Crimea, ICANN, and the lost airplane.

View 816 Thursday, March 20, 2014

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

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

 

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

 

The Crimean adventure is done so far as the Russians are concerned. The President has blacklisted a bank and a number of prominent Russians said to be influential in the government, freezing their assets and presumably making ready to confiscate their property. That will do wonders for the trustworthiness of the United States. I have not heard that Putin is seizing the assets of the Heinz Corporation, but I am sure they have some in Russia. I am sure there is some Congressional authority for Presidential seizure of the property of foreign nationals on the grounds that the US does not like their foreign policy, but I confess I don’t know what it is. Perhaps the President will tell us sometime.

I hear as I am writing this that a number of Congresscritters and other Americans are now banned from going to Russia. If the President keeps it up, he will maneuver us out of any access to the International Space station, and Russia will be able to claim it as jetsam.

The Boston Globe today asks an interesting question: Why Fix Internet Oversight when It’s Not Broken?

Last week, the administration said the United States will begin negotiations to cede control of one of the Net’s most powerful institutions, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. Currently overseen by the Department of Commerce, ICANN will be taken over by an international agency to be assembled later. The process is set to begin next week in Singapore, where the current ICANN members are scheduled to meet.

The story has been kicking around all week, and in between bouts if extreme indigestion – I’m back on Zantac now and it seems to be working – I have pondered just what President Obama thinks he is doing. I see no rational purpose for his giving up control of something we invented and set up and which has been working very well. Neither does Esther Dyson, founding chairman of ICANN. She thinks turning ICANN over to the UN would be a disaster, and she’s a smart cookie who knows something about the subject. There are conspiracy theories that say that President Obama has decided that the US doesn’t deserve to have control of the Internet (we don’t have all that much, really, but ICANN gives us some) and the US deserves punishment. Get rid of it. And we don’t deserve to be a superpower, either.

I don’t believe in conspiracy theories, but I would like an alternative to this one since I can’t think of any rational reason the President is doing this. I have heard no great pressure on the subject. Old fashioned bribery? Control of ICANN can be valuable if you know what to do with it.

I welcome correspondence on this. I am truly puzzled.

We still know nothing about the airplane. It is in Burma. It is in India. It is in China. It is at the bottom of the Indian Ocean on a path west. It is in the Indian Ocean down near Australia. Pieces have been sighted only they may just be floating trash. An on and on.

It is a reasonable assumption that human activity turned off the transponders, but whether as a general electrical shutdown or switched off individually is not known. Cell phones rang but were not answered – some say – meaning that they were still undestroyed and turned on, but no one was attending them. No, that didn’t happen, say others.

It was not a bomb. And we certainly cannot rule out a well planned takeover by an experience pilot – perhaps the airplane’s captain.

It is impossible to draw any logical conclusions from all this. A false proposition implies the universe class. I have no information reliable enough to draw conclusions from, and I am a bit weary of wild speculations. We’ll just have to wait and see.

The ACA is in deep trouble: not very many of the young and uninsured have signed up and it does not appear that they intend to. The insurance companies cannot sustain this without the increased revenue from the young and healthy, and no insurance company that only sells policies to people already in need of medical care will survive. The President can delay enforcement of various provisions of ACA but the soup gets thicker with no relief in sight. ACA will have to be rewritten – but by whom?

 

SUBJ: Global Warming Model and Data

For what it’s worth, global warmist Michael Mann claims to be be providing both his model and his data in the following on-line Scientific American article:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mann-why-global-warming-will-cross-a-dangerous-threshold-in-2036/?&WT.mc_id=SA_ENGYSUS_20140320

I haven’t the time right now, but if someone wants to poke around and examine assumptions and the data it might prove interesting.

—

Cecil Rose

 

Interesting, but if anyone looks into it I would be glad to hear from you. My conclusion remains: We don’t have a good climate prediction program. We cant predict El Nino and its variants and that controls a good bit of the surface temperature of the Earth. We know that it is has been warmer than now and colder than now in historic times, and if we look back ran enough it has been MUCH warmer and MUCH colder; and CO2 has been at level several hundred times as great as now.  We can continue to play with climate models, but none we have now are of much use.  So it goes.

 

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