Chaos Manor View, Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Very hot today in Los Angeles. Pounding away on fiction, but it’s not easy. Typing continues difficult. I have dozens of suggestions regarding Dragon, and one day I’ll implement it and try, but the weather and time pressure both argue against trying a whole new way to “write”; the last time I tried dictation it was a flop; I got so concerned with the way I was composing sentences, and waiting for them to appear on the screen, that after a while I was more worrying about the writing details than about what I dictated. Of course that’s something of what is happening now.

As it happens, yesterday over in another conference (SFWA) where I spend too much time, a new member asked for advice on career management. I answered:

I don’t think there has ever been better advice given than that of Mr. Heinlein:

To be a writer you must write.

I will add, until you are established as a writer, you would do well not to spend a lot of time talking about writing or listening to others talk about writing in the hopes that you will learn some secret formulae. You won’t. Randall Garrett was fond of saying he knew no professional writers who got there through workshops or discussing writing with other beginners. I do, but not many.

To be a writer, you must finish what you write.

I will add that there is something sadly amusing about the “writer” who always has an unfinished manuscript to inflict on his friends.

Do not rewrite unless instructed to do so by someone who is going to buy it.

This was probably the most controversial, and most badly misunderstood, of Heinlein;s dicta. He did not mean write first draft and never rewrite; he meant that the rewrite is part of finishing and it should be done and over. Don’t rewrite finished work. You will do much better to work on something new.

Send your work to someone who can buy it, and start on something else. Keep that up. Keep writing, finishing, and sending to editors.

Basically that’s it.

The magic is in doing the writing. For story tellers it takes a while to make writing automatic so you can concentrate on the story, not on how you tell it.

And there are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays…

As to career management, it used to be that you sold to the magazines, got the cover, graduated to a novel, etc. Now there are alternatives, many discussed here. But before you manage a career in writing you have to write, and the best way to learn that is to write, finish what you write, send it to someone who can buy it, and don’t rewrite unless someone who will buy it tells you to. Obviously there are stories that if rewritten can be made better, but a better investment is to do a new story. Then another. Then one more. Finishing each.

After a while the writing comes easier and you can concentrate on what you want to say, not on how to say it.

Of course you may be well past needing that advice.

Jerry Pournelle

The point being that if you have to think about what you are doing, rather than on what you are trying to say, you have a severe handicap; and that’s what I am trying to overcome. I’m getting there but it’s slower than I like. But then it took longer than I like just to feed myself…

For some reason I cannot fathom, the Word grammar program does not like the first sentence in that paragraph. I give up on why it thinks it is bad grammar. If it be, then so be it. Oh. I see. It wants a proper verb. Ah well, it’s clear enough.

Anyway we will continue the discussion of philosophy of science. To summarize my views, which are derived entirely from Sir Karl Popper and St. Thomas Aquinas:

Science has become a very useful way of discovering truth about the world. To most of the world, “reason” and “science” are essentially synonymous.

Science has strict rules. The most fundamental rule is that no theorem or hypothesis is scientific if it cannot be falsified. It does not mean that “I saw a man who wasn’t there” cannot be true, but it is not a scientific truth because there is no conceivable way to falsify it.

We may act as if scientific theories (those which can be falsified) were true, but always with the understanding that they may someday be falsified.

This can lead to conflicts of theories, and sometimes does. An example is the late Petr Beckmann’s theory of entailed aether, as opposed to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity; they both, as I understand it, “explain” all the relevant data; where they make different predictions, falsification of either requires experiments we cannot perform. That leads to wildly different possibilities, but we cannot choose among them given the present state of observations. There is an overwhelming consensus in favor of Einstein, but there is no crucial experiment to choose between them at this time.

When conflicting theories lead reasonably to disparate courses of action the situation becomes critical, in particular if the different actions have high cost; this is the situation in which we find ourselves regarding global warming, with the added problem that there are mutual assertions of falsifications of the different theories, as well as conflicting claims of the validity of certain evidence.

Some statements may be true, but are not scientific because there is no way to falsify them. My prediction that unrestricted capitalism will lead to the sale of human flesh in the market place is “scientific” in that it could be falsified, but it also rests on the non-scientific assumption that the sale of human flesh – or baby parts – is not morally acceptable. “Ethicists” and religious leaders may or may not agree on that assumption, but their disagreements cannot be settled by any scientific process I am aware of. At some point you are faced with “good” and “evil”, and it is meaningless to say that good is better than evil because good’s gooder. There are those (I am among them) that say that certain morality systems lead to a “better” way of life than others, and there are many examples, but this not science; one reason why education needs to include the liberal arts, but this goes far afield of this discussion.

Regarding philosophy of science

Jerry,

Just now catching up on the latest blog post. Last couple days were busy writing/recording/editing the weekly Osborn Cosmic Weather Report. So I want to respond to some talking points.

1) Astronomers certainly did NOT pounce upon Doppler shift uncritically, after Hubble’s discovery — more like throwing a firecracker into an ant’s nest. I didn’t go into the details of the history because I could have written a book about it. Many books HAVE been written about it. And like it or not, the bulk of the demonstrable evidence that we have today lands on the side of large-scale expansion. Note I said LARGE-SCALE. It’s long been known that localized inhomogeneities were required even to develop the galaxies we see, let alone clusters, superclusters, and the other structures we’re still discovering, like “walls” and “bubbles.” So this is no new thing. I will say that we’re still working on how it all came about, but we know it did, because we see the results.

Hubble’s discovery and subsequent others produced an uproar in the community, with huge infighting about the validity of the results between the “Steady-State-ers” and the “Expansionist Universe-ers.” This is in fact a close parallel between a similar and more or less concurrent, long-running controversy in geology between the concept of uniformitarianism and catastrophism, where uniformitarianism can be likened to steady state and catastrophism could be likened to big bang/expansion. Geologists now think that the reality seems to be a blending of the two, a kind of uniformitarianism punctuated by episodes of catastrophism; is it then so surprising that cosmology is proving to be the same?

Moreover in no wise are astronomers/cosmologists/astrophysicists favoring a particular model over another, as evidenced by the large number of theories/models that are put forward. (My friend, physicist Dr. W, and I have discussed the whole “dark matter/dark energy” concepts several times; neither of us is disposed to care for either one, and are inclined to think that it will eventually be disproven. But right now it does seem to explain observations.) My entire point was that these things are indeed being considered, but just because we seem to find a data point that is in conflict with current theory does not mean we automatically throw out the baby with the bath water and start over from scratch.

Also note that I am not saying that any theories would be “knocked out if new theories were accepted.” Obviously Newtonian physics was not “knocked out” by relativity theories, nor quantum mechanics, nor any of the rest. In fact what we find is that Newtonian physics is what the others reduce to in the everyday world. Quantum mechanics devolves to Newtonian physics as the scale increases from subatomic to macro world. Relativity devolves into Newtonian physics at increasingly lower sublight speeds. Et cetera. This is what a proper “new theory” SHOULD do — reduce to the established, observable ways/models when “ordinary world” initial conditions are plugged in. What is happening, however, is that this thrust experiment is contradicting the “ordinary world” model, which has been demonstrably proven correct over centuries (and arguably millennia) of observation. And THAT is what experienced scientists take issue with.

2) I think some may be confusing the difference between the universe and the models we have of the universe. When new, unexplained data is discovered, obviously this is coming FROM the universe, and it is the MODELS that must be adjusted to try to see if the new data can be explained. It isn’t that we’re trying to shoehorn the universe to fit our theories. We are looking to see if this new evidence has uncovered something that needs to be added, something we didn’t know about before. It is a MODIFICATION of our theories/models, not changing the universe, that is occurring. This usually requires several iterations, and not infrequently does in fact require the model to be reduced to its basic components and rebuilt, or occasionally thrown out altogether and replaced.

Think about it like this: You want to race cars, and you want to win. You’re on a budget constrained by other factors — house payment, credit card payments, food bill, kid in college, etc. So which is easier and more economical, which fits into your budget better: Take the stock car already in your garage and modify it to juice it up, or throw out the stock car and start building an Indy race car from the pavement up? You’re going to start with your stock car and modify it, then you’re going to race it and see if you win. If you don’t win, you keep modifying the stock car until you’ve reached the limits of what the frame will handle. If you’re still not winning, you scrap the stock car and start work on an Indy car design.

In this analogy, your budget constraints are the body of existing observations. Your stock car is existing science and its models. Winning in this case means your model correctly predicts the observations; juicing up the stock car represents the modifications to existing theory you have to make to try to predict the data. The Indy car design is when you can’t get existing theory to match observation, so you scrap the theory and construct another. But you still have those budget constraints! The new model has to accurately predict, not just the new observations, but all the old ones too. It has to be “drivable on the road,” as it were. Sort of like a Transformer that goes from Indy car to your mom’s sedan and back.

