| Tuesday, April
24, 2007
The Nuremburg Laws: Can
they still be enforced?
Melissa Heads for Home.
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/2075
- Roland Dobbins
German Courts are enforcing Hitler's decrees
against home schooling, and the new Gestapo may kidnap Melissa again. One
wonders if the European Union has much to say about this kind of child
slavery? And what other Nazi laws can still be enforced?
==========
Blood, Bullets, Bombs, and Bandwidth.
Long, but a must-read:
http://rezendi.com/travels/bbbb.html
-- Roland Dobbins
You shall know the truth, and the truth
will make you free. But getting access to the truth?
=========
"I guess free money is free money."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/
content/article/2007/04/23/AR2007042301563_pf.html
Roland Dobbins
Why am I not astonished?
=========
"Very few people ask whether we could have prevented
HIV."
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.05/feat_firstblood.html
Roland Dobbins
========
RE: Heinlein and Ortega.
Doctor Pournelle,
Thought about:
1) Heinlein's an armed society is a polite society.
2) City councils, State & federal legislatures keep
passing laws with an occasional & accumulative effect on guns. Islands of
the disarmed, appear & grow, on the political map.
3) Ortega's mass man captured said councils &
legislatures from the elites.
a) passing more laws rather than adjusting existing laws.
b) a persistence mob mentality within said bodies.
4) When I think of Ortega's elites, I think of
Pareto's foxes & lions. My guess is the foxes are trying to disarm the
masses. e.g. the unelected EU guiding the elected european governments.
5) I favor rolling laws back to when individual
firearms were an undefined term. Such terms as "concealed carry" would be
meaningless.
Scott Rich
=========
Subject: Where
Government-Provided Healthcare Takes Us
Simply for your interest.
Healthcare stories:
Pensioner 'must go blind to get NHS treatment' <http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health_medical/article2481020.ece>
<http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/city/
2007/04/23/ f055b47b-666c-49f6-9ed4-b0199c7fcce4.lpf>
<http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2064145,00.html>
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6584403.stm>
<http://politics.guardian.co.uk/publicservices/story/0,,2064173,00.html>
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6582839.stm>
Terror stories:
<http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1687360.ece>
<http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article1697625.ece>
Dangers to women cyclists in London--if you obey the
law as a cyclist in London, it puts you at risk around lorries due to their
blind spots. Men tend to violate the law at red lights, while women don't.
My experience is that vehicles are a problem for bicyclists at round- abouts
(where bicycles riding along the kerb usually surprise exiting drivers),
intersections between bike trails and roads (when drivers don't think to
check the traffic on the bike trail), and lorry/bus left turns (when the
driver, sitting on the right, often fails to check his left mirror for
bicycles in the blind spot). <http:// www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1695668.ece>
BTW, I was staying at Palekastro when I scouted Zakros.
Go ahead and write that story!
-- Harry Erwin, PhD, Program Leader, MSc Information
Systems Security, University of Sunderland.
<http://scat-he-g4.sunderland.ac.uk/~harryerw> Weblog at:
<http://scat-he-g4.sunderland.ac.uk/~harryerw/blog/index.php>
=========
Subject: On education and
immigration
Dear Dr. Pournelle:
What dragged me to your website in the first place was
a quest for information on the Janissaries series. When you wrote the first
two I was in university doing degrees in physics - in spite of a thirst for
hard science fiction you will understand that working and doing degrees in
physics means that such enjoyments must be put to one side for the nonce. It
has taken me years to catch up, and I am pleased to see that the series is
still alive and thriving. I look forward to getting my hands on the rest of
it, I assure you it will be devoured voraciously.
But on to education and immigration. If you think the
problem is bad in the US (I came out of east Los Angeles), try Canada. I had
had enough of the Land of Liberty some ten years ago, quit a well-paying job
as a research physicist in San Diego, and headed north to pursue another
Master's and now a Ph.D. in astrophysics. Met my husband, married, and am
now totally unemployable.
Canada has gone mad. My degrees are from the US.
