Monthly Archives: August 2013

View 787 Sunday, August 18, 2013

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

President Barrack Obama, January 31, 2009

Sunday night, Mission Beach (San Diego)

The grandchildren are safely back in Washington, the highways are open to LA, and tomorrow we will get back home and I can resume a sensible work schedule. I got some work done down here but not a lot. I guess I have become accustomed to my good keyboards, bug screens, comfortable chair, and the other comforts of home. And of course high speed Internet. I could have got over to the AT&T store Friday and got them to arrange to add some time to my AT&T wireless gadget – it’s actually a sort of cell phone that does data transfer, and I’ve used it down here for the past couple of years, but apparently AY&T forgets who you are if you don’t use it often enough. I’ll go replenish it one of these days.

I missed the 20^th Anniversary of the DC/X which happened in New Mexico over the weekend. A lot of people wanted me to come to it, and I’d have liked to go, but the logistics couldn’t be arranged. We’d planned to get together with Phillip and the grandchildren on this weekend a long time ago, and while the DC/X was important and it sure wouldn’t have happened without me (well, me, Max Hunter, and General Graham were the ones who went to VP Dan Quayle then the Chairman of the National Space Council –

Rather than make that a long parenthetical I may as well tell the story. The Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy came about in a curious way. Back in August of 1980 before the election there was a planetary encounter or some other event at JPL, and G Harry Stine and BJO Trimble were there. Mrs. Trimble was the Star Trek fan club activist who had pretty well sparked the big push for another season of Star Trek when it was being considered for red or green light by the network, Harry was an old space enthusiast, consulting engineer, pilot, and science fiction writer, and I was an SF writer with some political experience. We planned a small conference to be held at Larry Niven’s house later in the fall to see what we could do to promote the space budget in the incoming administration, which we thought would likely be Reagan’s. I’d done some briefings when Reagan was Governor and I was in the professor business. None of this was important and it wasn’t worth making notes about.

But then Reagan won the election, and he asked General Schriever to prepare a paper for his incoming administration: a space and defense policy. At this point it gets complicated. Back in 1968-70 I was the junior author of a book called The Strategy of Technology. The senior author was Dr. Stefan T. Possony, then a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford. We had worked together on some other projects, and Steve was very much my mentor. The Strategy of Technology was a succès d’estime, meaning that it sold reasonably well, but got really good reviews and was interesting to the people we had written it for – it eventually was a textbook at all three service academies in one class or another, as well as in the War Colleges, and there are copies used in some senior military seminars even to this day. (The principles are still valid but all the examples are from the Cold War or Seventy Years War era when the Soviet Union with its 26,000 nuclear warheads and enormous delivery capacity was the main threat to the US. Those who remember that era will understand; but there is now a generation that doesn’t remember the USSR and its Strategic Rocket Service and Tsar Bomba and the rest of it. But I digress.) Anyway there was a third author to The Strategy of Technology, Francis X.Kane, Ph.d., Col. USAF. As an active duty Air Force officer Duke didn’t want his name on the book, which was quite critical of some US policies. Kane had been Director of Plans for General Schriever, and General Schriever asked Duke to do the transition team space plan that Reagan had asked for. Kane obtained his Ph.D. in political science from Georgetown University where his principal advisor was Professor Stefan T. Possony. Possony had been in the Pentagon during much of WW II, then to Georgetown, and thence to the Hoover. (Possony got his Ph.D. from the University of Vienna about the time I was born; he was active in the Schussnig government which opposed – with the help of Benito Mussolini – Hitler’s bid to take over Austria.  Obviously that opposition failed. When Austria fell, Steve fled to Czechoslovakia, and when that fell he fled to France where he was an advisor to the Air Ministry – until 1940, when he fled to unoccupied France and managed to get passage to Oran and thence to the United States.  Steve was fond of saying that the Gestapo had his library – three times.)

