Category Archives: Mail

Mail 812 Sunday, February 23, 2014

Subject : Seitz: CO2 absorption lines

Regarding Russell Seitz’ comment, "Mark Sanicola claiming that CO2 does not have an absorption band " between 9 and 13 microns is pure hogwash ." Sanicola is correct and Seitz is wrong. The two primary CO2 absorption lines in the atmosphere are at 15.0 microns and 4.26 microns. A CO2 laser operates by pumping the CO2 molecule ground state up to the 2349.3 /cm energy level (= 4.26 microns) and then making a transition to the excited state at 1388/cm. The energy difference between theses levels generates photons with a wavelength of 10.4 microns. For details see Fig. 3 of http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~phylabs/adv/ReprintsPDF/CO2%20Reprints/03%20-%20CO2%20Lasers.pdf.

The CO2 laser does present an interesting argument against the claims of the global warming alarmists. They know that the back radiation from CO2 in the atmosphere cannot raise the ground temperature much, ~ 1 C according to them. They then posit that the extra energy flux, ~ 1 W/m^2, at 15 micron will evaporate extra water into the atmosphere and water vapor’s much larger greenhouse effect will amplify the extra CO2 by about a factor of 4 to lead to catastrophic heating of the earth. [The obvious question is if H2O is such a powerful greenhouse gas, why doesn’t it just bootstrap the heating itself and cause runaway warming? There’s also an infinite reservoir of water called the oceans. But I digress.]

If you do a search for CO2 lasers you’ll come up with ads for lasers for plastic surgery where it’s used for scar removal and other cosmetic problems. The reason they work so well for that application is that 10.4 micron infrared barely penetrates the skin, which is mostly made of water. The surgeon can ablate the skin a few microns at a time because the penetration is so shallow, even with an energy flux of 10^6 W/m^2, a million times higher than the atmospheric flux. The same holds true for the 15 micron CO2 line in the atmosphere. It doesn’t penetrate the water more than a few microns and is consequently incapable of evaporating all that extra water into the air to cause more warming.

Paul S. Linsay–

Subject : Future of Work

Dear Dr. Pournelle;

To begin, allow me to thank you for the excellence of your site. I value the knowledgeable and insightful commentary from you and your readership. I would like to offer some comments of my own on the subject of the diminishing need for certain forms of labor.

One comment in particular, that technological changes are eliminating the need for those that fall on the ‘left side of the curve’ touches upon my own thoughts. I don’t disagree with the statement, but there seems to be an unstated assumption that only those on the left side of the curve are at risk. I believe that they are simply the first to feel the effects of the technological revolution we are undergoing.

The confluence of several technologies will, I firmly believe, eliminate the need for the vast majority of Human labor. It will do so in relatively short order, perhaps within 30-60 years were I so bold as to make a prediction.

The technologies I speak of are battery technology, robotics and ‘artificial intelligence’. I think a case could be made for adding 3D manufacturing to this list as well (and molecular manufacturing a few decades later).

Robotics that can manipulate their environment with greater precision and robustness than any Human, batteries that are energy dense enough to untether them from a wall socket and guiding software that will undoubtedly give them the ability to perform nearly any task a Human performs and do it with absolute consistency. These technologies in particular, as well as cheap, waste free and de-centralized manufacturing could eliminate the need for the majority of Human labor.

I know that predictions regarding artificial intelligence have promised much more than they have delivered so far, but there is little doubt that the coming years, possibly as few as 20, will see software that can replicate Human activities with ease, thus consuming much of the right side of the curve as well.

There is no Human endeavor with the possible exception of leadership roles that will not be more economically performed by intelligent, or at least expert/brilliant software: surgeons, lawyers, engineers, every-damn-thing you can think of. They can work 24 hours a day without fatigue, they don’t form unions or demand higher wages, they can be retrained by simply re-programming them (which will also be competently done by machines). And there is of course something else they cannot do: purchase the product of their work. In point of fact, if a new economic model is not developed in the very near future, when Human input on a grand scale is ‘surplus to requirements’ there won’t be anyone with two dimes to rub together.

This will occur quite naturally as a result of market forces. If firm ‘A’ and firm ‘B’ compete for the same market and firm ‘B’ fires it’s Human staff in favor of robotics and A.I. and can then deliver a service/product for a lower price firm ‘A’ will soon be out of business. Legislated incentives to retain Human staff can, I think, only slow the process, not stop it.

Obviously my position is stated as an extreme: Long before 90 percent of the Human race is without work, changes to our civilization will have been made or it will have collapsed. But just what is the answer to a civilization that no longer needs Human workers? When our tools and creations can do Humanity’s work cheaper and more efficiently, what will Humans do? Will we be served by our artificial minions, be saved from menial necessities so that we can turn our attention to bettering ourselves? Ah, Utopia! I rather think not. I seem to be incapable of taking such a future seriously. I simply don’t know what the future holds. The only thing I am quite certain of is that given the pace of technological advancement, we are rapidly reaching the point where a robot can be cheaply built and programmed to do any form of work. Personally I am a technophile and I see this as an opportunity to set our species free, not just from the drudgery that has defined much of Human life to present, but perhaps to fulfill the ideals set out nicely by Ayn Rand:

"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men."

Respectfully,

Eric Gilmer

Marx wrote eloquently of a time when a man might be a worker in the morning, an artist in the afternoon, and revel in the evening. This was his picture of the end of history.

Of course he also wrote that capitalism tends to widen the gap between workers and capitalists, between rich and poor, and to concentrate more and more wealth into fewer and fewer hands. David McCord Wright thought that US trust busting – prevention of monopolies and promoting competition – made America different. Now the goal of most capitalist firms is to buy out their competition, and the government seems to allow or even encourage that. Note that ComCast wants to buy Time Warner and it appears to be on track for government approval; and many other “mergers” recently reduce competition and produce firms and banks that are too big to fail.

Science fiction has long generated stories of a time when work was pretty well uncoupled from actual productivity – recall George Jetson’s job which consisted of fighting traffic to get to “work” where he mostly did nothing. And Poul Anderson explored the theme more than once. None have been very satisfactory.

And our schools continue to send out students who don’t know how to do anything that someone would pay money to have done.

Online learning

http://scottishsceptic.wordpress.com/2014/02/19/the-end-of-the-uk-university-ii/#more-2972

A friend of mine discussing online learning replacing traditional universities. Pretty much what you have said but if you have a few minutes to kill…..

Neil Craig

Ford’s $5 / day

I’m surprised to see Ford’s own web site implying that Henry Ford raised wages so his employees could afford to buy Ford cars. I’ve searched a number of times, and never found anywhere he said such a thing. His goal was to increase sales by reducing prices, not by giving more money to his employees and hoping they would spend it on his cars; if Ferrari announced they were increasing wages for the guy who bolts the doors on so he could afford to buy a $250,000 Ferrari 458, people would rightly think they were mad.

What Ford did say, and the Ford site touched on, was "The payment of five dollars a day for an eight-hour day was one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever made, and the six-dollar day wage is cheaper than the five. How far this will go, we do not know." (Henry Ford, My Life And Work). The economy was booming, and auto workers could easily quit and take another job elsewhere if they were offered a better deal; increasing wages allowed Ford to hire the best workers, encouraged them to work hard to keep their jobs, and cut annual employee turnover from nearly 400%(!) to nearly zero.

He certainly believed companies should pay good wages, but had solid financial reasons to do so. Paying his workers more money reduced costs, and increased productivity, which did allow more people to buy his cars.

Edward M. Grant

I would not try to argue that Mr. Ford was a particularly generous man, and having been at Boeing when part of the company personnel policy was to keep people from leaving Seattle for jobs elsewhere because it was in those days difficult to get people to move to Seattle and thus isolate themselves from the aerospace industry – remember, this was before jet airliners were common – I quite understand the notion that it was generally cheaper to pay a good man more to stay than to try to recruit someone from Southern California to come to Seattle.

The point was that part of the increased productivity of the new techniques did in fact go to the workers, not just the stockholders; while most of the recent increases in productivity have not done that. The stockholders get the money, and the displaced workers get whatever they can; while the workers who stay on may or may not get large raises, but most do not get anything like the increases the investors have got. I am trying to stay as emotionally neutral in describing that as possible: objectively it seems clear that the thesis that increases in productivity are not going to the increasingly productive workers seems clear, and of course the size of the work force generally is reduced. America produces more goods than it used to, but with a smaller work force – just as farms produce far more than they did when more than half the working population worked on farms.

Raising the minimum wage.

If the Chinese could be persuaded to raise (or establish) their minimum wage, it would be far more beneficial that raising

the minimum wage in the United States.

Charles Brumbelow

What a marvelous idea. Who bells cat?

JEP

Tariffs should level the playing field nicely. Impose a tariff on any imported goods, and we’ll build them here.

iPods. MADE IN THE USA. Who could complain?

Mike Lieman

People who buy iPods?

JEP

People who buy iPods can afford the extra marginal expense to support their friends and neighbors, can’t they? At the end of the day, we need to choose what’s important to us. PEOPLE ( labor ) or THINGS (capital ) . I know what side I’m on.

