Wednesday, August 30, 2017

The map is not the territory.

Alfred Korzybski

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

Packing for DragonCon. That turns out to be more work than it used to be. Ah, well. I do hope the weather hasn’t affected the Dallas airport.

Longest war

Lately I keep hearing the talking heads on the news refer to the current conflict as “America’s longest war”. In modern times it can be (weakly) argued that since the Korean War that started in 1950 was paused by an armistice rather than ending with a peace treaty it has been 67 years and counting. A better claim can be made for the even longer Indian Wars. the VA recognizes the Indian Wars as running from 1817 to 1898 a total of 81 years. More proof that history is not something the media worries abound.

John

I expect that’s correct. And even includes the year Congress appropriated no money for the Army, leaving the officers with the problem of how to feed the men…

Floods and FEMA

Dear Jerry –

You recently wrote, 

The way FEMA worked, at least when I was familiar with it, made Clinton’s action as good as any, because the local FEMA officials’ competence was irrelevant. Washington controlled FEMA, and needed no advice from locals; neither local FEMA nor National Guard. Locals couldn’t possibly as competent as the DC Professionals, and don’t you forget it. Of course when Clinton became President he had some reasons to suspect that…

and certainly the approach reached its disastrous apotheosis in Katrina. (Of course, it’s important to keep in mind that FEMA had been folded into DHS, and DHS was largely focused on terrorism at the expense of disaster relief, which led to wholesale retirement of upper level FEMA managers with disaster relief backgrounds who might have done the necessary and made Brown look good. And it’s always a good idea to consider that all the pre-Katrina estimates said that at least half of New Orleans was too poor to evacuate – and then folks blew a gasket when half of New Orleans DIDN’T evacuate. Plus, the press frenzy started about 48 hours after the barriers failed and completely ignored the fact that the nominal FEMA response time had always been stated as 72 hours.)

But there is hope. The FEMA director for the last 8 years has been Craig Fugate, who seems to be about as far from Michael Brown as possible, and who preaches “whole-community response” and makes statements such as,

We had almost by default defined the public as a liability. We looked at them as,We must take care of them, because they’re victims. But in a catastrophic disaster, why are we discounting them as a resource? Are you telling me there’s not nurses, doctors, construction people, all kinds of walks of life that have skills that are needed?

and

“Quit referring to people as victims and call them survivors.” I said, my first goal is to change the vocabulary of emergency management. As long as you use vocabulary like “victims,” you’re going to treat the public like a liability and you have to take care of them. That works in most small- to medium-size disasters, ’cause we can bring in more help than there are people—but the bigger the disaster the less effective it is. When you step back and look at most disasters, you talk about first responders—lights and sirens—that’s bullshit. The first responders are the neighbors. Bystanders. People that are willing to act.

I recommend this interview https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/09/we-are-all-first-responders/402146/

Of course, Pournelle’s Iron Law applies, and there’s no telling how much progress he’s made in a mere 8 years, but it’s certainly hopeful.

Also hopeful is the lack of FEMA response with respect to the civilian efforts such as the Cajun Navy, which have apparently moved several thousand people out of flooded homes and are continuing the god work. Contrast this with the the attempts by FEMA post-Katrina to actively prevent private boat-owners from doing the same function because it wasn’t coordinated. And somehow I doubt volunteer firefighters from other states will be required to undergo a week of training before they are allowed to start work.

It’s still early days, of course, and there are some big political differences from Katrina, such as competence from both the local and state governments (Chocolate Ray Nagin was never properly held accountable for his utter incompetence, and the Louisiana governor’s refusal to ask for help has gone remarkably unnoticed – and both stand in stark contrast to the current politicos). I thought the advice by the Rockport mayor to those who wouldn’t evacuate (“We’re suggesting if people are going to stay here, mark their arm with a Sharpie pen with their name and Social Security number,”) showed a certain welcome bloody-mindedness. But we shall see what we shall see.

Regards,

Jim Martin

==

Civil Defense

The “Cajun Navy” is proving your position on “Civil Defense” to be correct.

Duane

Civil Defense

With regard to Civil Defense teams, which I remember being aware of in my youth. If you aren’t already you might want to become familiar with CERT (Community Emergency Response Teams [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_emergency_response_team]) – I don’t know about your area but I became aware of their existence shortly before I moved from Stockton (Central Valley) a couple of years ago. With recongnition of the earthquake dangers of the subjunction zone here in Oregon there has been an increasing emphasis on these local teams (Salem OR has numerous teams within each of several regions in the immediate locale, although they are not as yet completely built out). Last spring there was a weekly series of page long preparation guides in the Statesman Journal, and there was a significant presence of CERT representatives at our recent National Night Out neighborhood gatherings. There is quite a lot of media promotion on emergency preparedness and at least low level prepping here. OEM offered the free ham radio class I took a few months ago. CERT is coordinated with the Oregon Office of Emergency Management, headquartered at the National Guard base here in Salem. CERT courses are being taught at our local junior college and in other venues.

Paul

Afghanistan.

There are several reasons why we should maintain a presence in Afghanistan.

We’ve been there 16 years. The Afghan government will most likely never stand alone.

If we leave, the Russians, Iran, or more likely China will have to move in to support

their government.

This is undesirable. One main reason is Rare Earth Elements mining. China currently controls

97% of the market. The Rare Earths are Lanthanides like Neodymium, Scandium, Cerium,

Lanthanum, Yttrium and 12 others. The Rare Earth elements are used in everything hi tech

from cell phones, batteries, magnets, to hi tech aluminum and steel alloys.

The problem with the Rare Earths is they all are generally contained in the same ore.

They are very difficult and expensive to separate in the refining process because they

are closely grouped on the periodic table. China has put the single major US company out

of business by undercutting the market.

