Category Archives: Mail

Mail 795 Sunday, October 20, 2013

I’m still sort of recovering, so this will be Mail not View, and comments will be brief. Apologies.

This is the end of the Fall Pledge Drive. This site operates on the Public Radio model : it is free to all, but it remains open only if we get enough subscriptions to make it worth while to keep it open. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html Thanks to all the new subscribers during this drive. If you have not yet subscribed, this would be a great time to do it. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html And if you have not renewed in a while, now would be a good time to do that. I won’t be bugging you again for a couple of months. You can renew now while you are thinking about it. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html

response to a letter from a “highly successful cardiologist

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

Referring to the article/letter from the “highly successful cardiologist” Mark, I would like to relate a (very) short story:

I was recently introduced to a man who was, at one time, a well-paid “roadie” for one of the very highly successful bands of the ‘60s-‘90s, who now holds a low-level job with no health benefits one step above a burger-flipper. He enjoyed himself in those years, led the “good life” and spent money like it was water with no thought for the “winter”.

He strongly reminds me of the story of the grasshopper and the ant: the one derived from Aesop’s Fables which underpins the Judeo-Christian ethic of hard work and individual responsibility which I heard as a child and not the “socially responsible” version of kindness and charity to which it had been altered in the early part of the 20th Century.

What right does he have to put his hand in my pocket, telling me at the same time, “You have the responsibility to look after my welfare” quoting the first paragraph of Article 1 Section 8 (obviously he misinterprets the word "welfare" in the context in which it was written). Where should it end? If I have to pay for his shelter, clothing, sustenance, ad inf, ad naus, at least I should be able to take him off as a dependent. Essentially, if he were a child, I would be “fostering” him and the government would be paying me.

Re: Tort Reform to reduce tort litigation and damages Medical malpractice litigation may be the threshing machine for quality of care.

I think this may be one of the primary reasons why people from all over the globe flock to the United States for medical care which, if not the finest in the world, is very close to it (and usually they pay out of their own pocket).

I find your correspondent’s logic to be both tortured and tortuous; very difficult for me to follow (asks me to assume facts not in evidence and compares apples to frankfurters).

Finally: “…we need to decide if EVERY person can have stents or artificial knees and how do we decide.” And who decides just who is the we who will decide: shades of Sarah Palin’s “Death Panels”.

Reading his letter I feel as though I’m living in one of the “who deserves to live beyond 18” SF novels from the ‘50s co-authored by Paul Krugman and Ezekiel Emanuel.

Gary D. Gross

The legal system is required to prevent incompetence and fraud, but the way it works now is to enrich lawyers at the expense of health care insurance. It needs reform. We have not discussed how.

And the question of subsidies to the undeserving poor has been important for a long time. Shaw tried to take it up in Pygmalion (My Fair Lady preserves a bit of this.) Alas, the discussion has run to ground.

Leave Palin out of it: is it not a valid question: How much is health care your responsibility and how much is your health care mine and that of my physician friend? Or your neighbor down the street? Who shall pay for your daughter’s maladies, and why?

American Exceptionalism and the Current Kerfuffle

Jerry,

Dr. Mark does describe well an attitude of what he calls "American Exceptional-ism."

"An attitude and culture of what’s loosely known as American Exceptional-ism. There is simply no other country on planet earth that can teach us anything. Our entire raison d’etre is to be the world’s beacon of shining success – in freedom, liberty, democracy – and really everything (but especially technology)."

" Health Care issues, government shut down, marvels, and other matters of interest."

<https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=15732>

I have always thought the ideas and principles of American were exceptional, not necessarily things done in our history.

So " American Exceptional-ism" is not my bugaboo for opposition to the Affordable Health Care Act.

I have five reasons for my opposition– I could support whole heartedly approaches that might meet what President Obama wants to do.

1) If you want to change a system, a good practice is to change one small thing to improve it and add in more changes incrementally. If you can’t change the one small thing, how can you do anything else?

We still can’t get rid of bunny inspectors. So why in the world would any bigger change to the federal government work?

2) The Congress and the Executive branch are "goodied up" with all sort of special perks in health care. Pardon me, I have forgotten my place in the world.

3) I am taxed for not doing something. I am waiting patiently for being taxed for not eating my peas.

July 11, 2011 Press Conference by President Obama <http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/07/11/press-conference-president>

National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius <http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/11-393c3a2.pdf>

4) I am fined for not participating in commerce. I am waiting patiently to be fined for not selling my peas.

317 U.S. 111, Wickard v. Filburn

<http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0317_0111_ZO.html>

5) Medical care is subject to economic forces. Obviously we cannot spend all the wealth of the US or the world to save a single person, nor can we say we will help no one with their medical expenses. Thus we are deciding on who gets what, at what cost, and who pays for it.