Steve and Duke asked me if I could help get this space plan together. It would need a meeting of a number of aerospace people, and a good working environment. The Nivens had already committed to a space promotion conference, and agreed to expand it. It expanded beyond even his home’s ability to provide guest space for all those who were coming – about 40 all told – but Marilyn Niven with some volunteers said she could handle the meals, and the house was certainly large enough and had the right atmosphere for a space conference. We reserved a nearby motel for sleeping rooms; everything else would happen at Niven’s house in Tarzana.

I started inviting people mostly by phone, with the promise of an opportunity to be persuasive at a level where persuasion might have some effect. We had a pretty good turnout, starting with Buzz Aldrin, George Merrick who was manager of the Shuttle program at North American, Dr. Gould from North American, Max Hunter, General Graham, Gordon Woodcock from Boeing, George Koopman, several other military officers, Phil Chapman, Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy, Lowell Wood from Teller’s people, Steve Possony of course, a number of science fiction authors I thought would be useful including Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Greg Bear, Dean Ing. Gary Hudson and some space entrepreneurs. Art Dula. Phil Chapman. BJO Trimble was recording secretary and in charge of building a fan base. I’m naming names off the top of my head, and I will forget a lot of them. SF publisher Jim Baen. More active duty mil8itary people none of whom were officially there. We worked all weekend and produced a paper for the transition team, then at the President’s request we started in on a plan for after inauguration at another meeting. The President read the full reports, which strongly recommended Strategic Defense. In 1983 he made his Star Wars speech. It included several phrases from the Council reports.

Anyway, after that frantic period between November 1980 and January 1981 we were asked to continue to work on space policy, and we were all space enthusiasts. I was chairman, largely because I had found someone willing to host the conference and Niven sure didn’t want that job. We did some good work in the next eight years. Then, in 1988, we had a meeting at which Max Hunter said “Maybe it’s time to revive the X Programs.” There’s a long story in that. Anyway, a much smaller group still under the name of Citizen’s Advisory Council on National Space Policy (well, I had to call it something; Newt Gengrich thought it was a pretty good name) devised the SSX project, which General Graham, Max Hunter, and I took to DC just after the inauguration. Mr. Bush had pretty well cleared all the Reagan people out of the White House, but he couldn’t fire VP Dan Quayle, and Quayle was ex officio the chairman of the National Space Council and also had been “the respected junior Senator from Indiana” even in the New York Times until the day he was the Republican VP nominee after which, in under 24 hours, he became a bumbling philandering fool in much of the media; but in fact he was a pretty sharp cookie. He had control of a fair amount of the Strategic Defense Initiative research budget. The SSX Project was 600,000 pounds Gross Lift-Off Weight. There wasn’t enough money in the SDI funds to built that, but there was enough to fund a scale model to test many of the vital concepts of Single Stage to Orbit, and Mr. Quayle was able to get that project funded after having RAND and some other people reevaluate the feasibility of Single Stage to Orbit – which most of the aerospace industry had decided was impossible. There were also questions about control at low speeds and low altitudes. DC/X would test those questions and others. But this isn’t an essay on X projects – for that see my Access To Space.

Anyway, after that Mr. Quayle passed the SSX proposal to the National Space Council which got DC/X funded. Bill Gaubatz made the ship happen, on time, under budget, not paper studies but flying hardware, and I’d have liked to have been at the 20^th Anniversary. And of course the whole story is more complicated than this; but it would not have happened without Dan Graham, Max Hunter, and for that matter me. So I’d love to have gone to the Anniversary. But I’d rather have spent the weekend with my grandchildren.

What I would have said had I been at the anniversary is that the SSX Project as proposed by the Council back in 1989 would still be an excellent X project. The 600,000 GLOW is still just about right, and with new structure materials and vast improvements in computers, gyros, avionic – both in capability and weight savings – SSX might actually make orbit. Max Hunter used to say “We may not make orbit with SSX but we’ll sure scare it to death.” And we would learn just what we would need to make a fleet of ships that were savable and reusable, and which could fly several missions a month, at essentially fuel costs. That’s access to space. One day we’ll do that. Not by government built ships; but government does have a role, as it did in development of aircraft. Not building airplanes but in funding research. And X projects are still one of the most valuable tools for developing technology. But then I’ve said all this before. If I’d have go to the meeting I’d have said it again.

