Monday, December 12, 2016

John Glenn must surely have wondered, as all the astronauts weathered into geezers, how a great nation grew so impoverished in spirit.

Our heroes are old and stooped and wizened, but they are the only giants we have. Today, when we talk about Americans boldly going where no man has gone before, we mean the ladies’ bathroom. Progress.

Mark Steyn

If Republicans want to force through massive tax cuts, we will fight them tooth and nail.

Senator Elizabeth Warren

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

James Burnham

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

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

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

Immigration without assimilation is invasion.

The squabble over who hacked who, and did the Russians try to influence our elections, and who’s going to investigate who seems to be boiling, but there’s very little there. Actually, there’s a lot to worry about, but none of the serious stuff is being talked about at all.

First, there’s the question of who, precisely, is this “Intelligence Community” which may or may not have a consensus about the Russians and their activities and intentions. As far as I know, that “community” doesn’t exist; it certainly didn’t exist back in the days when I was an intelligence consumer. The Army had its intelligence people, the State Department had some, the Navy had its share, and while the Air Forces came late to the game, they managed to come up with Intelligence people as well. The three Service Intelligence organizations were sort of supervised by the Defense Intelligence Agency, headed by a three-star General – the late General Dan Graham was once that general – who reports directly to the Secretary of Defense, and sometimes to the President. It has both humint (spies) and sigint (electronic intercepts) and usually acts as if it doesn’t want anyone to know it exists.

DIA was supposed to work with but not exactly be subordinate to the Central Intelligence Agency, which grew out of the Office of Strategic Services formed during World War II to be a civilian military intelligence and black ops organization. Because it had responsibility for behind the lines resistance people, it learned to work through the case officer/ informant/client/ model, and still does that. In theory it has no jurisdiction over the Caribbean, which Hoover insisted belonged to the FBI along with the United States and all its Territories, but that distinction has been fading. The CIA was supposed to be the primary source of Intelligence for the President, and to have the last word on what the President was told, but it couldn’t always enforce that; the Director of Central Intelligence does not have the authority to forbid anyone from meeting the President, either alone or in an invited group; although some CIA heads are rumored to have tried.

Then there was the NSA, sometimes known as “No Such Agency”, which was formed by Harry Truman from the old Army/Navy codebreaking group of the Army Signal Corps that existed long before either DOD, DIA, or CIA were dreamed of. By law it deals only in Sigint, and does not have any case officers or black ops operatives despite popular TV shows portraying both.

There are others, but this should be enough to make it questionable just how such a diverse group of rivals can be called a community. The Director of Central Intelligence was supposed to calm their squabbles and produce a National Intelligence Estimate, but after the 9/11 disaster, something had to be done.

The something was the creation of the Director of National Intelligence who by law was the head of the Intelligence Community. By law he cannot be either the Director of Central Intelligence – who still runs the CIA but now reports to the DNI – or the DIA or any other intelligence organization. He shares this power with a deputy.

It gets more complex, but that, by law, is the way the “Intelligence Community” comes into being, and the DNI, who has (at least in theory) no spies or hackers or case officers or black ops agents under his direct control is supposed to keep the Community in line and deliver the real poop to the President. Those of you who wonder how anyone possessed of his senses thought that adding another layer at the top could form a community out of a group of rival organizations with radically different origins are permitted to do so. I quote from Wikipedia

“Critics say compromises during the bill’s crafting led to the establishment of a DNI whose powers are too weak to adequately lead, manage and improve the performance of the US Intelligence Community.^[6] In particular, the law left the United States Department of Defense in charge of the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). (The limited DNI role in leading the US Intelligence Community is discussed on the Intelligence Community page.)”

One reason for all the complexity comes from the Cold War days: the predecessor of the National Security Agency broke some of the Soviet codes used by Soviet agents in the United States and shared that data with the FBI. Hoover knew that many of the old OSS and State Department Intelligence operatives were communist sympathizers, and did not tell anyone at State or the OSS (which was becoming the CIA) lest the Soviets suspect we were reading their spy reports (which identified some of the Soviet agents in the US.) The knowledge that the old code breakers had actually (partially) broken some of the Soviet unbreakable codes was not made public until the 60’s, and Eisenhower was probably the first President to know about it; Truman was explicitly not told because the Truman White House was thought to be a leaky operation, and any hint that Venona existed would end its usefulness. That’s another and complex story. But it helps explain the mutual distrusts within the Intelligence Community.

We can also add the relatively recent Department of Homeland Security which is trusted by almost none of the traditional intelligence workers, some of whom believe it to be outright incompetent.

Finally, we add that over eight years nearly all the senior people within the “Intelligence Community” have been appointed by the current President, and many of the career people within those agencies do not respect their appointed bosses.

With that background, which is known to anyone who cares to look, we can now look at the claim that the Russians have hacked various electronic sources within the United States. The question is absurd. Of course the Russians listen to any electronic source they can find, as to the Brits, the French, the Swiss, the Chinese, the Nigerians, the Danes, various Arabs, the Israelis, and nearly everyone else including Boy Scout Troops. Some are more successful than others. I can’t comment on the security of government communications between government servers which are said to use security measures comparable to those used by banks to transfer huge sums of money; I can comment on private servers used by government officials for various reasons mostly of convenience – really secure systems are cumbersome – and which are routinely hacked – listened to – by teenage pranksters who buy a script for a few bucks on the dark net and go fishing.

I don’t know personally what scripts were available for the server that sat in the Clinton family home basement; but I am told that several were for sale at various prices; so I would be astonished if there were anyone who seriously wanted to know about the Secretary of State’s emails was denied that knowledge; and from my acquaintance with various members of subsets of the Intelligence Community I’m pretty sure that that server was examined by experts with malicious intents. Certainly anyone in the KGB or GRU who worked for me would have a junior officer whose job was the scan the printouts daily once the first classified document showed up.

One tenet of the intelligence game – at least when I was involved – is that you can rarely get decent intelligence of intentions, so you have to gather everything you can about capabilities, which is the basis of all threat analysis: while intelligence would like to know what you want to do to me, it first needs to know what you can do to me. Of course each of the various rival groups within the nonexistent intelligence community has its own notion about what are the most important threats.

And you don’t have infinite resources. You allocate what you have to do you the most good. Now we can be pretty sure that the Clinton basement server was hacked, after which the hard drive was destroyed, preventing even NSA from discovering just who had got into it; despite the TV wizards at NCIS, shamming the hard drive with a hammer pretty well makes it impossible to recover much from it. In a TV script there would be one little scrap that you can build a plot from, but in actuality it isn’t very likely.

Signals from one server to another san often be recorded as they go by. With enough effort some of that can be read. Is that hacking? The Russian Intelligence Community is itself divided, between the successors of the State Security Committee (KGB) and the military intelligence organization (GRU). Both still exist but I think under different names; the KGB was successor to the ministry if the Interior, and went by MVD, NKVD, and a other names; there was also a party intelligence agency under the Soviets; I believe its assets were mostly absorbed by the KGB, which itself divided into an internal and an external agency, like the British MI 5 and MI5. Of course there are the remains of the old spy nets in the US and Canada; they are officially disbanded, and you can believe as much of that as you want to.

What they don’t have is infinite resources. They have enough to go after the low hanging fruit like a private server used by the Secretary of State, but hacking the Democratic National Committee with a goal of influencing an American election?

Hillary would like an explanation of the disaster that befell the Democrats in 1916 – one other than her candidacy. She hinted at stolen elections in key states, since she won the popular vote. Mr. Trump said a few words about investigating illegal alien voting in Democratic strongholds, and that talk died fast. Then came

Russian Hackers Acted to Aid Trump in Election, U.S. Says

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/us/obama-russia-election-hack.html

From the United States newspaper of record.

WASHINGTON — American intelligence agencies have concluded with “high confidence” that Russia acted covertly in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances and promote Donald J. Trump, according to senior administration officials.

They based that conclusion, in part, on another finding — which they say was also reached with high confidence — that the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks.

In the months before the election, it was largely documents from Democratic Party systems that were leaked to the public. Intelligence agencies have concluded that the Russians gave the Democrats’ documents to WikiLeaks.

Republicans have a different explanation for why no documents from their networks were ever released. Over the past several months, officials from the Republican committee have consistently said that their networks were not compromised, asserting that only the accounts of individual Republicans were attacked. On Friday, a senior committee official said he had no comment.[snip]

Of course it is possible that there were no Republican documents worth publishing on the RNC servers? Maybe there were no Republican Congressmen whose wives were senior Trump advisors sending out pictures of their private parts to underage girls? The Director of the FBI concluded that Hillary had put classified information on her basement server – i.e. published to anyone who seriously wanted it – but since she acted without malice it wasn’t really a crime. Then Weiner wagged his photographs, and hacked documents were in the news again, and the head of the FBI – of that part of the Intelligence Community – said he needed another look. I have no idea of why; perhaps Weiner’s wagging had nothing to do with it. Then he decided she wasn’t to be prosecuted after all, but it was too late. Now she lost Pennsylvania. And it was all the Russians’ fault.

Meanwhile, the recounts demanded either were not conducted or were slightly in favor of Trump, but CNN reported

“[snip] While there is no evidence of large-scale voting machine hacking, U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia targeted Clinton in a series of cyber attacks on Democratic Party groups. Trump has questioned those reports.[snip]”

But just who are these US Intelligence agencies? The New York Times says it’s the US Intelligence Community.

U.S. Says Russia Directed Hacks to Influence Elections

The Obama administration on Friday formally accused the Russian government of stealing and disclosing emails from the Democratic National Committee and a range of other institutions and prominent individuals, immediately raising the issue of whether President Obama would seek sanctions or other retaliation.

