Monday, March 13, 2017

“The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed across the entire world.”

Donald Trump

Between 1965 and 2011, the official poverty rate was essentially flat, while the government spending per person on poverty programs rose by more than 900% after inflation.

Peter Cove

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

Every time I think I am recovering from the crud, I have a relapse. This time for sure, as Bullwinkle was fond of saying. I seem to have no more symptoms other than running out of energy; when I expel my tidal air I get wheezing, but some deep coughing clears that out. Maybe I had mild pneumonia, but I doubt it; friends tell me they had this cried for six weeks. But the weather is nice outside, and much of the domestic stress at chaos manor has been rectified, so things can improve rapidly. We have adjusted the staff taking care of Roberta, and the reconstruction of the house is in order.

I should get some time in the Monk’s cell, giving me a chance to run through Mamelukes; the interstellar colony book Steve Barnes, Larry Niven and I are working on; and the serious novel on artificial intelligence and robotics John De Chancie and I are doing. I can still work on non-fiction from down here in the chaos – after all, I wrote a lot of the columns in the press room at computer shows and AAAS meetings – but I can’t do fiction with constant distractions.

Speaking of which they are calling dinner. I’ll get this up fast to relieve curiosity; also I have finally recorded the subscriptions sent to the po box; I hadn’t been there in a month – actually in two months. Thank you all for renewing; there was a pretty big bundle.

I’ll have a substantive contribution and an amusing story later tonight.

I posted this much before dinner.

 

I returned after dinner to write the rest of this.

 

I thought I would have a substantive essay.  I have notes for several. unfortunately it is 2150, and I have had no time to work on it.  There are several things to contemplate. One is technical: the best keyboard I have found to work with is the keyboard of the ASUS ZenBook. The keys are large, larger than the keys of the Logitech Bluetooth keyboard I use on my main machine, but it’s a laptop; it doesn’t have the enormous disk capacity of my main machine, and maybe I just have a prejudice for big desktops; on the other hand, I can write faster on the ZenBook’s keyboard, and the ZenBook has at least as fast a CPU as does Eugene (this machine). On the gripping hand, Eugene has a lot of customizations; it has a big set of spam filtering rules, and a lot of junk mail addresses I have no idea of how to transfer to a laptop. It has a number of AutoCorrect rules that let me type faster with fewer corrections. It took a while to build that and I’d hate to lose it, but I have no notion of where that AutoCorrect table is stored. I suppose I can find it, and many of the other things on Eugene I want on a main machine, but since my stroke I am very nervous about starting big projects that I don’t really know how to do; that’s probably why I no longer do the monthly computing column. Intimidated; of course the most popular feature of the column was my log of attacking big problems and bulling through to a happy ending, but now I’m not so confident of the happy ending.

All of which argues that I should do that, and write up the experience in Chaos Manor Reviews, and I suppose I ought to do that. My experiments with keyboards since the stroke took away my touch typing capability have led me to the conclusion that the ZenBook keyboard is superior to any others I have tried – larger keys and better key separation, and all over better layout. It has output to a big screen, which is what I need to edit text – my eyes ain’t what they used to be – and since it has a docking station I can attach an enormous capacity disk to, I can simply copy Eugene’s D drive to that and it will be the ZenBook’s D drive. We’ll see about everything else.

It will take a while, though. For the moment, Eugene with the Logitech K360 will just have to do.

If you have not seen Peggy Noonan’s “A Surprising Show of Confidence” in the Saturday, March 4-5 issue of the Wall Street Journal, it’s worth your time. Ms. Noonan learned her way around the White House in Nixon days, and has remained a respectable – and my many respected – journalist since. She is nominally conservative but often realistic and objective. This is her reaction to President Trump’s speech to Congress, and shows that some journalists might be getting the news of the election in November. I meant to write about her piece a week ago, along with my analysis of the speech, but chaos intervened.

I contemplate three essays. One is probably part of a longer discussion of how to “repeal and replace” Obamacare, and just how much of the income of the healthy do the unfortunates rightfully claim? That is, if I’m healthy and you’re not, how much of your health care bill do I have an obligation to pay? And if I don’t have that obligation, who does? Our grandchildren? Immigrants? If they’re entitled to “insurance whose rates are nor raised by prior conditions” – clearly a losing proposition to any insurance company – someone must pay. Who should it be, and how did they get that obligation?

(And please don’t argue Christian duty. That may well be true, but nothing stops you from donating to Christian hospitals and clinics and for that matter missionary doctors; but that can’t affect non-Christians, nor legal obligations; see all kinds of Supreme Court rulings on that subject.)

One answer to health care problems is reduction in costs of health care. That is quite obvious, and certainly not being neglected by President Trump, but one reason for those high costs, particularly to the elderly, is the costs of drugs and pharmaceuticals in general. For more on that, see

A Doctor to Heal the FDA

Scott Gottlieb may be Trump’s most important nominee.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-doctor-to-heal-the-fda-1489357456

in today’s Wall Street Journal editorials.

[snip]One of Dr. Gottlieb’s priorities will be moving generic medicines to market, and competition is the best way to reduce the price of treatments like the now infamous EpiPen. About 10% of 1,300 branded drugs “have seen patents expire but still face zero generic competition,” Dr. Gottlieb wrote in the Journal last year. “New regulations have, in many cases, made it no longer economically viable for more than one generic firm to enter the market.” Now he can roll back such arbitrary directives.