3) String theories: there are in fact five basic string theories. (And while I’m about it, let me point out that there is a difference between a cosmic string and a superstring. Here I refer to superstrings.) Each theory was developed by a different researcher or group of researchers, and each one accurately predicts some of the observable data — but no one superstring theory predicts ALL of the observable data. Nor, so far, can they be made to do so.

This is a case where the scientists dropped back and punted. It wasn’t exactly that they scrapped the stock car, but they definitely were pulling Indy car concepts into the modifications! (To continue my racecar analogy, I’d say they kept the frame but put in a new engine and more aerodynamic body.)

Unable to get their superstring  models to wrap around the whole problem, they made a fundamental realization that relates back to that “new theories should reduce to the older forms” comment I made earlier: They realized it was very likely that the five different superstring theories were actually special cases of an overarching theory. So they instead created a new theory/model, called M Theory. And this, so far, DOES accurately predict all of the observable data, though again it may possibly not be the simplest way to do so; Occam’s Razor and all. But it’s the best we’ve come up with so far.

(This is a case where Dr. W might be more up on the latest developments than I am, since it falls more into the realm of particle/quantum physics in which he specializes than the astronomy/astrophysics in which I specialized. I did study M theory and the related stuff in order to write both Extraction Point with Travis S. Taylor, and my Displaced Detective series. And I’ve tried to stay up on what’s going on with the theory — I get asked about it a lot at SF cons. I don’t claim to be an expert in M theory by any means.)

4) Quasars: given that, in recent years, we’ve been able to image the distant galaxies in which quasars are embedded, and we have been able to generate models of the mechanism that predict observational data, it’s going to be rather hard to argue away the notion that they are indeed embedded in galaxies.

As for proper motion, that is still in debate. Proper motion is not, contrary to what you might think, immediately obvious to the observer, especially when we are looking at extragalactic objects. Why? It’s complicated — because the Earth is making a truly spectacular gyration through the universe: it is spinning on its axis, revolving around the Sun, following the Sun in its orbit about the galactic center, and moving with the galaxy as it orbits the center of mass of the local cluster, which is in turn orbiting the center of mass of the local supercluster, which is experiencing linear motion through the universe…and then there is precessional motion of all of that, and more. All those motions have to be determined as accurately as possible, and then SUBTRACTED FROM THE MEASUREMENTS of the apparent proper motion of any given object. Only then can we say that the object MAY be experiencing true proper motion.

Current studies of quasar proper motion seem to be indicating that there is an inadvertent systemic error in the reduced measurements (as well as a couple of other things occurring within individual quasars) that, if corrected properly, will remove most if not all of the purported proper motion. Or to put it more simply, we may have an error in our estimate of the motions we ourselves are making, which is causing an apparent motion of the studied objects, when there really is little or none. The jury is still out on that, but legitimate research is ongoing.

Also consider that we currently have a nice spectrum of galaxy “types” or morphologies, ranging from “ordinary,” to interacting, to Seyfert/BL Lacertae/radio galaxies, to quasars. These in general range nicely from nearby, to a little farther out, to pretty far out, to way the hell over there. There’s a whole lot of observational evidence that quasars are embedded in galaxies, and that they have a lifetime that takes them through several morphologies, it’s going to be hard to disprove. Note I didn’t say impossible. There are arguments for other kinds of Doppler shifting, such as relativistic gravitational. But, “With great power comes great resp–” no, sorry, wrong quote. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

Now, somebody reading all this is bound to be thinking that I’m just one of these “accepted science” conspirators who are trying to stifle anything new. Not so. I have a brain, I use it most days, and I am trained to be a skeptic. (Blonde hair notwithstanding.) If I were into “accepted science” then I would not be posting guest blogs like this:

http://accordingtohoyt.com/2015/05/30/solar-space-and-terrestrial-weather-some-reflections-by-stephanie-osborn/

No, I sit down and look at the data in the light of what I know. I look at the models and decide if they make sense, or if they are off in the weeds someplace. If it all lines up, and if I can take the data, feed it into the model, and predict more data, and that prediction is demonstrably correct by collecting the additional data, then I conclude that the model is correct insofar as we understand the science to this point in time. If it does not, I conclude that the model is wrong, and possibly the theory behind it as well, depending on whether I can determine if it was just a poorly-constructed model or if the problem with it is more fundamental.

This is not simply going along for the ride because someone else says so. And this is the way science is supposed to work. Does it always work like this? No, it doesn’t. Because scientists are human too, and we can get hidebound and attached to our pet theories. (Go read up on William Thomson, Lord Kelvin’s successes, as well as his failed predictions, if you don’t believe me. And he was as “established” as they come.) But it does so more often than not, and especially in my chosen fields, I’m pleased to say.

Stephanie Osborn

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

It is clear that we are at the edge of observational accuracy, and possibly many statements which appear to be falsifiable are in fact not so with present equipment. It would not be the first time.

And I will repeat my own view: the extraordinary claim of reactionless drive needs considerable evidence that it exists, since it falsifies a fundamental principle of Newtonian physics, as well as being incompatible with Relativity.

More on Beckmann and Einstein
<<Jerry P I commend to you Petr Beckmann and his Einstein Plus Two…>>
And I commend to you Tom Bethell’s book, Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessary? (2009), explicating Beckmann’s theory, and putting it into the whole historical context of the development and testing of relativity theory, and the wider and continuing question of the nature and existence of the “ether”.
Bethell has been a contributing columnist and/or editor of National Review, The American Spectator, Harpers, and other intellectual periodicals, and he is a Hoover fellow. He specializes in whistle blowing on politically correct orthodoxies, so of course he is personal non-grata with the elite establishment, which in my book is one of his strongest credential.
Among the many thoughtful and trenchant pieces of his I’ve clipped and saved, was a two part swipe (in the June and July/August American Spectator at the cancer research mafia that has deflected so many tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer money into unproductive reinforcement of the established paradigms that retroviruses (and now faulty genes) cause cancer, while shunting aside the fact that virtually all solid tumors consist of cells that contain more than the two chromosomes of normal cells: this phenomenon is called aneuploidy and it has been known since the 1960s, yet practically no research has been done on the replication errors that must lie at the heart of it. How many lives have been cut short and/or blighted because of this waste of funds and scientific talent?
Bethell worked closely with Beckmann and with his colleague and collaborator, physicist Howard Hayden (who wrote the introduction to Bethell’s book), and Bethell did extensive research of his own, drawing on papers of Einstein that have only recently become available, and also on the papers of Nobel Laureate Albert Michelson, who designed the interferometer that was used in the classic Michelson-Morley experiment, and who went on to design and conduct the Michelson-Gale experiment in 1924 that conclusively established that there was indeed an ether – a gravitational ether detectable against the earth’s rotation – a finding that has been partially replicated in passing by the Brilet-Hall experiments of 1979, which ironically were focused on finding the same kind of ether (detectable against the frame of the earth’s orbital motion) that the Michelson-Morley experiment failed to find in the first place (Brillet-Hall predictably repeated that original failure).
Einstein himself was one of the chief encouragers to Michelson, then at the University of Chicago, to conduct the Michelson-Gale experiment, which involved constructing an apparatus that spanned an area of some 50 acres, and he traveled to Chicago and met with Michelson for that purpose. Einstein had also begun to recognize as early as 1911 that his General Theory of Relativity REQUIRED a gravitational ether, regardless of the fact that his Special Theory of 1905 had dispensed with it. Bethell quotes Einstein thus {p182}:
“In a article published in 1911, ‘On the Influence of Gravitation on the Propagation of Light,’ Einstein acknowledged that the constancy of the velocity of light is ‘not valid in the formulation which is usually taken as the basis for the ordinary [special] theory of relativity.’ The velocity of light in the gravitational field ‘is a function of the place,’ Einstein said. Light rays ‘propagated across a gravitational field undergo a deflexion.'”
Einstein may thus be said to have backtracked on his premature discarding in the Special Theory of Relativity of the ether principle that presumes that some medium is necessary for the propagation of waves, whether they are light quanta or gravitational quanta, and to have anticipated, not only Beckmann, but the Michelson-Gale experiment.
None of this casts any shadow of doubt on Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, except that it suggests that it ought to have been called Einstein’s Theory of Gravitation, dropping the relativity moniker altogether. However, it is clear from the body of evidence reviewed by Bethell that Einstein’s Special Theory is both irrelevant to practical modern physics and pernicious in its paradoxical implications. The Special Theory is irrelevant because it applies only to inertial (constant velocity) frames of reference, yet we live in a universe of accelerations. But for that, the Michelson-Gale experiment of 1924 would have falsified special relativity since light was found to travel at different speeds depending on the beam’s orientation with respect to the rotation of the earth.
The 1971 Hafele-Keating experiments transporting atomic clocks around the world in opposite directions also appear to contradict Special Relativity, which asserts that time slows down for an object moving with respect to the observer, which would mean that the airplane clock would appear to be faster than the Naval Observatory clock on the ground, but that the reverse would be true too if the airplane clock were taken to be the fixed observer, but the interpretation of the results (which were consistent both with General Relativity and with Beckmann’s theory) required the postulation of an inertial clock at the center of the earth with which the times of the other clocks could be compared.
Because we live in a universe of accelerative forces such as gravity, the Special Theory may well be unfalsifiable, which would make it a metaphysical, not a scientific hypothesis, in Popperian terms. Certainly no one has ever observed the predicted dilations of space, or the mutual speeding up of clocks from the points of view of two observers moving relative to each other, or of the corresponding relative buildup of masses in both of the relative frames of reference as their relative velocity approached the speed of light. Science fiction has had fun with many of these paradoxes, but the Special Theory of Relativity, properly understood, gives us no reason to suspect that any of these phenomena are features of our universe.
The Special Theory of Relativity is also pernicious, not only because it gives rise to incomprehensible paradoxes that suggest that our whole conception of physics is wrong, but also because the second postulate of the Special Theory, that the speed of light is a constant independent not only of the source but of the observer permeates the thinking of modern physicists as a dogma, even though it is ignored in practice, and for good reason. For example, if the speed of light were always constant in our universe, the concept of simultaneity would dissolve into meaninglessness and there would be no way to synchronize clocks, nor could the GPS satellite system be made to work: it does work, of course, but only because a fixed temporal frame of reference is presumed.
The main problem with the Special Theory is that in order to preserve Einstein’s dogmatic postulate of the constancy of the speed of light independent of both source and observer, and its relativity implications, the mathematics of the General Theory of Relativity had to be unduly complicated. And, as you note, Beckmann’s work has demonstrated that the gravitational phenomena with which the General Theory is concerned can be accounted for in classical Newtonian terms, without all the mystification and paradoxes. However, Hayden notes in his introduction that the actual mathematics of overlapping gravitational fields (e.g. taking into consideration where the balance points lie between the gravitational fields of the earth, the moon, the sun, etc.) can still be quite complex, and Beckmann himself never got around to working those out.
John B. Robb