Mike Lieman

When I was younger in in sixth grade in the Old South, at a time when the South voted 99.44% Democrat, it was taught in the public schools that Democrats wanted “Tariff for revenue only” while Republicans wanted protective tariff to prevent industrialization of the South.  The South could afford to be customers for northern manufactured goods, and could pay for them by shipping cotton and other agricultural products to the north – but could not buy spinning mills and looms because there was a huge tariff on importing such equipment. We will leave out examining the truth of this assertion.  Now the Republicans are for Free Trade, or say they are. No tariff at all, not even for revenue.

CUI BONO?

Hi, Doc.

I’m so tired of hearing straw-man arguments about "conspiracy theories".

You don’t have to conspire with anybody to notice you can get grant money for lying.

You don’t have to conspire with anybody to notice which scifi horror flicks scare lots and lots of voters.

You don’t have to conspire with anybody to notice which candidate’s rhetoric will let you make more money for your overproduction of corn, either.

That’s all I have for now, as it is too chilly in this house for me to care about much else.

Matthew Joseph Harrington

e pur si muove (the motto of consensus deniers since 1633)

The SBI : A New Approach To Drone Warfare

Dear Jerry :

Here is a link to a recent piece of mine that may be considered an homage to Poul Anderson, whose work first inspired scientific analysis of the specific impulse of beer as a rocket propellant.

It may have strategic uses still:

http://takimag.com/article/the_strategic_beer_initiative_russell_seitz/print

—

Russell Seitz

Fellow of the Department of Physics Harvard University

http://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2014/02/06/a-tale-of-two-droughts-n1790132/page/full

Dr Pournelle

"It would be great if we could pick out which, among the bright kids, will be the future Steve Jobs, and which will be philosophers and statesmen, but we can’t do that." https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/the-education-disaster/

If we picked out the future Steve Jobs in order to give him a university education, he would not be Steve Jobs. Jobs dropped out of college. So did Bill Gates. Albert Einstein never earned more than a bachelor’s degree.

The propaganda is that higher education correlates to higher achievement and higher earnings. I am not persuaded.

The only institution of higher learning in the United States that has a demonstrated record of turning out graduates who go on to become great men is the USMA at West Point. I doubt that has much to do with the academics they teach there.

Live long and prosper

h lynn keith

Jerry,

You might enjoy this paper: http://conference.leansystemssociety.org/focus-talk-comparing-parasitic-behaviours-biological-organisational-systems.htm

I have cited the technological strategy book you coauthored more than once.

Cheers,

Carlo

Dr Carlo Kopp, Fellow LSS, Associate Fellow AIAA

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

Mail 811 Friday, February 21, 2014

Minimum wage

Like all progressive legislation, the mobs will be sold that this is their Right.

It can not be defeated, so acquiesce, but extract a price.

Any new business ( not counting existing business under new management) would be granted a ten year exemption from all wage laws (and hopefully all other government regulations) They could even hire teenagers for 50 cents an hour. Throw in your proposal of a doubling (actually I would favor a five fold increase) in the size of the workforce for exemption from government regulations and you begin to return Freedom to the workplace. Also add a rider that small businesses under 100 would be exempt from regulations under Interstate Commerce – the States can protect their own citizens.

And to appeal to those politicians who sold their souls, don’t stop with $10 or $12 go all the way to $20. (and to stop the trend towards subsidizing illegals) make the minimum wage only count for actual citizens of the United States. With a high penalty for falsely claiming citizenship. Not that it would ever be enforced.

This would be an excellent camel nose under the tent to get the Right Wing attached. In return for the Lefts pipe dream we would release the small businesses from bondage.

Earl Smith

 

Raising the minimum wage…

If the Chinese could be persuaded to raise (or establish) their minimum wage, it would be far more beneficial that raising the minimum wage in the United States.

Charles Brumbelow

What a marvelous idea.  Who bells cat?

Productivity and Pay

William Galston makes good points, but, as seems always to be true of those "in the mainstream Democrat intellectual community", his suggestions require a state with substantial coercive power and further assumes that the public programs will be efficiently administered by the state.

Anyway, wages as we understand them do not couple compensation to productivity; they couple compensation to time at the job. Piecework is the simplest way to couple compensation to actual productivity and it can and has been applied to large-scale manufacturing. Perhaps this archaic idea should be dusted off and given a fresh coat of wax.

Richard White

Austin, Texas

It looks as if officialdom have finally learned about tularemia.

<http://theweek.com/article/index/256780/how-do-you-weaponize-a-rabbit>

——-

Roland Dobbins

Luck is the residue of opportunity and design.

— John Milton

I first wrote about the use of tularemia as a terror weapon in about 1977. I also did a paper for a team at Edgewood Arsenal on the subject. I haven’t followed it much since, although I have toyed with using it in a novel sometime, but was worried about giving someone an idea. Glad to hear they are taking it seriously in the open now; I suspect that there was considerable attention paid to in at Edgewood at one time.

The Economics of Doomsday Preparations.

<http://www.smartasset.com/blog/economics-of/the-economics-of-doomsday-preparations/?ns=1>

—-

Roland Dobbins

As some of you may recall I was once a contributing editor to the late lamented Survival magazine.  Sometimes I am tempted to find some of my old columns and polish them for the modern era.  There are many things one should be prepared to survive: any one of them may be a low probability, but the probability of a Black Swan is not zero, and all the possible disasters are not uncorrelated.

Keystone Pipeline and energy independence

Jerry,

I was listening to an interview this evening where an environmentalist was vehemently against the Keystone Pipeline and stating that we need to make self sustaining communities producing sustainable energy and being self sufficient in other ways. I began putting other thoughts together and began to wonder…could it be the progressives are trying to reduce the capability to travel or ship goods over distance, having the communities have their own food production, people working locally and having housing become less sprawling and more centralized. By doing this they are attempting to make the populace into small, heavily concentrated population centers with reduced physical communication between the centers and potentially monitored electronic communication between them. All the things I’ve mentioned have been promoted in various initiatives I’ve seen over the past several years from ‘we don’t need the grid’ to placing monitoring devices in vehicles to cube type housing in city centers. Perhaps I’m guilty of too much paranoia but a picture is emerging…or perhaps everyone else has seen it and I’m just behind the power curve. 🙂

Tracy

We can all hope you are wrong.

sousveillance strikes again

Sousveillance is surveillance from underneath; when we serfs and peasants hear what our lords and masters really think. For instance:

http://boingboing.net/2014/02/20/report-from-a-meeting-of-wall.html

To the tune of Dixie: “In Wall Street land we’ll take our stand, said Morgan and Goldman. But first we better get some loans, so quick, get to the Fed, man.”

I forgive his failed attempt at humor; for humor is subjective. What sounds like gentle mockery of failure to one’s friends might sound like arrogant callousness to the victims of those failures. He had enough self-awareness to attempt this jest in private; but then sousveillance struck.

I also forgive his untuned singing voice. Not everybody has the gift; and those who don’t must spend 10,000 hours practicing to attain expertise.

But I do not forgive his rhymes, nor do I forgive his scansion. If he can count megabucks, then he can count syllables. He should not give up his day job.

Or maybe he should. Maybe he should quit banking, move to a cheap small room, and there spend 10,000 hours learning how to write a poem. At 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 2 days vacation per month, that’s only 5.31 years. He could afford that, easy.

It would be like a short prison term, even though bad poetry is not, technically, a crime. For him to voluntarily confine himself at hard labor for bad poetry would be poetic justice; but also a fantasy, for he and his friends have avoided being ‘guests of the State’ for far worse misdeeds.

Literary critique aside… I see in his song a reconciliation of Northern and Southern power systems. At last Wall Street and the Plantation are one. It’s not about wage servitude, nor about chattel slavery; they met in the middle at debt serfdom.

[long time contributor]

Navy deploying laser and railgun weapons

Jerry,

It’s not science fiction any longer! The Navy is deploying a laser defense weapon this year, and has plans to deploy a railgun experimentally next year.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/star-wars-on-the-seas-us-navy-to-deploy-laser-for-1st-time/

In the next 10 years or so, say medium-term, I think these two technologies have the potential to be game changers.

I hope that your recovery from your fall continues to go well.

Respectfully,

Tom Brendel

I have been waiting for this for a long time. Note that a nuclear carrier has a great deal of electric power, a lot of deck room to mount various sizes of rail guns, and a great capacity for ammunition…

Non-replicable research

Dear Mr. Pournelle:

You recently noted an L.A. Times article regarding landmark research the results of which can’t be replicated. I’ve read such articles also, and find the question fascinating.

The one comment I’d make is that it would be prudent not to assume this stems from fraud or sloppy science. It may, of course. But I’m thinking of an article in the Atlantic some years back about medical errors, which pointed out that while it would be comforting to attribute medical malpractice to a few bad apple doctors, it would be inaccurate. It turns out that more often serious errors in medicine result from unrecognized points at which errors are likely; as in when anesthesiologists pointed out that at that point their equipment was not standardized. On some models, you turned a knob clockwise to reduce the anesthetic. On other models, counterclockwise… Once this was standardized, serious operating room errors dropped dramatically.

So, a more interesting question regarding non-repeatable research would be: are we systematically not noticing a point of probable failure? Not through inattention or intellectual dishonesty, but perhaps an excessive confidence in our ability not to make mistakes.