The press is overcome with relief that President Trump didn’t pick Jim O’Neill, a Peter Thiel pal who supports making drugs available to patients after testing for safety, though not for efficacy. But that idea is far from crazy, especially for drugs that treat rare diseases when no approved options exist. Why should desperate patients have to take a sugar pill so the FDA can satisfy its demand for 100% certainty that a drug works? [snip]

And of course there is room to debate just what phrase in the Constitution gives the Federal Government power to forbid sale of something they think ineffective, when they know it’s not harmful, but there is no proof of ineffectiveness? Why can the Feds forbid snake oil? And of course the argument is that they know snake oil just wastes the badly needed resources of desperate people who have a powerful motive to buy anything that gives them the shadow of a hope.

While I was sick I did participate in some chatter in other conferences; one of them was the SFWA Forums, which are open to members only, and quoting anything said there without explicit permission from the author is explicitly forbidden; a policy I have no argument with, but of course I can give myself permission to quote myself, and I do.

I said:

Someone might develop the technology, but the FDA will require tests costing tens of millions of dollars before they will let anyone sell that technology to users, even if the users have full knowledge that this is a new technology not certified by the government to be effective. That will prevent upstarts from getting into the business, so the already established companies are safe from competition from newcomers. The use of government to prevent new competition to established business has been going on for a long time.  Adam Smith wrote about it.

Once a bureaucracy is established it inevitably cooperates with the established businesses to prevent new entries that would be competition.  The cost of tests for any new drug — not just tests that it does not harm, but that it is “effective” — keeps Big Pharma safe from new competition.  People who see some technique as their holy hope must beg the bureaucrats to let them try it, but they are not often successful.

Exactly why the Constitution gives the Federal Government the right to forbid me from buying a drug is not clear.  The Volstead Act forbidding us from alcohol was declared unconstitutional, there being no grant of power to the federal government to prevent it, and it required the 18th Amendment to make federal prohibition possible.  It sure turned out well.  It was repealed.

There is no Constitutional grant of power for the FDA, but apparently, it can forbid not only narcotics and hemp, but competition to aspirin and for that matter snake oil, although which clause of the constitution gives that power to the feds is not clear.  Perhaps it is a penumbra of some emanation?

This was answered by stating the good intentions of the Congress in giving that authority, and references to Henry VIII and his attempts to ban medical fakes and their drugs.

Yes; but how does the Federal Government get the power to forbid me from buying snake oil if I want to?  Or some new drug product that the FDA doesn’t “know” to be effective, even though there is no evidence that it is harmful? It took decades before the FDA finally approved aspirin as a possible blood thinner. A Glendale dentist had noticed that patients who routinely took aspirin had fewer strokes than those who didn’t. It was amazing how much effort was put into keeping him from saying that at medical conventions. Now, of course, it’s accepted wisdom. I doubt it would be if he hadn’t been a persistent nuisance insisting that it seemed to work.  Of course there’s no big money in preventative use of aspirin.

I have nothing against the FDA having the power to insist on labeling accuracy, and even to require that the seller label a drug “Not Approved by the FDA. Take at your own risk. This could be useless.” Well, I sort of do because I find no grant of power giving the Feds any control over that sort of thing, but we’ve let them do it for so long that it’s well established; but after they insist that the seller tell you that the Government doesn’t think this will do you any good, and maybe it will kill you, why do they employ armed agents to prevent you from selling it when it is properly labeled  “The FDA thinks you ought to avoid this stuff”? Or stronger labels. “The FDA believes this is a scam, and it may kill you.  Don’t buy it.”

I know some desperate people with terminal problems who’d be willing to try all kinds of stuff. Probably none of it will do them any good. They can afford snake oil. Why is this the people’s business? I can understand the government not wanting to make snake oil an entitlement and have to pay for it. I don’t understand why they won’t let me buy it.

You can argue that making them inform you that’s they think it’s worthless is a good idea, but it’s still your business if you want it anyway.

It was pointed out that this power is part of the power to regulate Interstate Commerce, and of course that is the Court decision. Rather wordily and not very brilliantly I said

My question is, where did the federal government get the power to substitute its judgment for mine when it comes to questions of my health or my children’s? 

The obvious solution is to take that away.  I can understand requiring proper labeling (although the source of that authority is subject to debate). I can understand requiring the label to say “The FDA has not approved this. Beware.  But to say it can’t be sold at all because some say it is not effective is another story.  if a doctor I trust says that snake oil is good for me, and the government disagrees, why should the government be involved at all?  Of course it really has to be snake oil, derived from snakes, or it has to explain that it isn’t, it’s really just swamp water; but isn’t even that the province of the states?

At which point came an eloquent assertion of people’s rights to be protected from fraudsters and snake oil salesmen who drain away the resources of people who desperately need them.

To which I said:

Because some citizens are incompetent all citizens must be deprived of the power to make what government thinks is a bad decision.  Understood.  Alas, I cannot agree.

Hardly the most brilliant argument I have ever made, but there it is. I did get one chap to say he agreed with me, this being Liberalism vs. Libertarianism; not precisely what I was arguing. There followed a long discussion of Liberalism vs. Libertarianism, and a protest that this was not assertion of control over people, but protecting them from obvious harm.

Since I am neither Liberal nor Libertarian, I wouldn’t know.  I thought I was pointing out that protecting people from things they don’t want to be protected from looks a lot like control. Children need to be protected from pederasts. One of those protections is jailing people who have child pornography on their hard disks; even cartoons of child pornography. How it got there is of no concern; claiming you didn’t know it was there is no defense.

