A mixed bag for the New Year

Mail 708 Tuesday, January 03, 2012

Did You Know? – YouTube

Jerry

Don’t know if you’ve seen this video before:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kWwSY

It was prepared by Sony for its 2009 shareholders’ meeting.

Ed

A very disturbing video. Well worth the time to watch. Thanks.

Both of these are from the same reader:

RE: the American Workforce

Steve Jobs wanted better technicians? Why didn’t he train them himself, then? “Because then they’d go work for IBM.” So pay better than IBM does. “They aren’t worth that much.” Hm. So Steve Jobs wants people who work cheap and can’t leave. He doesn’t want employees—he wants slaves. And if he has to go to China to get slaves, well, that’s where he’ll go. Meanwhile we’re told that there’s Jobs Americans Just Won’t Do.

Building Swarms of P-47

There’s a little more to modern manufacturing than riveting sheet metal. Saying “we built lots of things in World War II, therefore we should be able to build lots of things today” is the kind of thinking that suggested we’d colonize the asteroid belt the same way we colonized Australia.

M

I do not think that most Apple employees think of themselves as slaves. If the problem of well educated technical workers is that they are in short enough supply that they can demand such high wages, the obvious first thought is to increase the supply. With a population of more than 300 million we certainly have the potential. And given the technical educations we observe in the Orient we were once able to provide that to a large part of the population in California and in Tennessee (two places I am familiar with), so I see no real reason why we can’t have superior schools in most of the country.

Of course this isn’t Lake Wobegon, and half of the children are below average; but we have more above average now than we had as a total population when I was born. There’s no shortage of people smart enough to benefit from a decent education. Moreover, the problem isn’t money or resources: when I went to first through eighth grades, my schools had two grades to a room and 20 or so children per grade. At Capleville there were only 4 teachers for the entire school and the principal taught 7-8^th grades. Yet we learned quite a lot, including an introduction to algebra and geometry, and had a fairly decent introduction to Western civilization and its literature.

As to manufacturing, perhaps so, but I would have thought that propeller driven airplanes were quite complicated, and the electronics of the day were very complex requiring a lot of hand work; we didn’t have much in the way of robots and automation.

And I continue to believe that we can colonize the Moon, and thence the asteroids, in much the same way that we colonized Australia. I have written a number of novels about doing that.

Rising to the occasion

Jerry,

I do believe there are times that this country can still rise to the occassion, although perhaps not quite as broadly or as lengthy in duration as occured in WWII. Witness the history of the GBU-28 bunkerbuster… from the drawing board to field deployment during Desert Storm in a time measured in weeks.

Whether we could repeat a sustained effort like the Liberty ship program, I have my doubts. But there are still some things we can pull off if we put our minds to it.

Karl

This came with impossible formatting. I have tweaked it a bit. I would request that in future don’t send me mail with weird formatting. Plain text with two carriage returns at the ends of paragraphs is good. I can manage much other.

"Fathom the Hypocrisy of a Government that requires every citizen to prove they are insured…. but not everyone must prove they are a citizen."

Ben Stein

: During a visit with a fellow chaplain, who happened to be assigned to the Pentagon, I had a chance to hear a first-hand account of an incident . This is little-known story from the Pentagon on 09/11/2001: that happened right after Flight 77 hit the Pentagon.

The chaplain told me what happened at a daycare center near where the impact occurred. This daycare had many children, including infants who were in heavy cribs. The daycare supervisor, looking at all the children they needed to evacuate, was in a panic over what they could do. There were many children, mostly toddlers, as well as the infants that would need to be taken out with the cribs.

There was no time to try to bundle them into carriers and strollers. Just then a young Marine came running into the center and asked what they needed. After hearing what the center director was trying to do, he ran back out into the hallway and disappeared. The director thought, ‘Well, here we are-on our own.’

About 2 minutes later, that Marine returned with 40 other Marines in tow. Each of them grabbed a crib with a child, and the rest started gathering up toddlers. The director and her staff then helped them take all the children out of the center and down toward the park near the Potomac and the Pentagon. Once they got about 3/4 of a mile outside the building, the Marines stopped in the park, and then did a fabulous thing – they formed a circle with the cribs, which were quite sturdy and heavy, like the covered wagons in the Old West. Inside this circle of cribs, they put the toddlers, to keep them from wandering off. Outside this circle were the 40 Marines, forming a perimeter around the children and waiting for instructions. There they remained until the parents could be notified and come get their children.

The chaplain then said, "I don’t think any of us saw nor heard of this on any of the news stories of the day. It was an incredible story of our men there. There wasn’t a dry eye in the room. The thought of those Marines and what they did and how fast they reacted; could we expect any less from them? It was one of the most touching stories from the Pentagon."