In a statement from the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., and the Department of Homeland Security, the government said the leaked emails that have appeared on a variety of websites “are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/politics/us-formally-accuses-russia-of-stealing-dnc-emails.html

Since by law the Director of National Intelligence speaks for the “Intelligence community” the Times is correct in saying this is the opinion of the “Intelligence Community” and the career operatives have no right to say different.

“[snip] The official accusation against Russia comes after anonymous American intelligence officials told The New York Times in July that they had “high confidence” that the Russian government was behind the hack of the D.N.C., which led to the resignation of Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Florida Democrat, as committee chairwoman, amid evidence that the committee was favoring Mrs. Clinton over her competitor for the party nomination, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.[snip]”

Mr. Obama, we are told by the Times, announces this now, because to say it later might be interpreted as political.

Mr. Trump was elected to drain the swamp. Does anyone wonder that he is appointing experienced managers without much political experience to head agencies that seem to be very much in need of attention and who complain of inexperienced managers?

Phillip is in from Washington for a visit, and it is bed time.

Fake News

Remember CIA wasn’t onboard with the other 16 agencies just before the election.

Look who’s pushing the Russian narrative with no evidence and look what news organizations support the operation and witness the effectiveness:

@thehill: Electors demand intelligence briefing on Russian interference before Electoral College vote http://hill.cm/PFwgx6w https://twitter.com/thehill/status/808367846954831872/photo/1

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Subject: CIA Fake News BS

Why is CIA allegedly — and I say allegedly because “the news” tells me so — saying Russia hacked the US election with no evidence?

If CIA is doing this, CIA is wrong for one of two reasons: CIA is wrong because they know — based on their history e.g. Church Hearings, MKULTRA — they cannot say anything and expect to be believed without evidence. Other examples exist to support my argument of poor audience analysis, public speaking skills, and presentation skills. Or CIA is wrong because they are lying.

But, let’s suppose CIA actually said this and it’s not just some nonsense fake news narrative led by the liar Brian Williams [the irony] and the corporate media, desperate to maintain market share and job security. And, let’s suppose CIA is correct in saying this. If all true:

The Obama Administration brought us Operation Gunwalker, Snowden as “the hacker”, ISIS as the “JV team, the six month intermission to develop “an ISIS strategy”, and every other failure we’ve commented on for the last eight years failed again. According to the Obama narrative, this administration allowed Russia to influence an election and failed to protect America — again. In fact, we have accusations the Department of Homeland Security tried to hack an election site, but nothing about Russia except from this administration and “the news”. So, Russia felt this administration and it’s party were failing so badly that even Russia didn’t want them in power, is that the narrative? It’s either that or this administration and it’s media shills are lying.

Let us hope CIA are incompetent and POTUS failed. After all, despair is a sin and the beat will continue until everything dies…. And people wonder why Trump got elected; it was a desperate move by a desperate people if you ask me..

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Among the political appointees to the various and sundry intelligence agencies I suspect you can find any anonymous opinion you like. Only one person by law may speak for the intelligence Community, but since that community does not really exist…

Maureen Dowd
Did Dowd really write this? It seems incomprehensible, but it shows that sometimes even liberals can be embarrassed.
Bob

Maureen Dowd
Election Therapy From My Basket of Deplorables
The election was a complete repudiation of Barack Obama: his fantasy world of political correctness, the politicization of the Justice Department and the I.R.S., an out-of-control E.P.A., his neutering of the military, his nonsupport of the police and his fixation on things like transgender bathrooms. Since he became president, his party has lost 63 House seats, 10 Senate seats and 14 governorships.
The country had signaled strongly in the last two midterms that they were not happy. The Dems’ answer was to give them more of the same from a person they did not like or trust.
Preaching — and pandering — with a message of inclusion, the Democrats have instead become a party where incivility and bad manners are taken for granted, rudeness is routine, religion is mocked and there is absolutely no respect for a differing opinion. This did not go down well in the Midwest, where Trump flipped three blue states and 44 electoral votes.
The rudeness reached its peak when Vice President-elect Mike Pence was booed by attendees of “Hamilton” and then pompously lectured by the cast. This may play well with the New York theater crowd but is considered boorish and unacceptable by those of us taught to respect the office of the president and vice president, if not the occupants.
Here is a short primer for the young protesters. If your preferred candidate loses, there is no need for mass hysteria, canceled midterms, safe spaces, crying rooms or group primal screams. You might understand this better if you had not received participation trophies, undeserved grades to protect your feelings or even if you had a proper understanding of civics. The Democrats are now crying that Hillary had more popular votes. That can be her participation trophy.
If any of my sons had told me they were too distraught over a national election to take an exam, I would have brought them home the next day, fearful of the instruction they were receiving. Not one of the top 50 colleges mandate one semester of Western Civilization. Maybe they should rethink that.
Mr. Trump received over 62 million votes, not all of them cast by homophobes, Islamaphobes, racists, sexists, misogynists or any other “ists.” I would caution Trump deniers that all of the crying and whining is not good preparation for the coming storm. The liberal media, both print and electronic, has lost all credibility. I am reasonably sure that none of the mainstream print media had stories prepared for a Trump victory. I watched the networks and cable stations in their midnight meltdown — embodied by Rachel Maddow explaining to viewers that they were not having a “terrible, terrible dream” and that they had not died and “gone to hell.”
The media’s criticism of Trump’s high-level picks as “not diverse enough” or “too white and male” — a day before he named two women and offered a cabinet position to an African-American — magnified this fact.
Here is a final word to my Democratic friends. The election is over. There will not be a do-over. So let me bid farewell to Al Sharpton, Ben Rhodes and the Clintons. Note to Cher, Barbra, Amy Schumer and Lena Dunham: Your plane is waiting. And to Jon Stewart, who talked about moving to another planet: Your spaceship is waiting. To Bruce Springsteen, Jay Z, Beyoncé and Katy Perry, thanks for the free concerts. And finally, to all the foreign countries that contributed to the Clinton Foundation, there will not be a payoff or a rebate.
As Eddie Murphy so eloquently stated in the movie “48 Hrs.”: “There’s a new sheriff in town.” And he is going to be here for 1,461 days. Merry Christmas.

Well, Snopes says no: http://www.snopes.com/maureen-dowd-election-therapy/

The original column is http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/26/opinion/sunday/election-therapy-from-my-basket-of-deplorables.html and Ms. Dowd has not changed her opinions much.

Trump could not give any tax breaks to Carrier, not now, not after he is inaugurated. The only taxes he might influence with more than the “bully pulpit” would be federal income or payroll taxes, and that not without Congress and IRS approval. I suspect the tax breaks were from state and local taxes, which the VP-elect could influence, since he is still governor of that state. State and local tax breaks are common when trying to lure companies into a state; why not when trying to keep one already there. 

Not likely, I hope, that a “Bury My Heart at Lake Oahe” disgrace takes place. 

Pipelines in the states… 

Charles Brumbelow

McCain, Graham join Schumer in accusations of Russian hacking

http://www.gopusa.com/?p=18216?omhide=true

WASHINGTON — A bipartisan group of lawmakers is pushing back against President-elect Donald Trump’s dismissal of a CIA assessment that Russian hackers tried to tilt the election in his favor, setting up a potential battle between Trump and Congress.

“I think they’re probably popping champagne bottles at the Kremlin over the tension between the incoming executive branch and the Congress,” said Steven Pifer, a senior fellow in the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at the Brookings Institution.

Related Story: Obama mocked Romney over Russia, but now he blames Russia for Trump

Yesterday, U.S. Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Jack Reed (D-R.I.) and incoming Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) called for congressional investigations, saying in a statement that “interference in our election should alarm every American.”

“I think it’s ridiculous,” Trump told Fox News’ Chris Wallace of the CIA’s conclusion, instead blaming Democrats for “putting it out because they suffered one of the greatest defeats in the history of politics in this country.”

“I think it’s just another excuse. I don’t believe it.”

Related Story: Divisions between CIA, FBI surface in debate over Russian motives in election hacks

The CIA has accused Russian hackers of giving embarrassing Clinton campaign emails to WikiLeaks in an effort to sway the election. A statement from Trump’s transition team dismissed intelligence officials as “the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,” an assertion Pifer said is misinformed.

“The intelligence community has tightened its standard since then,” Pifer said.

Asked about Trump’s dismissals in an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” McCain said: “The facts are there about Russian behavior, and Russian, not just hacking into the United States in the 2016 election campaign, but throughout the world.

McCain said he will push for the formation of a select committee to probe the hacking.

Trump blamed Democrats for pushing the narrative of Russian involvement, and said the intelligence officials he’ll appoint would be better than those laying the blame on Russians.

Brian Katulis, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress specializing in national security strategy, said that assertion demonstrates “an ignorance of political intelligence organizations which should be concerning.”

“The number of political appointees in intelligence agencies is relatively small,” Katulis said.

Trump also dismissed criticism of his consideration of Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson for the post of secretary of state, given his Russian business ties.

“To me, a great advantage is he knows many of the players. And he knows them well. He does massive deals in Russia,” Trump said, adding that Tillerson is under consideration along with Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

 

And Mr. Trump continues to consider his cabinet.

Napolitano: NSA hacked Clinton emails after revelation of secrets

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TZWkjQn5oo

Take with whatever size grain of salt you prefer.

Subj: Fwd: OBAMA AT THE BAT

This really IS good.

OBAMA AT THE BAT – REALLY CLEVER

SOMEONE HAS SPENT A LOT OF TIME ON THIS…Turn on the speakers!

http://www.angelfire.com/ak2/intelligencerreport/obama_at_bat.html

Twenty years ago, if I felt like this, I’d go to my Dr.  Now, I consider it a “good day”.

 

It amused me. 

Free trade reducto redux 

Dr Pournelle 

RE: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/modern-times/

Jim’s observations on free trade spurred a memory. 