We are deciding on how to ration care–period. That is the dirty little secret. Not everyone can get the health care they would want.

Now the fabulously wealthy will get fabulous health care, So we are talking about the rest of us.

I am unalterably opposed in having a single payer system since then the single payer will be the only entity deciding on who is naughty or nice. I would rather have many providers to attempt to get good enough care at a good enough cost.

For the future I am very certain that medicine will become cheaper as AI (a la the Watson device & robotics) come into more play.

But for now, I am opposed mostly due to the shenanigans of the Congress and the Executive (both Democrats and Republicans) as they get the health care goodies and leave us to the AHC Act.

As Bill the Cat would say, "Pfft!"

Regards, Charles Adams, Bellevue, NE

Just before the Kabuki ended:

Shutdown and Sequester, and Obamacare – long – sorry!

Jerry,

I take no joy in apparently being correct that this White House is actually willing to damage the country rather than give an inch on the massively mono-partisan Obamacare law.

(If anyone wants more damning evidence, consider the recent unsubtle efforts by members of the Administration, even the President himself, to talk the financial markets into panicking.)

(I note also the modern US left’s habitual "tell" of projection. Recent history shows again and again that whatever they loudly accuse conservatives of is a very good bet to emerge six months later as what the left was actually up to. Consider all the recent hyperbolic accusations of extortion, blackmail, hostage-taking, terrorism, and totally unreasonable refusal to execute a branch of government’s traditional obligations in that light, and much becomes clear.)

The majority of the House Republican caucus seems to have swung round to this view yesterday. Today’s House agenda is reported to be approving a Senate "compromise" bill said to consist mainly of reopening the government and extending the debt limit until early next year, in conjunction with negotiations aimed at reducing long-term deficits. The Sequester, at least for now, is said to remain in force.

In other words, kicking the can down the road a few months, combined with a likely continued impasse over future spending. Positions the Dems have taken in the last week show that their basic goals haven’t changed. They still want to raise taxes, remove the Sequester caps, and get on with spending our way into becoming the United States of Detroit.

They also feel massively burned by the Sequester; they’re determined not to fall for any such automatic spending limit again.

Current signs are the Senate compromise will pass, possibly with a fair number of House Republicans. (At least if Harry Reid can resist the urge to include any obvious poison pills.) House conservatives will likely be very, very unhappy about this, and I don’t blame them. (But given apparent Dem determination to take the country down rather than give an inch, this is unpleasant but probably necessary.)

At which point the fight will continue regardless, probably right through next fall’s election. Essentially, I expect from here on out we’ll see nothing but 2014 campaign; I would not bet anything important in the current legislative logjam breaking before then.

One remarkable thing about this exercise has been that, as long as there was even a remote chance of winning, the Republican House stayed united behind a strongly conservative position. The Tea Party wing now has power. Not enough yet to beat the combined White House, Senate, and conventional media, but real and growing power nevertheless.

To everyone who cares about not seeing this country bankrupted, I say:

Don’t get mad, get even. Forget the circular firing squads. Work to consolidate and increase the political power needed to actually fix things. IE, focus on winning back the public, then on winning back the Senate next fall.

Meanwhile, one obvious thing about this exercise is that Obamacare is now once again clearly hung around the necks of the Dems. They’ve nailed their sail to that mast. If it really is still a train wreck come November 2014, the public will know who was driving the train and who tried to stop it.

In that regard, some thoughts.

The current mess with Obamacare web signups will probably turn out to be secondary. (Indicative of the unwisdom of putting that big a slice of our economy under a federal bureaucracy, yes, but secondary.) They may have web signup mostly working in a few months, or those problems may drag on for years (as with many other major Federal software projects) but either way, there are two far bigger problems looming:

Cost, and access.

All due respect to your cardiologist correspondent, but I think he’s very wrong that there’s no serious cost-increase problem.

He may be looking at cost instances where the states involved had already imposed most of Obamacare’s expense-increasing requirements.

Hard to say.

Or, he may be making comparisons where the Obamacare version has drastically limited provider networks to keep monthly payments down.

Voters will NOT be happy if OCare routinely sends them fifty miles past the good hospital next door for treatment. Early reports are that there’s a lot of that going on.

I’ll give two like-to-like cost data points for now. There is the young fellow who blogged (on Daily Kos, of all places) about how Kaiser has just told him and his wife that their coverage cost is essentially doubling after 2013

(http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/361321/daily-kos-blogger-obamacare-will-double-my-premiums-avik-roy)

with the January 1st kick-in of Obamacare’s additional requirements.

His monthly premium is going from $150 to $284, his wife’s from $168 to $302. He was quite irate, threatened to drop coverage and not pay the federal fine.