Mining and refining Rare Earths is not a very Eco-friendly operation. The mine tailings are

generally mildly radioactive due to Thorium and Uranium. All the acids and chemicals that

are used in refining are strictly regulated by the EPA upping costs.

In remote, sparsely populated Afghanistan, these issues are non-issues. Mining and refining

can occur with little, if any, global impact. China’s monopoly on the market will be mitigated.

David Rockefeller spent a lifetime building a Central Asian presence along with people like

Zbignew Brzezinski and that effort and accomplishment should not be wasted or thrown away.

Through the Council on Foreign Relations and other local boards and commissions, an overall

Central Asian policy of cooperation has been developed.

The Central Asian policy is best put forth and described in Zbignew Brzezinski’s essay;

“A Geostrategy for Eurasia”published through the Council on Foreign relations (CFR);

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/asia/1997-09-01/geostrategy-eurasia

and his book “The Grand Chessboard”

http://https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_chessboard.htm

When one reflects on the decades of dedicated work by David Rockefeller and people like

Zbignew Brzezinski for developement, stability and partnership in Eurasia, it becomes

apparent it’s in everyone’s best interest.

If we are not in Afghanistan, somebody else will be there.

That’s what the interventionists fear. They may be right; but stationing 20,000 troops for decades in Afghanistan is a serious matter, and might even require building a different sort of Army; Legions that expect to serve out their time in foreign lands. Would they be rewarded with citizenship? Pensions – land – for his veterans was one of Caesar’s major concerns.

if they say you are wrong, say it again louder

Dr. Pournelle,

They’re back:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/renewables/100-percent-renewable-energy-for-139-countries-by-2050

I notice, again, that the authors do not estimate cost, or who they expect to pay, or the actual cost of development in barrel of oil equivalent units, or the cost of maintenance, or the limitations of wind and solar power generation.  And, as in their study two years ago, still don’t state the cost of the energy storage that their proposal requires.  They don’t account for projected growth of demand.

This time, they pointedly also don’t mention the cost in comparison to the gdp of the countries involved.  Obviously, the U.S. will be expected to foot the bill, and China and India will be expected to continue to absorb the pollution generated by mining, smelting, concrete production, and chemical processing.

It will obviously be all free, since we will all be paying two or three hundred percent more  (corrected for collectivized petroleum industries) for the five to ten-fold increase in fossil fuel usage that will be required to build these technologies.  And of course, it will all have to be replaced again by 2075.

I feel better already.

-d

Glad that problem is settled.

Thinking for oneself

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

In the midst of woe, gloom and uncertainty, I see this little note in freshman orientation at Princeton U which brightened my day, and I hope yours as well.

https://jmp.princeton.edu/announcements/some-thoughts-and-advice-our-students-and-all-students

In a nutshell, the profs warn the students to beware of campus orthodoxies and the ‘tyranny of public opinion’, to think for themselves and to give even ‘unspeakable’ ideas a second look.

Good for them. C.S. Lewis asked “What do they teach them in those schools?” It’s nice to see that some of the old light survives, even in the midst of the Crazy Years.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

That’s what my generation was brought up to expect of any college. Some were better at it than others. Not necessarily the big research Universities. When I worked as a consultant on the California University Master Plan, the State Universities were different campuses of one University, and had small undergraduate student bodies; the California State Colleges were supposed to be the primary undergraduate institutions, and were not to have graduate students or issue graduate degrees. On this basis the costs were sold to the taxpayers. Of course so soon as the law was passed the California State Colleges insisted on becoming California State Universities and be able to give graduate degrees, and started humping for grants and wanting graduate students to teach the freshmen, ad so forth, etc., etc.

And here you thought there was no slavery anymore anywhere.

Actually there still is slavery. If you go to a backwards nation on the West coast of Africa near the equator you can find massive slavery operations which the government refuses to do anything about. It’s a Mohammedan nation. It is run according to Sharia law. And Sharia law, the law supposedly handed down to Mohammed by his sham Moon god Allah. The Guardian, of all things, published an article about slavery in Mauritania. It’s there. It’s active. It’s the way of life there. And regardless of pressure placed on them, it remains a standard practice in the nation.

Here are Jihad Watch’s excerpts and comments:

Defying international pressure, Islamic Republic of Mauritania refuses to free slaves https://www.jihadwatch.org/2017/08/defying-international-pressure-islamic-republic-of-mauritania-refuses-to-free-slaves

And in case you miss the click through to the source here it is:

US warned Mauritania’s ‘total failure’ on slavery should rule out trade benefits https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/aug/25/us-warned-mauritania-total-failure-slavery-trade-benefits

The US is making this an issue under the Trump administration. If Trump plans to have the US military somehow get involved, that would be a bad bad thing. But, making a public issue of this is a nice way to show the savagery of Sharia Law.

We need to do MUCH more of that. Mohammedanism is a threat. And it should get criticized for the uncivilized, indeed savage, behavior called for from its adherents.

{^_^}

I wonder if the law against filibustering still applies? (Private expeditions of US volunteers intent on liberating the oppressed in other nations was once known as filibustering, and at one time outlawed after vigorous debates.)

Re: Your Aug 29th post and refrigeration

There’s another issue about the change in refrigerants. I don’t know how much coverage the Grenfell Tower fire and the subsequent discovery of hundreds of deathtrap tower blocks in “social housing” in the UK have had, but one thing that has had almost no coverage (probably because the environmentalists don’t want it to get any) is that the actual direct cause of the Grenfell fire (the spark to touch it off, if you will) was almost certainly an exploding refrigerator.
Huh? you say? Well, it so happens that approved refrigerants are tightly controlled and much more expensive than the old ones. Because of this, makers of budget fridges have started filling them with such things as propane and butane. Which works fine, until the fridge gets a bit old, doesn’t get maintained (as most don’t) and the refrigerant starts leaking.
Picture it. A small, unnoticeable leak in the cooling circuit, inside the fridge. It gets left overnight; gas builds up inside the refrigerator. Go into the fridge in the morning to get the milk for your cereal, the little light inside goes on, the switch that does that arcs over – and BOOM! (And the blast fractures the cooling circuit altogether, and half a litre of liquid propane flashes almost instantly to gas…)

Ian

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

Tuesday, August 29, 2017

Being intelligent is not a felony. But most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor.