Roman merchants encountered trade problems with foreigners. Specifically, 1) whose law applied to whom and 2) how were contracts enforced? Were goods exchanged for other goods or for an agreeable coin, the deal was done in an instant, and the need for law faded to insignificance. But if the transaction required future performance, how could a Roman bind a Syrian by oaths that held no meaning for the Syrian? 

The Roman solution was religion. If the Syrian’s religion would outlaw him if he broke an oath, then the Roman could contract with him. Such a religion — one that supported outlawry — was call a good faith, bona fides. 

And that’s the origin of the term in contract law. 

Live long and prosper 

h lynn keith

peek into the Trump Transition

people at the DOE were angry about some questions the transition team asked, so they leaked the questions and they got published
a transcription (+ commentary) of the questions is at https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/12/10/the-doe-vs-ugly-reality/
If all of the agencies are getting similar questions, things seem poised for some rather significant shake-ups under the new leadership.
David Lang

When fighting the alligators it is sometimes difficult to remember that the mission was draining the swamp…

AAAA batteries

There are now lithium 9v batteries. I don’t know how much better they are for longevity, but they’re marketed as being for hard-to-reach applications.
I once had a secondhand laptop whose battery had evidently died and was too costly to buy another… so some clever previous owner had replaced the battery’s original innards with a couple dozen neatly soldered-in rechargeable AA batteries. Worked fine!

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

Saturday, December 10, 2016

John Glenn must surely have wondered, as all the astronauts weathered into geezers, how a great nation grew so impoverished in spirit.

Our heroes are old and stooped and wizened, but they are the only giants we have. Today, when we talk about Americans boldly going where no man has gone before, we mean the ladies’ bathroom. Progress.

Mark Steyn

It’s always something. Yesterday at 12:41 PM I stopped getting mail, except that if I sent text messages to myself they would eventually arrive in my mailbox. Messages sent to others got out, some of them, but replies did not come back to me. A check with my SPAM folders revealed that nothing was coming in.

Meanwhile other interruptions continued. I did manage to get in a walk, and that turned out well as I hobbled with my walker down a few blocks, and discovered I was out at the time when the neighbors turned out en masse to walk their kids home from school. When I bought this house in 1968, Studio City was a village, and a 1928 house was not very expensive. It did have the advantage of being near a reasonably good school, but even so, it was not considered an upper middle class district; decidedly not. The postman lived down the street, and my next-door neighbors kept a hair salon cum plant shop, and struggled to maintain their house repairs. A former movie star lived in the house up the hill across the street, but the flats weren’t thought all that fashionable.

Then they started a massive program to bus in kids from downtown districts (the incoming busses always had more kids than they carried away in the afternoons. My kids went to Catholic schools a mile or so away, and the area was safe enough for those old enough to bicycle.

Came Lucifer’s Hammer and we built a swimming pool, which served us well. But over time bussing went out of fashion – why anyone supposed that spending two or more hours a day on a school bus so they could sit next to Studio City kids in grade school would improve the bussed kids’ education is not comprehensible to me – and the local school kept improving while most of the other schools in the monstrous bureaucracy that calls itself the LA Unified School District got intolerably worse, and Studio City became a place with a rare good school that didn’t cost an arm and a leg. I didn’t notice because I made enough money to afford St. Francis elementary and Notre Dame high school for my four boys, but I did see there were a lot more kids around than there were when we moved in.

Anyway, on my walk I saw an amazing number of well dressed – some expensively so – young women in very good physical condition, all with good manners and very polite to the old geezer with his walker. Since this was about 1400 and a bit later I presumed there must be a lot of stay at home moms here; they were far too well dressed and groomed for any large part of that horde to be nannies (although there were some obvious nannies), which says something about the times.

When I was growing up, women’s liberation meant not having to work outside the home – in the Depression the only work many could find was not enough to support a family and the wife had to work as well, and during World War II defense jobs opened up for women; but many wanted to go back home and be mothers. Times have changed now, but I note that Studio City has many young women with children in school who can show up, well dressed and well groomed, at two PM to walk their children home when they get out at 2:30. They looked happy with that.

Of course, this being Studio City, I know that some of them are actresses and models, looking for parts and some with parts – I could recognize one or two, and the girl next door is a regular character in one of Tim Allen’s sitcoms, Last Man Standing. Of course Amanda has no kids – well, on the show she does, she’s the daughter with a son, but in real life she isn’t married. I suppose some might be script writers who work at home, but there were few to no men. And models, possibly just back from a shoot, or hoping to be called to one. In any event it was a pleasant experience, to go for a walk and see a fashion show…

Kirk Douglas Turns 100

https://twitter.com/search?q=Kirk+Douglas+turns+100&ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Esearch

B-

And by accident a copy of his autobiography fell into my hands just the other day and I read some of the early chapters before putting it down, I can’t remember where. Not a bad read, actually.

https://www.amazon.com/Kirk-Douglas-Ragmans-Son-Autobiography/dp/B000HF8YFQ?tag=chaosmanor-20

US Regulations Overseas

Jerry
Regarding the impact of US regulations in other countries, I was once many years ago on a consulting team sent to a Swedish manufacturing plant in a town remote enough that on the road north of town was a sign reading “Santa Claus, this way.” The reason was that FDA auditors had visited their plant and found violations, such as assembly operators using hand-written notes for instructions rather that properly reviewed and approved company Work Instructions. The FDA auditors had actually stripped the hand-written instructions from the walls and other places where they were taped — whereupon the workforce was unable to assemble the devices at all. We were recommended to help them put together a proper manual of instructions, a task at which we succeeded. The point is that even then, the long arm of US regulatory agencies could reach up to Santa Claus’ doorstep. If a medical device was exported to the USA, its manufacture was subject to spot audits from the FDA.
I also learned that when the German engineers met with the Swedish manufacturing people, they had to use English because they did not speak each other’s language.
Mike Flynn

And of course the devices were subject to the special medical device tax that helps finance Obamacare, although of course they probably were not at the time of this story. It took brains and big greed to tax crutches and wheelchairs. I hadn’t realized that the assembly process inspections were part of “Free Trade”; or for that matter anyone would be fool enough to put up with that. If you can’t tell it’s incorrectly assembled from the finished product…

How AI is revolutionising the role of the literary critic | Aeon Essays

As a software guy I find this pretty interesting. Parsing books for ideas and info using algorithms gets a lot more interesting when we can leverage AI in the process. 

What’s really interesting is that maybe this could lead to AI driven code refactoring for modernizing large applications. 

Who knows…maybe in a few decades the NYT literary critic will be an AI.

https://aeon.co/essays/how-ai-is-revolutionising-the-role-of-the-literary-critic?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=f6dfcc6f84-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2016_12_09&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-f6dfcc6f84-68739925

John Harlow

I have mixed emotions about this. I read reviews for informed opinions, and I have trouble understanding how an AI has opinions at all; but perhaps sp. After all, AI’s in my stories definitely have opinions based on a primary table of preferences…

Free trade reducto

Jerry,

A couple of observations on free trade.

a) Free trade used to mean “A buyer in Country A could contract to purchase commodities from a seller in Country B, with no government involvement (with the possible exception of civil or criminal court actions in cases of default on the terms of contract).

Whatever you call a trade agreement to which governments are party, “free” trade is not an accurate description.

b) In the event you have a product liability case against a foreign manufacturer and cannot pursue it, you should be able to pursue your claim using tort law against the importer. (For some reason, I’ve never heard of anyone attempting a product liability case against Chinese manufacture.) 

Jim

The Chinese method is to ship a satisfactory product, then gradually reduce the quality of components and the skill of the assemblers until the purchaser complains. Adjustments are quickly made until the buyer is once again satisfied, then the process starts all over again. American importers – some of them – are learning that. Others don’t until it’s too late.

I doubt you’ll win any cases in a Chinese court…

Facts and Theory

First, continued best wishes to you and Roberta hoping that you are both able to enjoy the holiday season with family and friends.
Your correspondent Mike Flynn had some very cogent thoughts on fact and theory, but I think he got ahead of himself when he said, “Similarly, the Evolution of species is a fact, and Natural Selection is one theory put forward to explain it. Sexual selection, neutral selection, natural genetic engineering, et al. are other theories.”

The Existence of species is an incontrovertible fact. Evolution belongs on the other side of his equation. Evolution is a man-made attempt to impose order on a system whose mechanisms we can only speculate. Evolution is no more settled science than climate change and inspires similar religious fervor.
Thanks,
John Thomas

I think I will let others argue that one. It is clear that some species evolved from others – or are these species? Take dogs and wolves; are they different species? Is it Canis familiaris or Canis lupus familiaris? Is this a subspecies – race – breed – of wolf, or a new species? It is certain that species exist, and races within species. It is certain that dogs descend from wolves (and can interbreed with them). It seems reasonable to assume that horses and donkeys have a common ancestor, but their crossbreed offspring (mules) are generally infertile. A mule is the offspring of a jackass and a mare. I once saw an animal that looked like a mule and was said to be born of a female mule and a stallion, but I do not know that to be the case.

Going further, we know of species that cannot interbreed, but which are sufficiently similar to allow us to deduce with some certainty that they must have had a common ancestor, even if that ancestor no longer exists.

Those who find this discussion interesting may find Fred’s speculations amusing. http://www.fredoneverything.net/LastDarwin.shtml While Fred writes more for humor than persuasion, he produces some powerful arguments in the evolutionary debates. Of course questioning Darwinian Evolution will probably get a tenured professor fired as either stupid or mad or both in most universities, and speculation on the origin of species generally cannot stray far from the modern modifications of Darwin; certainly cannot include the notion of design. Yet questions remain for some few…

blast and damnation

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/last-true-national-hero-john-glenn-dead-95-n693391

John Glenn, America’s New Frontiersman, Dead at 95 http://www.nbcnews.com Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth and later served four terms in the U.S. Senate. As a Marine fighter pilot, while flying 149 combat missions during World War II and the Korean War, he received praise for his ability to draw enemy fire and keep the plane flying with huge holes blown into its exterior. Most Americans remember Glenn for taking to space in 1962. Dubbed Friendship 7, Glenn’s space capsule circled the Earth and put the United States on equal footing with the Soviet Union in the space race.