The Mamelukes continue to reassert control in Egypt. Control of Egypt by what Plato called a Timocracy has a long history. One should not forget that the Mamelukes were slave soldiers, and after they took control they decided to remain slaves, even buying more Circassian slaves to augment their ranks. And they were in control for a long time. Then Mustapha Kemal Ataturk showed in Turkey that Timocracy wasn’t dead.

It will be interesting to see what happens next.

And it’s bed time. I have lots of mail, and a number of thought on Navy policy—you can’t be in San Diego without thinking about the Navy. And sometime this week I can start catching up.

View 786 Tuesday, August 13, 2013

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

President Barrack Obama, January 31, 2009

My son Phillip is in town with his wife Patty and their children Catherine and Emma. I will be dependent on my ThinkPad, and while I have this AT&T gadget that is supposed to provide high speed wireless – and it has in the past – my attempts to buy some more time for it have failed, and I’ll have to go to an AT&T store to get that straightened out. I suspect I end up with a new account and have done with it. I haven’t used this one since last summer, and apparently AT&T forgets about you if you don’t use their services.

So: if I can find an Internet connection or get the AT&T gadget activated, I’ll be on line sometime this week. If not, then I’ll have a nice vacation. The house is in good hands, and Sable feels good enough that I don’t mind leaving her with the sitters (old friends we’ve known for years who live in the house for us when we’re away). If I get a few minutes at an AT&T Store I’ll either buy another of those gadgets or more likely get a new sim card and account for this one, and I’ll be back on. If not, I have my iPhone, I have most of my current work on my computer, and I’ll just be out of communication for a few days.

My ancient – 1980’s! HP LaserJet has a paper jam that I can’t manage to fix. It doesn’t open up to where I can get at the tiny bit of paper that tore off and there is not manual way to make it just turn the feeder. I am sure it’s about 2 minutes to fix for someone who knows what they are doing, but it happened when I was writing the checks to pay the bills and I had to make out the checks by hand reading from the computer screen. That shot the say. It is actually not a bad week. We thought Sable would be gone by now but she still enjoys her daily walks, she knows she can beg from the sitters whom she loves, and she’s really not much worse off now than she was 8 months ago. I had some help in cleaning out 20 years worth of junk going back to DOS software days, so there’s getting to be a bit of room in the back room so I can move stuff from the Great Hall and finally turn that into a place where I can sit and talk with people. Slowly making progress on Mamelukes. It goes slow but I am writing.

The news isn’t very good and is even less interesting but then it’s the Silly Season. Oprah either was not insulted and the insult either was or was not racist, and everyone is sorry, and it’s still a dull story – and still the most interesting so far this week. The Egyptian Army continue to hope they can become the new Mamelukes as they were in the old days, with the Kemal Ataturk model to guide them in the 21^st Century. That is probably the best Egypt can get, but there are plenty who don’t want that. The Muslin Brotherhood thinks it has won the right to govern – one man one vote once, and they got a plurality, so get out of our way – and everyone else thinks that isn’t what they thought they were getting. And the Army says no, we will not assist in installing Sharia and suppressing minorities and generally breaking heads. If there are heads we must break then we will do so for our own cause, not that of the Muslim Brotherhood. And what happens next isn’t predictable. To predict it we would need a reliable estimate of the confidence we can give the gutted remnants of the CIA as the old hands retire and the new troops take over. We’d also need to know just how much damage the Benghazi hang up did when the Commander in Chief simply vanished from the control room for hours yet no clear orders had been given.