Sincerely,

Allan E. Johnson

Subject: Student Debt Hurts Housing Market

Who would have thunk it? Putting the middle class in life-long debt to attend college hurts other parts of the economy?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/student-debt-may-hurt-housing-recovery-by-hampering-first-time-buyers/2014/02/17/d90c7c1e-94bf-11e3-83b9-1f024193bb84_story.html?hpid=z2

—

Dwayne Phillips

Who would have thought that making bondsmen of the middle class would have a deleterious effect? Yet I seem to recall that being debated in the time of Cicero.

.

Hawking’s Revenge

Dear Jerry

Your correspondent , Mr.John R. Strohm complains :

The latest version seems to say that Cthulhu could not only pop out of the black hole, but he could pop out of the black hole and into the “normal” universe at ANY point in the normal universe. It also seems to say that something that is at ANY point in the normal universe could suddenly, without warning, find itself engulfed by the black hole. Yes, of course the probability is inversely proportional to the distance from the center of mass of the hole, but it ain’t zero…

The bloody thing seems to me to be SCREAMING at us that one of the fundamental assumptions going into the discussion is false.

I beg to differ, as there is another ontologically coherent explanation :

—

Russell Seitz

Fellow of the Department of Physics Harvard University

How can Black Holes even "exist"?

As far as we know, isn’t it true that due to relativistic effects there is not enough lifespan to the universe for an asymptotically time-dilating (to ‘normal space’ observer) collapsar to form an actual event horizon? Like Xeno’s runner we can wait until the stars are cold (or atoms themselves are torn apart by the constantly accelerating expansion of Space) and never record the formation of an actual, fully formed event horizon?

Would not Superman himself fail to EVER see a singularity; even if he was standing with the top of his head level with the surface of a star when it began its final collapse?

According to Einstein, and never refuted that I know of, all "black holes" are, in relation to all of the universe WE can ever inhabit, possess the effects of a true black hole but are actually frozen an almost infinitely small step from ridiculously dense neutron star matter to that theoretical hole; which could only be observed by a point-like observer at the gravitational center of a pre-collapsed star "riding the front of the wave of implosion.

Or am I missing something as obvious as when Larry had to gently point out to me (Back in the fthp@aol.com days) that my modern, science-based space drive was nothing more than a re-invention of the principal of Cavorite? 😉 Questions? Comments? Criticisms? Old TV Guides with cool articles?

Guy DeWhitney

weather

Several blog posts. Salient data: Globally, Jan 2014 was warmer than Dec 2014. So the extreme cold in the US is balanced by warmth

elsewhere. In other words, it’s weather, not "climate change."

Jim

Of course I have never seen a rational explanation of the measures and weights used to achieve a single figure ‘global temperature’ from any of the modelers and I am not sure there is one. What ocean temperature depths? Is the ocean weight by surface area or by volume? If volume, doesn’t the land have volume too? Or it is all atmospheric temperature?

Jerry Pournelle

Chaos Manor

I believe that the UAH measurements use temperature normalized to a specific altitude and averaged over all resolution cells.

The models are likely a hodge podge, and to the extent that I suspect most are spherical earth, my back of the envelop suggests that the corrections for insolation on oblate earth are greater than their measurement fidelity.

http://www.drroyspencer.com/

Epicycles

"When you have to invent dark matter and dark energy as the makeup of most of the universe – something you cannot detect – it seems to me that you have gone far away from scientific methods as I learned it."

Throw in neutrinos magically morphing into _undetectable_ neutrinos to account for the "missing" solar neutrinos, and the ever-increasing count of new undetectable "dimensions" in string/brane theories…

… and I keep thinking, "Epicycles."

Carl "Bear" Bussjaeger

Author: Net Assets, Bargaining Position, The Anarchy Belt, and more Free Books, Craft How-To Articles:

http://www.bussjaeger.org/

I may be near with Laser Fusion

Jerry,

Two interesting papers, an overview in Physics and the principle paper in Phys Rev Lett

Regards, Charles Adams, Bellevue, NE

Physics: Steven J. Rose Viewpoint: Encouraging Signs on the Path to Fusion, <http://physics.aps.org/articles/v7/13>

Phys Rev Lett: <http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v112/i5/e055001>

Abstract:

"High-Adiabat High-Foot Inertial Confinement Fusion Implosion Experiments on the National Ignition Facility

H.-S. Park,* O. A. Hurricane,† D. A. Callahan, D. T. Casey, E. L. Dewald, T. R. Dittrich, T. Döppner, D. E. Hinkel, L. F. Berzak Hopkins, S. Le Pape, T. Ma, P. K. Patel, B. A. Remington, H. F. Robey, and J. D. Salmonson Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, P.O. Box 808, Livermore, California 94551, USA J. L. Kline

Los Alamos National Laboratory, P.O. Box 1663, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545, USA

(Received 14 October 2013; published 5 February 2014)

This Letter reports on a series of high-adiabat implosions of cryogenic layered deuterium-tritium (DT) capsules indirectly driven by a “high-foot” laser drive pulse at the National Ignition Facility. High-foot implosions have high ablation velocities and large density gradient scale lengths and are more resistant to ablation-front Rayleigh-Taylor instability induced mixing of ablator material into the DT hot spot. Indeed, the observed hot spot mix in these implosions was low and the measured neutron yields were typically 50% (or higher) of the yields predicted by simulation. On one high performing shot (N130812), 1.7 MJ of laser energy at a peak power of 350 TW was used to obtain a peak hohlraum radiation temperature of ∼300 eV. The resulting experimental neutron yield was ð2.4 _ 0.05Þ × 1015 DT, the fuel ρR was

ð0.86 _ 0.063Þ g=cm2, and the measured Tion was ð4.2 _ 0.16Þ keV, corresponding to 8 kJ of fusion yield, with ∼1=3 of the yield caused by self-heating of the fuel by α particles emitted in the initial reactions.

The generalized Lawson criteria, an ignition metric, was 0.43 and the neutron yield was ∼70% of the value predicted by simulations that include α-particle self-heating."

Dr. Stefan Possony was convinced by his friends at Livermore that laser triggered fusion weapons were inevitable, and would be developed before the end of the Twentieth Century. If they have been I do not know it.

Thwarting Climate Change

Hello Jerry,

The one thing that all official Climate Experts agree on is that Anthropogenic CO2 (ACO2) is causing run away heating of the planet and that the heating will be catastrophic if something is not done to drastically limit ACO2. Taxes on CO2 and regulation of any activity that produces ACO2 directly (power plants/driving) or indirectly (consumption of electricity) seem to be the favorite ‘go to’ solutions.

Everyone (all the experts) agree that we need to Do Something Right Now or We’re All Going To Die, but when asked to provide evidence of the efficacy of their ‘solutions’ their reaction tends to be to ignore the question or call the questioner names.

Since I have had no luck on Dr. Curry’s site in getting answers to these questions (except the obvious from respondents with views similar to mine, that we don’t know and there is no way to find out), maybe your readers can help:

a. If we take absolutely NO action to control ACO2 and simply derive our energy from whatever sources are most convenient and economic, what will the Temperature of the Earth (TOE) be in 10, 50, and 100 years?

b. If we convene a panel of 100 of the climate experts most convinced of the existential threat posed by ACO2 and implement their recommended solutions to our ACO2 problems, world wide, what will the TOE be in 10, 50 and 100 years?

c. Why is the TOE obtained by absolute government control of ACO2 ‘better’ than the TOE that we will experience by ignoring ACO2 completely?

d. Do Climate Scientists have any actual, empirical evidence that their solutions, if imposed world wide, would have ANY measurable effect on the TOE

It would seem to me that if the problem is that the TOE is increasing we should be relatively certain that controlling ACO2 would in fact prevent the TOE from increasing, and a pretty good idea of how much. Or that halting or reversing the rise in the TOE actually desirable in the first place.

So far, no luck on obtaining answers to any of the above.

Bob Ludwick=

Dear Jerry

The Steve Goddard piece you link, written by one Mark Sanicola claiming that CO2 does not have an absorption band " between 9 and 13 microns’ is pure hogwash .

10.6 microns is the molecule’s primary vibrational band, the one on which CO2 lasers are based.

Sanicola’s claim to have worked all his life as " a professional infrared astronomer " is equally suspect- he is a retired optometrist..

When new contrarians make extraordinary claims, it is wise to run their names through Google Scholar to see if they are for real. Most of them prove to be all hat and no bibliography

best regards

—

Russell Seitz

Fellow of the Department of Physics Harvard University

Ah well. So what was he saying?

The Iron Law

Jerry,

I will have to label this as "the Iron Law" at play…

An understanding of bureaucracy

http://www.gocomics.com/9chickweedlane/2014/02/10#.Uvl4Q8-YaWg

Jim

The Iron Law of Bureaucracy

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

SUBJ: Fred on Education

Since education is the topic du jour. Our house curmudgeon turns his blowtorch on schools.

http://www.fredoneverything.net/Soul.shtml

One money quote:

"Keep’em dumb, keep’em mad. Especially, keep their tuition."

Fred at his best. Depressing, yet rather entertaining – and always enlightening.