Stephanie Osborn

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

This is of course only one of a great many on this subject. I met John Glenn in the late 50’s as part of the space suit tests; I also designed and conducted some stress tests, and several of the original astronauts, including Glenn, were among my test subjects. He was more immune to distraction than anyone else I have ever met.

Free Trade

Jerry,
With respect to Mr. Keegan’s “Lincoln’s Epigram & the Cost of Trade”, both of his (and Lincoln’s) points are fallacious as justifications for protectionism.
“The first point Lincoln was making is simple: if the United States was to grow its wealth, we needed to purchase from each other and export to foreigners. By purchasing from each other, we keep our wealth at home, while exporting to foreigners brings their wealth to us.”
No matter who is the purchaser of goods or services produced in the United States, the seller receives the same wealth for his efforts, and if he is a successful businessman, he covers his costs and earns the same profit, which he is then free to spend and/or to invest, and he is of course most likely to invest some of that surplus in growing his own business. And if he has the whole world to sell to and not just domestic markets, which may not value his products more highly than any other place in the world, even with no transportation costs (which are nominal today), he earns a higher profit and thus has more to spend or invest in the domestic economy.
“The second point is more subtle. If we export the cotton to make one shirt to England, we will bring some British wealth to the United States. If we then purchase a British shirt, we send even more wealth to England than we received for our cotton. Raw materials are a low value commodity.”
Again, there may not be much demand in a raw material exporting economy for high value added transformations, and the costs of industrialization may be entirely beyond the capacity of a less developed economy. However, in such a case, if there is abundant local cheap labor it’s likely to attract foreign capital to make optimal (because local) use of it, which is the whole story of what’s been happening in recent decades with developing countries and emerging markets. The US during the colonial period was a Third World raw commodities exporter, and was kept in that position deliberately by the mercantilist policies of England – not because there was any natural impediment to development – nor, when we threw off the colonial yoke, was there any need for protectionism to allow US industries to emerge and flourish, in spite of British protectionism. Our merchants and manufactures simply traded with other countries that were less intent on preserving trade monopolies for their governments and crony capitalist buddies.
As for Shylock Holmes’s argument that free trade is contrary to the interests of many individuals, if not to the interests of society, and its economy, as a whole, I say: So what? That’s true of any economic transaction. If I purchase a toaster manufactured by Corporation A, from Merchant X, rather than a different model made by Corporation B, and sold by Merchant Y, A and X benefit at the expense of B and Y, yet we don’t (unless we are communists) say that the latter ought to be compensated by “transfer payments” – a euphemism for government extortion. And the principle’s the same whether I’m selling my labor services or something I own. The mere fact that I think that my labor or my goods are undervalued in the market doesn’t give me a right to steal from others in compensation. If I feel sorry for Corporation B or Merchant Y because they’re not doing as well as their competitors, I am perfectly free to patronize them on that account, or if I feel sorry for their workers who are laid off in consequence, I could offer to compensate them directly, either personally or through a voluntary charity. That is the way free, responsible people in a free society address such problems, and it was the American Way until our governments became the coercive agents of special interests.
Holmes also argues, without citing any persuasive evidence, that people need jobs to give their lives a sense of meaning (that leisure past a certain point is deleterious to happiness), and that modern social pathologies are especially rampant and a consequence of this, but I would argue instead, that moderns have been so spoiled and cossetted in our decadent society that they’ve never learned that each of us existentially has to learn to create our own meanings and values in life, and that the best way to do that is to figure out what we like to do (whether we are compensated for it or not), and put our heart and soul into that activity. If we are lucky, by getting good at something we may be able to find someone to pay us for our activities; otherwise, we will have to fall back on our leisure time, and the more of it, the better.
I would argue instead that “work” is something you need to be “compensated” for, precisely because it is not the way one would chose to make use of the time devoted to it, and that insofar as a job provides social activities, it isn’t work – it’s time stolen from the employer, no different morally from appropriating office supplies for one’s personal use. If the main value of a job is provide an outlet for one’s social impulses, that tells me that the work itself is perceived as less than enjoyable, or meaningful. I also note that in Soviet Russia, everyone had a job, but that substance abuse was the norm, not the exception, because the work was correctly perceived as meaningful or valuable. I would also argue that most white collar jobs in America today are make work bureaucratic jobs, in effect created by the government through gratuitous and counterproductive regulation. Most of the real white collar work that people engaged in in my own youth (the 1950s and 1960s) has long since been automated, and most of the time on the job today consists of sitting in useless wheel-spinning meetings, and in generating paper work for others to process. No wonder that modern college “educated” Americans are bored and turning to substance abuse, promiscuity, and the like.
The way out of this dilemma is not more government intervention, it is less intervention – massively less. Government subsidies for idleness need to be phased out; all tariffs and protectionist devices need to be scrapped; all government regulation of business per se needs to be terminated; and along with that the double taxation of business profits needs to be ended (profits are now taxed first at the corporate level, then again when what remains is distributed as income to the owners of the business). These changes would kick start annual growth in this country to at least 10% per year, and whole categories of rewarding and meaningful personal service jobs for Americans would emerge, with the internet as the great facilitator of that process. By personal service jobs, I mean the provision of specialized information, entertainment, social interaction, counseling, design services – you name it – and most of these jobs would remain American because only entrepreneurs and would-be employees who have grown up in America would understand what there might be a market for in our country, and have the cultural and interactional skills to provide it.
John B. Robb

For a man to love his country, that country ought to be lovely; and only the deserving poor should receive subsidies. Of course many would disagree with either of those statements.

We could all use personal servants, who so far would be much more useful than the best robots, and some might even care. But when enough of the population contributes nothing but their progeny to the public good, can democracy last? For now we can get the economy going again by reducing regulations.

Dear Doctor Pournelle,

An idea on taxes.

In tax incentive deals for businesses, it is often pointed out that the taxes not levied on the corporation are offset by the taxes on the income of the employees of the corporation, which either are new revenue in the case of a corporation moving one of its’ operations into a tax region, or are tax revenue not lost in the case of keeping an existing corporate operation from moving from a tax region.

Taking a page from the operation manual of such tax havens as the Cayman Islands, what if the Federal government, or a state, just decided not to tax corporations. A corporation may earn as much as it can, and not pay tax on income. The moment corporate money passes into any other “hands”, it becomes taxable, but so long as the corporation keeps it or invests it, it is non-taxable. This would mean personal tax rates would go order to replace the loss of corporate tax revenue,,, but would that increase not be offset by a huge boost in business activity, increased hiring, a more competitive job market with consequent rising wages/salaries, and everyone is better off.

Yes, it’s a variant of “trickle down economics”, but I’ve always thought the reason liberals hate that concept is that it doesn’t give them a way of making people do things against their will, which is a large part of what makes a “liberal” heart go pitty-pat.

Of course, there is something for that Liberal mentality in my idea:

they can indulge their love for Righteous Outrage. Why, that is almost as big a rush as “Do This, Or Else!!!”

Petronius

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

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

PEARL HARBOR DAY

If Republicans want to force through massive tax cuts, we will fight them tooth and nail.

Senator Elizabeth Warren

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

Any science consensus without Freeman Dyson is not a consensus.

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

Immigration without assimilation is invasion.

Trump surprised no one when:

Trump Picks Scott Pruitt, Climate Change Denialist, to Lead E.P.A.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/us/politics/scott-pruitt-epa-trump.html

although a number of Greens pretended astonishment, and the groans could be heard throughout the land. “Denialist”, like “Racist”, is a term of art among some political commentators, and has no real meaning any more than “Fascist” other than as a term of disapproval. It is applied to anyone who does not accept the full “Climate Change” Party Line, complete with guilt and determination to do anything including bankrupting the United States to reduce the amounts of CO2 released into the atmosphere. Even those who accept the various climate change models as “agreed upon science” but point out that the remedies proposed harm the UDS economy but reduce the world CO2 generated by very small amounts as developing nations build fossil fuel plants by the megawatt and increase their CO2 “pollution” as we reduce ours are called “Denialists.” After all, isn’t the science question over? Isn’t there a consensus? How can anyone raise doubts?

Yet some do. And as I have said, even those who agree with the climate models do not all agree on the mitigation practices. One way to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere is to produce enough energy to allow extraction of CO2 to stabilize it at levels we can all agree are safe. We can debate what those levels should be – increased CO2 in the atmosphere increases crop yields and lowers the price of food, and warmer climates make large areas, presently sparsely inhabited, much more attractive.

Of course energy production increases CO2 – or does it? Nuclear power increases it not at all. The danger of being killed by a nuclear power disaster is small compared to the projected climate disasters predicted, yet strangely enough we hear little about that from anyone but – wait for it – Denialists. And if you are still afraid of industrial nuclear power, there is always space solar satellite power, which has no nuclear accident fears attached, and could be used to build power stations in the deserts where we could also put CO2 reduction plants, which are likely to be unsightly and you wouldn’t want them in your back yard…

In any event the confirmation hearings are likely to be interesting, and perhaps we will get some actual rational discussions of climate, energy, and wealth; but I doubt it.

Pruitt to head EPA!

http://www.climatedepot.com/2016/12/07/trump-ignores-gores-advice-instead-picks-skeptic-to-head-epa-dismantle-climate-agenda/

greenies heads are exploding all over the world. Hurray!

—

Phil

Verily.