In a case forty years ago, a chap was suspected of embezzling from a bank; also with mail fraud; both federal crimes. There wasn’t enough evidence to get a search warrant, but the feds were morally certain that he was guilty and a search of his house would prove it.  A federal postal inspector mailed him, registered mail, some kiddie porn (printed; this is before the Internet). The chap had to sign for it. Now they had absolute proof that he had kiddie porn in his house, obtained a warrant from a friendly judge, searched his house, ignored the porn but found plenty of evidence of embezzling, and charged him.  I expect it would be easier now to download a video file to someone, and in these days of terabyte hard drives it would not be noticed until discovered by a search team…

Good way to protect people?

Yes, often people do need protecting, and law officers need a victory over very clever criminals every now and then. Government is a positive good, not merely necessary. No one wants to live in a Hobbesian society where life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Hobbes solved that problem: absolute monarchy. He protects you, you submit to him.  In 1648 the English decided that had gone too far. Then they found they needed the King after all, and brought his son back. In 1688 the decided they needed a king, but not that one, and came up with a new balance between King and Parliament. That experiment was still going on in 1776. The Convention of 1787 had all that in mind when they drafted the Constitution (sorry to repeat what used to be taught in 5th grade). It’s always a balance between government doing too much, and places where anarchy reigns and it does too little. There are always people who think we have too much government and those who think we have too little. We will hardly settle that here.

I was trying to point out that people with perfectly good motives for protecting others do end up controlling them for their own good, and sometimes the protected people resent the hell out of it.

There followed a long discussion of child pornography laws irrelevant to this discussion, as well as discussion of various food supplements not approved by the FDA which some people found helpful and some did not. There was other chatter on that subject. You are very likely sick of the subject, but there’s a point to this long exposition (other than a desire to give you something I wrote while neglecting you; I do know it’s not my best).

Much of that discourse was in response to some well-made arguments I regret I cannot quote either the assertion or my answer without skating closer to the rules than I care to go. At one point, I said:

Here in southern California we have either a severe cold or bit-worse-than-moderate-flu going around. Laid me low for a week, and I find that many friends have lost four or five weeks to it;.  One couple eventually developed pneumonia. I have found Alka-Seltzer Plus, sudafed, and lots of down time the only things that work, and I’m slowly climbing out of it, but it’s quite real. I credit the myriad pills I take daily with keeping it from being as severe with me as it was for some of my younger friends.

We come now to the close of this, and the point. There was a long and impassioned defense of the good intentions of the authorities, and the good work they do. I replied:

Surely there is a way to let people mind their own business that doesn’t involve sending SWAT teams to raid a business for selling things that aren’t harmful? Particularly if they are clearly labeled?  I’m of the opinion that you should be able to sell snake oil so long as it is properly labeled; indeed, I have no objection to a label that says “The US Government believes the claims made for this stuff are ridiculous and absurd, and a waste of your money”  — and that it contains what it says it is, namely actual snake oil. 

Jailing doctors for prescribing off label — there aren’t enough billion dollar tests of the effectiveness of this for a particular disorder that it might work on, but you can prescribe it for something else — seems to me a bit of a stretch and a power I can’t find in the Constitution.  Whether a state can do that I can’t say.

The urge for well meaning people to mind someone else’s business for their own good is fairly strong.

The states may have inherited the crown powers of Henry VIII, but the federal government got only those granted in the Constitution, as witness the failure of the Volstead Act until the passage of the Prohibition Amendment, whereupon the feds could protect people from drinking alcohol. A well meant act with side effects severe enough that the Amendment was later repealed.

John Adams said that in America we believe that each man is the best judge of his own interests; of course he was speaking of the nation as a whole, not of the states with their inheritance of crown powers which used those powers in quite different ways one from another.

It is always good to protect small children from profit seeking capitalists, but how does that apply to protecting Jim Baen and me from SAMe, which we had to have brought to us from Italy where it was sold on the open market but prohibited in the US?  Now of course it is open market here in the US, but for years it was confiscated at the border if detected.  Possibly a folly, but one I indulge in.

Good intentions are not always justification for protecting people from their follies — or what others perceive as follies. Like aspirin as a heart attack preventative.

At which point there was a plea from an officer I respect to stop this discussion; no reasons given. I was ready to do so, but it continued anyway, and after other exchanges I said:

But surely there is room for disagreement on the effectiveness of various vitamins and other food supplements?  Linus Pauling was probably wrong about the universal effectiveness of saturation bombing with Vitamin C, but perhaps stupid is the wrong word to apply to a Nobel Prize winner?  And it may be that it is effective on some and not others, but we do not yet know how to distinguish one from another, so we use “psychosomatic effect” to “explain” the actual data that suggests that some do indeed have dramatic cures while others do not?  

Jim Baen found in his search of the literature (mostly from overseas literature) that SAMe has a dramatic beneficial effect, at least on some people.  At the time it was very expensive in the United States because it was illegal; perhaps it was much to the benefit of those manufacturing it to have the United States government involved in keeping the price high?  But it was so popular in some parts of Europe that there was competition in selling it, so the price there was low.  For years, the US spent money preventing the importation of SAMe, and people like Jim Baen and me spent money acquiring it. Eventually the US restriction was dropped, and you can buy it on line at reasonable prices now.  No one ever asserted that it was harmful; only that it was not “effective”; yet a great many people, here and abroad, thought it was effective in many ways.  Perhaps we were fooling ourselves, and the placebo effect was triggered, and there was nothing more to it.  Perhaps, but what little continued research there is suggests otherwise.