Employers in Canada don't know how to evaluate degrees from the US, and
aren't so sure about the quality of education there (they may have a point,
but that is another topic for another time). So, they are worthless. I have
a high school diploma from the Los Angeles Unified School District, but it
is worthless in Canada. I could go and get a GED, but if I were to get one
in Alberta (say), it would not be recognized in (say) British Columbia
because "Educational standards are different and we don't know how to
evaluate a GED from a foreign (sic) province." I cannot work as an
electrician (in my younger days I apprenticed to the IBEW) because this
apprenticeship program is not recognized in Canada. Or more properly it is
recognized, but I do not have the right piece of paper proving that I meet
local standards. I cannot work at a MacDonald's because I do not have 40
semester hours of instruction in Food Safety 1, Food Safety 2, and Cuisine
Arts 1 (not to mention the required certificate in proper cash register
operation). Yet, there are complaints about the Great Alberta Labour
Shortage. From my perspective it is not what you know or what you can do
that is important, it is all about the pieces of paper you have in your
portfolio, and where they come from. I believe the phrase I want is "overcredentialism".
Thus, in a land desperately crying for skilled workers
from the rest of the world to come here, we have degreed engineers working
as convenience store clerks, and Ph.Ds driving taxi cabs (if they can afford
the 700 hours - yes, that's right, seven hundred hours - of instruction in
how to properly operate a taxi cab).
Back to working at Mickey D's, it is not that
employers do not wish to hire people without these documents - the labour
shortage here is very real and getting worse - they CAN'T, by law. So we
have the conundrum of highly qualified and skilled people desperate for work
but not being able to find employment, and at the same time employers unable
to find employable people. I should also mention (I have done some digging)
that for a foreigner to recertify to Canadian standards is extremely
difficult - the roadblocks abound, and this I am sure is not happenstance.
What can be said as to a society where they are
desperately in need of qualified people, entice them to come here, and then
deny them employment once they are here? You may dismiss this screed as sour
grapes, but the problem is real.
With best regards, /s/ Anna Harding
An astonishing story. Thanks for telling
us.
I will finish Mamelukes, the next part of
the Janissaries story, sometime this summer.
And see mail.
========
Subject: Follow-up on Yale sword
disarmament
Greetings, sir.
Thought you might like to see a follow-up comment from
another site about the recent "security theater" (a literal use of the term,
in this case) at Yale.
Regards,
Tim Elliott
...Such foolery isn't limited to elementary
and secondary schools. The Yale Daily News <http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/20843>
reports that "in the wake of Monday's massacre at Virginia Tech in which
a student killed 32 people, Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg
has limited the use of stage weapons in theatrical productions":
According to students involved in the
production, Trachtenberg has banned the use of some stage weapons in all
of the University's theatrical productions. While shows will be
permitted to use obviously fake plastic weapons, students said, those
that hoped to stage more realistic scenes of stage violence have had to
make changes to their props.
"Fub <http://volokh.com/posts/1177279409.shtml#209137>
," a commenter on the Volokh Conspiracy, has a perceptive analysis:
What makes these ritual bannings of
depictions or imitations of real weapons politically effective (among
those for whom they are effective) is a very primitive human thought
process: belief in sympathetic magic.
The actual object, the weapon, is imbued
with magical power. Its very presence magically causes harm. It causes
people to behave in evil ways. The rationale commonly offered is that
the mere presence of a weapon makes people more prone to violence.
Sympathetic magic is the belief that what
one does with an imitation of the thing with magical power will affect
the actual thing. For example, in a magical religious context we see the
image of a deity addressed, or given gifts or sacrifices. The magical
deity is affected through the treatment of its image, and so performs
its magic for the one who gives the image a gift.
In the imitation weapon banning context we
have first the belief that the object, the actual weapon, is magic and
causes those in its presence to behave in an evil manner. The
sympathetic magical belief is that by banning the image or the imitation
weapon, the magical power of real weapons to cause people to be violent
will be lessened, or the real weapons will stay away from the presence
of the faithful.
Betty Trachtenberg, do do that voodoo that
you do so well!
http://opinionjournal.com/best/
Why am I not astonished? One has to
believe in voodoo to believe in political correctness.
===========
Subject: r.e. Matthew Ing's
Acreage Calculations
Dear Jerry,
My congratulations to Matthew Ing for his work.
>>reliance on biofuels will eventually force food
& fuel to compete for land.<<
Chicago spot prices for corn say this is already
happening. This pricing signal plus current $3+ gallon gasoline will spur on
projected new projects and existing distillery expansions and utilization.
>>only in the very limited case of burning,
gasifying, or otherwise converting agricultural wastes does the use of
biomass not amount to burning foodstuffs in one way or another.<<
This case is not that limited, at least physically.