An Economist’s Cautionary Note on Free Trade.

<https://shylockholmes.blogspot.ca/2016/12/an-economists-cautionary-note-on-free.html>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

A lengthy disquisition, much of which I could have written. A good rational discussion of a situation we have raised before. Those interested will find this very interesting.

In case you missed it, I give you Mike Flynn’s explication again; it is well worth a second reading.

Facts and Theory

Jerry
Your correspondent, Mr. Porter, asks what is the difference between a Fact and a Theory. This was not a question much asked in the 19th century, when the difference was clear, but the certitude with which many Theories have been repeated in the Late Modern Age give them many of the appearances of Facts, so the question does now need some clarification.
Basically, there is a three-layer cake in science: Facts, Laws describing regularities in the Facts, and Theories that provide a narrative explanation from which the Laws may be deduced and the Facts predicted. (Especially, New Facts.)
1. Facts.
Mr. Heinlein once said that Facts are “self-demonstrating; but this isn’t true. Fact comes from factum est, “that which has the property of having been accomplished,” “something done”; cognate with feat. This is clear in German: Tatsache, “deed-matter.” Down to Jane Austen’s time, the expressions “in fact” and “indeed” were used interchangeably.
In modern terms, a Fact is a product produced by a measurement process and in general two distinct processes will produce two distinct sets of results. For example, there are at least two ASTM-approved methods for measuring the coefficient of friction of packaging materials. One uses an inclined plane and translates the tangent of the angle at which the package begins to slide into its CoF; the other employs a dynanometer to pull the package and translates the Force at which the package begins to slide horizontally into the CoF. The same package, tested by each of the two methods, will in general return two different values. In other words, there is no such thing as the coefficient of friction. There is only the result of applying a specified method of measurement.
I recollect a situation, lo, these many years ago, when we discovered that the thickness of an aluminum can depended on the technician who measured it. Tech B consistently obtained thinner sidewall measurements, even when measuring the same can. The reason, as it turned out, was that she thought the micrometer was a C-clamp and screwed the barrel as tight as she could. But unlike steel, aluminum is compressible; so…. 
Dictionary definitions are often of little help in the practical problem of actually producing the measurement; and whether a measurement meets a requirement or not may depend on how that measurement has been defined operationally. In another case, a dimension on a beverage can lid was measured differently by ourselves and by our customer. Both gauges gave the same result on the gage block, but different results on the lids. The customer’s gauge was hand-held and the part dangled vertically from the pin. Our gauge was mounted vertically on a granite block and the part sat in a “nest” holding it at a certain angle. We were not actually measuring the same dimension, and the difference was enough to put one set of measurements out of specification and the other set in.
Even so simple a problem as determining the diameter of a pipe is fraught with questions. A pipe has infinitely many diameters, so in practice we can only take a sample of them. So how many diameters will we measure? At which locations on the pipe? Shall we use a pair of calipers or some other instrument? Will we report the mean of these diameters? The median? The extremal average? Far too many folks show a touching faith in the reliability of measurements. Hence the straight-faced reporting of political opinion polls and who has gained or lost ground since yesterday. What does the GNP mean when it includes not only the tons of steel poured but also the gallons of martinis poured? It’s not that combining these figures means nothing, John Lukacs once wrote, but that it might not mean what you think it does. Can we legitimately add values for manufacturing and for service? What about popular vote totals for States with different rules for eligibility? Or temperatures for Anchorage and New Orleans?
Now throw in questions of accuracy, precision, linearity, reproducibility, and stability of the measurement process.
2. Laws.
Regularities in the Facts are called Laws, preferably stated in the privileged language of mathematics — Euclidean geometry in the case of Newton, or differential equations in the case of Maxwell. For example: that a body moving under uniform acceleration will cover the same distance as a body moving at the mean velocity during the same time was demonstrated by Nicholas Oresme using Euclidean geometry in the 14th century. But the thing to remember is that Laws are descriptive, not causative. Objects do not fall because of the Law of Gravity; rather the Law of Gravity simply describes how they fall.
3. Theories.
A Theory finally is a story we tell ourselves so that the Facts and Laws “make sense.” From the story you can deduce the Laws and predict the Facts. More importantly, you can predict New Facts that were not used in developing the Theory in the first place. To the instrumentalists, that is all they need to do. They need not be True in any cosmic sense. In fact, any finite body of facts can support multiple theories that can account for them. There are today several theories that account for the facts of quantum mechanics: Copenhagen, standing wave, multiple worlds, transactional. (They are called “interpretations” for some reason.) This Duhem-Quine Theorem in Logic is what lies at the root of falsification mania. There is always more than one way to skin a cat, and more than one theory to explain a fact. Sometimes a new Fact can blow a well-established Theory clean out of the water. The Ptolemaic model explained the motions of the heavens tolerably well since the second century. (Motion around an epicycle around a deferent is mathematically equivalent to motion on an ellipse.) And the Aristotelian physics on which it was based had stood even longer. But when the phases of Venus were discovered by Lembo and others (all within the same month!) Ptolemy went down the tubes and his model was replaced with Tycho’s model. (Both Tycho and Copernicus explained the same data. They were mathematically equivalent, given only a shift in the center of the coordinate system.)  It was only with the discovery of stellar aberration, Coriolis effects, and stellar parallax between the mid-1700s and mid-1800s that geomobility was proved in fact.
So we might say that Falling Bodies are the Facts while Gravity is a Theory meant to explain them. To Aristotle, this was a tendency inherent in the bodies themselves by which they moved toward the center of gravity. To Newton, it was a mysterious action-at-a-distance by which bodies reached out (somehow) and “attracted” other bodies (somehow). To Einstein, it was a property inherent in mass that “bent” the space-time manifold so that other bodies would move along geodesics toward the minimum gravitational potential. Each of these narratives (in of course greater detail) pushed our understanding of mechanical motion forward.
Similarly, the Evolution of species is a fact, and Natural Selection is one theory put forward to explain it. Sexual selection, neutral selection, natural genetic engineering, et al. are other theories.
This may be more explanation than the question wanted, and we are overlooking

#4. Models. In the third phases of Modern Science, oftimes data itself is actually model output masquerading as data. For example, when some of the measured data is missing or if the instrument is broken or out of calibration, the missing data may be replaced by kriging or some other model output and then treated as if it were data. Or Something Else might be measured, such as tree rings, and translated to temperature by means of a statistical correlation model. A Model is sort of a hybrid of Facts, Laws, and Theories, partaking in many cases of the worst flaws of each.
Mike Flynn

On the subject of facts:

The Great Wines of Vineland

Dear Jerry:

I  have a duty to take issue with  what you wrote  on  December 5th :

“We know that in historical times the Earth has been warmer than it is now. In Viking times. Leif the Lucky and his cohorts built dairy farms in Greenland that are still covered by ice; and the Vikings planted a colony on Nova Scotia which they called Vinland because they could grow grapes and make wine there. Needless to say it’s still to cold to grow grapes in Vinland.”

This is simply not true: grape growing in Nova Scotia has been documented as early as the 1600s, when colonists planted  vines in Annapolis Royal.where wine production continues today.

Nova Scotia’s Kentville research station where experimentation with grape varietals began about 1912

Commercial grape growing and wine production in modern Nova Scotia began in  1979  at Grand Pre Winery, owned by Roger Dial, founder of Appellation America, who also began  growing the L’Acadie Blanc variety and others began  at  vineyards in Grand Pre , and Jost Vineyards winery on  the Malagash Point peninsula has been in continouous production since the early 1980’s

.

Gaspereau Vineyards vines are situated on a south-facing slope to maximize sun exposure

In 2003, the Wine Association of Nova Scotia (WANS) was created, and there are now a score of wineries in the province, with  over a square mile of vines in production.in 2015. 

Mark Steyn may  deny  warming has driven the  northward spread of viticulure on both sides of the Atlantic, but the alarming  reality is that in former Viking haunts far north of  Nova Scotia ,  wine production has begun in Scotland  and  Northumbria  as well.

—

Russell  Seitz

Fellow of the Department of Physics Harvard University     

       Senior Research Fellow,  The Climate Institute   

I have never been to Nova Scotia, and I stand corrected.  I have been to Greenland, and I have seen Viking dairy farms emerging from the ice; the ones I saw looked to be still half covered by ice, and I would not care to try to raise dairy cattle on the herbage growing on the parts not under ice. 

Vines since 1600 lead me to believe that Nova Scotia enjoys a far better climate than I had supposed and did so even during the Little Ice Age. I will remove it from my examples; but the fact of the Viking Warm period remains.

Air force one

I worked for a company that sold fans for aircraft. Back when Marine One was a Westland helicopter project we sold a fan to ventilate the shower in the helicopter. Unless it was for some radiation decontamination protocol it is hard to imagine the need for POTUS to shower between Andrews and the White house

Alec

You never know. And I suspect the service inspections were pretty expensive.

article on telepresence

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/07/i_was_a_robot_and_this_is_what_i_learned/

Telepresence as a means of dealing with physical limitations.

Chris

I used to write about teleoperation a lot; I should look into it again.

Trump’s Conflict of Interest.

The recent phone call from Taiwan’s president to the President Elect was just another

“End of Civilization as we know it” episode.

Mainstream Media starts harping on Trump’s business interests in Taiwan. It’s going

to be a regular talking point from now until the end of time.

Trump has business interests all over the globe. There’s a difference between Trump’s

business interests and Clinton’s. Trump’s business interests are real business that

creates jobs and is constructive.

Hillary’s interests were just selling out the U.S. out for personal gain and the war profiteers.

It’s pretty clear that Obama was just a front man for the Clinton/Podesta Lobbying group

handing out Clinton Foundation cash to buy influence in Washington and the press.

Obama is just a likable guy that serves as a distraction. I voted for him.

Had me fooled.