The point being, what power in the Constitution gives the Federal government the authority to keep the price high?  Perhaps the states have inherited that power from the Crown, but the Constitution explicitly rejects the notion that the Federal Government (as opposed to the States) inherited any powers at all, and has none not explicitly granted in the Constitution of 1789 as amended. I can well imagine that the Feds can and perhaps should refuse to pay for anything not proven effective by the FDA itself, but that brings up entitlement in general and that is certainly not a subject for this discussion; but not paying for someone’s use of a disputed substance is not the same as having Customs officials seize and presumably destroy a product not shown to be harmful  and in fact widely used elsewhere on the grounds that the FDA has not seen the results of a tens of millions of dollars double blind study of its effectiveness, and Federal officials’ judgment is superior to that of individual citizens.

We went through all this in the California battle over compulsory use of helmets for motorcycle riders.  For years cyclists protested that they have the right not to wear a helmet.  Now they do not, because head injuries use a lot of medical resources, some of those — probably nearly all, now — are provided by public money, and helmet protection is a reasonable requirement.  That has been accepted by most motorcycle associations, reluctantly by some. But surely that argument is far more reasonable than one substituting a public official’s judgment for that of a citizen when it comes to the use of SAMe — or snake oil, for that matter.

The discussion is not unimportant; perhaps it should be transferred to another topic,

That was too much. A SFWA moderator, backed by the officer who had requested that the discussion halt, locked the conference, and it sits in frozen silence. The reason given was that it was too personal, and I was privately informed that there were complaints about me. Since I named no one at any time, I mildly protested that I was unaware of what was personal about it that would be personally offensive to professional writers voluntarily reading a topic no one could possibly feel required to read.

The answer I got was that these discussions upset some members, and that a SFWA forum was no place for political discussions at all. And that’s the point: we have come to this, that a professional writers’ association finds that we can no longer have discussions that include politics because some members (who voluntarily read the topic) find it upsetting, and toxic, presumably because they disagree with the opinions expressed. For the life of me I cannot tell you what professional science fiction writer would find anything I said there personally offensive. Disagree, yes, of course; many disagree; that is to be expected, and it is those the FDA will rally to support the proposition that the FDA should insist that generic prescription of Name Brand drugs whose patents have expired be forbidden until double blind tests of the generic drug’s effectiveness have proved its effectiveness.

I think health care costs can be drastically lowered by letting doctors have more room to try different remedies; obviously only with informed consent of the patient, but medical associations I would suppose will work to assure that; but apparently the entire discussion can’t be discussed in a science fiction professional organization because some members are upset over encountering opinions contrary to their own – and if it can’t be discussed there, where the devil can it be discussed?

I suppose another discussion of immigration enforcement is in order, but nothing will change physics: transporting ten million people to the borders will take time and many resources just to do; and the inevitable legal tangles will take more. Surely it’s best to start with the least desirable? In which case, do we have to let those who aren’t among the worst know they’re safe, at least for years? Or will that just make them bolder in protest rather than calming their fears? Perhaps a random process: undocumented immigrants arrested in a protest face a 5% chance of being deported? But that makes this a farce, and is not what we need.

A new government? Or no government

Dr. Pournelle, hope that you are now on top of the cold or whatever it is… seems to be an epidemic around Northwest Florida as well.
This comes from Sign of the Times (https://www.sott.net/article/345144-A-week-in-the-life-of-the-American-kleptocracy) I submit this without any ability whatsoever to vet or verify. The salient quote seems to me to be this:
“This begs the question: if the government is overstepping its authority, abusing its power, and disregarding the rule of law but no one seems to notice—and no one seems to care—does it matter if the government has become a tyrant?
Here’s my short answer: when government wrongdoing ceases to matter, America will have ceased to be.”
In this article our current form of government is represented as a “Kleptopcracy” meaning a rule by thieves and enforced by “techotyrany” (ie: CIA, NSA).
The examples quoted range far and wide but all seem to tie into our current political malaise and mistrust of government in general.
John Thomas

 

I am no anarchist, nor am I Liberal or Libertarian; and having been read out of the Conservative movement I feel no need to defend them. I do think there are elements of a ship that exists only to serve its crew in what we have at present. And Bunny Inspectors?

WikiLeaks and Umbrage

Dear Mr. Pournelle,
I’ve been following a useful series of articles in the (London) Times regarding Russian cyberwarfare. An article this Sunday caught my attention (http://www.thetimes.co.uk/past-six-days/2017-03-12/focus/yo-bro-im-totally-watching-you-zcxtckcq9) Here are a few brief quotes.
‘But perhaps the most significant element of the cache was the claim by WikiLeaks that the CIA’s “umbrage” division” had been “fabricating” Russian hacks against the West. …
‘One British intelligence source told The Sunday Times that this was the key “revelation” in the WikiLeaks dump, and would be used to discredit western-backed allegations about Russian cyber-attacks on Britain and the U.S.
‘The source added: “Winston Churchill famously once said: ‘In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.’
“In the Russian manual of disinformation, lies are so precious they should always be attended by a bodyguard of truth. Assange’s Russian masters have inserted a conspicuous lie in these documents, which are otherwise largely accurate.
“Wikileaks claims that the Americans have stolen Russian cyber-weapons are are now using them. Doubtless this line of defense will be used in Washington in the coming months by parties with an interest in muddying the waters.”
‘The party with the greatest interest in Washington in “muddying the waters” is Russia …’
And further down:
‘Michael Hayden, former CIA director, said “I’m now pretty close to the position that WikiLeaks is acting as an arm, as an agent, of the Russian Federation.”‘
I would use WikiLeaks as a source of information extremely cautiously; if at all.
Yours,
Allan E. Johnson

I distrust most intelligence sources; one of my jobs was once to sort out credible technological threats. There is a strong incentive for spies to find what they’re looking for. And of course an astonishing number of agents on the other side are turned by ours, leading to the obvious speculation…

Health Insurance

Dear Dr Pournelle,

So far I have resisted the temptation to comment on the Trump Presidency. But the following comments on Obamacare vs Trumpcare might be of interest.