Thank you for the summary. I have many times recommended Tom Bethell’s book http://www.amazon.com/Questioning-Einstein-Is-Relativity-Necessary/dp/0971484597 and possibly should have done so again; there are other works on modern aether theory as well. Google “Is Einstein necessary”… Relativity was “confirmed” by the bending of light rays in a gravitational field; there are other explanations which do not require tensor calculus. Whether understanding the universe requires mathematics of that order of difficulty I cannot say; I confess that I hope not. Tom leaves out the math, which is perhaps wise.

Subject: Epistemology and the Münchhausen trilemma

I had an email about this in my drafts. Since you’ll discuss epistemology, where do you stand on the Münchhausen trilemma? How do we overcome the balkanization of epistemology? Why don’t we teach epistemology in high school? I think that and general semantics (per Alfred Korzybski) would solve many problems.

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Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Probably but I have only so much time. What is the Munchhausen trilemma?

Jerry Pournelle

Chaos Manor

Epistemology and the Münchhausen trilemma

I’ll keep this very short, relatively speaking; this is an outlined response:

The Münchhausen trilemma is the crux of epistemology. Anyone who studies epistemology soon becomes aware that every tendency in the epistemology has weaknesses — including science — making it fallible. No tendency e.g. authority, faith, science, empiricism, logic, rationalism, idealism, constructivism reveals truth because you come to a point of infinite regress. John Pollock describes it best:

“… to justify a belief one must appeal to a further justified belief. This means that one of two things can be the case. Either there are some beliefs that we can be justified for holding, without being able to justify them on the basis of any other belief, or else for each justified belief there is an infinite regress of (potential) justification [the nebula theory]. On this theory there is no rock bottom of justification. Justification just meanders in and out through our network of beliefs, stopping nowhere.” You find no solid truth that everything is built upon and it becomes more like a ball of ants crossing a river. Now you have to make a choice; you have three options — all of these undesirable. You must face the Münchhausen trilemma.

The story is named after the story Baron Münchhausen, who pulled himself out of quicksand by his own hair. The Münchhausen tribesman is the how we answer the question “How do I know this is true?” When we ask ourselves this, we provide proof but then we need proof that our proof is true and so on with subsequent proof. We can deal with this problem in three ways:

1. We create a circular viz. coherent argument where theory and proof support each other. X is true because of Y; Y is true because of X.

This is dangerous because the arguments can be logically valid i.e.

their conclusions follow from their premises. It is an informal fallacy. The main problem is one already believes the conclusion and, anyway, the premises do not prove the conclusion in this way.

Therefore, the argument will not persuade — well, it might persuade non-critical thinkers. This is where guys like Hitler do really well.

Coherentism is the approach.

2. We agree on axioms. Consider the conch shell in Lord of the Flies; the group agreed on the axiom that whomever held the conch had the right to speak. In epistemology, we might agree that a series of statements is true even though we cannot verify this. Most social organizations seem to run on this approach. Some more esoteric organizations even mention a “substitute” for something that was “lost” and this is a reference to the axiomatic tendency of the organization. Foundationalism is the approach.

3. We accept infinite regress. We realize that each proof requires further proof, ad infinitum. This view rejects the fallacies and weaknesses of the previous two choices, while accepting reality. Infinitism is the approach.

While most scientists I speak with relegate this as an “exercise in abstract philosophy”, I think they’re wrong. I think they’re not comfortable with the weaknesses of their paradigm and I confirmed this when discussing the weaknesses of empiricism and rationalism — the constituents of science. I normally get the “science is settled” or “if it isn’t science it’s not worth knowing” arguments and we reach an impasse (their axioms). Despite their inability to prove their claims, that is the only criticism I’ve entertained involving the trilemma.

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Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Having had only an undergraduate training in philosophy with some help from the Jesuits, I may have missed something, but I could have sworn that “The Munchhausen trilemma” was not commonly, or indeed at all, referred to in the late 40’s and early 50’s; it may be well known today by that name, but this has not always been so. As to the identity of the Baron, thank you, but I have had some previous exposure to the nobleman’s exploits. His name is also used in psychological diagnoses, although that is rather modern; before the need for appellations to use in insurance claims, we were content to use less colorful diagnostic terms than Munchhausen By Proxy. But that’s a different story

I was not aware that a common philosophical problem/criticism had been given the Baron’s name; I suspect this is due to the popularity of certain movies.

I am not ready to undertake the rather long task of providing instruction in philosophical principles; I simply have to make do with Sir Karl Popper, and the rather mundane notion that if two psychiatrists, a nurse, and the wardboys tell you that you are not covered with bees, you might as well stop brushing them off your coat. We can insist that statements about the world are not science if they cannot be falsified. As to what is truth; we can agree that statements that can be falsified but have not been may be acted on as if verified, even though full verification is not possible. Of course this can lead to having to treat two different views of reality as true if they do not generate falsifiable statements that conflict with each other. Rather like Beckmann and Einstein.

Excuse my brevity. It is painful to type while staring at the keyboard.

Jerry Pournelle

Chaos Manor

I appreciate you taking the time to respond at some length; especially considering that it’s not easy to type right now.

I did some research on it and the term was coined in 1968 in reference to Karl Popper’s trilemma of dogmatism vs. infinite regress vs.

psychologism. Popper, in his 1935 publication, attributed the concept to Jakob Fries. However, the trilemma of Fries is slightly different from the Münchhausen trilemma. You can read more here if you’re

interested: http://wiki.ironchariots.org/index.php?title=M%C3%BCnchhausen_trilemma

I understand that your time is limited; perhaps you could publish our exchange on the Münchhausen trilemma? My understanding of the trilemma is limited but it is important to me. For me, this is the bottom of the pile and it’s something I spent a good part of my life searching for and I want to popularize it as much as possible along with General Semantics, arete, Bloom’s Taxonomy, cheaper energy, and the Classical Trivium. =)

As an aside, under the Jesuits, you may know Agrippa’s trilemma — presented by Sextus Empiricus and attributed to Agrippa the Skeptic by Diogenes Laertius (not the Cynic). However, Agrippa’s trilemma has five — not three — choices.

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Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

The map is not the territory. Science can provide us with better maps – if we follow the rules – but they are only maps.

Hello Jerry,

Reader James had a nice comment on your post for 24 August re Settled Science about the uncanny precision of planetary temperature measurements, over century time frames, when an instrumentation calibration lab, under controlled conditions, would be hard put to duplicate it over 24 continuous hours.

Without critiquing every ‘a’,’and’, and ’the’ of his post it sounded spot on to  me.

Coincidentally, the pooh-bah’s of climate science from around the world made the following announcement this month:  July 2015 was the hottest month ever, since records began in 1880.