Minds me of an old anonymous quote "You have made me think. I’ll be wary of you in future."

Cordially,

John

Fred is generally worth your time. and particularly so this time.  He is blunt, of course, and not politically correct; but he calls things as he sees them and that is a remarkable quality in these times.

Schools

From the letter from Karen

“In the context of "America hating its bright kids" you have suggested that NCLB, by requiring more resources, at least in the form of teacher attention and time, being directed to low-performing children, makes those resources less available for bright and/or self motivated children. The implication is that schools and teachers can tell which children are brighter and stupider, and that their unimpeded freedom to direct their attentions as they see fit would lead to a better allocation of resources.

Respectfully, this is not true, and is in fact a load of horse manure. Indeed, you yourself have noted your wife’s success in teaching children who arrived at her classroom with piles of paperwork from previous "teachers" proving that these children could not be taught.”

——————

I am not sure how Karen managed to get from the first paragraph to the second. The fact that Roberta was successful in teaching students to read suggests a teacher can determine brighter students from slower students. Karen suggests that Roberta’s success shows they cannot?

The piles of paperwork showing a student will never learn to read did not really come from a ‘teacher’. At least not a teacher with unimpeded freedom to act. I suggest the paperwork came from the system, via a teacher blindly following mindless rules. I suggest Roberta threw out the rules and used her own good sense and judgment in place of it and was successful.

There is a mentality here which I call ‘Going Corporate’. Not sure how to define it, but I know it when I see it. The earmarks are when mounds of rules are used as a substitute for good judgment and common sense.

Brice

Indeed. But in California the Superintendent of Public Instruction ordered that teachers in California Public Schools not teach “decoding” or Phonics because it impeded good reading, and that was the state school policy for a long time; and while the policy was rescinded, it was after a decade in which all the teachers going to state colleges of education learned that, and learned that teaching phonics caused student to be bad readers, and a great deal of other such nonsense; and California has never recovered.

And to this day the Federal Department of Education has the crazy concept of reading readiness, and that young children are not ready to learn to read and thus will be harmed by early exposure to phonics; so that the Head Start program does not teach reading, because Head Start students are “not ready” to read. Yet for a hundred years and more English upper middle and upper class children were taught to read in the nursery by nannies at age 4; and just about all of them learned. English children are not better protoplasm than American children, and what they can learn ours can learn – but only if it be taught to them. Most theories of reading are excuses for why the teachers are not teaching them to read.

About a quarter to a third of children in first grade will learn to read no matter what it taught to them; a similar group will learn if given any rational clue to the notion of the Phoenician Alphabet as opposed to ideographic writing; but it is hard work teaching the last third or so. Hard enough that if you don’t know how to do it, you will fail. And thus the pounds and pounds of literature proving that these particular kids can’t learn for various reasons. Alas, most of the teachers do not know they are part of a vast cover thy arse conspiracy. But those who do not learn to read by grade four are not going to be scientists and engineers.

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

Mail 809 Sunday, February 02, 2014

The Superbowl was interesting but a bit of a surprise. Since I met Roberta in Seattle, we were married there, and I got my advanced degrees from the University of Washington before we came to California in 1964, we naturally favored the Seahawks, but I was astonished at the actual outcome of the game. I certainly would have thought it would be a lot closer. The Legion of Doom was remarkably effective. I suspect that coaches everywhere are reviewing every play.

Mail has been piling up. I’ll try to get up some interesting letters. We are recovering from the – flu, I would say, but we had our flu shots. Whatever we were inoculated against it wasn’t what I came down with in early January.

Regressing to the mean?

NYC School Cuts Gifted Program for "Lack of Diversity" <http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3118319/posts>

townhall.com ^ <http://www.freerepublic.com/%5Ehttp://townhall.com/tipsheet/christinerousselle/2014/01/31/nyc-school-cuts-gifted-program-for-lack-of-diversity-n1787812> | Jan 31, 2014 | Christine Rousselle

Another case of political correctness gone awry: a school in Brooklyn has decided to scrap its gifted and talented program after accusations that the program was not "diverse" enough.

Citing a lack of diversity, PS 139 Principal Mary McDonald informed parents in a letter that the Students of Academic Rigor and two other in-house programs would no longer accept applications for incoming kindergartners.

“Our Kindergarten classes will be heterogeneously grouped to reflect the diversity of our student body and the community we live in,” McDonald told parents in a letter posted on the photo-sharing site flickr and obtained by Ditmas Park Corner.

The school is roughly two-thirds African American or Hispanic. Asian and white students account for almost 30 percent of the student body. Exact ethnic breakdowns of the Students of Academic Rigor program were not given, although the program was described by some as being "overwhelmingly Caucasian."

This move infuriates me. It would be insane for a school to cut its special education program for developmentally disabled students due to a "lack of diversity" among those who need the services. Students on both ends of the special education spectrum — either gifted or developmentally delayed — need the specialized classes to reach their highest potential as a student. It would be insane to suggest someone with an IQ of 70 (the benchmark for mental retardation) should be grouped in the same classroom with students with an IQ of 100 and treated like everyone else, and it should be considered equally insane to suggest that students who have an IQ of greater than 130 (gifted) need to be in the same classroom as average students to fill some sort of "diversity" quota. That is not fair to both the above-average students and the average students. Studies have shown that grouping gifted children with their non-gifted peers has a negative effect on both parties.

This is a bad move by PS 139. I hope the principal reconsiders her decision, and I hope the parents of children enrolled in the gifted education program are able to successfully advocate for their kids.

Al Perrella

See also http://www.newsweek.com/america-hates-its-gifted-kids-226327

I am working on a major article about this whole matter. Either one believes, as we all used to believe, that the world is sustained by about 20% of the population – which generally controls 80% of the property, the so-called Pareto distribution, or one must come up with an alternate theory. Marx so little understood technology and industrialization that he presumed that anyone could be trained to do any job; management was easy if everyone cooperated, and sustaining the industrial civilization would be simple. Ownership was not important. Others thought differently, and all the data seems to indicate that the great advances have been sparked by a rather small number of people. It isn’t that only Shockley could have discovered the transistor, but it does seem likely that only someone with Shockley’s smarts could have done so. I knew Shockley. My very conservative friend Peter De Lucca thought him a “civilizational monster” after a couple of dinners with him; he was certainly a good example of C P Snow’s “Two Societies”. But no one could doubt his intelligence and his – stamina? Fortitude? Determination? – which kept him working on the transistor principle once he had a hint of it from his observations.

I discovered science fiction in the 1940’s when I was in high school. In particular I discovered John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction (later Analog), and I wrote Campbell a letter about one of his editorials. He answered it with two pages of comment on my comments. Needless to say I took him seriously after that; and one of Campbell’s principles was that the human race was sustained by its top 20% and advanced by its top 10%. There were exceptions, but not many. My reading of history as well as the newspapers seemed to confirm those beliefs, and when I discovered Pareto I was more confirmed in those views. Galton’s Genetic Studies of Genius came to an interesting conclusion: while “Great Men” were far more likely to sire a “Great Man,” most Great Men were not descendants of Great Men. This led me to the conclusion that the most important resource of a society was the undiscovered potential great men, who might be educated to a level as to allow them to reach their potential. I must have concluded this in 1948 or thereabouts. I have never found any good reason to abandon this view. Fortunately at the same time I came to this conclusion, the Brothers made certain I was aware of George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington along with other Great Men of American history – which led me to the conclusion that the law ought to be color blind, a view I have held since and which has generated no end of contempt, which I had expected from my contemporaries in legally segregated Memphis, but I still get plenty from those who claim to be champions of equality now.  But that’s another story.

But of course the United States hates the gifted kids who are not descended from the 20% who control 80% of the resources. We do not say that, of course, but were it true it would be hard to show a more efficient system for keeping those upstarts – potential great men and women not born to the rich – down where they belong. We have a system whereby they are sent to inferior schools and kept there since their parents can’t afford to get them out. Once through 12 years of mostly inferior education they are invited to go to universities: but unlike the system that allowed my wife (11^th child of a coal miner) and I to get through college, we have devised a system that allows them through only if they owe the establishment a great sum which is unlikely ever to be paid. I do not expect that the children of Bill and Melissa Gates will have any lifelong debts due to the cost of their education – whether they are potentially Great or not.

The result of the efforts to “equalize” education in the public schools is obvious. No child left behind is easy to accomplish if no child is allowed to get ahead. Of course that does not apply to the children of the 10% wealthiest, and even less to those of the 5%.

And the rest never catch wise.

The lights we see in this educational darkness come from technology which makes it possible for the best and brightest to acquire an actual education without incurring a monstrous burden of debt; Alas, we also have “equal opportunity” employment laws which make it almost certain that personnel departments – excuse me, Human Resources – will hire only those with credentials, and the credentials are far more important than actual abilities. The universities charge heavy sums for those credentials, and those who enforce the bureaucratic credential exercises are very well paid. The credentials don’[t mean much but employers must use them. What else do they have? Human judgment which is certain to bring lawsuits? (We have already outlawed the use of IQ tests in employment.) The results would be predictable if they were not already known. Couple this with regulations that make it very difficult to start new businesses – particularly those which require high technology investments – and you will find that the phrase “You can’t keep a good man or woman down” proves to be objectively false.