Remember Ronald Reagan’s great compliment: "Most of us wonder if our lives made any difference. Marines don’t have that problem."

God Bless the USA , our troops, and you. If you care to offer the smallest token of recognition and appreciation for the military, please pass this on and pray for our men and women who have served and are currently serving our country and pray for those who have given the ultimate sacrifice for freedom.

Will the real Cheetah please stand up

Dr. Pournelle,

You wrote

"Did the real Cheetah die in 1938? "

Reminds me of the oft repeated rumors of the death and replacement of Sir Paul McCartney. One wonders if playing the soundtrack of the Movie "Tarzan finds a Son" backwards will somehow reveal Johnny Weissmuller chanting "Cheetah is dead" buried in the elephant noises. If we cannot convince the crazies about the continuing good health and creative output of a modern artist, I’ve little hope of convincing any of the identity of a chimp.

Glad that your home is back together.

Thanks for re-releasing Starswarm. I enjoyed it, and it measures well against Heinlein’s. I also re-read _Podkayne of Mars_ on Kindle, so I have a basis of comparison.

-d

I haven’t heard more from any reliable source. One says the real Cheetah died early on, before 1945. The other says that this was the genuine article, an 80 year old chimp. Dunno.

California Declared Judical Hellhole

Jerry,

I know you are familiar with the legal situation in California based on your previous posts, but I thought you might find this report interesting.

http://www.judicialhellholes.org/2011/12/15/latest-report-names-philadelphia-as-the-worst-of-the-judicial-hellholes-while-courts-in-california-west-virginia-florida-illinois-new-york-and-nevada-also-make-the-list/#more-1197

The full report is available here:

http://www.judicialhellholes.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Judicial-Hellholes-2011.pdf

The section on California is pages 9-12.

Joel Upchurch

Thanks. And it is not an exaggeration. One chap brought several hundred suits against public establishments because men’s room mirrors were several centimeters too high for his comfort. He claimed that he could not properly preen himself from his wheel chair. He travelled from place to place looking for restaurants and bars so he could examine the restroom.

Another sued over 100 nail parlors for using the wrong polish remover. He would of course settle for a thousand dollars, otherwise you go to trial. And there are others.

In France they remedied much of this with guillotines after 1789.

Interventionism and the survival of the U.S. as we know it

"We are the friends of Liberty everywhere. We are the guardians only of our own. I see no need for a policy different from that, but I am willing to have it debated." {Pournelle, 29Dec2011}

If you really believe that, you should be supporting Ron Paul for President, not Gingrich.

I think that it is high time we pulled all our troops home, though retaining much of our capacity to project force should there be dire need, including, of course, much of our Navy. I would like to see half of the savings from this move spent on building out and maintaining state-of-the-art Star Wars defensive and counterstrike capability, and making significant improvement to our human intelligence, both in the field and analytically, back in the agencies. We also need to significantly improve our counter-intelligence, and in fact we need a thorough overhaul and consolidation of all central U.S. intelligence agencies into one.

The focus of our foreign policy should be limited to fostering and protecting the freest possible trade, and incidentally promoting free market capitalism based on absolute respect for property rights as the necessary foundation. We should return to serving as a shining example to the rest of the world in that regard by abolishing all Unconstitutional functions of government, i.e. all the sham regulatory agencies, starting with the DEA. The wars on terrorism and drugs should be declared over, and all future wars should be subject to the approval of the Senate, as the Constitution requires.

These are my views, but Ron Paul comes close to them in every respect. It is doubtful, given the state of our society, that anyone who is elected president can prevent the coming breakdown of the world financial system, and with it the U.S. government, even if that president’s party controls both houses of Congress. The reason for supporting Ron Paul is not because he has the best chance of being elected, but because he alone of all the candidates has the understanding, and the insight to grasp the radical changes that are necessary. Thus, he is the only candidate who provides a ray of hope that in time enough Americans can be awakened to the fact that the U.S. government is the problem, not the solution, that there’s a chance of avoiding our otherwise inevitable fate.

John Robb

I have not announced my support for any Republican candidate. Mr. Paul says he does not expect to be the candidate. His popularity has a great influence on whomever the candidate will be.

Our President is President of the U.N. Security Council and the U.N. flew flags at half mast for Kim Jong Il.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.55799cfbd389f865660da24bb02616c9.4f1&show_article=1

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

I do not think that a matter for either the Assembly or the Security Council; I believe it falls into the jurisdiction of the Secretary General.

The first Congress declined to appoint anyone from the US an ‘ambassador’ on the grounds that this was a royal title; the lack of that title meant that the US representative was always last in precedence.