Here is a quote from NOAA’s official announcement ( http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/201507 ):

“The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for July 2015 was the highest for July in the 136-year period of record, at 0.81°C (1.46°F) above the 20th century average of 15.8°C (60.4°F), surpassing the previous record set in 1998 by 0.08°C (0.14°F). As July is climatologically the warmest month of the year globally, this monthly global temperature of 16.61°C (61.86°F) was also the highest among all 1627 months in the record that began in January 1880. The July temperature is currently increasing at an average rate of 0.65°C (1.17°F) per century.”

In the spirit of James’ comment, are the people producing such drivel stupid enough to believe it themselves?  Do they REALLY believe that we have had a planet wide instrumentation system in place since 1880 and a 135 year data base of its output that would allow us to list the 1627 months since 1880 in rank order of the temperature of the entire planet for each month?  In spite of the fact that there is AFAIK no universally agreed upon method of even CALCULATING the temperature of the planet for a given month?  And if there IS a cookbook procedure, do they really believe that the planetary instrumentation system provided sufficient coverage and precision over the entire 1627 months to justify their proclamation of an anomaly of 0.08 C for a specific month to be a ‘record’ ?

Back when I was a Navy tech and we were faced with some incredible feat of technological wizardry our typical response was “Modern science knows no limitations!’.  That would appear to be especially applicable to ‘Modern Climate Science’.

Bob Ludwick

I am at a loss to explain why they cannot tell us the formula for “the temperature of the Earth”. I suspect they are afraid they would be laughed at.

if you want more of something, subsidize it
Dr. Pournelle,
A case demonstrating your point: How Carbon Credit Program Resulted In Even More Greenhouse Gas Emissions
http://news.google.com/news/url?sr=1&ct2=us%2F1_0_s_0_1_a&sa=t&usg=AFQjCNF8uoAGTACLRE6JnuGarMAtOl-nkg&cid=52778934561097&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.csmonitor.com%2FEnvironment%2F2015%2F0825%2FHow-carbon-credit-program-resulted-in-even-more-greenhouse-gas-emissions&ei=5KLcVeD9H4HRhAHjq7CICw&rt=SECTION&vm=STANDARD&bvm=section&did=1096999885361212996&sid=en_us%3Asnc&ssid=snc&st=1&at=dt
-d

Surprise!

Turning Atmospheric CO2 into Carbon Nanofibers
Dr. Pournelle,
Regardless of what one believes about Climate Change, an economic process for manufacturing carbon nanofibers from atmospheric CO2 is pretty cool stuff. Projected cost is $1000/ton of nanofibers.
http://www.nanodaily.com/reports/Diamonds_from_the_sky_approach_turns_CO2_into_valuable_products_999.html

Jeffrey

If the system produces a product worth more than the cost of making it, I would assume it will be capitalized soon enough. I’m too lazy to do the numbers. But I suspect the CO2 entering the atmosphere each year far exceeds the amount of carbon fiber you can sell, so if it be actually needful it may have to be subsidized, but that’s better than bankrupting ourselves.

Security Theater, er Theatre

“Toddler’s Minions ‘fart blaster’ not allowed on flight as it has a trigger”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/aviation/11807263/Toddlers-Minions-fart-blaster-not-allowed-on-flight-as-it-has-a-trigger.html

Well don’t we all feel SO much safer now?

“Will there ever again be an England?” -Anon

Cordially,

John

I dare not answer that…

: Celebrating George Orwell’s birthday

A group of Dutch artists celebrated George Orwell’s birthday on June 25th by putting party hats on surveillance cameras around the city of Utrecht.

http://front404.com/george-orwells-birthday-party/

“If you want any discipline to shape up, first get it laughed at.”

– Paul Harvey

Cordially,

John

http://www.nanodaily.com/reports/Diamonds_from_the_sky_approach_turns_CO2_into_valuable_products_999.html

The article is well beyond my expertise, but is very interesting. The climate modelers tend to secrecy about such matters.

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

Chaos Manor View, Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Most of the day was devoured by medical appointments, and the rest was pleasurably enjoyed in lunch and dinner with Roberta two of our sons. Frank, who lives in Texas, came out for the day and actually joined us going out to Kaiser in Panorama City, and when we had lunch on the way back we were joined by Alex, who lives in the Valley. Then we all four went out to dinner.

In other words I didn’t write much, for this journal, for the SFWA Bulletin, on my novels, or anything else. Tomorrow Larry Niven and I will go out to JPL to have lunch with Richard, my youngest son, who lives in DC but operates out of Houston a good part of the time; after which he has a presentation at JPL, doubtless about NanoRacks and the satellite launching business. And after that my old friend Harlan Ellison will come to a LASFS meeting, and Niven and I can’t miss that, and ==

So it’s thin gruel today and probably less tomorrow. Ah well.

A little more on reactionless drives:

OK, this is most likely my last on this subject, having foolishly gotten myself into it…
Housekeeping first:
1) No, I did not dig more for further information than the popular science bits that were first presented. My research time these days is used for other things (mostly economic and social evolution, military history, and one rather nasty astrometric project.) I would submit, though, that this is precisely why the Doctor invites many different people to the Manor.
2) I stand by my opinion of Chinese research. When all things are subordinated to the State, there is a far steeper cliff of verification needed. There are Chinese researchers that I have on the trust but verify list (a very few), ones that I’ll take a look at but approach with a great deal of skepticism (the majority), and ones that I automatically dismiss (once again, a very few). By the way, I hope that nobody confuses the institution at which these researchers work with the American university – Northwestern PolytechnicAL Institute is in Xi’an, Shaanxi, China; *not* Fremont, California, USA. This paper fell under the majority rule – but on checking, looks like a fairly reliable description of a beginning research effort.
The preceding being out of the way – now to the meat…
Reviewing the links for all three published pieces (sorry, not the YouTube clips – time, again) *not* one of them is claiming a reactionless drive. (See page 2 of the Shawyer IAC presentation, abstract of the Chinese paper – NASA does not say it so simply, but “momentum transfer” is action/reaction, whether momentum is being transferred by “normal” kinetic processes or through the virtual quantum plasma.) Sorry, no breaking of the current “laws” of physics here…
Probably the best way to (vastly) simplify the Shawyer and Chinese work is to describe it as putting a nozzle on your “traditional” engine’s combustion chamber, thus turning a relatively low thrust into a far higher one. Shawyer describes a NASA test device that is quite like his own, and that of the Chinese. All of them apparently produce thrusts at a rough order of magnitude of 0.2 Newtons / kilowatt. (That’s one kilogram, accelerated at 1 meter/second/second with an input of 5 kilowatts of power – which is *extremely* good).
Where Shawyer and the Chinese part company is in what they see as the *potential* of the technology. Shawyer is, in the best Western tradition, looking at the speculative endpoint of a huge amount of further research and engineering advancement – it is a long way from 1 Newton for 5 kilowatts to a SSTO lifting large masses against a 1G field. Note that there is nothing *wrong* with that, and everything *right* with it – how does anyone think the West gained its preeminence in the first place? In any case, this is the very long view.
The Chinese, on the other hand, are seeing this technology as solving in the near term a very practical, but important problem. That is the problem with the fact that any kind of “traditional” thruster that throws mass is certain to cause interference with delicate instrumentation on your spacecraft – or, even worse, deposit that mass onto things like camera lenses, communication antennas, solar cells, etc. To them, this is a way to get small thrusts without the inevitable “pollution” of the immediate environment. It would not surprise me to see this showing up in PRC surveillance satellites, planetary probes, and the like in the near future.
The NASA link is to an engineering paper. You might think it is simply a more sophisticated version of the Shawyer/Chinese devices – but the apparatus described is *very* different, as is their description of the physical principles involved. They also measured the thrust of their apparatus at a mean of 40 *micro* Newtons – which, unless someone did something very wrong, is not in the same region as the other two, not by a very long shot. I think that, despite the superficial similarities (no propellant mass and involving microwaves), the NASA paper is describing a completely different line of approach to achieving thrust. (Apparently not an overly efficient one, either, which does not surprise if the momentum transfer is through the virtual particle plasma – it is called the “vacuum energy” for a very good reason.)

Richard Skinner

I don’t have time to analyze that. I can only repeat, any reactionless drive – any thrust without a propellant – is impossible under the Standard Theory. It blows up Relativity so far as I can tell; certainly makes it complex beyond understanding. It requires serious adjustment to Newton, much more than Beckmann’s postulating a finite speed of propagation to gravity. It makes the quantum structure more important, and certainly changes what we think we know about it. Magnitude isn’t important here. Any propellantless thrust changes our understanding of the universe.

And that’s wonderful. It’s also unlikely. Sagan was fond of Descartes’ dictum, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” Existence of a device that can produce thrust without a propellant is a very extraordinary claim.