-Robert A. Heinlein

The map is not the territory.

Alfred Korzybski

It’s terribly hot outside, and I am busily preparing for my trip to Atlanta and DragonCon, where I am presenting an award as well as participating on panels and the usual stuff. Travel is a major expedition for me now, and takes a lot of preparation; and alas, all my experience during the Cold War and even in BYTE days is basically irrelevant. Back in the days when you wore a necktie to air travel I flew around enough to get lifetime memberships in most airline lounge clubs, which simplifies things a lot, but what I learned then about airline travel doesn’t apply now. Maybe to First Class, but not to anyone else. Fortunately I can arrange for a wheel chair and get help boarding, but the old days seem to be gone. The cabin crew – can’t call them stewardesses anymore – try, but they’re overworked and understaffed, and more and more passengers no longer wear neckties and are polite and understanding. I miss the old days before deregulation of prices, when airlines had to compete on service, not on being cheap. And yes, I thoroughly realize that I’ve just said I’d rather have higher prices filter airline travel, and that’s assertion of privilege and all that. It won’t stop me from missing the old days when flying was a pleasant experience.

Anyway, I’ve got appointments this afternoon and not a lot of time.

If there’s a lesson from the current weather – you really can’t blame it on climate – it’s one we used to know. When I was a kid during the depression, people who built houses in areas a few feet above flood level – in flood plains like Houston and Baton Rouge and much of the Mississippi Valley – built them on stilts. In Tornado Alley they built storm cellars. In flood plains in Tornado Alley they built on stilts and hoped to find shelter every 25 or thirty years. The primary rule was, if you build mansions in flood plains, prepare to self insure, and if you’re not that rich, think of living somewhere else.

After all. Talk of 30 year floods, or 50 year floods, or even 100 year floods is a prediction; and while the likelihood of two 50 year floods in a decade is low, it ain’t zero. My house is 70 feet above the concreted river down by Ventura Blvd, and I didn’t worry even when the only storm drains were streets, which we’re about six feet above anyway; our streets being 70 feet above Ventura Blvd. And yes, I did all those calculations before we bought this place. After all, I grew up in Memphis, known at Bluff City, and then in Capleville known at Nonconnah Bottom, and I was born in Louisiana. I know about houses on stilts, and one of my earliest memories is of railway flatcars filled with injured and refugees from the Tupelo, Mississippi Tornado.

Which is not to say I have no sympathy for the victims of the storm. I do think it madness to continue the fiction that replacing the old local Civil Defense organizations, many of them managed by volunteer retired military officers and veterans, with FEMA which Governors like Clinton used as places for political agents to get a salary while they worked for his election, was a good idea.

The way FEMA worked, at least when I was familiar with it, made Clinton’s action as good as any, because the local FEMA officials’ competence was irrelevant. Washington controlled FEMA, and needed no advice from locals; neither local FEMA nor National Guard. Locals couldn’t possibly as competent as the DC Professionals, and don’t you forget it. Of course when Clinton became President he had some reasons to suspect that…

A long time ago, Civil Defense organized local communities down to Boy Scout level, and it worked pretty well. After Katrina drove some victims to seek refuge in Houston, then came Humphrey (which may be a bit ironic), we learn that a 30 or 40 year flood can be followed by something worse in fewer than 20 years; of course we have always known that, but perhaps this time we can pay attention?

The date of this picture is 1935.

http://blabber.buzz/politics/conservative-news/216117-climatologist-former-nasa-scientist-houston-flood-not-sign-of-climate-change

 

Another Visit to the law of unintended results.

 

Jerry,

During our current SoCal heat wave I began to wonder how much additional CO2 has belched into the atmosphere since R22, commonly referred to as Freon, due to the fact that none of the replacements are as efficient.

I did a little reading and learned that not only do the replacement coolants require more energy for the same amount of cooling, but ChloroFluoroCarbons are much more potent greenhouse gasses that CO2. (Not hard to believe since CO2 is a very weak greenhouse gas.) All of the retrofitting of R22 systems with “acceptable” refrigerants has undoubtedly released a lot of refrigerant into the atmosphere.

BTW, how is the naturally occurring and fluctuating Ozone hole doing these days.

Bob Holmes

But the models say…

Antifa Mobs Violently Attack Peaceful Protesters At Berkeley, Police Stand Down

Is anyone surprised?

NEWin Q-MAG.org: humans in caves – heath advantages

http://www.q-mag.org/

Third and last installment of Amanda Laoupi’s article on the environmental bio-advantages of Neanderthals.

Anne-Marie de Grazia

I have found this interesting. We are after all the children of Cain and Abel.

Thousand-Year-Old Viking Fortress Reveals a Technologically-Advanced Society.

<http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/thousand-year-old-viking-fortress-reveals-technologically-advanced-society>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

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

Wednesday, August 2, 2017

Being intelligent is not a felony. But most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor.

-Robert A. Heinlein

The map is not the territory.

Alfred Korzybski

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

Donald Trump

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

Peter Cove

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

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

James Burnham

[For homosexuals] Death is the sentence. We know there’s nothing to be embarrassed about this. Death is the sentence.

Imam Farrokh Sekaleshfar in an address at Hussein Islamic Center, Orlando. Florida, 2013

We are a nation of assimilated immigrants.