The ruling class may repeatedly state that they do not hate bright kids (other than their own) but it would be difficult to prove that from their actions.

Greetings!

Reading your reports about your new hearing aids brings a smile to my face every time I read one.

You mention that, by third grade, no one can tell which children went to head start and which children didn’t. I think that’s the point of the program; if there were no head start, the kids who would’ve gone to head start but didn’t would lag behind the rest of the kids. I wonder if anyone has ever tracked these kids through their school careers to see where they end up.

Wishing you good health and happiness,

Nick Hegge

Believe me, nearly everyone who studies education wishes mightily to be able to show that Head Start is effective. Charles Murray has worked very hard to find evidence for the effectiveness of Head Start. But when you examine a class of fourth graders, some of whom were Head Start and some of whom were not, you cannot reliably determine who went through the program and who did not. This comes as a surprise to nearly everyone who makes the attempt.

Now yes, this can be made complicated, because in some communities Head Start-like opportunities continue after pre-Kindergarten age, and those selected into Head Start have a big head start on learning how to get into such programs; controlling for such factors is what makes evaluation so difficult and often contaminates the conclusions. Once again, though, a great number of people sympathetic to Head Start have attempted to do all this. After all, whether you are liberal or conservative, it is not hard to be convinced that improving education is the key to cutting the costs of Great Society like programs. Anything that allows kids to learn more in later life is going to make the system cheaper, and just about every employer wants a smarter labor pool to hire from.

There are many studies tracking Head Start kids from pre-school to adulthood. If any could show unambiguous positive effects they would be widely known.

Wasn’t It Supposed To Be Fiction?

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jan/30/nyc-school-cuts-popular-gifted-program-over-lack-d/

“A popular gifted-student program at a New York City elementary school is getting the ax after school officials decided it lacked diversity.

“PS 139 Principal Mary McDonald told parents in a letter Jan. 24 that Students of Academic Rigor, or SOAR, would no longer accept applications for incoming kindergartners, the New York Daily News reported.”

I thought "Higher Education" (Pournelle & Sheffield) was supposed to be fiction.

–John R. Strohm

Well, we showed a way out, and that part certainly was fiction. Many of my early stories postulated that the great corporations would get so disgusted with the schools that they would set up company schools for employees’ children, and go on to set up programs that would substitute for college education. That last wasn’t entirely speculation: when I went to work for Boeing in the 1950’s a large portion of the aeronautical engineers were not college graduates; they had begun as draftsmen and mechanics, learned on the job and in company classes, and became certified by examination. I think there a none of those now. My friend Paul Turner was one of the last non-degree professional engineers in the North American Shuttle program, and he retired years ago.

We can only conclude that the ruling class hates bright upstarts kids not their own.

3D printing will stir ethics, regulation debate,

Jerry

“3D printing will stir ethics, regulation debate, Gartner predicts.” No big surprises, right? But this caught my eye:

“Companies that have the ability to print human tissue and organs, for example, are well-intentioned, but there is very little medical precedent.”

“3D bioprinting facilities with the ability to print human organs and tissue will advance far faster than general understanding and acceptance of the ramifications of this technology," claims Pete Basiliere, Gartner Research Director, in a statement. "These initiatives are well-intentioned, but raise a number of questions that remain unanswered. What happens when complex ‘enhanced’ organs involving nonhuman cells are made? Who will control the ability to produce them? Who will ensure the quality of the resulting organs?"

Oops.

http://www.tweaktown.com/news/35150/3d-printing-will-stir-ethics-regulation-debate-gartner-predicts/index.html

Oh, and there is this:

“Major ethical debates will likely take place by 2016, according to research firm Gartner, as developing nations and emerging markets should drive 3D demand.”

Ed

I can imagine many stories that can come from this. Note that technology is still in the exponential-appearing part of the logistic (or S curve, see Strategy of Technology) that describes technological advances.

It’s about time!

Jerry, a non-profit advocacy group, Students Matter, is suing to have California’s tenure laws ruled unconstitutional because they prevent giving all students equal access to a good education:

http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-teachers-lawsuit-20140126,0,4567951.story#ixzz2rXXaqUjv

One can only imagine how the plaintiffs are going to be demonized by the Teacher’s Union and all of the Democrats who depend on their contributions to keep getting re-elected. Only time will tell, of course, but this is certainly a step in the right direction.

We can hope. But of course you assume impartial courts not influenced by teachers unions.

Jerry,

I’m bringing this to your attention for the climate change pieces herein and for the link to the George Will column on the Unaffordable Uncaring Act appearing at the end, that because of the Constitutional issues addressed.

J

Subj: Fwd: Daily Digest for Thursday

View online at: http://patriotpost.us/digests/23051

Right Analysis <http://patriotpost.us/> | Right Hooks <http://patriotpost.us/> | Right Opinion <http://patriotpost.us/opinion>

Patriot Headlines <http://patriotpost.us/headlines> | Grassroots Commentary <http://patriotpost.us/commentary>

________________________________

Daily Digest for Thursday

January 30, 2014 <http://patriotpost.us/digests/23051/print>

THE FOUNDATION

"If there be a principle that ought not to be questioned within the United States, it is, that every nation has a right to abolish an old government and establish a new one. This principle is not only recorded in every public archive, written in every American heart, and sealed with the blood of a host of American martyrs; but is the only lawful tenure by which the United States hold their existence as a nation." –James Madison, Helevidius, No. 3, 1793

TOP 5 RIGHT HOOKS

Pelosi Wants Action

Nancy Pelosi says she’s glad Barack Obama promises to keep up his habit of merely bypassing Congress when he doesn’t get his way. "When you have exhausted the legislative remedies," she said, "then the question is why don’t you do something about it where you have the power to do it?" For starters, Obama often doesn’t have the power to do things he does — but constitutional limits have never stopped Democrats from pushing their agenda.

Comment <http://patriotpost.us/posts/23047#post-comment> | Share <http://patriotpost.us/posts/23047#share>

Biden Speaks His Heart

Joe Biden was asked about another possible presidential run in 2016, but, as all possible candidates do at this stage, he demurred. That said, he confessed, "In my heart, I’m confident that I can make a good president. It’s a very different decision to decide whether or not to run for president." We have no brief for Biden but we’ll give him one thing: He’d be a much funnier president than most, though his humor generally makes you want to bury your head in your hands.

Comment <http://patriotpost.us/posts/23046#post-comment> | Share <http://patriotpost.us/posts/23046#share>

Climatologist Gets It Right

At the turn of the century, climatologist Dr. Don Easterbrook issued his own offbeat prediction. "[I]n 1999 … the PDO [Pacific Decadol Oscillation, a natural cycle that fluctuates between warm and cold phases] said we’re due for a climate change," he explained, "and so I said okay. It looks as though we’re going to be entering a period of about three decades or so of global cooling." Indeed, data reveals his prognostication was correct. "We have now had 17 years with no global warming and my original prediction was right so far," Easterbrook points out. "For the next 20 years, I predict global cooling of about 3/10ths of a degree Fahrenheit." And that’s not necessarily a good thing: "Cold is way worse for humanity than warm is," he adds. So as alarmists continue with ostentatious rants about nonexistent global warming, just remember that what we’re actually seeing was foreseen long ago by someone with facts on their side.

Comment <http://patriotpost.us/posts/23032#post-comment> | Share <http://patriotpost.us/posts/23032#share>

NC Unemployment Drop

North Carolina ended its own long-term unemployment benefits last summer, making the state a possible glimpse into what might happen if Congress quit authorizing the perpetual extensions. The unemployment rate in North Carolina dropped precipitously after benefits were not extended, and its rate is falling much faster than the national rate. Nationwide, the rate is dropping largely because people are dropping out of the labor force and it’s not clear how much that’s true in North Carolina. Either way, however, slowing down the gravy train certainly didn’t hurt, which is a lesson Congress would do well to heed.

Comment <http://patriotpost.us/posts/23045#post-comment> | Share <http://patriotpost.us/posts/23045#share>

DC’s ‘Mental Disorder’

This statistic explains a lot. A new report on the Social Security Disability Insurance Program reveals that of the more than 10 million Americans collecting disability benefits, 35% are characterized as having a "mental disorder," topping all categories. In Washington, DC, however, that number jumps to 43.2% of recipients. We’ll need to dig a little deeper into the data, but we’re expecting to find that the majority of these individuals work on Capitol Hill.

Comment <http://patriotpost.us/posts/23031#post-comment> | Share <http://patriotpost.us/posts/23031#share>

For more, visit Right Hooks <http://patriotpost.us/> .

Don’t Miss Alexander’s Column

Read 2014 SOTU: The MO BO Show <http://patriotpost.us/alexander/23023> .

If you’d like to receive Alexander’s Column by email, update your subscription here <http://patriotpost.us/manage/> .

Share <http://patriotpost.us/cartoons/20357#share>

RIGHT ANALYSIS

MyRA Proposal Is a Head-Scratcher

One of the more puzzling proposals in the State of the Union address <http://patriotpost.us/alexander/23023> was the idea of MyRAs. Structured like a Roth IRA that invests in savings bonds, the federal government would guarantee these beginner investment accounts aimed at the poor. "It’s a new savings bond that encourages folks to build a nest egg," Barack Obama said. "MyRA guarantees a decent return with no risk of losing what you put in." Naturally, he implemented the plan Wednesday with his infamous pen.

