working class, interacting with, and influencing both. When the middle class is too small and lacks power/influence to restrain elites, those elites are not constrained will eventually make decisions that though they may in their immediate interest, but ultimately damage the state (Free Trade anyone!)
A stark example of this is the long running conflict between the aristocracy in the Thematic Period of the Byzantine Empire and the state enfranchised soldiers who lived on government provided land in return for military service. The military strength of the Thematic period was dependent on these small-holder farmers who provided well equipped cavalry for the state in return for land (And a small state income), this created an abundant source of low cost reserve manpower and enable the state to expand its borders and the thematic system.
Yet limited investment opportunities meant that there was always a desire by the aristocracy to buy these small holdings, land being the only secure investment. This would increase the elites personal wealth (And influence), but reduced the military strength of the empire and as a side effect reduce it revenue (Elites, then as now never paid their share in tax). Much Imperial legislation was focused on addressing this issue, some of which was very punitive (Confiscation of such purchases with no compensation) but eventually the aristocracy won and the empire began its long decline.
The history of Republican Rome, Late Imperial Rome and many other states I would suggest offer further historical examples that support this hypothesis, uncontrained elites acting selfishly and undermining the very basis of the state that allows them to exist.
I would suggest that their is a further impact when the influence of the middle class declines. The working class are in daily contact with the middle class and will see decline in that classes wealth and influence. As entry to this class is the only route open to them to improve their lot, any perception that this opportunity is closing, if not closed must result in lower morale, declining patriotism and a general disgust and distrust of the existing system of government. This “morale” factor will of course impact the middle class as well, leaving the state vulnerable to external threats/challenges that it could easily have vanquished before. Consider the losses incurred by Republican Rome during the 2nd Punic War and the response, a mass mobilization impossible for any other state of that period, supported by all classes. Now consider a period of less calamity (376-450’s AD), with vastly greater resources available to the state, yet which lack the morale and unity to mobilize those resources to save the very existience of their society, in fact many seemed to prefer barbarian rule to that of a distant and dishonest empire.
I know this may sound speculative, but as an avid student of history I have always puzzled at the decline of such powerful and effective states as Rome and Byzantium. Now living in such “Interesting times” as the Chinese define it, I think that I at last have a glimmer of understanding as to the real factors that allowed those states, so imposing and seemingly eternal, to decline and fall.
Please excuse the long response, but I think that the Chaos website is one of the few arenas where such matters will receive informed and informative discussion.
Best regards
Simon Enefer
UK

 

 

 

 

 

Aaaand new book available for preorder!

http://www.sff.net/people/steph-osborn/ScienceFictionByScientists.html

is where you can find out a bit more about it.

https://www.amazon.com/Science-Fiction-Scientists-Anthology-Stories/dp/3319411012?tag=azlinkplugin-20

is where you can preorder!
And this makes title #30, which I’ve either authored, co-authored, or to which I’ve contributed (including a sappy romance I wrote under a pen name, lol)!!!

Stephanie Osborn

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

Here’s a bit of information, guys

The latest NEW version of the Osborn Cosmic Weather Report, folks, as posted on my blog, Comet Tales. It includes some information about a near-Earth asteroid, and the current lack of sunspots. It will also point out books I’ve written that pertain to the subjects being discussed.

http://stephanie-osborn.blogspot.com/2016/08/a-new-direction.html

I am also tweeting the blog articles @WriterSteph, and there is also a Facebook group for discussion:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/294672317552181/

Stephanie Osborn

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

 

The Great Chinese Crash

Dear Doctor Pournelle,

Here is a BBC report on the more or less current state of the Chinese economy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXVnoIThq-A

What I found most of interest in this is that much of what is

happening, i.e. the slow down of the Chinese growth rate, the slow

motion collapse of the State Sector “Zombie Companies”, also called

“The Iron Rice Bowl” for the way it employs tens of millions of workers

in obsolete, money losing industries, has been foreseen for over a decade.

About fifteen years ago I was hired to write a video series on the

history of China. Over two dozen episodes, covering everything from

politics and wars to food and clothing. In typically weird “Hollywood”

style, I got the job not because of any knowledge I had of China, but

because I knew somebody who knew someone who wanted something fast. I

knew -nothing- about China that wasn’t in my undergraduate World History

survey course twenty years before.

So I undertook a years worth of reading everything I could get my hands

on to do with China. At that time the massive explosion of the Chinese

economy was just hitting the “radar screen” of most Westerners, and a

lot of what I read for the parts of the video series dealing with modern

China led me into the innards of how it could grow so fast, and what

might happen.

The time bomb is those “Zombie Companies”. As The Beeb says in this

report, they employ a total number equal to the population of Britain,

and are largely responsible, by their inefficiencies, for the Chinese

economy accumulating two to three trillion dollars annual in new debt.

In a word, unsustainable. But once they get a stake through their

collective hearts, you set things up for massive social instability, and

what is the resume of the Chinese Communist party, other than “We

Brought, maintain and ensure -stability-!”? If they cannot do that, what

are they good for, to the Chinese Man In The Street?

Another interesting fact: much of the Chinese debt is owned and/or

facilitated by British banks. The City of London is massively exposed to

any Chinese economic collapse. Britain is seeking as much Chinese

investment as it can, and with BREXIT this can only increase. One

wonders just what role the Chinese connection may have played in the

BREXIT itself. I suppose it might be a bit much to foresee Britain

becoming a virtual Chinese economic colony, but it’s a trend.

In thinking on all this, I keep recalling a factoid I once came across

when researching the history of Chinese industrialization: the first

machine tools made in China were manufactured in 1917. Britain first

made such tools around 1800, and the British economy in 1900 was pretty

well topped out, reduced to slow growth and “filling in the corners”.

America got into industrializing in the 1820’s to 1830s, and a century

later we had our Great Collapse. Well, maybe there is just something

about “flipping the switch” for going industrial? Maybe you get a

hundred years of” party like its’ never going to stop”, and then

everyone goes “Whoa!”, and collective the economy falls on its face,

like a party goer on January 1 when the sun comes up who suddenly

realizes he ate and drank Way too Much?

After all, an economy is just what a very large group of people do when

they hang out together.

Petronius

 

 

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