It would be okay if they just went away.

Eric Sabo

I have always believed Fleishmann and Pons were on to something; so, incidentally, does the US Navy; at least they have continued to fund their research. We don’t know everything about atoms; we don’t even claim to.

It’s Not Cold Fusion . . . But It’s Something.

<https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/its-not-cold-fusion-but-its-something/>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

I don’t know what the something is, but it’s not fraud.

Petronius’s proposal on Robots

Hi
I read Petronius’s proposal on free robots to each citizen. However I would like to point out that it would be easier to give every citizen the right to license the creation and existence of one robot equivalent.
When every citizen has licensed a robot the number of robots a citizen can license would be increased to two and so on.
Parents would license the rights of minor children or alternately the licensing authority would be a present awarded as part of a minor’s ‘coming of age ‘ birthday party.
All Industrial automation would be examined and assigned a number of robot equivalents and illegal unless licenced by the required number of citizens.
Licensing would be for a fixed period and have to be renewed periodically.
The advantage of this is that the market would presumably set the licensing fee without the involvement of government, except for declaring (once a month?) what are the maximum no. of licenses a citizen can issue and keeping a central registry of the licenses every citizen has issued(to protect the poor industrialist from the rapacious greed of the citizens). Banks and mutual fund like organisations which would presumably come into being would ease the whole process.
just an idea.
Ramesh

Of course this assumes that you can’t own a robot without the approval of the government…

Lincoln’s Epigram & the Cost of Trade

Jerry,
One of your contributors wrote a rebuttal to your use of Lincoln’s epigram on trade. While your contributor was correct that there is more accounting to be done in the shirt purchase, the additional accounting does not negate Lincoln’s point. The first point Lincoln was making is simple: if the United States was to grow its wealth, we needed to purchase from each other and export to foreigners. By purchasing from each other, we keep our wealth at home, while exporting to foreigners brings their wealth to us.
The second point is more subtle. If we export the cotton to make one shirt to England, we will bring some British wealth to the United States. If we then purchase a British shirt, we send even more wealth to England than we received for our cotton. Raw materials are a low value commodity. A shirt is a high value commodity. Any nation that mainly exports raw materials and imports finished goods is mining its economy for the benefit of the nation exporting the finished goods. This can be a path to wealth, but only if the raw materials exporter uses the trade money to build its own industrial base, minimizing its purchase of foreign made finished goods along the way.
The United States was once a net exporter of raw materials. We became a world power by investing in our own industrial base to become a net exporter of finished goods. We have been very hard at work reversing this achievement in our trade relationships with third world countries and China. This has had a massive impact on our economy and our growth in GDP. We are trading our way back to the 18th century.

Kevin L Keegan

Well, we were, anyway. Perhaps not so now.

REDUX: Tax Code and Carrier Deal

Eric Sabo’s post on the Carrier Deal got me thinking. The leftists on NPR were critical of Trump’s deals, saying the Federal Government is now in the business of picking winners and losers…as if the Affordable Care Act or the bail outs didn’t happen… But, when you consider the breakdown presented by Eric Sabo, it is clear that Trump is merely micromanaging the tax code.

The Federal Government picks winners and losers inter alia through the tax code, which Republicans wish to reform and they will oppose Trump on tariffs to secure his cooperation on tax code reform and corporate tax breaks to solve the problems of free trade, according to my reading yesterday.

So, it seems government will begin subsidizing US businesses through tax breaks — most likely similar to the Carrier Deal whenever possible — to make free trade work because that’s the compromise Trump seems left to have. Perhaps, Trump can use these deals inductively to create better principles for a new tax code?

Do you think the Congressional GOP position of using tax code reform and tax breaks can fully address the problems of minimum wage and regulations? If so, how? If not, why not? These problems are not going away and we’ve been dealing with this since I was a child.

NAFTA was supposed to be this wonderful thing and now we’re still dealing with it.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Free Trade

You summarized the quandary aptly. One solution to this problem is world governance; I noticed Kissinger went to Trump tower so I assume that voice is being heard today.

Another solution is trade agreements — this is how the EU started.

Trump says these trade agreements are not fair. I’m not sure whether to classify these as “fair or unfair”. Compared to what? From whose point of view? Under what conditions?

Let’s say “fair” means that either we all have minimum wage or we all agree to race to the bottom and see what grotesque acts of self abasement we’re willing to perform in our assault on what Johnson referred to as “the bastions of success”. Let’s say health and safety regulations are also necessary for a “fair” agreement.

Now, you’re Korea, Japanese, whatever and suddenly you’re told that you’ll need to start doing business according to American health and safety regulations and pay a comparable minimum wage to participate in the common market. How is this not governance? How does this not affect the social and cultural progress of all members to the agreement?

This is what I believe we are really looking at and I wonder how could we make it work. Is it possible? What do you propose?

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

I’m working on what I propose, but my actual goal is to make people aware of the rational arguments…

dark matter

Dear Mr. Pournelle,
As I read about “dark matter” and “dark energy,” I keep being reminded of “luminiferous aether”…
Yours,
Allan E. Johnson

Read Einstein Plus Two and maybe you’ll think again about ether…

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Petr_Beckmann

Feds deny key permit for Dakota Access pipeline

http://www.gopusa.com/?p=17981?omhide=true

CANNON BALL, N.D. (UPI) — After weeks of growing protests, the federal government announced Sunday it will not issue a permit for the construction of a stretch of the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota.

The Army Corps of Engineers said it will not give an easement for the Dakota Access Pipeline to build a stretch of pipeline to cross under Lake Oahe, saying it will work with Energy Transfer Partners, which is building the pipeline, and other groups to find another route.

About 2,000 veterans joined protests at the site this weekend, forming a human shield around the growing group of protesters against the pipeline.

It may get interesting up there shortly…

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

Tuesday, December 6, 2016

If Republicans want to force through massive tax cuts, we will fight them tooth and nail.

Senator Elizabeth Warren

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.

Meet Tinky. He comes with Ryan and Kelly, who are taking care of Roberta. They live upstairs, as does Tinky, but he wanders the house as dogs do and he cheers Roberta up. Ryan and Kelly are settling in, and Chaos Manor is slowly returning to the mild but chronic chaotic state, or at least I certainly hope so. I have been working with the iPad 2, which I have neglected lately, and now that Eric has pretty well restored Precious, the Surface Pro 3 with Pro 4 Keyboard to the Standard Windows 10 rather than the Insider more frequent upgrade versions I am able to get some work done at the breakfast table. Eric restored the latest release of Windows 10 using a thumb drive since Precious doesn’t have a DVD drive; a fair number of updates to apply in order, but no serious problems.

Except one. When I tried to use the Microsoft Pen with the Surface Pro, nothing happened. One Note would open when you pressed the “eraser” key, but otherwise it didn’t exist as far as the Surface is concerned. We fussed with it for an hour, resetting the machine and otherwise fooling with it, but always with the same result. Bluetooth was working, the computer said it saw there was a pen and they were coupled, but the pen didn’t work. Eventually we figured it out: the pen battery was burned out. That takes a AAAA battery. Those aren’t easy to come by.

It turns out you can take certain 9 Volt batteries apart, and Lo! there are AAAA batteries inside it, and you can unscrew the pen, and replace the 1.5 volt AAAA battery you find inside with one from the 9 Volt battery. http://www.instructables.com/id/How-To-Get-AAAA-BATTERIES-OUT-OF-9V/ will tell you more. Of course it still didn’t work after we did that. AAAA batteries are not common and not very standard, and the polarity isn’t well marked. Once we got the polarity right, Eric took a piece of aluminum foil and folded it up to go inside the pen, and that tightened things up enough that it now works, so I’m busily using the Surface again; but I’ve also ordered some standard AAAA from Amazon. I don’t know how long the Microsoft stylus batteries last, but I got Precious several years ago, and the pen stylus worked until this Summer.

A long time ago, I had a Compaq tablet/laptop, with handwriting recognition, and OneNote; the combination was one of the best research tools I have ever had. I’m hoping the Surface Pro will have the same capabilities. I know you can take notes with the Apple iPad, but I don’t know of a good handwriting recognition program. You get pdf files, so they can be copied, but the notes are not searchable. You can use the keyboard to put searchable text in among your handwritten notes. The iPad is small, light, easily carried, and will serve nicely as an electronic notebook (there are a lot of good apps for organizing them; https://9to5mac.com/2016/04/06/the-best-ios-apps-for-taking-notes-with-apple-pencil-ipad-pro/comment-page-1/ summarizes some of them).

I haven’t much hope that the Surface handwriting recognition program will recognize my handwriting: since my stroke I can’t read all my own notes – but we’ll see. More on The Surface Pro with OneNote another time.

The news media seems to be divided into several camps regarding President-Designate (not quite yet President Elect until the Electoral College returns are counted and certified by Congress) – regarding Mr. Trump taking a congratulatory telephone call from the President of Taiwan. Those who don’t like Trump – most of the usual media – are convinced that he is a bumbling ass who probably didn’t know what he was doing, and we will have to leave it to the professional diplomats to straighten this out, if it can be done at all, but it probably can’t be fixed, o woe, WOE!

The others are themselves divided into various camps. There are those who think he probably doesn’t know what he was doing, but it’s not all that bad, and we can fix it (possibly with some well placed bribes). There are also those who think Mr. Trump knew exactly what he was doing: he was sending them a personal message. We do not yet know if the President of the United States will accept phone calls from the President of Taiwan (Once known as the Republic of China); it hasn’t happened yet. But Mr. Trump, personally can and has; if you want the next President of the USA to not take those calls, well, possibly we can make a deal. How much is it worth to you? Our current President is not all that unhappy about your actions in the South China Sea, for example; but Donald Trump certainly is not happy and has said so. What the next President will do is not yet known… And so forth.