Given that there are already many retirement-account options out there, we’re left wondering what problem Obama is trying to solve. And as National Review’s Kevin Williamson notes <http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/369738/what-heck-myra-kevin-d-williamson> , "Does anybody know why savings bonds went out of fashion? Because they are a terrible way to save money." Low-risk, low-return. In fact, the federal workers’ program this seems to be based on had a return of less than 1.5% last year and 2.24% over the last three. While the principal protection would keep the account balance from going down, the account could still lose value if inflation outpaces the return.

Given Obama’s predisposal to nationalize everything, we question if this isn’t the first step in doing so for retirement accounts. After all, just think about all the tax-free earnings sitting in IRAs that Obama wishes he could get his hands on. At a minimum, he seems to want poor, uninformed voters to invest more of their paychecks into the U.S. government. To the extent that MyRAs are used, that money will be invested in U.S. debt instead of private equity — at least until each account hits $15,000 and rolls into a private IRA.

We have another idea. How about privatizing (even partially) Social Security? That’s what George W. Bush proposed in his post-re-election State of the Union. Unfortunately, the idea never went anywhere, and Social Security, with its multi-trillion dollar liabilities, remains unsustainable. In fact, the MyRA proposal is a tacit admission that Social Security isn’t going to be enough for younger workers. According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, that’s exactly the case: Baby boomers and Generation Xers need $4.3 trillion more for retirement than Social Security and savings currently provide.

Comment <http://patriotpost.us/articles/23050#post-comment> | Share <http://patriotpost.us/articles/23050#share>

Climate Change Nonsense

Atlanta with two inches of snow

In his State of the Union address <http://patriotpost.us/alexander/23023> Tuesday night, Barack Obama warned, "[W]e have to act with more urgency — because a changing climate is already harming Western communities struggling with drought, and coastal cities dealing with floods. That’s why I directed my administration to work with states, utilities and others to set new standards on the amount of carbon pollution our power plants are allowed to dump into the air." Those regulations are greatly harming the coal industry and are thus reflected on your monthly power bill.

Obama then declared, "[T]he debate is settled. Climate change is a fact."

Indeed, much of the nation saw several inches of "climate change" Tuesday, as snow and ice covered several states as far south as the Gulf Coast. In the South, thousands of people were stuck for hours — often overnight — in traffic or wherever they could find shelter, kids were stranded at school, and a region unaccustomed to dealing with such weather was crippled.

One of the main problems in the South was inaccurate forecasting. Chattanooga meteorologist Paul Barys admitted, "This was just not what we were seeing in the forecast models." Therefore, road crews made almost no preparation until the snow actually began to fall, and schools waited until then to send kids home, compounding a bad situation. The South isn’t exactly known for its snowplows anyway.

It’s important to note that weather is not the same thing as climate, but we’ll make some observations. First, climatologists also use computer forecast models to show that the climate is changing. Computer models can be wrong, especially if the data entered is faulty, and that’s true if the prediction is tomorrow’s weather or the next century’s climate. Indeed, as we noted above, there hasn’t been any global warming in 17 years — hence the change in terminology to "climate change." Second, alarmists like Barack Obama constantly point to weather patterns — drought and floods, for example — as definitive proof that, in order to prevent climate change, we need draconian government regulations and taxes that will hit the economy like, well, a snow storm in Atlanta. And no matter the weather, these alarmists blame climate change. Truth is the only thing getting plowed.

Comment <http://patriotpost.us/articles/23049#post-comment> | Share <http://patriotpost.us/articles/23049#share>

For more, visit Right Analysis <http://patriotpost.us/> .

TOP 5 RIGHT OPINION COLUMNS

* Michael Reagan: Lots of Laughs but Sad Commentary <http://patriotpost.us/opinion/23041>

* R. Emmett Tyrrell: Politics Double Standard <http://patriotpost.us/opinion/23038>

* Rebecca Hagelin: Do You Know What They’re Teaching Your Kids? <http://patriotpost.us/opinion/23035>

* George Will: The ACA’s Four-Word Waterloo? <http://patriotpost.us/opinion/23005>

* Jeff Jacoby: Income Gap? Not Many Are Obsessed <http://patriotpost.us/opinion/23030>

For more, visit Right Opinion <http://patriotpost.us/opinion> .

<https://patriotpostshop.com/categories/75>

OPINION IN BRIEF

Columnist Ann Coulter: "Immigrants … have always been the bulwark of the Democratic Party. For one thing, recent arrivals tend to be poor and in need of government assistance. Also, they’re coming from societies that are far more left-wing than our own. History shows that, rather than fleeing those policies, they bring their cultures with them. … This is not a secret. For at least a century, there’s never been a period when a majority of immigrants weren’t Democrats. … The two largest immigrant groups, Hispanics and Asians, have little in common economically, culturally or historically. But they both overwhelmingly support big government, Obamacare, affirmative action and gun control. … It’s not [Republicans’] position on amnesty that immigrants don’t like; it’s Republicans’ support for small government, gun rights, patriotism, the Constitution and capitalism. Reading these statistics, does anyone wonder why Democrats think vastly increasing immigration should be the nation’s No. 1 priority?"

Comment <http://patriotpost.us/opinion/23040#post-comment> | Share <http://patriotpost.us/opinion/23040#share>

Historian Victor Davis Hanson: "Postmodernism (the cultural fad ‘after modernism’) went well beyond questioning norms and rules. It attacked the very idea of having any rules at all. Postmodernist relativists claimed that things like ‘truth’ were mere fictions to preserve elite privilege. … Without notions of objective truth, there can never be lies, just competing narratives and discourses. Stories that supposedly serve the noble majority are true; those that supposedly don’t become lies — the facts are irrelevant. … To paraphrase George Orwell, everything is relative, but some things are more relative than others."

Comment <http://patriotpost.us/opinion/23025#post-comment> | Share <http://patriotpost.us/opinion/23025#share>

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908-1973): "You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harm it would cause if improperly administered." (If only he’d followed his own advice…)

Columnist Burt Prelutsky: "When Muslim terrorists threatened to make their presence felt at the Olympic Games in Sochi, Obama quickly responded by sending men, equipment and warships, to help beef up Russian security. I’m sure that somewhere, Ambassador Chris Stevens was musing, ‘Instead of diplomacy, I knew I should have taken up figure skating.’"

Comedian Jay Leno: "In his speech [Tuesday night], President Obama urged Congress to raise the minimum wage. Now don’t confuse that with congressional minimum wage. See, that’s doing the minimum for your wage. That’s completely different."

Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!

Nate Jackson for The Patriot Post Editorial Team

Join us in daily prayer for our Patriots in uniform — Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen — standing in harm’s way in defense of Liberty, and for their families.

*PUBLIUS*

And now for a touch of possible good news:

‘China’s military is intentionally organized to bureaucratically enforce risk-averse behavior, because an army that spends too much time training is an army that is not engaging in enough political indoctrination.’

‘China’s military is intentionally organized to bureaucratically enforce risk-averse behavior, because an army that spends too much time training is an army that is not engaging in enough political indoctrination.’

<http://thediplomat.com/2014/01/chinas-deceptively-weak-and-dangerous-military/?allpages=yes>

Of course one underestimates a potential enemy at great peril; still, there is historical evidence for these trends. Most of the rulers of China have survived purges from the left and from the right and a couple of simply weird campaigns like the Cultural Revolution.

Educating the Brightest

"It says little we haven’t been saying here for years, but the long term effect of ignoring the brightest 10% so that you can devote a larger portion of education to bringing up those just below normal up to normal is disastrous."

I recall a lesson from a high school economics class… Two people shoveling, one who is 10% faster than the other. Two shovels are available, one that can shovel lift 10% more material than the other. Which of the two people should get the better shovel? If the goal is to increase the overall production, then the better shoveler should get the better shovel If the goal is to try to equalize the output between the two, then give the better shovel to the less capable person.

Obviously, this is a very simplistic demonstration of how to allocate resources. But the concept can be applied to education. Of course… the first thing that needs to be done is to decide: What is the goal?

Karl

But would you not say that whichever goal you choose, you must have enough resources at least to sustain the situation? If there’s only this one hole to dig and it’s going to take more than one day to dig it whichever way you decide, is that different from when there are twenty holes to dig and no one gets paid until all the holes are dug?

Jerry Pournelle

Chaos Manor

Yeah.. as I noted, it was an overly simplified scenario, being used to make a point. In a perfect world, we would be able to provide the best of resources to all people, so they could each work to their maximum potential. But of course, perfect worlds are hard to come by. If we provide the limited better resources to those better able to use them, overall production may be increased. That increase may perhaps be used to provide more of the limited resources, allowing the less capable to improve their productivity, too. But if we set "fairness" as the initial goal, will the overall production ever improve enough to provide more of the better resources?

Fairness may feel good, but it also may not allow the situation to ever be improved. Anyway, I always appreciate your insight….

Vexillari

And I’ll do more of these shortly. There’s enough to think about here.