Jerry,

For whatever it’s worth, coming from one who consistently flunked high school math, but, having looked at the number of stars in our galaxy, and the number of galaxies in “our” known portion of the universe — and said to himself, “wow, that’s a lot of stars…” I have to ask: If a reactionless drive is indeed possible, then it would seem to my mathematically challenged mind that the upper limit of velocity, given sufficient time, would approach an impressive fraction of the speed of light.

If so, then, given the equally impressive number of stars in the sky, how unlikely is it for us to be “visited” by others?

The more I ponder the questions, the more important the warnings from Hawking et al seem — and the more idiotic any form of “active” SETI (AKA “Here we are, come and get us!”) seem.

Anon

Many years ago Freeman Dyson pointed out the mathematics point strongly to there being but one intelligent species per galaxy. The logic summarizes thus: assume a thousand years in transit in a generation ship to get to the next inhabitable planet. Assume a thousand years for the resulting colony to achieve an industrial technology to build two more star ships. How many millions of years does it take to fill the galaxy? But we have billions. The only variable is how long it takes to evolve the first star crossing industrial civilization…

I have drastically summarized a brilliant analysis, but you may now play with the assumptions, and you will find the conclusion compelling. One per galaxy.

One way or another.

Gulf conveyor slowing

From (admittedly alarmist) articles and television programs I saw at least a decade ago, I know that interruptions of the Gulf stream are likely to have played a part in historic periods of cooling in the Northern Hemisphere. Now comes this:
-Gulf Stream system: Atlantic Ocean overturning, responsible for mild climate in northwestern Europe, is slowing
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150323132746.htm
This seems to match some of your speculation.
-d

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9edfa07c-ceaa-11e4-900c-00144feab7de.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3VFLx03DX

Apple puts clinical research tool in your pocket

Bloomberg

Tapping an iPhone’s touchscreen to take a photograph or make a phone call is as familiar as the traditional cameras and mobile phones that it displaced. Medical researchers hope to use the same simple interactions to study diseases from Parkinson’s to asthma.

Apple began its move into the digital health industry last summer when it unveiled Healthkit, a software platform that developers can use to pool data about workouts, caloric intake and weight. Apple touted its potential to alert doctors about changes to the user’s wellbeing, and several US hospitals have begun to pilot the system.

Less than a year later, almost 1,000 fitness apps are plugging in to Healthkit, giving Apple a strong base upon which to launch its health-centric Watch device.

Apple’s longer-term plans became clearer with the launch earlier this month of ResearchKit, a way for medical researchers to transform the iPhone into a tool for conducting clinical research.

“All you have to do is stick the iPhone in your pocket, walk out 20 steps and back, and the iPhone’s accelerometer and gyroscope precisely measure gait,” said Jeff Williams, senior vice-president for operations, of an app studying Parkinson’s, at this month’s launch.

Apple is not planning to make money directly from these apps, which also track diabetes and cardiovascular health. But ReserachKit is building goodwill with the medical community that could help to sell more iPhones or Watches.

“Having a common platform is a godsend to researchers at the university, hospital, clinical and government level,” says Richard Doherty, research director at Envisioneering, a technology consultancy.

Guaranteeing users’ data security and privacy will be essential. Mr Williams has said that customers will opt into any ReserachKit programmes and promised that Apple “will not see your data”.

“Apple has always believed that amazing things can happen when you put technology in the hands of the many,” Mr Williams concluded.

Force fields could be the next big battlefield innovation (WP)

By Dominic Basulto March 25 at 7:00 AM

America’s military-industrial complex keeps coming up with innovative ideas for how to win asymmetric wars in far-flung locations around the world. As if insect-like drones and Terminator bots were not enough, Boeing recently filed a patent that describes how to create a “force field” capable of shielding soldiers and military vehicles – including tanks and armored personnel carriers – from the shockwaves of IEDs.

While Boeing doesn’t actually call it a “force field patent,” that’s essentially what it is. You can see how Boeing’s “method and system for shockwave attenuation via electromagnetic arc” works in the figure below. Here, a sensor (10A) mounted on the top of a military humvee would detect an explosion and its resulting shockwave (24) in the immediate area. The sensor system would then almost instantaneously send a signal to a power source (38) to superheat the surrounding ambient atmosphere (26) around the vehicle, producing a heated, plasma-like medium (30) between the target and the explosion that would act as a buffer and shield from any shockwave.

Although some have referred to this innovation as a Star Wars or Star Trek-like shield for repelling enemy attacks, that’s not exactly the purpose of the patent. As Boeing points out in patent no. 8981261, such a system would act to “attenuate” any shockwave by a combination of means that might include “reflection, refraction, dispersion, absorption and momentum transfer.” The goal, then, is not to knock down an incoming projectile or missile, but to deploy an intermediate medium that would reduce the collateral damage from such an attack.

Unlike previous attempts at creating a similar type of shield, this Boeing patent – if it ever gets commercialized — would be a dynamic system, rather than a stationary system, relying on sensors to activate a shield in real-time. This would differentiate it from previous patents, which focused more on how a specific substance – such as an aqueous foam, gas emulsion or gel – could somehow absorb the blow of an incoming object when placed inside a barrier. In other words, the force field would be highly mobile and be capable of activating at a moment’s notice, rather than being erected in front of a structure hours, days, or months ahead of time.

Given the nature of modern asymmetric warfare, such a dynamic “force field” is greatly needed. Over the past decade, the “roadside bomb” has fundamentally changed the way the military operates as well as how it innovates. Consider the number of IED attacks in a war zone such as Iraq or Afghanistan, where over 3,100 deaths and 33,000 injuries have been sustained over the past decade. Clearly, the U.S. military needs some way to counter the ability of a terrorist or insurgent group to inflict maximum damage on unsuspecting U.S. soldiers with minimal risk.

As researchers are now finding out, even the shockwave from a detonated IED can cause internal injuries that may not be detected for years afterwards. Unlike the Hollywood movies, where heroes walk away from impressive-looking detonations and blasts as if they were nothing, researchers now say that IED shockwaves are tantamount to being hit multiple times by a ferocious NFL middle linebacker, resulting in potential head concussions each time.

There’s a huge potential market for this type of technology and that means it’s not just the U.S. military that could become buyers of such a battlefield innovation. The British Army is also working on the creation of supercharged electromagnetic fields to deflect anything up to the size of a small missile. And the Israeli Army is also working on a system to knock down incoming projectiles.

Real force fields would be a major development and require new theories…

If you haven’t got your California Sixth Grade Reader (1914) you should do so: https://www.google.com/search?q=california+6th+grade+reader&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/Sixthgradesample.html

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

View from Chaos Manor, Monday, February 02, 2015

I got Firefox spelling checker to work on the SFWA forum, but it was a lot of effort.The easiest way to explain it is that after much searching I found:

Firefox Enable Internal Spell Checker

I occasionally find a problem with Firefox where it will stop spell checking all fields. It’s a small bug, but it’s easily fixed.

Firstly, make sure you have spell checking on:

Tools > Options > Advanced > Check my spelling as I type

If that is checked then uncheck it and restart the browser, then recheck it and again restart the browser – if the spell check still doesn’t work, then once again uncheck the option, then enter about:config in the address bar.

Search for Layout.spellcheckDefault and change the setting from 0 to 1 to enable spell checking in all <textarea> fields, or make the value 2 to enable spell checking in all text input fields.

See also: Layout.spellcheckDefault – MozillaZine Knowledge Base

http://www.liamdelahunty.com/tips/firefox_enable_spelling_check.php

It told me more about Mozilla than ever I wanted to know – I just use the thing, I’m not developing it – but going through that rigmarole did the job.

Yesterday we got a lot said about air supremacy; if you are interested, scroll down. There was plenty. Alas I have had many distractions today and I am a bit tired.

“About 75% of these sorties were in Vietnam (shame we didn’t win that one, eh?). “
The United States did not lose the Vietnam war. The United States destroyed the Viet Cong, and drove the North Vietnamese Army out of South Vietnam. The United States signed a peace treaty with North Vietnam and withdrew its troops from Vietnam.
After that, North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam. The South Vietnamese request American aid to repel the Northern Invasion. Congress under the control of the Democrat Party refused to provide funds or permission for the US to aid South Vietnam, which in due course collapsed, causing the deaths of millions of innocent people in Vietnam and Cambodia.
This is an extraordinarily shameful chapter of American History. But it is about the treacherous behavior of the Democrat Party, not about any failure of the United States Armed Forces.
The leftists who run the schools and the media have created the legend of the loss of the Vietnam War, as part of their mimetic assault on patriotism, and also because they want to lie and blame others for their perfidy.