After Sadowa von Moltke said that he was the last field general to operate without a telegraph wire from the high command up his arse. The days of the independent commanders were over. Roosevelt delegated a lot to Marshall, and Marshall left most of the operations to Eisenhower. Truman tried something of the sort with MacArthur and decided that didn’t work in Korea: MacArthur skated too close to the winds of war with China, and it took a lot of diplomatic fiction to pretend that the US wasn’t at war with China as they killed our troops in Korea. W got through all that, but more and more power was concentrated in the White House. Jimmy Carter was on the phone to Charley Beckwith all during the Iraq operation and its failure.

Benghazi was another chapter in that story. What effect that had on the effectiveness of special ops isn’t something we’ll know for a while. It had one. You can be sure of that.

And Elon Musk wants to build sealed pneumatic tubes between LA and San Francisco, claiming that can be done cheaper and operate at lower costs than high speed rail. Just how much the effects of all those faults and elevation changes will impact on the pneumatic transfer scheme hasn’t been determined. It’s worth discussion when I get back on duty.

I may or may not be getting email, and I may or may not be able to keep up with much. Mostly I’m going to enjoy my grandchildren.

Back when I can be.

I did go down and play with the antenna, rotating it this way and that, and got the LG set to find two more channels.  I can now get channels 4 KNBC and 7 KABC but not 2 KCBS (nor 34 or 43 which seem to be where it broadcasts;  there is more to that story, but no time now).  KCBS seems to have the weakest signal of the bunch.  With digital you get it or you don’t  (and it breaks up more or less often depending on signal coherence).  With KCBS we just don’t get it here.  I’m not going to climb about on the roof.  I don’t think we get DSL here; just too far from the switch. But perhaps AT&T or DSL Extreme or someone has an offer. I’ll see when I get back.  Or maybe Time Warner and CBS will settle their dispute.  And pigs will grow wings.

Wednesday, August 14, 2013 1630:

As it happens I am at the beach place on Wednesday afternoon, about to go to dinner with Phillip and the grandchildren, and able to connect with the old reliable if a bit slow EarthLink dialup connection. It is slow and I can’t use it to cruise the Internet for information, but it does get email and let me update this page.  At least this is a test…

Odd.  Using the Lenovo ThinkPad and EarthLink dialup, it took less time to update this page than it does back home.  I’ll have to look into that.  Possibly something to do with Firefox and lots of open tabs?  Or Internet traffic? Or just luck this time.  I’ll pay attention but I suspect it’s nothing to be interested in. And I’m off shortly.

View 786 Monday, August 12, 2013

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

President Barrack Obama, January 31, 2009

Time Warner and CBS are having a dispute over how much Time Warner should pay CBS for the right to put CBS on the cable and thus give CBS access to millions of listeners and thus charge advertisers more. There’s a lot of money involved. CBS is the most watched network so they think they can raise their rates. Time Warner says well, maybe, but not so much, so we aren’t going to carry you any longer until you sober up.  he city council gives cable monopolies in exchange for campaign funds. City Hall looks to see how much it can rake in out of this.  No one give a rap about the viewers. So it goes.

When Cable first started, the Cable companies would receive the over the air broadcasts, and redistribute them saving the listeners the expense of rooftop antennas and in the room rabbit ears. At least at first I don’t think the cable companies paid the TV stations anything, Then for a while came “cable only” networks, and those paid the cable companies.

Sometime in the 1960’s there was an initiative in California that would forbid cable companies to exist. The pitch was that the cable companies were going to eat TV broadcasting and over time free TV would go away, and this needed to be nipped in the bud. The initiative didn’t pass. One reason is lost was that the cable companies assured everyone that they would always have broadcast TV for free.

Only now we don’t. Time Warner isn’t running Channel 2 and another CBS owned station in the LA area. That’s annoying.