See
http://www.tpub.com/content/altfuels10/methanol/methanol0001.htm
This is a mid-1990s DoE assessment for waste biomass to methanol potential
in the USA. Nearly all DoE support for biomass thermal conversion programs
has since been terminated. The policy makers preferred burning food crops
and betting on next decade's mirage of "cellulosic" ethanol from waste
biomass. Similarly, instead of supporting "Ablative Fast Pyrolysis" to make
bio-diesel from waste biomass, "Washington" prefers squeezing soybeans and
rapeseeds to make 'bio-diesel".
>.Since the yield-per-acre of corn-derived ethanol
is little over half that of sugarcane-derived ethanol, using corn
instead of sugarcane would almost double our land-use requirements.<<
Since sugar cane and oil palms require sub-tropical
and tropical climates, the corn and soybean numbers (plus potatoes in Idaho
as is already being done) are what matter in the U.S.A. outside of Hawaii
and Florida. All very interesting theoretical subjects. There are two
practical points.
The first point is the USA's primary developed
alternate fuels infrastructure (plant design, construction, operation,
trained work forces) now runs exclusively on edible food. This industry is
now growing by 20% to 30% each year. The flow of money is already so huge
this interest group can buy all the filibusters and vetoes it needs to
prevent any policy changes at this point. What happens when another CAT 5
hurricane barrels through the Gulf of Mexico? Perhaps the same year that
(pick your OPEC area and scenario) collapses into regional chaos? Is this
the moment it will be possible to restrict these plants' production to
contain food prices?
The second point is, have Chaos Manor readers staked
their claims for their Very Large Family Vegetable Garden plots? Have seeds
in store? Know what to do? Started practicing on a small scale? There's no
cavalry that'll come riding over the hill on this one.
Best Wishes,
Mark
Emphasis added by editor. You make
me remember my days as an editor of SURVIVE Magazine. I am a bit old to
reconstitute my survival company, but I do know how to make stone soup.
========
computer simulations
Hello Dr. Pournelle
Here is something that you may find interesting. A recent computer
simulation shows that the island of Taiwan would win, if attacked by
mainland China. The battle is predicted to last two weeks. So much for
computer simulations; I don' t believe it for a second, and wonder if these
are the same computers that they use to simulate climate, and predict global
warming.
The problem with this simulation, as with any computer simulation, is
that those setting up the simulation are allowed to make certain
assumptions. In this case, it is assumed that Taiwan forces will have enough
warning to take cover. This also assumes a certain strategy on the part of
the invaders, and that enough is known about Chinese forces to accurately
gauge their capabilities. Doubtless, many other assumptions are made, which
are not mentioned in the article.
Computer simulations make great games, and can be useful for modeling
certain systems, with a limited number of variables, and predictable
behavior, when the systems are well understood. For situations with many
variables, many unknowns, and very complex interactions between elements,
they are little more than glorified guesswork.
Anyone who closely considers the relative strengths of these two nations,
has to know that the conclusions of this simulation is questionable, at the
very least. I doubt that many people really think that Taiwan could defeat
Mainland China. Yet computer simulations, and the repeated pronouncements of
those who run them, have bullied many people into the belief of man made
global warming.
Is a two-week battle a less complicated system, than the climate of the
entire Earth over decades? Does it contain fewer unknowns, random variables,
and interacting systems? I suppose that the computer will become, if it is
not already the case, the new god of the faithful, and tool of those
initiates who know it’s secrets.
It is becoming rather like the old shamans, or the wizard of Oz. Do not
question the pronouncements of God, and pay no attention to the man behind
the curtain.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,267984,00.html
Neal Pritchett
========
Cybercriminals Look to Capitalize
on Virginia Tech Tragedy
I think the usual caveats apply to what follows.
Malware attack poses as camera phone footage of
Virginia Tech tragedy 19 Apr 07 Just a day after security researchers warned
people to be alert for hackers and phishers
<http://www.techweb.com/encyclopedia/
defineterm.jhtml?term=phishers&x=&y=>
exploiting the Virginia Tech tragedy, spam
<http://www.techweb.com/encyclopedia/
defineterm.jhtml?term=spam&x=&y=> promising images of the
shootings have begun spreading around the globe.