Robert Schwartz

Actually it’s worse than that: in 1972 the North invaded with 150,000 men.  Fewer than 50,000 ever got home. The Army of the Republic of Viet Nam, (ARVN) with US air support decisively defeated an invasion force the Wehrmacht would have been proud of, and it had more tanks than many WW II campaigns in Russia. ARVN won big, and there were only 650 Americans KIA in a campaign as big as Kharkov.  ARVN won big.  Then in 1975 the North sent another invasion force south, just as large, and the Congress would not allow US air support, while Russia supported its ally.  Viet Nam accordingly fell. But America was not defeated. And the tanks destroyed in 1972 were Russian and had to be replaced, with bad effects on the Soviet economy.

We could have won the Viet Nam War, but Congress did not want to.

I do not say our air support in Viet Nam was not effective, even though we did not have many USAF planes designed for that mission – the Navy and Marines were better.  USAF did a good job when they had to. But we need better ground support against ISIS.

: The End of Mutually Assured Destruction?

This article is worth your time; it covers how changes in ballistic missile accuracy undermine the assumptions necessary for Mutually Assured Destruction; to wit, second strike capabilities and the relatively haphazard nature of nuclear weapons.

Matt at 1913Intel.com wrote a small commentary about this article that presses the point:

<.>

Changes in missile accuracy in effect force the other side to act earlier. They lower the threshold for a bolt-out-of-the-blue preemptive nuclear strike </> http://www.1913intel.com/2015/02/01/the-5-most-dangerous-nuclear-threats-no-one-is-talking-about-the-national-interest/

The crux of the article is here:

<.>

However, after modeling a prospective first strike against Russia’s strategic forces, Lieber and Press concluded that the U.S. could execute a successful first strike with a high degree of probability against even Moscow’s massive nuclear arsenal. In fact, they claimed that U.S. policy makers had actually constructed America’s strategic forces with the goal of strategic primacy (defined as “the ability to use nuclear weapons to destroy the strategic forces of any other

country”) in mind. Furthermore, they later concluded that this effort extended beyond nuclear weapons. As they explained in 2013, “the effort to neutralize adversary strategic forces—that is, achieve strategic primacy—spans nearly every realm of warfare: for example, ballistic missile defense, anti-submarine warfare, intelligence surveillance-and-reconnaissance systems, offensive cyber warfare, conventional precision strike, and long-range precision strike, in addition to nuclear strike capabilities.”

</>

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-5-most-dangerous-nuclear-threats-no-one-talking-about-12160?page=show

This is most interesting and it almost forces Russia to keep pace, develop it’s own methods of primacy, and — perhaps as Matt points out

— act while they have the advantage. And, what about China?

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

We have seen the increasing accuracy of ICBM’s coming on since the 60’s, although I doubt anyone anticipated Moore’s Law then; I certainly did not when I was editor of Project 75 in 1964, We knew technology was advancing on an s curve. See the Strategy of Technology by Possony and Pournelle. And in my International Stability Study for the Air Council I noted that the stabilizer power needs escalation dominance at the high end. That remains true – but we have given up SAC. Nuclear stability requires a Force that is always ready but if successful will never be used. That is an elite force, hard to build, and USAF has let it go. It’s more fun to zoom around.

We sow the wind.

How long is Australia’s history with Jihad?

Now, that’s not a question I expect many people to be able to answer. As it turns out Australia imported a number of “Ghans” in 1860. While that’s short for Afghan the group included Muslims from many places around the world.

In 1914 the Ottoman ruler issued a jihad fatwa.

===8<— quote

The Ottoman fatwa declared that it was a religious duty “for all the Muslims in all countries, whether young or old, infantry or cavalry, to resort to jihad with all their properties and lives, as required by the Quranic verse of enfiru.” The verse of enfiru (Arabic ‘go forth’) is a reference to Sura 9:38:

===8<— quote

You who believe! What is the matter with you, that, when ye are asked to go forth in the path of Allah, you cling heavily to the earth? Do you prefer the life of this world to the Hereafter? But little is the comfort of this life, as compared with the Hereafter. Unless you go forth, He will punish you with a grievous penalty, and put others in your place…

===8<— end quote

===8<— end quote

“From Broken Hill to Martin Place: A Tale of Two Jihad Assaults in Australia a Century Apart”

http://www.islam-watch.org/authors/89-other-authors/1600-from-broken-hill-to-martin-place-a-tale-of-two-jihad-assaults-in-australia-a-century-apart.html

You’d think people would have learned by now that Jihad is built into Islam.

True believers must answer calls to Jihad.

The saving grace is that such calls can only be issued by a real Caliph, a ruler over the entire (or a very substantial portion of) the Islams in the world. So today, nobody is authorized to issue the call to Jihad. This is why ISIS and all the others try so hard to pass themselves off as setting up a Caliphate. Then their calls must be obeyed by all observant Muslims.

Another saving grace is that most Muslims really do not understand or know the Qur’an or Sunnah. The Sunnah is the way of life for Muslims derived from Mohammed’s words and actions. The Qur’an, by contrast, is supposedly revealed to Mohammed by the angel Gabriel and is Allah’s actual words, despite how utterly clumsy they appear.

So Australia has had 100 years to have figured out that regardless of how many Muslims adopt the strict Islamic way of life, terrorism, violence, and destruction follow Muslims as they migrate.

I wonder when WE will figure out what Thomas Jefferson had figured out when he sent the Marines to visit Tripoli et al.

{^_^}

This email is from a Marine who’s in Afghanistan; his buddy Jordan provides many of the details.
No politics here; just a Marine with a bird’s eye view opinion.

US Weapons:

1) The M-16 rifle: Thumbs down. Chronic jamming problems with the talcum powder like sand over there. The sand is everywhere. Jordan says you feel filthy 2 minutes after coming out of the shower. The M-4 carbine version is more popular because it’s lighter and shorter, but it has jamming problems also. They lack the ability to mount the various optical gun sights and weapons lights on the picatinny rails, but the weapon itself is not great in a desert environment.
They all hate the 5.56mm (.223) round. Poor penetration on the cinder block structure common over there and even torso hits can’t be reliably counted on to put the enemy down.

Fun fact:
1) Random autopsies on dead insurgents show a high level of opiate use.

2) The M243 SAW (squad assault weapon): .223 cal. Drum fed light machine gun. Big thumbs down. Universally considered a piece of shit. Chronic jamming problems, most of which require partial disassembly (that’s fun in the middle of a firefight).

3) The M9 Beretta 9mm: Mixed bag. Good gun performs well in desert environment; but they all hate the 9mm cartridge. The use of handguns for self-defense is actually fairly common. Same old story on the 9mm: Bad guys hit multiple times and still in the fight.

4) Mossberg 12 ga. Military shotgun : Works well, used frequently for clearing houses to good effect. (Great weapon – I used these when transporting prisoners).
5)The M240 Machine Gun: 7.62 NATO (.308) cal . belt fed machine gun, developed to replace the old M-60 (what a beautiful weapon that was!) Thumbs up.Accurate, reliable, and the 7.62 round puts ’em down. Originally developed as a vehicle mounted weapon, more and more are being dismounted and taken into the field by infantry. The 7.62 round chews up the structure over there.
6) The M2 .50 cal heavy machine gun : Thumbs way, way up. “Ma Deuce” is still worth her considerable weight in gold. The ultimate fight stopper – puts their dicks in the dirt every time. The most coveted weapon in-theater.
7) The .45 pistol: Thumbs up. Still the best pistol around out there. Everybody authorized to carry a sidearm is trying to get their hands on one. With few exceptions, one can reliably be expected to put ’em down with a torso hit. The special ops guys (who are doing most of the pistol work) use the HK military model and supposedly love it. The old government model .45’s are being re-issued en masse.
8) The M-14: Thumbs up. They are being re-issued in bulk, mostly in a modified version to special ops guys. Modifications include lightweight Kevlar stocks and low power red dot or ACOG sights. Very reliable in the sandy environment, and they love the 7.62 round.
9) The Barrett .50 cal sniper rifle: Thumbs way up. Spectacular range and accuracy and hits like a freight train. Used frequently to take out vehicle suicide bombers (we actually stop a lot of them) and barricaded enemy. It is definitely here to stay.

10) The M24 sniper rifle: Thumbs up. Mostly in .308 but some in 300 win mag. Heavily modified Remington 700’s. Great performance. Snipers have been used heavily to great effect. Rumor has it a marine sniper on his third tour in Anbar province has actually exceeded Carlos Hathcock’s record for confirmed kills with OVER 100.

11) The new body armor: Thumbs up. Relatively light at approx. 6 lbs. and can reliably be expected to soak up small shrapnel and even will stop an AK-47 round.
The bad news: Hot as hell to wear, almost unbearable in the summer heat (which averages over 120 degrees). Also, the enemy now goes for head shots whenever possible. All the bullshit about the “old” body armor making our guys vulnerable to the IED’s was a non-starter. The IED explosions are enormous and body armor doesn’t make any difference at all in most cases.