The Irish healthcare system is hardly ideal, in fact it’s a shambles. Public healthcare (funded from general taxation) is great for certain things but not so good when there’s a shortage of hospital beds or specialists. Private healthcare, which is funded by individuals who can afford to pay the premium, effectively allows you to jump the queue and get a better level of care. We have several providers in Ireland.

While private health insurance is frequently paid for or subsidised by employers, it’s not tied to the job. So if I quit work or change jobs, I can contact the insurer and agree to continue my payments and thus not break my cover. I can switch providers or change plan with no break in cover. If I am starting cover (for the first time or after a break in cover) or if I increase my level of cover, then pre-existing conditions are excluded for a minimum of 6 months. So buying cover right after I find a nasty lump won’t work.

This isn’t all ideal. While healthcare in Ireland is typically 5x cheaper than the US, some specialised treatments and drugs are not available. And even the private system can have capacity issues. Premium costs are going steadily up. Public healthcare staff here move to other countries where working conditions are better and salaries higher.

I do not envy the legislators trying to sort out the system in the US. In Ireland there have been moves politically to eliminate the existing two-tiered system but so far nothing has come of it.

Best wishes,

Simon Woodworth.

I don’t envy them either. There must be ways to lower costs.

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

Chaos Manor View, Saturday, September 17, 2016

Revision and additions, Sunday, 18 September

 

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

James Burnham

 

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

 

Deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

 

Immigration without assimilation is invasion.

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

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

 

http://www.ljsilvers.com/tlap

 

http://talklikeapirate.com/wordpress/

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Global Elites Forsake Their Countrymen

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

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

By

Peggy Noonan

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

1797 COMMENTS

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

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

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

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

Guanabara Knocking

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

Porter / August 14, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

websites and video

Jerry,

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

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

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

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

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

—

Phil

 

Bezos in space

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

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

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

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

Then there is:

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

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

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

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

Unbelievable

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

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

—

Robert K. Kawaratani
瓦谷ロバート孝一

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

John Harlow

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

What choice but to cherrypick?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stephen

—

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

It may yet be.

Illegal Immigration

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

A Description of a Hillary Clinton Presidency

Dear Jerry,

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

Debunking more Darwinian myths

Dear Jerry:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

reluctance or their desire for greater sales.

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

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

Best regards,

–Harry M.

assimilation

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

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

Sunday,18 September

Noonan,Globalization, Detachment, Dehumanization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://arxiv.org/abs/1107.5728

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

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

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

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

Chaos Manor View, Monday, August 22, 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

 

Money will get you through times of no Hugos better than Hugos will get you through times of no money.

Jerry Pournelle

Just back from Kansas City, where I was nominated for a Hugo. Didn’t expect to win, and I didn’t, but I had a good time, as did everybody there. I got more exercise than if I’d stayed home. The WorldCon was in a Convention Center, and although I was at one of the closest hotels, it was still a half mile walk to and from the Convention Center. Then, in the Convention City, it was another half mile of walking from the Green Room to some of the panels, the ballrooms and big event halls were spread about over a wide area, and if I got away with fewer than three miles a day I’d be surprised. My son Frank gave me one of those gadgets that measure how far you’ve walked, but alas I didn’t pack it, although I did pack far more than I needed. Ginny Heinlein once told me the proper way to travel was with seven elephants, and always to be sure there were two bathrooms available.

The last time I was in Kansas City was 1976 for a WorldCon. Mr. Heinlein was Guest of Honor, and somehow I got into the act as his executive officer. Sarge Workman drove my son Alex out from California and served as security, everything went well, and I have some stories including Walter the Lobster but for another time. It’s too late tonight.

Had breakfast with Tom Doherty, who recalled 1976 vividly: he had just bought Ace Books, and when he came into the Mulebach Hotel where the convention was, the first person he saw was me, proclaiming “I’m the Chairman of the Grievance Committee, and I’m auditing your company’s books.” They certainly needed auditing. The previous owner had engaged in some odd practices that resulted in quite a bit of money being owed to the authors, and back while I was President of Science Fiction Writers of America I had invented the Grievance Committee (which consisted of me at the time). When Fred Pohl became President he asked if I’d stay on, which I foolishly did, for several years, until I caught Joe Haldeman in a merry mood and got him to accept the job, thus letting me out of it. Anyway, it became a race to see who could find what money was owed to whom. Tom wanted to beat me to it and pay before I could find any, while I wanted to find it first. I don’t recall who won, but it cleared up all the suspicions of the writers against ACE, and also helped SFWA’s reputation as good for authors. Saturday night I went to Tom’s big party which was so loud I told him I was going to flee for my life, and he came with me, letting his subordinates run the party. We walked back to our hotel together. 