The spam e-mails carry a photograph <http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/articles/2007/04/virginia.html>
of gunman Cho Seung-hui, who killed more than 30 students and teachers at
the Virginia school on Monday before killing himself. The e-mails claim to
link to a Brazilian Web site <http://www.techweb.com/encyclopedia/
defineterm.jhtml?term=Web%20site&x=&y=>
> carrying movie footage of the campus
shootings, according to researchers at Sophos. However, clicking on the link
<http://www.techweb.com/encyclopedia/
defineterm.jhtml?term=link&x=&y=> downloads a malicious
screensaver file, called Terror_em_Virginia.SCR, which installs a piece of
spyware <http://www.techweb.com/encyclopedia/
defineterm.jhtml?term=spyware&x=&y=>
that acts as a banking Trojan, which can be used
to steal passwords, user names and account numbers. The trojan seeks to
steal passwords and usernames for online banking sites, opening up the
possibility of identity theft and financial loss to any user infected with
the program.
J.
========
Anna
Harding's tale of Canada
I would not "dismiss her screed as sour grapes" at
all. My middle daughter elected to attend the University of Windsor, and
every time we head across the border for a visit it is clear that at least
some people in Canada would really like as many skilled workers as they can
find.
On the other hand, I've been casually checking to see
if there's a reasonable way to get my wife and I out to the Pacific
Northwest for the last year or so. Our family related responsibilities in
central Indiana are basically closed, and we've both decided that the
scenery in 'Cascadia' would probably be quite nice for some number of years.
There is a chance that I could finagle an internal transfer at my current
firm - with no relo assistance, of course - so I've also kept an eye on
other job postings in an arc running from Portland through Calgary. On the
Canadian Immigration web site I 'pass' the qualification test somewhere
above the 90% mark (read: Yep! We would certainly want you!).
Keep in mind I'm not desperately pounding pavement in
an all-out job search, but.....
Number of callbacks/email chats/nibbles from U.S.
cities in my search grid: A respectable handful.
Number from the Canadian side: Nada. Zero. Zip. Zilch.
Make of it what you will, but I understand what Ms.
Harding is facing.
-dean
=========
Subject: Better a Maiden Aunt than a Mommy...
Pretty Lady weighs in on the question of whether it's
really a disaster that one-third of those college-educated women are not
having children at:
http://ohprettylady.blogspot.com/2007/04/in-praise-of-maiden-auntie.html
>>providing college educations to all potential Fiends
Incarnate is a grand filtering process for weeding out the psychos, and
safely installing them in civil-service middle-management positions, where
their sadism can find a relatively harmless outlet. Ultimately, this race of
twisted pseudo-humans will die out, or morph into cool-ass Maiden Aunties,
an archetype for which there is ample historical precedent.<<
Julie http://walkingprescott.blogspot.com
This I won't touch...
===============
On Global Warming and CO2
I reread part of your Step Farher Out from mummbelty
mumble years ago & saw your support of ocean thermal power generators which,
by using water from the sea bottoms bring nutrients to the surface &
stimulates plankton growth. I was struck by the similarity to the geritol
solution of cutting CO2 by using iron solution to stimulate plankton growth.
Does this mean that we have a method of making power
which is CO2 negative? Has there been either progress or serious glitches
since then?
Neil Craig
There were tests near Hawaii. The system
works, and ought to be tried; one problem is transport of the resulting
energy. It's idea for islands, of course.
I really need to get A Step Farther Out
back in print. There's a rough version of Two Steps Farther out as well.
What I don't have is time.
========
Subject: Teach them well...
http://bookwormroom.wordpress.com/2007/04/23/teaching-teachers/
"From the weekly update Little Bookworm's teacher
sends to parents:
This week for homework, your child is to read thirty
minutes each night and record their [sic] reading.
***
The class looked very nice to day [sic] as they [sic]
went to see the ballet preform [sic].
I think I'm going to be sick."
Mark
==========
Subject: FYI: The 69th Carnival of Homeschooling is up
- the Bee edition
Sprittibee has some beautiful pictures of bees, and a
ton of information about bees as she works in the entries for this week's
Carnival of Homeschooling:
http://sbees.blogspot.com/2007/04/carnival-of-homeschooling-bee-edition.html
Have a good day.
-- ---------- Henry Cate
cate3@panix.com
"Consider how hard it is to change yourself and
you'll understand what little chance you have in trying to change others."