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

Mail 806 Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Alas, much of this will be short shrift, but the mail keeps collecting and I haven’t time to do the comments I had planned. But I did find enough energy to make some comments as you will see.

On negative income tax and such, you recently wrote "The trick here is to make the basic minimum large enough to allow one to live, but not in luxury or even in excess comfort".

When I looked into the area, it strongly appeared that a sustainable system needed it to be a little less than that, as it had to hit a sweet spot where top up wages could be low enough to let practically everybody live, but practically everybody would have to work to get them and practically everybody could price themselves into low enough top up wages to get work. If you do hit the sweet spot, G.D.P.

actually goes up and there are no continuing aggregate costs, but if you miss it by much you just can’t afford it for long. Even when you do hit it, big problems come from churning funds (moving aggregate gains around while goring as few people’s oxen as possible, also allowing for transaction costs) and getting through a transition without people falling through the cracks before everything comes right, which is why I prefer a negative payroll tax approach.

Yours sincerely,

P.M.Lawrence

Actually there’s no proof that it will work at all. Distribution of confiscated property and income to go equally to all does break up concentration of wealth and power, and tends to increase the middle class, which is vital to any kind of mass republican form of government. The question is, will enough people work when work is no longer required to make a living? Some, we know, will not. Some will work but not at anything others would pay them much to do: will that help build an economy? Tocqueville saw that voluntary work through what he called ‘the associations’ could prevent the enormous growth of government power and bureaucracy that was even then consuming Europe. Claudius invented a sort of civil service using freedmen rather than citizens, and that made the Empire stable for a long time; of course it replaced the self-government of the Republic but that had long been lost anyway.

Dr. J,

You say:

"Fine tuning can contain refinements like a poll tax: you are paid enough in the basic entitlement to afford a poll tax, say on the order of $250 a year. If you do not choose to pay it, you do not vote, nor can anyone pay it for you: it is paid through the same system that pays you the entitlement."

Wasn’t this sort of ‘abrogation’ of rights settled long ago as unconstitutional?

I get facetious and say some sort of thing like, "Yes that is all well and good, but I’d rather have that $250 and the ability to vote myself a larger payout from the treasury…"

-p

Oh there are constitutional amendments that prevent poll taxes now, but a distributist republic that gave everyone a bare living income would be a pretty big change to everything anyway, likely requiring amendments, so we can be permitted one that allows poll taxes.

Winston Churchill once said that the best way to learn to hate democracy was to spend a lot of time with the average voter. Trying to require some qualifications for citizenship and voting has long been a pastime for political philosophers….

Jerry,

A contributor of yours, Bob Holmes, wrote a bit about a stipend… I find that a book I had earlier mentioned to you ‘Beyond this Horizon’ by Robert Heinlein seemed to describe such a thing as this… I’d like to recommend that he read it… Of course it is fiction, but the ‘grand-master’ balanced the same idea with the idea that dueling wouldn’t be dead… interesting if we are talking about future societies in any case…

I do not hate to reference the ‘grand-master’ of science fiction, other than to repeat something he said (about another gov’t system he ‘proposed’). I must paraphrase, but I think it can be found somewhere in ‘Starship Troopers’

We don’t hold on to this system of government because it is the ‘best’ we hold on to it because it works, it works better than anything that humanity has yet known, to make grand strides in the name of ‘progress’ is foolish if we take them as ten-league-boots strides.

I finish my paraphrasing, and perhaps the last bit is a ten-league-boot stride on RAH’s view…

I wonder; if you raise the bar from zero to ‘something above zero,’ if in fact that the new benchmark does not indeed become the ‘new’ zero… I guess you might run into the poor chap who indeed has less than nothing in such a scenario…

-pate

Mr. Heinlein was experimenting with the Social Credit notions of Major Davis: that production exceeded demand and the surplus needed to be distributed in a way that did not concentrate power. This principle is acknowledged by Keynes, but SoCred has so far as I know never ruled a sovereign state, although it did control government in at least one Canadian province. Without control of the whole structure of government SoCred can’t be implemented, so it has never actually been tried. In Beyond This Horizon Robert assumed that it had been.

This is ground control to Major Tom

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=KaOC9danxNo

Recorded aboard ISS by Chris Hadfield. Lyrics somewhat adapted.

Jerry,

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/12/gadget-border-searches-2/

Court Upholds Willy-Nilly Gadget Searches Along U.S. Border

Note: The article makes the point "The judge said it ‘would be foolish, if not irresponsible’ to store sensitive information on electronic devices while traveling internationally." I agree. But that’s because of theft risk and capture of the electronics by the country you’re visiting. It should not justify random searches of electronics by the US on return. This business of collective exceptions to the Fourth and Fifth Amendment is Unconstitutional, no matter what the Courts say. All of that said, I would encourage everyone traveling internationally to either buy a "sacrificial" laptop for the trip and only put the minimal information necessary on it (a practice at least one company of my experience recommends), or backup any personal or business sensitive information onto a disk that you leave at home and delete it from the computer using NSA protocols. (Speaking of which … at this point it’s probably safe to assume NSA has the data anyway…)

Jim

Its good to have time again to read your site and reply to it again. The article forwarded to you about Type 2 Diabetes and using cinnamon to help regulate blood sugar was eye opening for a type One Diabetic. This brings up an interesting point: Do major children’s cereal makers KNOW this and add it to so many as favoring without revealing their true intent? Scary.

I am adding this link http://www.sticksite.com/ to you for a human interest perspective. No doubt you’ve seen these walking sticks made of this wood around and possibly wondered about them. This guy harvests the wood. If you scroll down, you will find a link to his blog and photographs about how he is dealing with a diagnosis of terminal cancer. Worthwhile reading, to say the least.

John

PS I found this email in my deleted so not sure if it went to you. The man in question has since passed.

The stuff on second hand is of some concern. Most of the people who argue against it being dangerous don’t seem to follow reasoning in their arguments properly.

It is without question by now that smoking IS toxic to those who do it, regardless if they inhale or not. using a bit of logic, it would seem that inhaling it secondhand would carry similar risks, its just that these are harder to quantify. How would one go about studying this? Who would be the test population and who would be the control?

All *I* know about this subject is this, and my experience is this: I had two parents who smoked, my father only smoked pipes and some cigars and died at age 58 from a stroke followed by a heart attack a week or so later; my mother has smoked from age 13 to present day at age 79. She currently has fairly significant COPD requiring inhalers to deal with it.

Of 4 children, I had severe asthma from age 6 until age 23, with a brief respite from 18 to 21. My symptoms used to require me to carry a Ventoline inhalor and later on, aerasol steroids for better control. In these years, I had some 4 trips to the hospital to deal with severe attacks, several bouts of pneumonia and many other lesser bouts. I became virtually cured after doing two things:

1. No living with other smokers.

2. Not going to bars, clubs etc. that allowed smoking.

I know, absolutely anecdotal and based upon one sample.

John H Neufeld

I would not undertake to prove that living with smokers has no effect on the non-smoker. My guess would be that there has to be an effect. How much is another story. I quit smoking just before redesigning and rebuilding my house. I designed my new office suite with high cathedral ceiling with exhaust fans, so that Niven could work here. By the time we built it Niven noted I was healthier looking and attributed some of that to my non-smoking, so he quit. My office has a outside balcony/patio, and I require people who smoke to do so outside; but it was after all designed to allow smokers, so a few, such as Bob Bloch and Ginny Heinlein have been invited to smoke if they like – I put out an ashtray for them. But all those who smoked and were among those I invited to smoke here have since died, so my design turned out not to be needed… As I grow older I find being in the presence of smokers more and more annoying, and it makes me reflect on how I must have appeared to my non-smoking comrades in the days when I smoked constantly.

add-on to Couv’s last comment

Jerry,

An add on to Col Couv’s last posted comment on the 27th… During the

transition back to "peacetime" ops, don’t forget the practice of proving

that your efforts have a larger impact on the organization as a whole by

giving people outside of your immediate workplace more things to do.

Nothing gets a Capt or Maj more kudos than doing something with effects

outside their wing/base, and the easiest way to show an impact is to create

a time consuming program that everyone else has to do, and getting it

codified in command or force-wide regulations so it CAN’T be ignored.

Sometimes it seems like that’s how folks get promoted nowadays, making more

work for everyone else or coming up with ways to interfere with other people

doing their jobs.

As an example, I offer up an old USAF services regulation that dictated when

particular types of alcohol may be served/consumed on base. This regulation

was based on "normal" desk-clerk working hours, with no regard to ops or

maintainers who may be on wildly varying shifts. Per this regulation, even

if a pilot worked all night and went off duty at 10am, he could not share a

beer with his fellow pilots in the squadron heritage room (pronounced "bar")

prior to going home until after 11am, and he could not drink anything harder

than beer or wine until 4pm. But that pilot would be reaching his 12 hour

"bottle to throttle" rules before it was legal to drink anything on base, so

the valuable team-building BS sessions that *should* take place after work

in a fighter squadron wouldn’t happen, per regulation. At least they

wouldn’t happen, if pilots paid any attention to stupid rules written by

shoe clerks that somehow don’t affect anyone but pilots. Shoe clerks get

promoted by making more work for everyone else to do, and operators get

practice solving tactical scenarios by figuring out how to avoid/ignore

stupid shoe clerk regulations. The relationship between the wolf and the

sheep is vital to both populations, but if given a choice the sheep would

vote the wolf out of a job.