12) Night Vision and Infrared Equipment: Thumbs way up. Spectacular performance. Our guys see in the dark and own the night, period. Very little enemy action after evening prayers. More and more enemy being whacked at night during movement by our hunter-killer teams. We’ve all seen the videos.

13) Lights: Thumbs up. Most of the weapon mounted and personal lights are Surefires, and the troops love them. Invaluable for night urban operations. Jordan carried a $34 Surefire G2 on a neck lanyard and loved it. I can’t help but notice that most of the good fighting weapons and ordnance are 50 or more years old! With all our technology, it’s the WWII and Vietnam era weapons that everybody wants! The infantry fighting is frequent, up close and brutal. No quarter is given or shown.

Bad guy weapons:
1) Mostly AK47s: The entire country is an arsenal. Works better in the desert than the M16 and the .308 Russian round kills reliably. PKM belt fed light machine guns are also common and effective. Luckily, the enemy mostly shoots like shit. Undisciplined “spray and pray” type fire. However, they are seeing more and more precision weapons, especially sniper rifles. ( Iran, again)

2) The RPG: Probably the infantry weapon most feared by our guys. Simple, reliable and as common as dogshit. The enemy responded to our up-armored Humvees by aiming at the windshields, often at point blank range. Still killing a lot of our guys.

3) The IED: The biggest killer of all. Can be anything from old Soviet anti-armor mines to jury rigged artillery shells. A lot found in Jordan’s area were in abandoned cars. The enemy would take 2 or 3 155 mmartillery shells and wire them together. Most were detonated by cell phone and the explosions are enormous. You’re not safe in any vehicle, even an M1 tank. Driving is by far the most dangerous thing our guys do over there. Lately, they are much more sophisticated “shape charges” (Iranian) specifically designed to penetrate armor.
Fact: Most of the ready made IEDs are supplied by Iran, who is also providing terrorists (Hezbollah types) to train the insurgents in their use and tactics. That’s why the attacks have been so deadly lately. Their concealment methods are ingenious, the latest being shape charges, in Styrofoam containers spray painted to look like the cinderblocks that litter all Iraqi roads. We find about 40% before they detonate, and the bomb disposal guys are unsung heroes of this war.

4) Mortars and rockets: Very prevalent. The soviet era 122 mm rockets (with an 18 km range) are becoming more prevalent. One of Jordan’s NCO’s lost a leg to one. These weapons cause a lot of damage “inside the wire.” Jordan’s base was hit almost daily his entire time there by mortar and rocket fire, often at night to disrupt sleep patterns and cause fatigue (It did.). More of a psychological weapon than anything else. The enemy mortar teams would jump out of vehicles, fire a few rounds, and then haul ass in a matter of seconds.

Fun fact: Captured enemy have apparently marveled at the marksmanship of our guys and how hard they fight. They are apparently told in Jihad school that the Americans rely solely on technology, and can be easily beaten in close quarters combat for their lack of toughness. Let’s just say they know better now.

Bad guy technology: Simple yet effective. Most communication is by cell and satellite phones and also by email on laptops. They use handheld GPS units for navigation and “Google Earth” for overhead views of our positions. Their weapons are good, if not fancy, and prevalent. Their explosives and bomb technology is TOP OF THE LINE. Night vision is rare. They are very careless with their equipment and the GPS units and laptops are treasure troves of Intel when captured.

Who are the bad guys? These are mostly “foreigners,” non-Afghan Jihadists from all over the Muslim world (and Europe). Some are virtually untrained young Jihadists that often end up as suicide bombers or in various “sacrifice squads.” Most, however, are hard core terrorists from all the usual suspects (Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas etc.). These are the guys running around murdering civilians en masse and cutting heads off.
The Chechens (many of whom are Caucasian) are supposedly the most ruthless and the best fighters. They have been fighting the Russians for years. The terrorists have been very adept at infiltrating the Afghan local government, the police forces, and the Army. They have had a spy and agitator network there since the Iran-Iraq war in the early 80s.

Bad Guy Tactics: When they are engaged on an infantry level they get their asses kicked every time! Brave, but stupid. Suicidal Banzai-type charges were very common earlier in the war and still occur. They will literally sacrifice 8-10 man teams in suicide squads by sending them screaming and firing AKs and RPGs directly at our bases just to probe the defenses. They get mowed down like grass every time (see the M2 and M240 above). Jordan’s base was hit like this often. When engaged, they have a tendency to flee to the same building, probably for what they think will be a glorious last stand. Instead, we call in air and that’s the end of that more often than not. These hole-ups are referred to as Alpha Whiskey Romeos (Allah’s Waiting Room).
We have the laser guided ground-air thing down to a science. The fast movers, mostly Marine F-18s, are taking an ever increasing toll on the enemy. When caught out in the open, the helicopter gunships and AC-130 Spectre Gunships cut them to ribbons with cannon and rocket fire, especially at night. Interestingly, artillery is hardly used at all.

Fun facts: The enemy death toll is supposedly between 45-50 thousand. That is why we’re seeing less and less infantry attacks and more IED, suicide bomber shit. The new strategy is just simple attrition. The insurgent tactic most frustrating is their use of civilian non-combatants as cover. They know we do all we can to avoid civilian casualties and therefore schools, hospitals and especially Mosques are locations where they meet, stage for attacks, cache weapons, and ammo and flee to when engaged. They have absolutely no regard whatsoever for inflicting civilian casualties. They will terrorize locals and murder without hesitation anyone believed to be sympathetic to the Americans. Kidnapping of family members, especially children, is common to influence people they are trying to influence but can’t reach, such as local govt. officials, clerics, tribal leaders, etc. The first thing our guys are told is “don’t get captured.” They know that if captured they will be tortured and beheaded on the internet. They openly offer bounties for anyone who brings in a live American serviceman. This motivates the criminal element who otherwise don’t give a shit about the war. A lot of the beheading victims were actually kidnapped by common criminals and sold to them. As such, for our guys, every fight is to the death. Surrender is not an option. The Afghanis are a mixed bag. Some fight well; others aren’t worth a damn. Most do okay with American support.

Finding leaders is hard, but they are getting better. Many Afghanis were galvanized and the caliber of recruits in the Army and the police forces went right up, along with their motivation. It also led to an exponential increase in good intel because the Afghanis are sick of the insurgent attacks against civilians.
Morale: According to Jordan, morale among our guys is very high. They not only believe that they are winning, but that they are winning decisively. They are stunned and dismayed by what they see in the American press, whom they almost universally view as against them. The embedded reporters are despised and distrusted. Our guys are inflicting casualties at a rate of 20-1 and then see lies like “Are we losing in Iraq” on TV and the print media. For the most part, our guys are satisfied with their equipment, food, and leadership. Bottom line though, and they all say this, is that there are not enough guys there to drive the final stake through the heart of the insurgency, primarily because there aren’t enough troops in-theater to shut down the borders with Afghanisan and Pakistan. The Iranians and the Syrians just can’t stand the thought of Afganistan being an American ally (with, of course, permanent US bases there).
Anyway, that’s it, hope you found this interesting.

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

View 832 Thursday, July 10, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

The locusts have been swarming around Chaos Manor this week, and have devoured much of my time. Meanwhile the world goes on, and not all that well, alas.

Russia & Putin

Dear Jerry,

The situation in Ukraine grinds on. The Ukraine forces appear to be regaining control over their eastern territories, and the Russians are not intervening to prevent that.

I see no reason to assume the conscript based Russian army would be more capable than the Special Operations forces presently deployed. The alternative is at least as likely. Specifically, these units would prove far less capable, and also far less motivated.

http://russiamil.wordpress.com/2012/01/06/new-pay-structure-for-conscripts-announced/

The basic pay for riflemen works out to less than $30 a month. Meanwhile Putin is paying the "volunteers" in the eastern Ukraine many times more than that. Putin himself has frequently said he wants to move to an all-volunteer force like the USA has. But so far the "siloviki" he depends on politically have frustrated that. As Rumsfeld said, you go to war with the army you have. Or you don’t go to war with it, as in this instance.

Putin’s high poll ratings rest on an apparently bloodless and cost free victory in the Crimea. Now things aren’t so bloodless and the costs are running up fast.

I cannot believe that President Putin has renounced his claims to the Russian speaking Russians in Ukraine, so what is his strategy?

I think the strategy adopted by Putin and his war advisers was that Kiev was going to roll over two months ago on "Novy Russia", just as it did in March in the Crimea. This didn’t happen. As a result he now has no end game strategy. This kind of fundamental strategic miscalculation is fairly common in war, as you know.

I had thought he would have the pro-Russian rebels fall back and consolidate, then offer some kind of deal in which there comes to exist an autonomous region still part of Ukraine but friendly to Russia. That may yet be the goal. We can only watch and wait.