Immigration without assimilation is invasion.

We have to start with the premise that the goal is to defeat the enemy.

Jim Woolsey

It’s breaking news, so no valid comments are possible, but it is my understanding that the so called Republicans have passed a sanctions bill penalizing Russia: and forbidding the President from rescinding any of them without consent of Congress. The rumor is that President Trump will sign it. That is such a bad action that whoever advised it ought to be fired, and the Congresscritter who proposed it marked for primary opposition at the next election. It is an attempt to break down the separation of powers in the Constitution, and deliver control of foreign policy over Russia to Congress, relieving the President of that responsibility. Of course there are stories of how the President wanted that, but the sources are, as is traditional with today’s journalists, anonymous.

I know no more than that. I hope it’s all made up. But if Mr. Trump signs anything like that, it’s a big mistake.

My Apologies: my posts are answered with a message saying inappropriate response by server.  I got use to that happening at midnight but it’s happening now.  Worse, while this is posted, the formatting is wrong, and I’ve no choice but to try to fix it. And every time I do it sends a message to the world about the new post, although I thought we had that tamed down; and when it is sending the appropriate response it never sends another unless considerable time has passed.  I can hope all this will fix itself.  I am not spamming you with “he posted” messages, something is broken. It will I am sure be fixed. Apologies.

You might find “The CEO Pay Machine” by Steven Clifford worth your time, and the Wall Street Journal review by Phillip Delves Broughton in yesterday’s Wall St. Journal even more so. It was entitled “Excess at the top” which implies a point of view, and after reading the review – if you can find it, it seems to have vanished from the Internet – you will have much to think about. Of course we don’t so much need educating as reminding; we all know about executive compensation going wild. But it never hurts to contemplate the matter.

A Better Way to Reward CEOs

Many companies are led by chief executives whose contribution to profit may be minuscule but whose compensation is astronomical. Philip Delves Broughton reviews ‘The CEO Pay Machine’ by Steven Clifford.

In 1978 the average chief executive at a large company was paid 26 times more than the average worker. By 2014, depending on your method of calculation, he was paid 300 to 700 times more. It has become standard for a CEO to make more than $10 million a year, and a few make more than $100 million. These aren’t founders or major shareholders but hired guns, managers playing with house money.

It is not like this everywhere. In the U.K., the fifth largest economy in the world, the pay ratio of CEO to average worker is 84 to 1. In Japan, the third largest, it’s 16 to 1.

So what happened in America that so much is now lavished on the executive class? And does it matter? To the second question Steven Clifford, a former chief executive at King Broadcasting and now the author of “The CEO Pay Machine,” responds with an emphatic “yes.” The outsize income, he thinks, feeds inequality and mistrust in our democracy. In response to the first question he argues that a system of compensation has emerged over the past four decades that rewards mediocre executives by stiffing shareholders, employees and society at large.

The CEO “pay machine” works like this: When a chief executive is hired, a company will also hire one of a handful of compensation consultants to establish a benchmark for his pay. The consultant will look at a bunch of companies in different industries and then propose that the CEO be paid at the 75th percentile. (No company wants to think it is paying its CEO at the 25th percentile.) The consultant is out to please the future CEO, since the real money will come if he is hired to design the company’s pension or health-care plans. Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s business partner, once said that he would “rather throw a viper down my shirtfront than hire a compensation consultant.”

But salary is just the beginning. Next come the short- and long-term incentive plans. Short-term plans contain bonuses for meeting annual targets or for simply accomplishing the tasks one expects of a senior manager. In 2014 Les Moonves, the CEO of CBS, received a cash bonus of $25 million. Roughly half of that was reportedly paid to recognize Mr. Moonves’s “leadership and direction in the creation of premium content.” In other words, doing his job. [snip]

Now I am not for confiscation of other people’s money, particularly if the confiscated funds go into the money available for the confiscators to spend – the incentives are horrible – but I do have some objection to great concentrations of wealth in the hands of those who didn’t earn that wealth. I don’t feel menaced by Bill Gates or Warren Buffet, but the great wealth of new rich is disturbing; is it stabilizing?

[snip] The marvelous thing about bonuses at this level, Mr. Clifford notes, is that they aren’t binary. If you fail to meet your targets, you don’t lose your bonus; you just get less of it. If you have a $1 million bonus target, chances are that the board will shave maybe 10% off if you underperform. And $900,000 for failure isn’t bad. Of course, there are also long-term incentives: the stock options and the restricted stock that vests over time. [snip]

It’s enough to encourage Distributism: some wealth is confiscated, but then distributed so widely that there isn’t all that much incentive to take more. The spending power is not given to politicians, nor does any one person or family get so much that there is much incentive about doing it again. The purpose is not to “soak the rich”, but to ameliorate some of the ills of concentration of wealth and power. Perhaps a foolish notion; yet we did get along without executive salaries in the tens of millions of dollars for a considerable time, and it likely did us good.

An essay from the past that most of you may not have seen.

Trouble with Marx

My memory fails, and I forgot the name of my favorite economist. I racked my brain to no result. I have his books upstairs, but while going up is easy, coming back down is not, and coming down carrying things is worse. Then I remembered his book, “The trouble with Marx”. The economist I had in mind was David McCord Wright.

I also remembered I had written about Wright’s observation that Marx was correct in some of his projections, and I had written about that, so I googled The Trouble with Marx Pournelle, which took me to an odd page: it was a serious discussion of Marx and Marxism from a long time ago. Much of it appeared in my journal at one time, including letters to me (which had full credit to the authors but there was no mention of me, my journal, or the original source.

The question of concentration of wealth arises again. Wright devoted some time in his book to Marx’s predictions about concentration of wealth under Capitalism, and speculated that one thing that had served the United States well was the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, and vigorous enforcement under trust busting presidents.