I tend to the latter view. Many of Mr. Trump’s “mistakes” turned out to serve him well. We’ll just have to see. At the moment he is not in control of the foreign policy of the United State, and will not be for weeks.

More on Free Trade

Lincoln’s epigram

Dear Dr. Pournelle:
Of course Lincoln was right that if he bought a shirt made in England, his money would go out of the United States and to England. But his accounting for what happened then was inaccurate. England, in turn, imported quite a lot of things from the United States; in fact, England had free trade precisely to make it easier to do so. The Anti-Corn-Law League had stood up for free trade in grain because they recognized that the high price of grain supported by English tariffs meant hunger for many working people. England was one of the world’s great centers of textile manufacture, but one of their major sources of raw material was American cotton; in fact, the laborers in the North of England who stood up against slavery did so knowing that the blockades of the Civil War would shut down some of the factories that employed them, which I have to call heroic. In normal times selling that shirt to the United States provided money to buy American food and fiber, keeping the factories running and their workers fed.

William H. Stoddard

Are robots good for democracy?

“A topic for another time; but are robots good for democracy? And what do we do here?”
I don’t know. But droid armies might be just the thing to protect the interests of the cloistered, wealthy elite from the seething masses. The Sci Fi movie Elysium captures the idea pretty well.

Craig

Jerry

Robots will make things and perform essential services. But we need not pay the people thus displaced to sit on their keisters. As I have suggested in the past, we can move to a full employment model. The ADA suggests that there are no disabled. We will find something for everyone to do.

There are many things that are difficult to automate: supervisor at sheltered workshops, for example. Other tasks we can deliberately fail to automate. Removing high corners and replacing them with wheelchair-friendly corners, for example.

Making everyone employed means that all will have health insurance . . . except the unemployed. And we only employ those who are citizens, or at least those who are here legally.

Cost more? You bet. Cost less than welfare? The robots are a comin’.

Ed

I noticed that recently you mentioned the wealth that had ‘developed’ in Hong Kong. With respect, I must disagree.
Hong Kong is often used as a counter-example to the overwhelming historical evidence that, for countries without an open frontier, sustained rapid population growth guarantees poverty for the many (moderate population growth does not guarantee prosperity, but only makes it possible). But it is not.
Another example: in 1960 Saudi Arabia had a very small population of about 3 million. They hit an oil bonanza, and their population doubled and then doubled again, but they remained rich. This is not because more people allowed them to ‘develop’ more wealth. This is because the Saudis stumbled onto a pot of gold large enough to support their (in absolute terms) small population.
Now Hong Kong: they developed nothing. They only stumbled onto a pot of gold. That was to be the toll booth for shipping goods made with (de facto?) slave labor on the mainland to the wealthier west. For a long time most goods stamped “made in Hong Kong” were in fact made in China (I know people who grew up there: it was an open secret).
And yet, even with this bonanza – which is NOT repeatable for most societies – outside of the fancy banks, most Hong Kong residents are quite poor (A person with a gallon of water valued at $1 in Hong Kong is on paper richer than a Canadian with 50 gallons of water valued at ten cents total – but who is really better off? GDP/capita misleads). And now, with no resources, limited industry, and China now able to ship goods directly to other countries, Hong Kong is headed down. Low tariffs won’t help the people of Hong Kong.

Pentagon waste

I didn’t know if you had seen this report regarding Pentagon waste. They have over a million pencil pushers making an average of $200K a year in salary and benefits, constituting 25% of the defense budget. And they tried to bury the report. Truly disgusting.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/pentagon-buries-evidence-of-125-billion-in-bureaucratic-waste/2016/12/05/e0668c76-9af6-11e6-a0ed-ab0774c1eaa5_story.html?utm_term=.10347604d104

 

Long ago, Dan Golden fired over a thousand senior civil servants at NASA headquarters. When I visited him a few weeks before he fired them, the 8th Floor was humming, lines at the copy machines, loud sounds of typing and printing.  A couple of weeks after he dismissed them I visited Dan again.  The place was quiet. People working at their desks.  I asked a senior career engineer “What did all those people do? You seem to be handling it all.”  He looked up and said, “You know, we can’t figure out what they did.”

Another of Pournelle’s laws of bureaucrat: work expands to fulfill the requirement that bureaucrats look busy. ” Don’t take this one too seriously.

More query than suggestion to Trump on “sanctuary cities”
Dr. Pournelle –
I am so glad to hear that Mrs. Pournelle is doing better.
I am somewhat torn about sanctuary cities. While I believe the policy is ill conceived and detrimental, I recognize that it is very Madisonian. Madison presumed that one of the checks and balances would be that local magistrates would not enforce mandates from the national government that were deemed to be unjust or onerous. [There is a history of this: the Fugitive Slave Act was ignored by many sheriffs and individuals, not just in the northern states but also by some in southern states.]
However, I don’t think it appropriate that cities and states with policies to not remand criminal aliens to federal authorities should receive immunity in federal court for the acts of criminal aliens. My understanding is that a suit is not allowed unless it is reasonable to presume that the city or state could have predicted a specific act.
Is it possible for legislation to remove this protection from lawsuits in Federal Court or would this require a constitutional amendment?
Pieter

I tend to favor local control whenever possible; but immigration and border control are national matters, and I doubt many courts would hold otherwise. It certainly does not take a constitutional amendment to make states deal for favors. If they want independence from Federal control, they should not accept Federal tax money…

The Case Against Dark Matter.

<https://www.quantamagazine.org/20161129-verlinde-gravity-dark-matter/>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

Until we understand gravity and its propagation speed, we cannot assume there are no explanations other than dark matter for the unexpected movements of far away objects. I would not lightly throw away the uniformity principle.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby (left), recently said that dealing with the religiously-motivated violence in Europe “requires a move away from the argument that has become increasingly popular, which is to say that ISIS is ‘nothing to do with Islam’… Until religious leaders stand up and take responsibility for the actions of those who do things in the name of their religion, we will see no resolution.” (Image source: Foreign and Commonwealth Office)

For the first time, a European establishment figure from the Church has spoken out against an argument exonerating ISIS and frequently peddled by Western political and cultural elites. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, speaking in France on November 17, said that dealing with the religiously-motivated violence in Europe

“requires a move away from the argument that has become increasingly popular, which is to say that ISIS is ‘nothing to do with Islam’… Until religious leaders stand up and take responsibility for the actions of those who do things in the name of their religion, we will see no resolution.”

Archbishop Welby also said that, “It’s very difficult to understand the things that impel people to some of the dreadful actions that we have seen over the last few years unless you have some sense of religious literacy”.

Continue Reading Article

A German court has ruled that seven Islamists who formed a vigilante patrol to enforce Sharia law on the streets of Wuppertal did not break German law and were simply exercising their right to free speech.

The ruling, which effectively legitimizes Sharia law in Germany, is one of a growing number of instances in which German courts are — wittingly or unwittingly — promoting the establishment of a parallel Islamic legal system in the country.

The self-appointed “Sharia Police” sparked public outrage in September 2014, when they distributed yellow leaflets which established a “Sharia-controlled zone” in the Elberfeld district of Wuppertal. The men urged both Muslim and non-Muslim passersby to attend mosques and to refrain from alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, gambling, music, pornography and prostitution.

Continue Reading Article

No Peace Within Islam

The headline for this was said something about a “shock poll”

involving British Muslims:

<.>

Forty-three per cent of followers of the religion living in the country believed that parts of the Islamic legal system should replace British law while only 22 per cent opposed the idea.

Researchers also found “deeply worrying” levels of belief among British Muslims in conspiracy theories such as blaming the US government or “Jews” for the 9/11 terror attacks on America.

</>

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/738852/British-Muslims-Sharia-Law-enforced-UK-Islam-poll

Life could get interesting in England, especially considering “Mohamed” is the second most common name in the United Kingdom according to an article I read the other day.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

NPR Lost the Plot

As the English say, NPR lost the plot. I got in the car this morning and had to drive over an hour to get to my destination and listened to NPR. I heard about some nut that allegedly shot a bunch of people in a church because he didn’t like their melanin content when compared to his own. That story took most of the morning because he was defending himself and they had to interview people and discuss this.

This piece segued nicely into a segment on the hate mail sent to mosques in the Greater Los Angeles area. And this was a lengthy piece. I suppose pieces like this need to be done, but I doubt the writers of the letter were tuned in and the piece was constructed in such a way that you were made to feel as though you were part of a large public outcry to get the writers of these letters to come and debate their ideas with the people in the mosque. We were told the FBI and LAPD are involved in investigating this “hate incident”, which is “not a hate crime”.

After that, NPR focused on Trump’s business ties and how he could be violating the Constitution and how the Democrats need to have a plan for the next two years and so forth. This went on for a period of time.

Then NPR did an in-depth segment about a group of white supremacists in a small town in Montana. So far as I could tell they never interviewed the white supremacists themselves, only a few local towns people. Nobody had much to say; so some people somewhere have strange beliefs and they’re no longer relegating themselves to cabins in the woods but living among us in small towns in places like Montana. This is not new, but it is new to them and very important — requiring much of my drive to showcase.

At no point did NPR discuss the Daesh attack by a Somali immigrant in Ohio at a university. What an oversight. I couldn’t believe it! I went to their webpage, surely they covered it on the website — NO!

Why is NPR leaving out an important story? Why does NPR ignore domestic terrorism?

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

I think you know the answer.

Dear Jerry:

Forget the Climate Wars– they  just don’t make existential threats like they used to.