I do appreciate the irony.

Health Care

Dear Mr. Pournelle;

While there’s a persuasive argument to be made for the position that health care is not a reasonable "entitlement" (though I do think accepting some responsibility for the welfare of all is a value I’d support), there are two other aspects to this which I think need to be worked through.

The first is the health of the herd. It’s simply dangerous to all of us if threats to the health of any of us go unaddressed. For example: it’s my impression that improperly treated tuberculosis is becoming more common in urban slums. Which increases the likelihood of drug-resistant strains developing. While one might argue that we have no *obligation* to act aggressively against tuberculosis in this population, it would be a foolish economy if drug-resistant TB came to haunt us all. In general, allowing a pool of infectious disease seems like a really bad idea.

The second issue is the cost of health care. The curve of health care costs against GNP is clearly unsustainable; we can’t spend *all* our production on hospitals. Obviously that won’t happen; so how will it stop? I’d rather look for a strategy which doesn’t rely on some catastrophic interruption. And I see nothing in the forces driving health care costs which suggests that they’ll be reined in by market forces.

The emergency room question which you raise is significant; not only are emergency rooms appallingly expensive, but with the exception of trauma care they’re hardly the best place to begin treatment. Presuming that we have not, as a society, made the decision to let poor people die untreated, why would we make the choice to make their treatment as expensive — and ineffective — as our technology allows? (I’ve been intrigued by recent pilot studies which suggest that health care costs can be significantly *reduced* by providing excellent and continuing health care to what appears to be a minority of the population which runs up heavy emergency room costs.)

How to bring health care costs under control, I *don’t* know. But since the only counterweight I am aware of would be governmental action, I think that’s where we need to look.

Thank you for your continuing attempt to promote civil and thoughtful conversation —

Allan E. Johnson

The question is whether someone ought to be made to pay for the health care of people who would otherwise burden the emergency rooms. I continue to ask the question: how did you get the legal obligation to pay for my health care? Is that also an ethical obligation or is it merely force majeure?

Sacco & Vanzetti

Hi Jerry!

Interesting reading your remarks about Sacco and Vanzetti (https://jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?page_id=491#note1), as I’ve been reading about the case recently, and have had some online exchanges with those who "know" what happened on April 15th, 1920 and subsequently, apparently by virtue of divine revelation.

Perhaps the most important books on this subject are two by the late Paul Avrich, a CUNY professor who was a historian of Anarchism: _Sacco and Vanzetti : the Anarchist Background_, and _Anarchist Voices : an Oral Oistory of Anarchism in America_. In _Anarchist Background_ he paints a picture of two men who were part of a violent revolutionary terrorist movement, men who’d been involved in bombings and other crimes years before they were ever arrested. In _Oral History_, you’ll find several people stating that Sacco was a participant in the robbery/double murder, and that one of the peripheral figures in the case, Mario Buda, was most likely the Wall Street Bomber, perpetrator of what was up till then the worst act of terrorism ever committed in the U.S. (38 dead, 143 seriously injured).

What’s amazing about the Sacco-Vanzetti case, the Hiss case, the Rosenberg case, and several other controversial convictions I’ve looked into over the years is that, when you go back to the original sources there was always a huge amount of evidence that the accused did it; that more such evidence appeared over the years; that the accused always acted in ways that showed they were probably guilty of something serious, even without considering what the prosecution said about them; and that their defenders obfuscated the issues relentlessly.

It just goes to show you how vicious and sinister the fascist U.S. govt. is: when they decide to persecute people for political reasons, they persecute people who actually did what they were accused of!

Best wishes, and Happy New Year,

Stephen M. St. Onge

Minneapolis, MN, USA

I t has been many years since Carlo Tresca, who as the anarchist leader presumably knew, said that Sacco was guilty but Vanzetti was not. I do know that a great deal of legal talent was employed in the case.

Project Icarus (1967).

<http://beyondapollo.blogspot.com/2011/12/project-icarus-1967.html>

Roland Dobbins

Forget The Bunny Inspectors

Jerry –

http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/politics/Adult-Film-Porn-Sets-Condom-Ballot-Measure-136259473.html?dr

LA is proposing to fund inspectors for the porn industry, to enforce condom use.

Will conforming videos get one of those blue USDA stamps?

Regards,

Jim Martin

I have no comment…

"Although there is only a tiny probability that alien technology would have left traces on the moon in the form of an artifact or surface modification of lunar features, this location has the virtue of being close, and of preserving traces for an immense duration."

<http://news.discovery.com/space/seti-to-scour-the-moon-for-alien-tech-111227.html>

Roland Dobbins

At one time a common theme in science fiction. Obelisks, anyone?