Marx was a founder of the Communist International, and he did have some ideas about “the specter” that was haunting Europe. As you say he was cheering for one side in the ‘class war’, and it’s often hard to separate that from his economic analysis.

Some of his analysis is plain silly, like the “labor theory of value’. Fortunately that’s not required for his major analytical thought, because if it were a necessary assumption then Marx’s thought would be as unread as pre-Lavoisier theories of oxidation. In fact, though, the ‘labor theory of value’ was part of what you rightly call cheering, and unrelated to any objective analysis.

Marx did not understand production, and particularly had no notion of the power of technology. He thought anyone could operate the “tools” and “means of production” and that the control and ownership of the power plants and big machine tools was terribly important. That’s to some extent what misled Stalin and Mao, of course. They ought to have known better. Marx wasn’t imaginative enough to see that the Industrial Revolution wouldn’t stop with massive centralized machine shops (made necessary because energy distribution was difficult and expensive); but Stalin and Mao ought to have known that there was a Second Industrial Revolution characterized by the hand-carried quarter inch electric drill that made distributed production possible. Now we have the Third brought on by the small computer and once again all is changed. Marx foresaw none of this, and his economic analysis is based on a very obsolete theory of industrial production.

As in the computer business, hardware often trumps software. Ownership of the means of production is no longer an automatic key to wealth, nor is it all that hard to acquire the means of production. Particularly in the computer/intellectual property field, the means of production are available to almost anyone.

So much for the fundamental flaws in Marx.

Even so, Marx was certainly influential among German economic theorists, and through them Asian including Japanese; Karl Wittfogel being one of the more important. Wittfogel almost single-handedly converted an entire generation of Japanese economists to Marxism, which meant Communism, until his break with the Party over the Hitler/Stalin Pact. He later used his great familiarity with Marx’s theories to see a major contradiction in them.

One of the major attractions of Communism was being on the inevitably winning side. Communism claimed to be scientific, and its adherents were marching in step with the flywheel of history. That’s a powerfully attractive argument to some. It was for me in my early twenties. It seemed to prove something.

But in Oriental Despotism, Wittfogel pointed out that Marx himself was horrified to see a contradiction: that state capitalism, modeled after the old hydraulic societies (Egypt, Babylon, etc.) could be eternal, not evolving, because it had no internal contradictions as Marx claimed everything except the classless society would have. Marx called this “the Asiatic Mode of Production” and was intellectually honest enough to leave the speculation in Das Kapital, but not honest enough to pursue the implications: that there could be eternal states, never changing much, never evolving, with utterly despotic governments. Such states are vulnerable, but ONLY to OUTSIDE pressures; as an example, the Great Mogul Empire lasted until a handful of Europeans pushed it over. Wittfogel also showed that the USSR was very nearly such an Oriental Despotism, and that China always was one: it was when it ceased to be such under Sun Yat Sen that it became vulnerable, and Sun Yat Sen was able to bring about partial revolution in China only with outside help.

Wittfogel is important to understanding Marx because he took Marx seriously and dealt with Marx’s arguments. David McCord Wright does much the same. His book “The Trouble With Marx” was originally a scholarly work much unread, and because of that was something of a failure as a Conservative Book Club selection since many buyers through that club didn’t know what to make of an economist who took Marx seriously as an economic theorist: they were looking for an anti-Communist tract.

Lester Thurow of MIT sometimes takes Marx seriously, but not often. He is a great lecturer, and it’s always worthwhile listening to him, but his analyses tend to be trendy and topical; I am not sure I have heard much from or about him since Hillary Clinton’s attempt to “reform” American health care, a subject about which Thurow knows more than most, although I strongly question his assumptions.

Wright believed that the American anti-trust laws were the major defense against the kind of destruction that pure capitalism can bring. And of course Schumpeter looked into the face of the capitalist abyss and withdrew in horror.

One attempt to mitigate the effects of unrelieved capitalism is economic nationalism, as well as local control of institutions. By local control, I mean using zoning laws to prevent WalMart from coming in and displacing all the local merchants. I won’t get into the desirability for a local community of placing large barriers in the way of WalMart; I do question the sanity of national laws that prevent the local community from having a say in the matter.

Similarly for economic nationalism: while a global economy is inevitable in the long run, as Keynes said, in the long run we are all dead; what matters are the living; and a nation that allows a skilled worker with 25 years investment in a particular company to suddenly be put on the street while his job is exported to a foreign country may well enjoy cheap jockey shorts, but may also have created a disaffected class from among those formerly the most patriotic. “For a man to love his country, his country ought to be lovely,” said Burke; and a country that is more concerned with cheap goods than the employment stability of its work force, and which goes out of its way to make it easy to export jobs, may be in trouble.

Couple that with an education system almost guaranteed to produce many graduates with no skills whatever and not even the learning skills of acquiring skills, so that they must now compete for menial jobs not merely with local menials but with the entire world including a single mother in Thailand, and you have an even more interesting situation. It is an experiment I would not care to have run, but we are running it here.

A world economy is probably inevitable in the long run, but I am not convinced that marching in step with the flywheel of history is always the right idea; and I am certain that Marx had some deep insights into what unrestrained capitalism can and will do.

I always thought David McCord Wright and Wilhelm Roepke to be economic theorists worthy of far more attention than they receive, because I always thought one ought to, and Schumpeter and those two did, take Marx quite seriously.

State capitalism is every whit as able to pave the road to serfdom as is communism. One may say it won’t happen here, but the one who says that isn’t reading newspapers.

All of which points us back to Roepke’s Humane Economy; and I am out of time just now.