I also had a strenuous book signing, lasting more than an hour, after which I had to go to a reception so there were still people standing in line when I left. I apologize, but there was nothing I could do about it. They should have scheduled it at an earlier hour, but that might have been difficult. I did have a lot of people to see. This was my first WorldCon in years, what with recovering from brain cancer – still all gone – and the stroke.

Met some new friends in the SFWA suite, saw a lot of old ones, and had a great time. Due to the layout of things – no really central hotel, the huge Convention Center a half mile from the nearest hotel, and no obvious place for it – the usual pro party in the main hotel bar didn’t happen and I never did see a lot of people I should have. But I had a great if somewhat exhausting time.  I also got to spend some time with Eric Kaplan, the Executive Producer of one of my favorite TV shows, The Big Bang Theory.  He lives half a block from me, but we had a great afternoon in Kansas City; we’re both usually too busy when at home.  He was glad to meet Larry and some other writers he reads but has never met. Made for a good afternoon.

One of my functions seems to be as an intellectual honeybee, introducing people who ought to know each other but don’t. That happened a lot in Kansas City.

More another time.

Bunny inspectors, meet shellfish monitors

This appears to be the last “news” story on the doomed website Gawker.com:

http://gawker.com/south-carolina-is-giving-body-cameras-to-shellfish-moni-1785566901

.              png

My old friend Peter Glaskowsky is one of those whom I managed to introduce to some people who ought to know him.

‘Whatever job you do, Cato wants seven billion others in domestic competition.’

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

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

Odd. Very odd. Then there’s

Lind: ‘And how exactly did we get caught up in this mess? By keeping troops in South Korea long after the Cold War ended, an event that removed all reason for their presence.’

<https://www.traditionalright.com/the-view-from-olympus-watch-korea/>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

We also kept troops in a lot of other places they didn’t need to be. We nearly went to war over Soviet Missiles in Cuba, but somehow we don’t understand that US missiles in Estonia worry the Russians. Odd, that.

This is when we NEED a space program.

http://www.universetoday.com/130276/earth-like-planet-around-proxima-centauri-discovered/

They’ve found what appears to be an Earth-like planet orbiting Proxima Centauri.

In the “Goldilocks” zone.

I don’t know whether the Hubble can be pointed precisely enough to image the planet, or whether it could get anything useful.

John

Hubble probably can’t but we have new ones coming up.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Jerry,

   This may be a contributing factor to the current cultural embracing of the far left by the education community.  I was having a discussion with an individual who was explaining to me how I was racist (and some other choice terms) simply because I am a white male conservative.  She made these statements before knowing any more about me, such as the fact that my wife (and hence my children) are native American, that I spent years in Africa putting systems in hospitals to help with the distribution of anti-retro viral drugs, have been involved in several programs through foundations and my church to help minority groups.  She then told me about a conference they were having discussing ‘The Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ and

Two excerpts from the Wikipedia discussion on the treatise and the Wiki discussion on it:

Dedicated to what is called “the oppressed” and based on his own experience helping Brazilian adults to read and write, Freire includes a detailed Marxist class analysis in his exploration of the relationship between what he calls “the colonizer” and “the colonized”.

Since the publication of the English edition in 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed has been widely adopted in America’s teacher-training programs. A 2003 study by David Steiner and Susan Rozen determined that Pedagogy of the Oppressed was frequently assigned at top education schools

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogy_of_the_Oppressed

 

 

 

Pedagogy of the Oppressed – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

en.wikipedia.org

Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Portuguese: Pedagogia do Oprimido), written by educator Paulo Freire, proposes a pedagogy with a new relationship between teacher, student …

And it’s getting late. This will have to do.

From Last Monday

 

Nice view. Obviously, I lean in your direction. Uncontrolled tech is potentially bad, leave most of this to the states and better yet local communities. They bay area for example. Read the constitution and follow it. If a section needs improvement, amend it. Don’t screw with it.

A practical example. Fluke meters for the USA are built here by hand with a life time warranty. They have a China plant in China that builds them for Chinese. I’ll take mine from the USA plant, built by Americans.

While they could be built by robots cheaper, I’ll take mine built by American hands. That way, people have jobs, and worth, and I don’t have to pay taxes to take care of them. Who knows, we might find people built is better than machine built.

A lot of the bay area wants a socialist utopia. Ok, let the bay area try it. Get rid of the cars, tax everyone at 50 to 90 percent and see what happens. It should be interesting. Most of the Chinese will run like hell, many of the whites already have. I may finally convince my wife to move to Texas or Florida where saner heads exists.

in about a hour, I take Katelin to high school and Angelin to junior high. What happened to my little girls?

—

Phil Tharp

There will always be a market for reliably built and improved only when improvements are needed durable goods.  Of course that’s not a growth industry and Capitalism puts growth ahead of good service, steady but not large profits, and social stability.  Its inevitable, and of course regulations make it necessary to grow or die by raising the cost of doing business and supporting regulators and compliance officers increasingly necessary.

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

Chaos Manor View, Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western Civilization as it commits suicide.

Under Capitalism, the rich become powerful. Under Socialism, the powerful become rich.

Under Socialism, government employees become powerful.

We’re reorganizing here. I’m going to spend at least two hours, with luck more, in the Monk’s Cell writing fiction. I’ve got my downstairs life organized well. Now for the fiction phase. This isn’t moving back into the upstairs offices with the Great Hall; that is still in the future. The problem with that part of the house is that while I have no trouble getting up there, getting down is tricky because of the twists in the stairway.