Here’s the nice note Nikita Khrushchev sent to  Fidel Castro , in response to  that great humanitarian’s  request  to blow us off the face of the earth:

https://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2016/11/castro-still-dead-science-stocks.html

—

Russell  Seitz

Fellow of the Department of Physics Harvard University     

       Senior Research Fellow,  The Climate Institute    

 

https://weather.com/forecast/national/news/early-december-first-arctic-blast

Global Warming and Consensus

I was reading in your update your reply to Robert Porter’s query on just what is known on Global Warming. It reminded me of an incident from one of the new Cosmos episodes hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson.
In the episode, Sisters of the Sun, Tyson showcased the women of astrophysics, those women at Harvard who worked for Pickering in classifying stars; they were called “computers.”
In this episode, Tyson tells the story of Cecilia Payne whose doctoral thesis, “Stellar Atmospheres, A Contribution to the Observational Study of High Temperature in the Reversing Layers of Stars,” correctly identifies the composition of stars.
At the time, the accepted wisdom – the “consensus,” if you will – was that the composition of stars was similar to that of Earth. Payne concluded that this was not so; that hydrogen, for example, was a million times more abundant.
When she submitted her paper to Henry Russell, an astronomer of note at Princeton, he convinced her to not make such a conclusion, so she succumbed to popular pressure – again, the “consensus” – and modified her paper accordingly, admitting that something must be wrong with her analysis.
However, the fact is, Payne was right and the consensus was wrong. But, because the consensus was popular, science accepted it as the Truth.
We are supposed to accept Anthropogenic (man-made) Global Warming – AGW – merely on the weight of “consensus.” A consensus that is, in my opinion, in addition to be not in keeping with the Scientific Method, highly suspect.
We have “climate change” rammed down our throats because of the hallowed “consensus.” Not because of any PROOFS, but merely because it’s popular.
Those who question the validity of this popularity are shunned, ridiculed, ostracized, even called to be killed.
Why?
Because those who support man-made “climate change” can prove what they claim?
Not in the least.
Because it’s “popular;” there’s a “consensus.” Skepticism, the foundation of science, is ignored.
Well, as the story of Cecilia Payne demonstrates, just because there’s “consensus,” doesn’t mean it’s right.
Cam Kirmser

Mike Flynn, one of the coauthors of Fallen Angels, presents a disquisition on the classical problem of facts and theories; this used to be taught in schools, but is not much so taught today. I urge you to read it. Twice.

Facts and Theory

Jerry
Your correspondent, Mr. Porter, asks what is the difference between a Fact and a Theory. This was not a question much asked in the 19th century, when the difference was clear, but the certitude with which many Theories have been repeated in the Late Modern Age give them many of the appearances of Facts, so the question does now need some clarification.
Basically, there is a three-layer cake in science: Facts, Laws describing regularities in the Facts, and Theories that provide a narrative explanation from which the Laws may be deduced and the Facts predicted. (Especially, New Facts.)
1. Facts.
Mr. Heinlein once said that Facts are “self-demonstrating; but this isn’t true. Fact comes from factum est, “that which has the property of having been accomplished,” “something done”; cognate with feat. This is clear in German: Tatsache, “deed-matter.” Down to Jane Austen’s time, the expressions “in fact” and “indeed” were used interchangeably.
In modern terms, a Fact is a product produced by a measurement process and in general two distinct processes will produce two distinct sets of results. For example, there are at least two ASTM-approved methods for measuring the coefficient of friction of packaging materials. One uses an inclined plane and translates the tangent of the angle at which the package begins to slide into its CoF; the other employs a dynanometer to pull the package and translates the Force at which the package begins to slide horizontally into the CoF. The same package, tested by each of the two methods, will in general return two different values. In other words, there is no such thing as the coefficient of friction. There is only the result of applying a specified method of measurement.
I recollect a situation, lo, these many years ago, when we discovered that the thickness of an aluminum can depended on the technician who measured it. Tech B consistently obtained thinner sidewall measurements, even when measuring the same can. The reason, as it turned out, was that she thought the micrometer was a C-clamp and screwed the barrel as tight as she could. But unlike steel, aluminum is compressible; so…. 
Dictionary definitions are often of little help in the practical problem of actually producing the measurement; and whether a measurement meets a requirement or not may depend on how that measurement has been defined operationally. In another case, a dimension on a beverage can lid was measured differently by ourselves and by our customer. Both gauges gave the same result on the gage block, but different results on the lids. The customer’s gauge was hand-held and the part dangled vertically from the pin. Our gauge was mounted vertically on a granite block and the part sat in a “nest” holding it at a certain angle. We were not actually measuring the same dimension, and the difference was enough to put one set of measurements out of specification and the other set in.
Even so simple a problem as determining the diameter of a pipe is fraught with questions. A pipe has infinitely many diameters, so in practice we can only take a sample of them. So how many diameters will we measure? At which locations on the pipe? Shall we use a pair of calipers or some other instrument? Will we report the mean of these diameters? The median? The extremal average? Far too many folks show a touching faith in the reliability of measurements. Hence the straight-faced reporting of political opinion polls and who has gained or lost ground since yesterday. What does the GNP mean when it includes not only the tons of steel poured but also the gallons of martinis poured? It’s not that combining these figures means nothing, John Lukacs once wrote, but that it might not mean what you think it does. Can we legitimately add values for manufacturing and for service? What about popular vote totals for States with different rules for eligibility? Or temperatures for Anchorage and New Orleans?
Now throw in questions of accuracy, precision, linearity, reproducibility, and stability of the measurement process.
2. Laws.
Regularities in the Facts are called Laws, preferably stated in the privileged language of mathematics — Euclidean geometry in the case of Newton, or differential equations in the case of Maxwell. For example: that a body moving under uniform acceleration will cover the same distance as a body moving at the mean velocity during the same time was demonstrated by Nicholas Oresme using Euclidean geometry in the 14th century. But the thing to remember is that Laws are descriptive, not causative. Objects do not fall because of the Law of Gravity; rather the Law of Gravity simply describes how they fall.
3. Theories.
A Theory finally is a story we tell ourselves so that the Facts and Laws “make sense.” From the story you can deduce the Laws and predict the Facts. More importantly, you can predict New Facts that were not used in developing the Theory in the first place. To the instrumentalists, that is all they need to do. They need not be True in any cosmic sense. In fact, any finite body of facts can support multiple theories that can account for them. There are today several theories that account for the facts of quantum mechanics: Copenhagen, standing wave, multiple worlds, transactional. (They are called “interpretations” for some reason.) This Duhem-Quine Theorem in Logic is what lies at the root of falsification mania. There is always more than one way to skin a cat, and more than one theory to explain a fact. Sometimes a new Fact can blow a well-established Theory clean out of the water. The Ptolemaic model explained the motions of the heavens tolerably well since the second century. (Motion around an epicycle around a deferent is mathematically equivalent to motion on an ellipse.) And the Aristotelian physics on which it was based had stood even longer. But when the phases of Venus were discovered by Lembo and others (all within the same month!) Ptolemy went down the tubes and his model was replaced with Tycho’s model. (Both Tycho and Copernicus explained the same data. They were mathematically equivalent, given only a shift in the center of the coordinate system.)  It was only with the discovery of stellar aberration, Coriolis effects, and stellar parallax between the mid-1700s and mid-1800s that geomobility was proved in fact.
So we might say that Falling Bodies are the Facts while Gravity is a Theory meant to explain them. To Aristotle, this was a tendency inherent in the bodies themselves by which they moved toward the center of gravity. To Newton, it was a mysterious action-at-a-distance by which bodies reached out (somehow) and “attracted” other bodies (somehow). To Einstein, it was a property inherent in mass that “bent” the space-time manifold so that other bodies would move along geodesics toward the minimum gravitational potential. Each of these narratives (in of course greater detail) pushed our understanding of mechanical motion forward.
Similarly, the Evolution of species is a fact, and Natural Selection is one theory put forward to explain it. Sexual selection, neutral selection, natural genetic engineering, et al. are other theories.
This may be more explanation than the question wanted, and we are overlooking #4. Models. In the third phases of Modern Science, oftimes data itself is actually model output masquerading as data. For example, when some of the measured data is missing or if the instrument is broken or out of calibration, the missing data may be replaced by kriging or some other model output and then treated as if it were data. Or Something Else might be measured, such as tree rings, and translated to temperature by means of a statistical correlation model. A Model is sort of a hybrid of Facts, Laws, and Theories, partaking in many cases of the worst flaws of each.
Mike Flynn

Carrier Deal

One thing you didn’t mention in your note:
“The Trump Carrier Deal
Carrier gets $7 Million in tax incentives.”
That’s *over 10 years*. So the wage base is $490M to offset those against. $49M is for one year.
So, an even better deal. The state gets $1M in revenue from those workers over a year (or so) and it “pays” 700K for the deal.

A Modest Proposal Concerning Robots

Dear Doctor Pournelle,

Rising productivity through greater efficiency leading to lower employment and the problem of how to fairly distribute the wealth is indeed a vexation.

One solution: If robots will do the work, but humans receive the benefit, then create a right to robot ownership. I suppose the courts will have to find an emanation from a penumbra of this somewhere in the constitution. Let each citizen receive title at birth to a certain number of robots. Five? Sounds like a good number to me. A new entitlement, the right to robots!

Of course there are a lot of devilish details. There will be a robot market. People will offer to manage your robots, for a portion of your robotic’ earnings. Maintenance will have to be done, replacement and upgrade robots purchased.

The lawyers will have a field day with this one.

Of course, we will have to pass Robot Laws. It will be illegal to teach a robot more than it need know to perform assigned labor. Robots may not travel without a pass from their owner. Anyone caught preaching Robot Rights will go to Coventry.

Perhaps we can count them as three-fifths of a human being and allow their masters to vote for them?

We might even free and grant limited civic rights to a few, very intelligent robots.

Just a modest proposal!

Petronius

PS

Actually, this is a form of Distributism. . It might be possible. Alas, robots as we have them today are not very fungible. But they might get there.

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