E-books vs. paper

Jerry,

I received a Barnes & Noble gift card for Christmas. I’ve been browsing their web site and noticed something that is interesting to me.

I’ve noticed that a number of paper books are cheaper than the electronic version. I have not looked at any Hot off the Press books, just slightly older books. As an example Torchwood: Bay of the Dead shows Nook (e-book) for $9.99 (marked down from $10.99) and an unused hard cover paper copy for $7.42.

The only explanations I have is either they are trying to clear their inventory of paper books or e-Books have become so popular that they can raise the prices to increase profits.

Mike

I don’t think publishers understand the eBook phenomenon very well. I know I would rather read on an eReader on an airplane than carry a book. It will all shake down I think.

Dr. Pournelle,

Any update on the availability of the reader you’re working on? My son

started reading "for real" before age 2, and he’s always looking for

something new to read. He’s about to turn 6 and is in first grade, so I’ve

been keeping an eye out for when the reader is ready for release. I like

sitting down with him while reading books and short stories so we can

discuss life lessons in the stories, and it sounds like the reader will be

perfect for that.

Keep plugging away! I always enjoy reading your work.

Sean

I am down to one last introductory essay, and I would have finished that by now had it not been this flu. I will get that done and up. The Reader is the 1914 California Sixth Grade Reader, which contains classic prose and poetry, with some comments. It is a good supplement to the pap that schools assign now in high school.

Windows 8 impact on platform decisions –

Dear Jerry,

A while back you were about to switch to the Mac as your platform of choice.

Then came Windows 7, and you decided to stick with PCs on a Windows platform.

Now that we have Windows 8, have you changed your strategy?

In my opinion Windows 8 is Microsoft’s coup in its efforts to make Windows the operating system for all machines. I is a step backward. We are forced to settle for the limitations of smaller devices, largely abandoning the capabilities and power of our larger machines in order to force the world into their one-size-fits-all view of Microsoft dominance.

It seems to me that Windows 8 fixes nothing, but breaks much.

Never since IBM has a company been so hated, and not since the IBM giant behemoth’s reign has such a widely utilized company so despised their customers.

I covet your thoughts, sir.

Marty Stephens

I don’t hate Windows 8, but I would not replace Windows 7 with it. I am told that Windows 9 will be an improvement. The fact is that the same operating system is not optimum for desktops and tablets.

fast & furious

Jerry,

Regarding Operation Fast and Furious

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/12/27/atf-agent-sends-shockwaves-across-internet-with-explosive-allegations-about-fast-and-furious-and-brian-terrys-death/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=story&utm_campaign=ShareButtons

http://www.erikrush.com/agent-feds-allowed-brian-terry-killing-to-gain-cartel-operatives-trust/

J

I do not endorse these views, but I do think it worth while to be aware of them.

A question on your website,

Jerry,

I am considering starting up a daybook for me on the web. I note that you use the SIteLock service option.

Do you use it for the ecommerce portion of your site for subscriptions, tipjar, and Roberta’s reading program? Or is there an additional or other reason you are using it?

I also see you have "whois privacy." I am considering it but it is "pricey."

Regards,

Charles

I have to say that I don’t make those decisions, or don’t remember making them. I have a team of experts who handled the transition from Front Page, which I did myself, to the new engine. For a long time my web service was provided by a business web service operated by old friends and fans, and when they decided to get out of that business we went to the new one, again under the direction of advisors, not me. I don’t keep up quite as well as I used to, but fortunately I can manage because I’ve still got advisors who do and who care. It’s nice being me.

hearing aids

Jerry,

I was interested to see what you wrote about the hearing aids you bought recently.

I have moderate hearing loss (being 80 now) and bought two MDhearingaid PRO models a couple of years ago. I was VERY impressed how good they were and suspect they are as good as analogue devices get, judging from the reviews.

I see there is now a MDhearingaid AIR that is a digital model, that sounds like it has all the features of the Costco Kirkland models that you have, but for much lower cost.

Although I don’t have to wear a hearing aid unless doing something like going to a meeting where it is difficult to hear, I’m at the point where I will probably start wearing them all the time. Right now I use ear phones for TV in order not to have the sound up too far for my family and think I get better quality of sound that way.

I think you do your readers a good service bringing up the subject. I would be particularly interested if you would get around to comparing the MDhearingaid line as they are so much cheaper. Possibly they would send you one to do the comparison as they seem a particularly friendly company. I don’t understand why most hearing aids are so expensive and suspect it is driven by what the market can bear and the thought that if it costs more it must be better.

Anyway, see https://www.mdhearingaid.com/shop/hearing-aid-comparisons/

Have a look at both the PRO and AIR models and see the reviews too.

Best regards,

Adrian Ashfield

"And my head is full of cotton wool"…

Genetic engineering has come far if they can plant sheep or extract plant products from animals.

I’ve never heard of cotton wool before. Is it both cool and warm, what are its properties, and where can I obtain some?

Alas it’s not mysterious. Cotton wool is the term we used to use for raw cotton as in the cotton you find in a bottle of aspirin. The term seems to have fallen out of use, but I learned it early…

Ice Follies

You say “I make no doubt there are plenty of explanations as to why the models didn’t show why three icebreakers couldn’t get through in mid summer. They just haven’t come out yet.”

Akademik Shokalskiy was rated as “ice capable”; it wasn’t an icebreaker, shouldn’t have been there, and Professor Tunney who chartered the ship ought to have known that. Stupidity on stilts, that one. Since his wife and children were aboard, we can be grateful that he’s not a Darwin Award candidate.

The Chinese Xue Long wasn’t really an ice breaker, either, although it was more capable. Aurora Australis IS an ice breaker, but apparently only rated for light to medium ice, and the ice they encountered was of sterner stuff, and it had been diverted from more important tasking. We can look forward to the arrival of the USCGS Polar Star, which is enroute from Sidney after its refit; this ship IS a heavy icebreaker, and ought to be able to free the Shokalskiy and the Xue Long. And if it cannot, then we’ll know something important about the coming ice age.

I understand that Tunney had pledged to plant 800 trees in New Zealand to “offset” the carbon generated in his expedition; an NZ newspaper now calculates that it would take 5,000 trees to “offset” the rescue missions.

I can sympathize about the health issues; I’m “recovering” from pneumonia myself. I hope we’re both feeling better soon!

Ken Mitchell

Thanks. I haven’t heard much about the ship in the past week, but then I’ve been hors de combat. I still find it ironic that climate experts couldn’t predict that there would be ice in mid summer precisely where they were going. Having seen “South” I don’t have much desire to go…

Archaeology vs. Physics: Conflicting roles for old lead

http://www.gizmag.com/relics-physics-archaeology-roman-lead/30032/

"The study of archaeology has long been carried out using tools from the physics lab. Among these are carbon-14 dating, thermoluminescence dating, x-ray photography, x-ray fluorescence elemental analysis, CAT and MRI scanning, ground-penetrating sonar and radar, and many others. What is less well known is that archaeology has also made substantial contributions to physics. This is the story of old lead; why it is important to physics, and what ethical problems it presents to both sciences."

I knew about the uses of the high quality steel removed from the sunken ships of the High Seas Fleet, I wasn’t aware there were similar uses for ancient lead shipments.

Graves

Asteroid spotted on collision course with Earth

http://boingboing.net/2014/01/02/asteroid-spotted-on-collision.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

"In fact, the International Astronomical Union says that the asteroid — 2014 AA — has most likely already hit us and burned up in the atmosphere. But here’s the cool part: This is just the second time in history that we’ve spotted an asteroid before it hit us."

Not how I’d characterize it. More like the horrifyingly tragic part is that this is only the second time we’ve spotted one before it hit us. I’d go on to discuss the horrifyingly inept way we don’t seem to have any method of dealing with one when we spot it. Good thing we have such brilliant people in charge to manage this sort of thing for us.

Graves

Kaiser and Obamacare

I have Kaiser group coverage for my company’s three full time employees. Today I got our renewal package. I can keep our current plan and if I do, the rates go down. 7% for the two male employees and 10% for the female employee. I can also convert to an Obamacare plan and possibly get a tax credit, but I didn’t have the time or energy to try to figure out how to compare them to Kaiser.

Good to hear. I continue to collect reasons for having a high regard for Kaiser Permanente. I do think trying to expand it radically would destroy it. Much of the success is in the attitude of the employees there.

‘The models account for none of this. Climate oscillates; the models do not.’

<http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/01/a_few_easy_tests_to_debunk_global_warming_hysteria.html>

Roland Dobbins

I certainly would not advise investing large sums betting that the models are giving correct predictions.

Unregulated markets

Unregulated markets are black markets. Black markets meet the demand for illegal sex, drugs, guns, and sometimes even babies. If you are worried about human meat, I would be concerned about the internet. The internet has already allowed a few weirdos who fantasize about being killed and eaten to meet up with those who fantasize about eating people.

Cynthia Allingham

That is one way to describe it. Thank you.

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