The Monk’s Cell is the large upstairs bedroom in the old part of the house. It does not connect with the Great Hall suite at all. It was Alex’s old room, inherited by the oldest son left in the house as the boys left, then became a sort of guest room. It has no telephone, and no books. It has a good console, and I set one of the first flat screen monitors up there – we still used large bottles, in those days – and a good keyboard, and brought to current laptop up there to work undisturbed by [phones and visitors. Got a lot of books done that way.

Came the stroke I couldn’t get up and down those stairs, so it got well cleaned out, and the ancient ThinkPad laptop slowly deteriorated. I never did have a high speed Internet cable going up there, and wi-fi was indifferent to slow, but that was fine – no distractions, but enough connectivity to save backups to other machines and to get to the Internet for the occasional research without any temptations. I don’t keep mail on that machine either. Or SFWA or any other Iternet distractions.

So now I need to replace the old ThinkPad, which worked quite well, and my first thought is to just get another one.

This morning I thought about it and sent this to my advisors:

The ThinkPad upstairs in Alex’s old room – the “Monk’s Cell” — is ancient and slow, and time for replacement.  I will as before have a large screen and a Logitech K360 wireless keyboard for my writing, and it will mostly be upstairs all its life.  I prefer a laptop up there because I can actually carry it downstairs if I have to, while getting a tower or desktop down would be a real pain.

But since I’ll be doing much of my fiction on it, the important thing is ease of use, and good wireless.  Since I have a rather powerful wireless network set up by Alex and Eric, a good built in and non-distracting laptop wireless should be fine; the ThinkPad was except that sometimes the ThinkPad and the Windows wireless software tended to get into conflict, and that wasted creative time.  Mostly what I want is fire and forget – when I go up there I don’t want to think about anything but what I’m working on.  The wireless is for research.

I’m having a problem getting the new Word whatever number that comes with Office 365 to accept my older custom dictionaries; it insists that it can only install dictionaries in some weird format whose name I cannot remember, but it doesn’t like mameluke.dic and the procedures Microsoft help gives me are as usual incomprehensible. That’s a secondary problem, but if anyone knows how to transform Word 2012 dictionaries or import and old dictionary into the new default, it would help.  I used to use a custom dictionary for each major work because there is no point in having the main dictionary know that Agzaral is a word, and things were slow and memory was expensive and you get the idea. Habits are hard to break and I had a habit of custom dictionaries, which Microsoft thinks is weird now.  At worst I’ll just manually put all the correct words in the main dictionary now since search is nearly instantaneous and dictionary memory is trivial. Memory used to cost money.

Anyway, should I just get a new ThinkPad or is there a better top end brand?  It will not be for games, should be reliable and trouble free, be able to connect to external devices such as the LASFS projector and con projectors in case I make presentations, and have good wireless. Much of the time it will simply sit upstairs with the lid closed waiting for me to come up for a couple of hours a day

For fiction.  I want it pretty soon, and given the importance reliability and lack of distracting quirks is FAR more important than cost. 

I realize the irony of this: that’s the sort of question everyone asked ME in the Byte era, and I was probably the best person to ask it of. Alas, those days are gone, but I still get good advice from my hard working advisors, but I don’t get to all the shows and have hands on ex[perience with all the new equipment any more.

One suggestion was

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834232777&ignorebbr=1&cm_re=PPSSXYRSOEBIJU-_-34-232-777-_-Product

which looks pretty good, only I think I would like the 15 “ one. I see that Amazon (and surely many other vendors) offers a docking station for it. And I hjave at least one spare monitor I can put up there: the one at present is from the early 90’s, quite good at the time but a bit small and far too low resolution now. Of course the best doesn’t cost much now. Things have got marvelously inexpensive lately.

There will be more later today, but that’s the project for the week as I move into high gear to get my writing projects done. My computer project is to set up a good writing station for stroke victims who have to do two finger typing and stare at the keyboard. I’ve found a few tricks for adjusting Word to my needs but if a Word expert is reading this. I’d sure like a lesson on importing old dictionaries. It would save me a bit of time. I also think the Word 2010 procedure for adding to the autocorrect table was much better than the one at present; it used to be that right-clicking a red-wavy-underlined word produced a menu of choices, one of which was to add that word and its correction to autocorrect. You need to be careful when the typo could have been any of several words, but if you got a unique suggestion and that was what you meant, it was simple to add it to autocorrect so that you would never see that typo again. For instance, in the last sentence I missed a space so that I typed “typoagain”. The spelling program offered to correct it to typo again, which I let it do; but with Word 2010 I could have, with one click, added that to autocorrect. I could give many other examples.

Alex will be over shortly and we’ll go to dinner. I’ll post this now, more later.

 

 

 

Chaos Manor View, Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western Civilization as it commits suicide.

Under Capitalism, the rich become powerful. Under Socialism, the powerful become rich.

Under Socialism, government employees become powerful.

We’re reorganizing here. I’m going to spend at least two hours, with luck more, in the Monk’s Cell writing fiction. I’ve got my downstairs life organized well. Now for the fiction phase. This isn’t moving back into the upstairs offices with the Great Hall; that is still in the future. The problem with that part of the house is that while I have no trpouble getting up there, getting down is tricky because of the twists in the stairway.

The Monk’s Cell is the large upstairs bedroom in the old part of the house. It does not connect with the Great Hall suite at all. It was Alex’s old room, inherited by the oldest son left in the house as the boys left, then became a sort of guest room. It has no telephone, and no books. It has a good console, and I set one of the first flat screen monitors up there – we still used large bottles, in those days – and a good keyboard, and brought to current laptop up there to work undisturbed by [phones and visitors. Got a lot of books done that way.