Then there’s my own case. I expect I’m considerably more middle-aged than the Kos couple, but I live in a lower-regulation state. I’m marginally self-employed, barely get by (work just keeps on interfering with reading time…) and pay a major insurer for individual coverage.

My rate was just this month raised to $220 a month for a plan with a stiff deductible and co-pay, but very solid no-limit coverage once past the first eight thousand or so. IE, actual catastrophic insurance.

My insurer recently told me that my plan will go away after 2014 due to not meeting Obamacare mandates, but that they’ll be happy to then cover me under one of their new Obamacare-compliant plans. But, they won’t yet tell me what that will cost.

So, I went to ehealthinsurance.com and did a bit of looking around. The site still lets you specify a 2013 pre-OCare plan, or a 2014 OCare-compliant plan. I checked under 2013 for my age, gender, smoking status, and zipcode, and sure enough there was my current plan at $220.

Then I switched to 2014 OCare-compliant plans, all else the same, and the cheapest plan they had for me was their $441 "bronze" plan, with broadly similar deductible and co-pay. (I didn’t check to see whether it narrowed my provider networks.)

So I’ve already seen my pre-OCare plan increase for 2014, and the post-OCare 2014 equivalent is double that. God alone knows what that rate will be by 2015, after most of the young Kos-couple types have

(sensibly) bailed. My suspicion is that, unless I hit the lottery, I’m going to have to then seriously consider dropping coverage also. (Or spending a lot less time writing screeds… Nah.)

Taking a rough look at where the increase comes in, it looks like for me OCare’s new limit on middle-aged rates (3:1 max ratio over 21-year-old rates versus the customary ~5:1) is roughly a wash with its ban on charging more for gender (women incur on average roughly 50% more medical expense than men). So the bulk of the 100% increase seems to be coming with the whole bunch of things mandated by Obamacare that I made a considered decision NOT TO INSURE FOR back when I was shopping for insurance.

And please don’t tell me I should jump through hoops for the DHSS and IRS to perhaps get part of it back as a subsidy. Take on massively intrusive BS paperwork, yet still pay more to get less? Feh.

Multiply my extreme unhappiness by the millions of others getting similar news over the next year, plus the millions more being pushed down to less than thirty hours or put out of a job entirely, and it could be an interesting election.

If, that is, the farging Republicans can remember that they have a mission hugely more important than putting conservatives back in their place. Make Harry Reid the Senate Minority Leader again, and the odds go from 2:1 against us to 2:1 in our favor.

Optimistic? Me? Not very. But we’ll see.

Porkypine

And just after:

Jerry,

Well, the President has made his position clear this morning. Now that he’s faced House Republicans down by being more willing than them to take the nation to the brink of massive economic damage, he expects that precedent to hold for future disputes. "Responsible" Republicans are welcome to join in giving him what he wants in future; the rest can go hang.

Obviously he hopes to divide-and-rule the House Republicans at will now.

I think he’s doomed to disappointment. They will have to be more circumspect about using their negative powers over funding and the debt limit, yes. But anywhere the President wants concessions requiring positive approval from the House, he has a problem. Republican politicians and the Republican base are both now infuriated.

The House Republicans gave Boehner a standing ovation at the end of this. They lost, but they fought till it was hopeless, he held them together, and they seem to appreciate that.

I’ve also noted signs that the Senate Republican squish caucus, chronically prone to preening over cutting bad deals with the Dems in between sniping at fellow Republicans, are feeling heat from the base over their less-than-helpful role in the recent fight. Will they solidify now? Completely, no, but usefully, probably so.

Meanwhile, the Obamacare slow-motion trainwreck will continue. In particular, the effects on employment and the economy will get worse, with the connection ever more obvious between flat growth and the 0Care hiring freezes, layoffs, and 28-hour jobs.

Speaking of Zerocare, if anyone out there wants to get very very rich, figure out a plausibly legal way to sell affordable bare-bones catastrophic health insurance to Americans. The potential market size over the next couple years is millions, if not tens of millions.

That’ll pay for a few top-flight lawyers, not to mention all the doctors who’ll be ecstatic if someone can show them how to bail out of dealing with the ACA.

Porkypine

The result is that we will have a replay in January. I suspect the President will be told he was victorious and he should now hold out for new taxes. Whether the Republicans will submit to that is not entirely clear. I would hope now.

What we do not have is a sober discussion of the simple fact that the debt rises monotonically even if the deficit is lower this year than last. As the debt grow the cost of servicing the debt grows. The temptation is to solve that by running the printing presses. Other countries have tried this with predictable results.

If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.

You wrote, "continued rises [sic] in the deficit is a sure path to an eventual default"

As the link I gave you shows, the "deficit" has been cut each year since 2011 and is projected to decrease even more in the future. You call for a 1% cut in spending, but we are already cutting more than an additional 10% each and every year.

We are headed well in the right direction.