Planetary Defense

Jerry,

Nice remarks about the Tunguska meteorite, and I love the National Science Foundation connection, as it is my former employer. If you don’t know this project:

https://www.lsst.org

It’s interesting, because it will survey the whole sky every couple of weeks. When I worked at NSF, I happened to be at an early review of this project, which was sort of a walk through of the work before it was presented to the National Science Board (NSB) for approval. All big NSF projects go through this, and the preliminary step is the “Director’s Review Board” (DRB), which is basically for the NSF Director and his closest advisors to listen for red flags before it goes to the NSB for final approval.

I was at the meeting because I had a project headed along the same trajectory, but I listened to the LSST briefing closely, and they stated something like “It will see and update the position of every magnitude 13 object every two weeks.” (I don’t remember the exact magnitude). And that was an interesting statement, so I broke protocol, raised my hand and asked,

“Given the albedo of a typical asteroid, what size asteroid does this mean that LSST can detect?” That comment caused a stir, for two reasons: (1) Lowly Program Officers do NOT ask questions at a DRB meeting, and (2) the reaction in the room clearly showed that a lot of people thought it was a good question!

The LSST presenters sort of huddled over this question for a few moments and came back with a rough answer: LSST should be able to detect a rock about the size of the Arizona Meteor Crater event. So, LSST won’t give us a warning on everything, but it IS an early warning system for civilization enders, and in fact, for most things Hiroshima-scale or larger.

And that’s nice to have, and a good first step. Of course, if we detect a civilization ender, we still lack the capacity to DO anything about it, but presumably an early warning would be extremely motivating.

The LSST web page now talks about the planetary defense benefits of the project. I can’t take credit, but I’ll say this: I asked that question, sometime around 2010, because there was nothing like that listed in the benefits of the project.

And I think it’s a great example of how you never know how basic research will pay off.

Chuck=

Precisely.

Microsoft Outlook

Dr. Pournelle,

    I understand your issues with Outlook. I’ve been supporting the product for five years, or I was until I had to stand on the dock waving goodbye as my job set sail for India. Before that I worked several jobs where I used it for daily communication. I remember my first look at 2007, I think, where the menus went away and were replaced with the”ribbon.” Everything that was hidden in the menus, is now hidden in plain sight. All that was easy, is now not.

    I have yet to play with 365. A) Being  unemployed, I can’t afford it. B) Being principled, I wouldn’t afford it. Note: That being principled bit was not taking a shot at those who pay for it. I just have a deep-seated aversion to paying for software. Being inconsistent, however, I’m sitting here at a Windows machine righting this, because I paid good money for the machine and am not facile enough with Linux to function in it one hundred percent of the time. In my head, I didn’t pay for Windows, I paid for the hardware.

    Want to have some fun? Try importing your Windows pst files to Mac. That can be done, but the formats for the two operating systems were totally different, and the process not easy. Also, bringing them back to Windows is nigh impossible. Of course, being a major corporation, they had left Windows XP in 2012 for Windows 7, just after Microsoft had ended support for it. If anyone remembers, Windows XP was released in 2000. So we were using Office 2010 on Windows and 2011 on Mac. It may have gotten easier since then, but I doubt it.

    In response to your comments about Microsoft having forgotten the normal user, the little guy, as it were. Is that not just a symptom of our society as it stands today. We’re forgotten, unless we gather en masse. Gather, and pull out the torches and pitchforks, ie. Tea Party. I guess, what I’m getting at is that you won’t get any notice if you don’t have a million or two to drop on the table. That’s the way we’ve been slipping for years. The only thing that really disappoints me however is that they’re trying to make it harder to join the club. Comments about which, I believe I’ve seen here.

    I digress. Back to Outlook. I’m using an Open Source mail client. I’m not totally enamored of it, but it’s free, and it’s almost as pretty as Outlook. I do miss some of the features of Outlook, especially the archiving and contact management. I’ve yet to find an Open Source substitute that handles those as well, but I’m still looking.

    Oh, well. What is one to do? As I’ve heard a wise man say, repeatedly, “Despair is a sin.” I guess I’ll keep my head up, and soldier on.

Atrox melior dulcissima veritas mendaciis,

Douglas Knapp

Word autocomplete, Christopher Chyba

Hi Jerry:

I don’t use Word 365, but in all the newer versions of Word (2010, 2013, 2016) all of the detailed settings are accessed through the File tab, then Options, then Advanced.  There is a checkbox in the “Editing options” category for “Show Autocomplete suggestions”.

On another note, you might be familiar with the Google feature called  “Scholar.”  Many years ago it was on the main page of features, but it is now buried way far down (unless you use it frequently, in which case it will move further up in the menu hierarchy).  From a Google search page, you have to click on the “Google Apps” icon, then the “More” button, then the “Even more from Google” button.  Scrolling to the bottom of that page you’ll see an array of icons, arranged in alphabetical order.  Look for the one labeled “Scholar.”  Finally you have to click on the “Search Scholar” button.

A Scholar search on Chyba Tunguska yields

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=chyba+tunguska&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C22

The paper in question might be this one (published in Nature):

http://eadproject.com/files/The-1908-Tunguska-Explosion.pdf

The co-authors were PJ Thomas and KJ Zahnle.

Hope this helps.

Best regards,

Doug Ely

Thank you. Yes, the options menu is where I find editing – not under proofing where I looked, but under advanced. Alas, it does no good. On all of my machines the “Show autocomplete options” box is checked; but on one – and only one – of my machines, the autocomplete options do not appear. I even tried unchecking it, exiting Word, then opening Word and rechecking. Nope. Then leaving it checked I used power options to turn the machine off, then turned it back on. It seemed to have no updates to offer. Autocomplete did not work, I’m tempted to say of course. The next step I suppose is to see if I can uninstall then reinstall Word, but as everything else is working and it is such a minor problem, I probably won’t. since I have other work that is more important.