Came the stroke I couldn’t get up and down those stairs, so it got well cleaned out, and the ancient ThinkPad laptop slowly deteriorated. I never did have a high speed Internet cable going up there, and wi-fi was indifferent to slow, but that was fine – no distractions, but enough connectivity to save backups to other machines and to get to the Internet for the occasional research without any temptations. I don’t keep mail on that machine either. Or SFWA or any other Iternet distractions.

So now I need to replace the old ThinkPad, which worked quite well, and my first thought is to just get another one.

This morning I thought about it and sent this to my advisors:

The ThinkPad upstairs in Alex’s old room – the “Monk’s Cell” — is ancient and slow, and time for replacement.  I will as before have a large screen and a Logitech K360 wireless keyboard for my writing, and it will mostly be upstairs all its life.  I prefer a laptop up there because I can actually carry it downstairs if I have to, while getting a tower or desktop down would be a real pain.

But since I’ll be doing much of my fiction on it, the important thing is ease of use, and good wireless.  Since I have a rather powerful wireless network set up by Alex and Eric, a good built in and non-distracting laptop wireless should be fine; the ThinkPad was except that sometimes the ThinkPad and the Windows wireless software tended to get into conflict, and that wasted creative time.  Mostly what I want is fire and forget – when I go up there I don’t want to think about anything but what I’m working on.  The wireless is for research.

I’m having a problem getting the new Word whatever number that comes with Office 365 to accept my older custom dictionaries; it insists that it can only install dictionaries in some weird format whose name I cannot remember, but it doesn’t like mameluke.dic and the procedures Microsoft help gives me are as usual incomprehensible. That’s a secondary problem, but if anyone knows how to transform Word 2012 dictionaries or import and old dictionary into the new default, it would help.  I used to use a custom dictionary for each major work because there is no point in having the main dictionary know that Agzaral is a word, and things were slow and memory was expensive and you get the idea. Habits are hard to break and I had a habit of custom dictionaries, which Microsoft thinks is weird now.  At worst I’ll just manually put all the correct words in the main dictionary now since search is nearly instantaneous and dictionary memory is trivial. Memory used to cost money.

Anyway, should I just get a new ThinkPad or is there a better top end brand?  It will not be for games, should be reliable and trouble free, be able to connect to external devices such as the LASFS projector and con projectors in case I make presentations, and have good wireless. Much of the time it will simply sit upstairs with the lid closed waiting for me to come up for a couple of hours a day

For fiction.  I want it pretty soon, and given the importance reliability and lack of distracting quirks is FAR more important than cost. 

I realize the irony of this: that’s the sort of question everyone asked ME in the Byte era, and I was probably the best person to ask it of. Alas, those days are gone, but I still get good advice from myh hard working advisors, but I don’t get to all the shows and have hands on ex[perience with all the new equipment any more.

One suggestion was

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834232777&ignorebbr=1&cm_re=PPSSXYRSOEBIJU-_-34-232-777-_-Product

which looks pretty good, only I think I would like the 15 “ one. I see that Amazon (and surely many other vendors) offers a docking station for it. And I hjave at least one spare monitor I can put up there: the one at present is from the early 90’s, quite good at the time but a bit small and far too low resolution now. Of course the best doesn’t cost much now. Things have got marvelously inexpensaive lately.

There will be more later today, but that’s the project for the week as I move into high gear to get my writing projects done. My computer project is to set up a good writing station for stroke victims who have to do two finger typing and stare at the keyboard. I’ve found a few tricks for adjusting Word to my needs but if a Word expert is reading this. I’d sure like a lesson on importing old dictionaries. It would save me a bit of time. I also think the Word 2010 procedure for adding to the autocorrect table was much better than the one at present; it used to be that right-clicking a red-wavy-underlined word produced a menu of chjoices, one of which was to add that word and its correction to autocorrect. You need to be careful when the typo could have been any of several words, but if you got a unique suggestion and that was what you meant, it was simple to add it to autocorrect so that you would never see that typo again. For instance, in the last sentence I missed a space so that I typed “typoagain”. The spelling program offered to correct it to typo again, which I let it do; but with Word 2010 I could have, with one click, added that to autocorrect. I could give many other examples.

Alex will be over shortly and we’ll go to dinner. I’ll post this now, more later.

Papal Statements Shocked Me

I’m not sure what to say; I’m not sure if you saw this but I never thought I’d see such statements associated with a Pope — even

privately:

<.>

Today, I don’t think that there is a fear of Islam as such but of ISIS and its war of conquest, which is partly drawn from Islam. It is true that the idea of conquest is inherent in the soul of Islam. However, it is also possible to interpret the objective in Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus sends his disciples to all nations, in terms of the same idea of conquest.

</>

http://www.la-croix.com/Religion/Pape/INTERVIEW-Pope-Francis-2016-05-17-1200760633

Maybe his Bible differs from mine, but I never read anything about beheading people who don’t convert to my religion, enslaving women, and so forth. I don’t recall any instructions from Jesus about this nor do I recall any pastors saying anything about any of this. Did I miss something?

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Popes are infallible only on formal matters of faith and doctrine, not on secular matters.  Like many, His Holiness has a good heart and proper instincts, but his experience is limited.

 

“We’re just trying to slow things down. It’s all going to be ruins eventually. But people love ruins.”

<http://nautil.us/issue/36/aging/the-gravekeepers-paradox>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

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