It was annoying enough that yesterday I went to Radio Shack and bought what I hoped was a good TV antenna, a Radio Shack brand. Now My expectations weren’t too high, because we never did get good TV reception at Chaos Manor, and we subscribed to cable – Century Cable I think it was – when it first was available. Over the years the name of the company that held a monopoly on cable in my neighborhood changed, and eventually it became Time Warner. They strung new fiber cables and for the first time Chaos Manor had high speed Internet – prior to that we had had a Wi-Fi setup until that company went out of business, then an Amazon direct satellite connection which worked quite well (fast throughput, long latency when it needed to go to a new Internet address, but it worked and I wish I still had it), then finally Time Warner, and it really worked.

I can’t remember if we got reasonably good Channel 2 reception here, because we’ve had cable for so long. Anyway I bought an indoor HD amplifying antenna.

We have a big LG flat screen, and it has an antenna input on the back. I connected the 75 Ohm cable to the antenna and to the set input, and used the LG clicker to choose “antenna” as the input. Naturally that showed nothing but snowflakes. I read both the LG and the Radio Shack manuals. Each basically suggested that I read the other manual. Fooled around, and eventually found a sub menu that offered manual and automatic tuning, and automatic offered to scan for channels, and Lo! it found about 38 broadcast channels. Edit Channel got me a big matrix of what was available. It was confusing. Some channels were designated as a channel number hyphen 1 or 2 or even 3. One was designated as the CBS owned local station that doesn’t do network CBS TV, but which is blanked out by Time Warner. I sent to that. It was on. Every now and then the signal broke up the way digital signals do, but when it was on it was one fine, no ghosts or snow or == well, about the way you’d expect. Bits is bits.

But no Channel 2, which is KCBS TV, which was the point of the exercise. It’s as if KCBS isn’t broadcasting at all. No signal. Not even a lousy one. None.

Which is where I stand. I can get several local broadcast TV stations. I cannot get KNBC (Channel 4) or KCBS (Channel 2). Channel 5 is the lowest number that antenna can see. I do get KABC on Channel 7, so if that major network has a problem with Time Warner I am set.

My alternatives are to look for a better antenna; possibly one I could put on the roof top but realistically I am not going to crawl about on the roof; or to see if The Phone Company now offers DSL to Chaos Manor. Up until the time we got Time Warner Cable, we were too far from the DSL switch by about 2000 feet, and I suspect that hasn’t changed, but perhaps it has; I’ll have to call. If I can get DSL I can tell Time Warner to come pack it in, and I start over, with a DSL Internet access and TV supplier. I’d rather not do that.

I am happy enough with Time Warner except that I can’t get Under the Dome and NCIS. I can live without Under the Dome – I’ve watched about 3 episodes and found only one character I care much about, and the story is getting more complicated, not less. In particular there is apparently no attempt by the people outside the dome to set up big blackboards and establish communication with those inside, and that’s absurd. We don’t know what’s going on outside, but surely someone will be trying to communicate, and no one is. That is a plot device known as an idiot block – the plot fails unless everyone without exception acts like an idiot – and I have always hated that trick.

Time Warner has block Internet access to Internet showings of CBS shows. I am sure they are available on Bit Torrent but I don’t do that. Not yet, anyway.

This week we are doing family things, and none of this is very important. Next week I can look into this with a bit more care.

Suggestions welcome. Of course either Time Warner or CBS may blink by then.

View 785 Friday, August 09, 2013

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

President Barrack Obama, January 231, 2009

I get inputs from many people.

Obama, the International President, or maybe he’d do better in Kenya?

Friends,

I love it how the Egyptians have seen though Obama’s Arab Spring, deposed the Muslim Brotherhood, and jailed its leader. America can learn a lesson from that.

It’s a lesson that Obama will likely not heed, however, as his Administration is loaded with high level Muslim Brotherhood agents, including the Weiner Wife — she was Hillary’s deputy chief of staff, her mother is co-founder of the Muslim Sisterhood, and her brother is a high level official in Hamas. There are jihadists in the White House. Valarie Jarrett is Iranian.

The Media reports Anti-American protests in Egypt.