Thanks for reminding me if the Scholar option; I eventually found Christopher Chyba, but only by remembering his name; no first page returns to Google of Tunguska even suggested that anyone of that name exists, much less says that he pretty well settled the “mystery”. It is I suppose more exciting to fill the returns with articles about “we don’t know” and “it’s a mighty mystery.” Which means that using that for anything like meaningful research is absurd: we have a consensus on climate change, supposedly, and you have to hunt to find that there are serious doubts from people usually labeled Deniers and thought by most Believers to be fools or mendicants; whereas with Tunguska there really is a pretty wide consensus that Chyba figured out a model that pretty well cover the known evidence, and while there are a few who don’t agree even they say he’s reasonable; but the first page returns on Tunguska still emphasize “mystery” and “we don’t really know” – something they’d never say about our understanding of climate change. Disappointing.

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

Tuesday, August 1, 2017

Being intelligent is not a felony. But most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor.

-Robert A. Heinlein

The map is not the territory.

Alfred Korzybski

Microsoft is on a mission to improve office to beyond the comprehension or use of the average computer user, possibly to get rid of office users who are not enterprise clients or very large accounts; they certainly don’t care what damage they do to people who just want to use the stuff, write letters, maybe run a blog or Facebook (not that I Facebook) or generally just use it.

My recent adventures with Outlook, all caused by Microsoft improvements, are not over, but we now see a complex path to restoring what I had before their improvements made it temporarily impossible to use. For a while I couldn’t even search Outlook mail files – an error known to have been caused by one Microsoft “fix”. There were others. I’ll try to have an account of the whole adventure, but I don’t have time now. At least that crisis is over; I almost lost all my subscriber files, because Microsoft keeps “Contact” files in a screwy format different from mail files. I have lost the “category” flags which gave me a quick visual view of a subscriber’s status, but the information that caused those characterization flags was preserved, and can be restored by hand. A tedious process, but it can be done.

On that score, we’ve not had a pledge week for some time now, because I haven’t been providing much for you to subscribe to. I’m doing more work on fiction now – I have a good chance of finishing this volume of the Janissaries series this year, possibly earlier, if my health holds up and there are no more Microsoft crises. Yes, you guessed it, it was intended to be the last volume in the series, but it won’t be. It will have an ending that makes sense, and it will be a final ending for some characters – I don’t mean I’m killing them off, although some will die. Others. Though, reach a state where they need not be tracked individually. But there are also new and very important characters, and they will have to be followed as they interact with Rick and Tylara. Worked on it a bit today, and I pretty well see where this volume is going. I had hoped to end the series, but I just can’t.

Then there is LisaBetta, a story of a girl pretty well raised by a strange kind of AI on a world that we might grow into in fifty or so years. John DeChancie has done a first draft, and I promptly got absorbed into everything else and it sat neglected for months. It’s good stuff, and I’ll have to get at it. I also have to remember that perfect is the enemy of damned well good enough.

And Starborn and Godsons, the third book in the Legacy of Heorot series. Is coming along nicely, with some writing that ignores that aphorism. Larry and Steve has some really great scenes, and I’ve done some I’m proud of.

And now that Roberta is coming along nicely, and I’m recovered pretty well, and I’ve survived Microsoft’s improvements, I can get at it. Except one on the War Colleges want Strategy of Technology for a text and could I help with the revisions, and Colonel Doug Beason and I are doing an anthology on planetary defense (of which we have none), and that takes time, and every time I pay a bill I worry a bit; but I feel better than I have in years, I get my time consuming exercises, and…

Well, the point is that if you haven’t subscribed in a while, now would be a good time to renew, or and if you never subscribed I operate this place on the public radio model. We don’t have ads and distractions, I don’t often bug you for money, but if I don’t get subscriptions it will slow down or go away.

And this is the silly season. Nothing much is really happening, and most of it isn’t worth commenting on (by me; it gets plenty of comment from others).

https://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html

One of the ways Microsoft improved Word for me: they turned off AutoCorrect on one of my machines. It used to be that if I typed in a few letters of a day of the week, it would offer to complete that, and if I typed in a day of the week follower by a comma, it would put in the date if I pressed return. Not the Earth, but convenient, and on all my other machines it does that. Not this one. And if I ask for help, I’m likely to get help that says I should go to the tools menu – a menu that no longer exists and hasn’t for a while. Or none at all. Microsoft doesn’t seem to have a name for this feature, and HELP is the usual uninformative nonsense it usually is. If anyone knows what the feature is called or where to find it in Word 365, I’d appreciate the tip. I don’t use it a lot, but it annoys me that it is off.

I mentioned that Doug Beason, (Col. USAF RET, former Chief Scientist of Space Command) and I are about to put together an anthology of stories and essays on Planetary Defense. More on that another time. Anyway, that sometimes has me thinking of events like Tunguska, a 10-30 megaton – yes, megaton – event in Siberia in 1908. A blast possibly half the size of Tsar Bomba that flattened and charred tens of thousands of trees over 2000 square kilometers, possibly the largest blast recorded in human history before the invention of the H bomb; a bigger blast than any weapons we now possess.

Meteorite is the obvious explanation, but there was no meteorite, and no crater either. When the Russians finally got around to inspecting the area – they did have rebellions, the War, Ten Days That Shook the World, their Civil War, and years of Stalin’s purges to distract them – in 1927, they could find no meteorite, no rocks, no hole in the ground, and in fact nothing that looked like the residue of a meteorite strike. It was a mystery that intrigues everyone, and back before I learned the explanation I was induced to speculate about it in broadcasts of the BBC and US public TV. I liked “black hole” as a possibility, although I knew damned well it couldn’t be that; and since I went on these shows to promote Lucifer’s Hammer I usually stuck to the comet theory. After all, we thought many comets were just dirty ice snowballs. Still do, I guess. The ice would have melted, and what’s to find?