Who is supposed to fund this proposed settlement long term? Kiev, the EU and the USA won’t. This leaves the bills for 5 million to 17 million people being delivered to The Kremlin, PO Box 1, Moscow, Russian Federation.

A few months ago there was a widespread faith bruited about in these regions that "Uncle Vovo" would effortlessly improve the general living conditions of the local Want-To-Be-Ruled-By-Russia Russians. And which "Russians" are disproportionately concentrated in the large towns and cities of eastern Ukraine. "Ukrainian speakers" dominate in the villages of the countryside far into eastern Ukraine. The "Russian separatists" have no demonstrated ability to hold the intervening countryside between cities like Slavyansk and Donetsk. This is because they command almost no support in this countryside.

Those "Ruskis" who do support annexation by Moscow have instead gotten the opposite result from what they expected. Their provinces have been turned into battlefields, the local civil economy has collapsed, a flood of refugees have poured into Russia and Europe and a horde of mercenaries and foreign adventurers have been turned loose to pillage and rape.

Meanwhile "Uncle Vovo" steadfastly refuses to mobilize either his tanks or his Oil & Gas Stabilization Fund.

The first reason he won’t roll is the non-zero risk the force he can send would be defeated in the field. The second reason is he has no domestic political mandate to run up high casualties with that ill equipped and poorly trained conscript force. The third reason is the scale of the international sanctions costs that will fall on vital parts of Putin’s ruling coalition.

Best Wishes,

Anon

A reasonable analysis. Putin does have some Regulars, and conscript training is getting better, but as the West has known since the English Civil War, militias and untrained conscripts are not the formula for winning wars. Republics need time to train conscripts and turn them into Legions; given that time and economic productivity, they are highly effective. As the Germans discovered in two World Wars.

Putin comes from a different tradition and a people with a different history.

He certainly has not abandoned Ukraine; the question is, how much of it does he think he can get over the long haul? He has Crimea. He has gambled and lost with Trans-Don Ukraine; but he hasn’t lost all that much.

Why We Lost Iraq

Jerry

There’s an interesting I-told-them-so piece in the Washington Post by a guy who was there, describing how we stuck with Maliki far past the point we should have if we wanted to keep Iraq unified and in our sphere.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-we-stuck-with-maliki–and-lost-iraq/2014/07/03/0dd6a8a4-f7ec-11e3-a606-946fd632f9f1_story.html

Leaving aside the argument over whether we should have been the regional hegemon at all, as long as we were we should at least have been a competent one. Once we’d broken Iraq expensively then put it back together at great further expense, washing our hands and walking away long before the glue had set was not the wisest way to express disapproval of prior policy.

Porkypine

That’s one view and a good case can be made for it. We could at least have a portion of it viable: Kurdistan comes close to what we thought we could make out of all of Iraq. It’s not too late to salvage that. I note that the Mahdi Army is demonstrating what the English speaking people learned from the English Civil War and the Commonwealth: militias generally cannot defeat regular armies, and untrained yeomen are not the key to victory. George Washington at Valley Forge was allowed to create the Continental Army and carefully nurtured it, using it in connection with militia until Lafayette brought him a fleet and some more regulars. It was done very effective, as at Cowpens. Greene gave these instructions to the militia: Give me three volleys, boys, and you can run. To the Continentals: stand fast when the farmers run, and let them get close. A classic battle. Sorry for the ramble.

There was no way Iraq could have been left intact, especially with the Shiites being given total control once we’d disbanded the Baathist controlled army and started the purge of all trained government officials. This was obvious to everyone who had any experience there, but neither Bush nor Obama understood. We could have built three – possibly four – reasonably stable nation states, formed an alliance with two of them, and got the hell out, at far les cost; but that wasn’t considered by anyone.

I’m not sure I know what being the competent hegemon would have been when Obama took office.

Battle of Cowpens

Dr. Pournelle: the patriots at Cowpens were led by Daniel Morgan, not Nathanael Greene.

Robert Evans

Of course it was Morgan.  Thanks for the correction

The flap over the Hachette/Amazon dispute has died away a bit, but it still roils the Science Fiction Writers of America. Some of the old time members have never discovered self publishing and are suspicious of those who have; and a number of newer members signed away most of their electronic rights to a Big Publisher and have  animus toward those who not only kept their eBook rights, but are making more money now from self-publishing than they would ever have made if they’d signed with a regular publisher. I don’t know how many of these people there are, but apparently there are a number of SFWA members who don’t want to see successful professional writers who make money self-publishing science fiction to be accepted as members of SFWA. I’d hope not very many, and perhaps I’m making all this up; but I do know there is apparently some opposition to allowing those making professional money from self-published SF to join SFWA, and that has exacerbated the original effects of SFWA officially signing a petition that appears to be anti-Amazon. That act was hated by the Independently Published – self-published if you will – professional SF writers; which of course astonished some of the old line traditionally published writers who haven’t thought about any of this.

After all, Amazon is a big corporation, and stopped taking pre-orders for Hachette published books, and that’s bad for authors. Of course it’s only bad for authors who have books coming out soon but not yet published, and actually of those it’s only the lead authors who will be affected: most mid list writers don’t get any pre-orders in the first place. Pre-orders can affect print runs for books that the publisher (and of course the author) hopes will be a best seller. Most of those books will have received a big advance, and in general big advances aren’t going to be earned out, so the financial impact on those authors isn’t so large after all. Of those who get big advances, and those earn out – well, we are down to a pretty small number now, and most of those don’t know such people.

Which is not to say that there shouldn’t be some solidarity between Big Name Best Selling Authors and the more typical mid list sometimes lead but not often authors, and vice verse, and over the years SFWA has managed to keep some of that solidarity intact; but for the most part outfits like SFWA don’t do much for the Really Big Names.

None of this means much to the Independently Published writers. What does have importance is Amazon, which is typically responsible for about 905 of their income; and for SFWA to be seen as taking sides with Hachette and the Big 5 Traditional Publishers (all of whom will have to go through the same contract negotiations as Hachette; Hachette just happens to be first. Think auto union negotiations and Ford) – for SFWA to be seen as on the side of outfits that pay 10% royalties on printed books, and really would like to keep royalties on eBooks down in that range, was startling, and appears suicidal.

And indeed it would be, but of course that wasn’t what, in a hasty action just before the 4^th of July holiday, SFWA President Steven Gould (yeah, him, one of those Big Names) decided to exhibit some solidarity with other writers and the Author’s Guild, and sign the petition castigating Amazon for harming writers, and asking them to stop doing that in their negotiations with Hachette. He probably wasn’t even aware that Amazon had already offered to join Hachette in paying into a fund that would compensate authors harmed by the consequences of Hachette and Amazon taking so long to negotiate a contract on who sets prices, who can discount what, and what percentage of cover price Amazon would have to pay Hachette for books – both physical books and eBooks. Amazon sells both, 85 – 90% of eBooks and something like 40% of printed books. And the contracts between Amazon and Hachette expired weeks ago, so Amazon doesn’t know what it will have to pay to get books it has taken pre-orders for.

I suspect that the SFWA board members weren’t all that aware of the background to the Hachette dispute, and this didn’t look like that big a deal anyway. Sure, writers organizations support writers. That’s what they’re for. Solidarity forever, and God Bless Us.

And then the storm hit the fan hours after the announcement, most of the SFWA Board were unaware of the storm, being engaged in holiday events – many at SF conventions, or course. So they came home to find they were in the middle of something they had no awareness they were starting.

No good to say ‘They Should Have Been.’ That’s already been said, and every one of the SFWA leaders now wishes mightily that they’d called a few other members, past presidents, independently published writers (there are many of them already SFWA members because they had made traditional print sales before doing the math and discovering that for them there was more gold in them there independent hills), and so forth.

The storm is dying out, and it should. And perhaps the lesson was learned. And we can all get back to work on pay copy.

I should never be President.  The Mexicans are still holding an American Marine in durance vile – and vile it is – on a silly technicality that should at worst cost him a few hundred dollars fine, and they won’t let him go. They are having fun with it.

Were I President I would call the Mexican President and tell him that a delegation of his fellow Marines, unarmed, are coming in to visit him and expect to take him home with them; and if they fail in that mission, his whole regiment with whatever support it needs from the San Diego Fleet, will make another visit to that prison, and they will carry their weapons.  And they will not leave Mexico without him. “The unarmed delegation leaves in one hour.  I suggest you call the Tia Juana Federales and prepare them.”  I suppose it’s a good thing I am not President.

In the land of the free:

http://dailysignal.com/2014/07/07/son-skips-church-father-arrested-child-endangerment/?utm_source=heritagefoundation&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=morningbell

‘The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s most accurate, up-to-date temperature data confirm the United States has been cooling for at least the past decade.’

<http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2014/06/25/government-data-show-u-s-in-decade-long-cooling/>

———–

Roland Dobbins

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