Not quite. If you pay close attention, the protests center on Obama and his hated pro-jihadist Ambassador. More disturbing is the recent report that there are also Muslim Brotherhood agents on John McCain’s staff. McCain and Lindsey Graham just visited Cairo on a mission from Obama to have Egypt’s government kiss and make up with Muslim Brotherhood terrorists. Egypt told them to stick it where the sun don’t shine.

Which prompted Glenn Beck to become horrified as how clueless this pair of Senior Republican Senators was, and a suggestion from Egypt’s government that they should go home and mind their own business. Seems like a good idea to me. A better idea would be to get the RINOs out of office so we can get a select committee with subpoena powers and appropriate clearances working to find the truth about Benghazi. Almost certainly, the Obama Administration was using our tax money to provide weapons to Syria, which, at the time, was ILLEGAL.

Egypt, a Muslim nation, is telling us that Obama sides with terrorist. Perhaps we should listen.

This video of a Cairo belly dancer — short and simple — has gone VIRAL. ENJOY!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpAt2nIBpF4

Best,

John

I have no confirmation of the pervasiveness of Moslem Brotherhood agents asserted in this. Indeed, it’s the first I have heard of most of it.

My view of Egypt isn’t unique. I believe the Mamelukes hoped to form an Atatürk-like constitutional regime, with a professional military as the guardian of tolerance and of the integrity of the state, specifically the peace with Israel. The business of government would not be their affair, except that the government should provide the military with an adequate budget (actually, simply not intercept the money the United States pays as part of the Israel-Egypt perpetual truce) and leave the military to run its internal affairs. It’s pretty close to the Mameluke regime of old. The Army sees itself as protector of the Egyptian people, not their oppressor, Of course there is corruption – there always is in timocratic regimes in the real world – but the model has been known since Platonic times, and political philosophers have considered it a viable government form (but of course none are eternally stable).

The Mamelukes have taken control because the Muslim Brotherhood grabbed far too much, including power over the Mamelukes – who have seen what happens to their kind in Turkey which has deconstructed the Atatürk state and is going away from secularism toward an Islamic state.

I suspect that something like the Atatürk form of republic is the best Egypt can hope for, and certainly the best the Jewish (almost non-existent now but large at one time), Christian, and secular Egyptian minorities can hope for. I wish them well of it.

If the President has a favored view of a possible Egyptian future, I am not aware of it and I do not think he has tried to explain it, nor do I think he has much vision regarding the future of *Iraq, Syria, Libya, Tunisia, Jordan, or any other part of the Middle East. Nor do I see anyone in the White House who does. I suspect Mrs. Clinton had more vision than anyone in State or at the White House now; but that’s an opinion for which I don’t have a lot of support. More of a conclusion.

I can see that there are Muslim Brotherhood influences in US policies, but I don’t assert those are caused by covert MB agents in government. Discussion invited.

The court martial trial of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan drags on, and no one can understand why. The constitution provides a definition of treason – levying war on the United States – which certainly fits the action of an armed man shooting military men and women while crying “Allah Akbar!” on a military base. What else could that be but treason? Major Hasan should have been ceremonially stripped of his rank in the presence of representative troops, then either hanged or shot, wheel chair and all, and this done last year. The wounded should get their purple hearts. This was no workplace incident, this was an act of war by a Muslim against the armed forces of the United States of America, and it should be treated as such.

The actual events, with months of discussion over whether he should have been forcibly shaved and all the other legal wrangling, does not reflect well on the United States.

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

President Barrack Obama, January 231, 2009

“Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide.”

John Adams

The President continues to grant exceptions to the laws passed by Congress, make recess appointments when Congress is not in recess, withhold information about foreign affairs incidents from the Congress, stall on information about who issued the ‘stand down’ order to the gunships ready to go help the CIA spooks in Benghazi, refuse to give Congress information about the IRS scandal which continues to grow worse and worse, and routinely blocks investigations into the operations of much of the executive branch.

If you didn’t see this, you should have.  http://www.france24.com/en/20130623-man-made-particles-lowered-hurricane-frequency-study

ditto this:  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323844804578529713576219412.html