But I learned better.

This afternoon I was reminded of a restaurant in the Baltimore harbor area, Eat Bertha’s Mussels; an intriguing name, and if it’s still there I can recommend it highly for sea food if you don’t mind sawdust on the floor.

But I remember it because it was there that Rolf Sinclair, and old friend from the National Science Foundation (and one of the reasons I used to say that the NSF budget might be the best Federal tax money we spend) took me. Mrs. Pournelle, Larry Niven, and Poul and Karen Anderson to dinner with two young men whose names, embarrassingly, I do not recall. They explained in detail, drawing some diagrams and writing equations on paper napkins just what must have happened at Tunguska. Not a comet, not a black hole, not the wrath of Jehovah or Thor, but a good old fashioned stone—not metal—asteroid entering the atmosphere at a rather steep angle and high speed. The great speed meant that air resistance to entry – hardly reentry – into the atmosphere became greater and greater as the rock descended, and eventually that energy potential exceeded the binding energy that held the stone monster—about the size of the Coliseum in Los Angeles – together. Thus it came apart. With a bang. A 10 to 30 megaton bang. Trees blew outward in a radial pattern around the impact point, but there was no impact: it blew up at a fair altitude. The debris was subjected to extreme temperatures, and everything that could be affected by that was consumed. The only thing that fell to earth was sand, and that was pretty well indistinguishable from sand blown in from the Mongolian Desert.

Thus no crater, and no trace of what hit us. Farewell the black hole, or the ice comet. Just a stone asteroid.

Of course there are a lot of them out there.

Our two dinner guests presented a paper on that to the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science – Rolf was the AAAS official who invited them to speak – and later published much the same thing in SCIENCE. And I can’t remember their names. I got to know them pretty well, too. But this was at least 27 years ago, and possibly much longer. Thin excuse for not remembering but it’s all I’ve got.

And a sad comment on the internet for scientific research outside your own field: the cause of Tunguska has been known for over 25 years. Yes, there are some anomalies, but not great enough to overcome the theory of a stone asteroid coming apart. That hypothesis explains all the known data, and there’s more than enough energy in a football field asteroid entering at high velocity to bring about all the observed phenomena.  Yet a half hour search doesn’t present me a link to the actual paper the lads – Chyba?—who presented the paper and explained it all to me in that Baltimore restaurant before presenting it to the AAAS. Hah! I just remembered thy name. Christopher Chyba. I got nothing searching for Chyba, but Chyba Tunguska got me a confirmation of his name and a condensation of his theory.  But note I had to know the name; otherwise Google showed me links to how it’s still a mystery, and it might be a black hole, and an old woman who’s convinced it was Thor, and – well, anything but the science.

Erosion Of The US Middle Class

Jerry,

Edward Luttwak has an excellent piece in the Times Literary Supplement on the currently hot topic of “what actually just happened?” Rather provocatively titled “Why the Trump dynasty will last sixteen years”, it’s at https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/trump-dynasty-luttwak

Luttwak spends some time on the Establishment’s continuing hysterical befuddlement, but his primary focus is the core issue in the current fight over who runs America: Will our middle classes grow again and rule, or continue shrinking and be ruled forever by their (our) self-proclaimed betters?

Luttwak focuses on what he presents as a key indicator, the growing unaffordability of a new car for the average American family, and builds his case around that. It’s a good piece, I recommend it.

It also reminded me of a couple of wider-reaching pieces I sent you a year and a half ago, in late ’15 and then early ’16 right after the Iowa caucuses. I think these are worth another look, now that the dust is (one hopes) beginning to settle.

I first took the hugely politically incorrect view that it’s not “democracy” per se, but rule by the middle class that makes Western nations successful. Democracy only succeeds if you have an informed and self-disciplined middle-class majority; otherwise it inevitably descends to “one man, one vote, once.”

https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/there-will-be-war-is-done-the-debates-porkypine-on-the-middle-class-and-a-great-deal-more/

Ergo, policies to foster and preserve an informed and self-disciplined middle-class majority are vitally important to free and prosperous Western nationhood. But the US middle classes are under assault across a broad front. I took a look at the wide variety of middle-class cost squeezes being applied in recent decades, and made the point that while we might not get there as fast, “one man, one vote, once” could happen here too.

https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/recuperation-continues-rip-ed-mitchell/

Will we continue (resume, really) middle class rule here? Things look more hopeful than they did two winters ago. But stay tuned.

regards

Porkypine

Aristotle defined democracy as rule by the middle class, as did many of the ancients. Middle class was defined as “those who possess the goods of fortune in moderation.” We do not have that now. In either party.

Feynman on Thinking

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr8sVailoLw

I’ll probably mention this again, with comments.

A Solar Eclipse of the Heart

Or, one can argue that space.com has lost it.  You’re choice.

https://www.space.com/37675-warby-parker-total-solar-eclipse-parody.html

Courtesy Uncle Timmy.

Don’t miss it. I’m planning on banging pans just to make sure the sun doesn’t get eaten.

And this deserves comments; the case for man made global warming grows weaker and weaker.

Solar Minimums May Be [the] Final Piece of [the] Puzzle in [the] Fall of Western Civilisation.

<http://www.nationmultimedia.com/detail/opinion/30322133>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

Apologies to whomever sent me this link: the Outlook crises ate you mail. But I had opened this link. Fascinating information on the end of the Greenland colonies after centuries. And it wasn’t the Gulf Stream. The western colony never was anywhere near any wandering of the Gulf Stream.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-greenland-vikings-vanished-180962119/?utm_source=keywee-facebook.com&utm_medium=socialmedia&utm_campaign=keywee&kwp_0=350935&kwp_4=1409424&kwp_1=620431

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