-- Jacob M. Braude Our blog:
http://whyhomeschool.blogspot.com/
=========
Despotic Populism Is On the
March.
http://www.tcsdaily.com/Article.aspx?id=042407B
Roland Dobbins
Tyrants are always the friends of the
people. Always. Now go read about
adolescent societies.
The American Thinker web site seems to
have been pirated: many people get a commercial advertisement rather than
the article. I have the original cached, and since I cannot get to the
article I presume no one else can:
The Adolescent Society
By Christopher Chantrill
Some people think that we have extended
adolescence way too far into adulthood.
In rural society there is no such thing as
adolescence. One day you are a child. The next day they conduct a
coming-of-age ceremony and you are a man or a woman.
Not any more. Now you can live in the
adolescent twilight zone between childhood and adulthood until way into
your twenties. We talk, a generation after the liberating 1960s, about
the responsibility of colleges in loco parentis for people who have
already attained the age of majority. Today, college kids are treated
more like children-except of course in their all-important "sexual
life"-than back in the good old days when students had to keep one foot
on the floor.
So when a crazed kid, sorry an adult
adolescent complete with reversed baseball cap, kills 32 people in a
gun-free zone of a college campus even the Wall Street Journal starts
busily editorializing about what the college woulda coulda shoulda done
to stop it.
But surely the pundits should be marveling
at how well colleges prevent student violence.
Young men, science tells us, are wired for
violence. We bombard them constantly with the message that violence
never solves anything. But we titillate them with all kinds of virtual
violence in movies, music, videos, and first-person shooter video games.
Then we humiliate them in our compulsory schools run, for the most part,
by women with the assistance of mood-altering drugs.
On top of that we have deliberately
targeted young men of little or no color in the past generation with a
deliberate program of discrimination to atone for the sins of their
fathers. Everywhere you look the education system has a plan or a
program to humiliate young men of little or no color.
So what do our young men do about all this?
Are they erupting against daily indignity in an existential rage that
will not be denied? Not at all. They just hunker down in front of their
first-person shooter video games and vote with their feet against the
schools and colleges that so humiliate them.
The astonishing thing is that, with all
this barrage of instruction, titillation, and humiliation, only one
middle-class boy misses the point, shorts out his social conditioning,
and fires up his hard wiring. It's a testament to the effectiveness of
our cultural conditioning system, or at least the tolerance of modern
young people for rank, unapologetic oppression.
Of course, the system doesn't work so well
among the lower orders.
The annual murder rate in the United States
is about 6 murders per 100,000. It's a bit higher in places like New
Orleans, according to Nicole Gelinas in City Journal, about ten times
higher. That's understandable. There's nothing you can do about
inner-city problems without solving the root-cause problems of poverty
and discrimination. So that's different.
But in the world of higher education almost
every kid seems to get the message. Except for one student at Virginia
Tech last week.
Now we are engaged in the usual
Monday-morning quarterbacking. Should the university have warned the
students? Should authorities have removed the disturbed young man from
school? Should there be more gun control? Should there be less gun
control? Did the university make a mistake by declaring the campus a
gun-free zone?
All these questions have only one answer:
More research is needed.
But some people wonder whether we are
asking the right questions.
They want to look at the bigger questions.
They want to question the entire program of extended adolescence and
endless education.
William W. Lewis in The Power of
Productivity has found that the importance of education to a productive
economy is overrated. You can train people for most jobs. And you can
train very ordinary people to be the most productive in the world, as
Wal-Mart has proved. Judith Rich Harris in The Nurture Assumption argues
that adults have grossly overestimated their ability to control and
influence children. Indeed she raises the question: Do we really know
what we are doing by crowding children into our factory schools, given
that children learn mostly from older children rather than from adults?
And Robert Epstein in The Case Against Adolescence argues that we should
do away with an arbitrary age of majority and emancipate children as
soon as they can pass tests of responsibility.
It's an interesting question. Is all this
extended education that is so central to our society really such a good
thing-other than for the education industrial complex, of course?
Don't expect changes any time soon. Vast
privileges and powers depend upon the existence of the Adolescent
Society and the extended childhoods of our children.
Christopher Chantrill is a frequent
contributor to American Thinker. See hiswebsites Road to the Middle
Class and usgovernmentspending.com.
I will take this down when the web site
returns tomorrow.
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