It seems you are making the common mistake of confusing the debt with the deficit, but people who would like to influence public opinion just look foolish when they make it.

J Stone

I may have mistyped deficit meaning debt but I am aware that the actual deficit is smaller this year than last. I also know that the debt has doubled in the past decade. Doubled: that is, in one decade, the US has acquired more debt than it did in the entire history of the Republic, wars and all, up to then. The fact that the deficit is still positive and must remain so – that’s why the deficit ceiling had to be raised in order to avoid default – is the important fact.

Consultants – meh…

http://www.salon.com/2013/10/13/ted_talks_are_lying_to_you/?source=newsletter

Despite the apology for Jonah Lehrer (itself a comment on the author’s innate bias – and ironically the very thing he is railing against), this is an insightful article about group-think and perceived exceptionalism (e.g. superiority). What is left out is the fact that even ‘herd instinct’ provides observation opportunities for advancement breakthroughs. We just can’t be enamored of the majority ‘consensus’; there is no law that ‘consensus’ is correct.

"Every gawddammed Marine officer regardless of rank, training, education, experience or intelligence thinks himself a mucking’ tactical genius. Get the fuck out of my Command Center!" LtCol. David Couvillon, USMCR; 2002 29 Palms, CA on the occasion of an adjacent unit commander trying to countermand the actions of one of my subordinate units.

David Couvillon

Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog Excellance; Avoider of Yard Work

The end of climate alarmism

I thought you might find this interesting.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/the-age-of-climate-alarmism-is-coming-to-an-end/article/2537417

Because so many powerful people have staked their reputation on climate alarmism, figure about 10 or 20 years before it completely disappears off the page and is retired quietly to the dustbin of discredited doomsday predictions, alongside Malthus, and ‘peak oil’.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

That is about how I read it. We don’t’ have decent models, and every now and then we discover that Nature has ways to change things in ways we never suspected.

BTW, if any of your correspondents have any information on the failure of the obamacare launch from an architectural/design standpoint, I’d appreciate hearing more. My understanding is that the site was extremely heavy in terms of Javascripts and database, resulting in something that ran impossibly slowly when thousands of people hit the web site at once.

http://hotair.com/headlines/archives/2013/10/05/it-experts-on-healthcare-gov-websites-problems-the-site-basically-ddosd-itself/

The usual changing requirements and lack of QA didn’t help either.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/troubled-obamacare-website-wasnt-tested-until-a-week-before-launch/article/2537381

I’m interested in learning more not because I want to make fun of Democrat failures, but because I’m building a web app myself and I’d like to learn from other people’s mistakes. It’s so much cheaper than learning the lessons yourself!

Brian P

Last flight of Grasshopper

Dr Pournelle

Perhaps that was the last flight of Grasshopper.

‘SpaceX isn’t planning to fly Grasshopper again, [Chief Operating Officer Gwynne] Shotwell said there were no plans to do anything else with it. “We’ll do like all SpaceX things: we’ll hold on to it,” she said. She added she almost regretted still having Grasshopper intact after its series of tests. “In some ways we’ve kind of failed on the Grasshopper program because we haven’t pushed it to its limit,” she said. “We haven’t broken it.”’

Live long and prosper

h lynn keith

Dear Dr. Pournelle:

I saw the Grasshopper flight. Very impressive and 21st-century.

But you wrote:

<<

… private enterprise is taking mankind to space. After all that’s how the airlines were built.

>>

That is a half-truth. The airlines have been subsidized by governments from their start unto the present day. Without this support, they would go out of business.

I predict the same for private spaceflight. It will be heavily subsidized and highly regulated.

And if you like the security theater at the airports, then you are going to love the spaceports!

– Nathaniel Hellerstein

paradoctor@aol.com

The airlines were more ‘subsidized’ by government during the creation of the airline industry through creating markets – Air Mail as an example, done by private carriers after experimenting with having the Army do it – and with labs and services like NACA Ames, wind tunnels, and the like. Since liberals have the great fear that somewhere, somehow, someone is doing something without permission and supervision from government, your prophecy is no surprise.

Public Employee Unions, Pensions, Political Contributions and RICO

Jerry,

With stories about Public Employee Pension Reform appearing regularly in the Press, I got to thinking about the processes that were involved in creating Public Employee Pensions that are so unreasonably high when compared to the Pensions available to employees in the private sector.

It occurred to me that these processes met the definitions of Racketeering.

On one side you have the Public Employee Unions financed by dues from their members.

On the supposed other side you have the elected Officials granting these bloated pensions who owe their election to the funds provided by the Public Employees who benefit from these bloated Pensions.

Standing on the outside looking in are the Taxpayers whose pockets have been and are being picked by those who were elected to represent them.

Looks like a Racket to me.

Let the RICO suits begin!

Bob Holmes

Why I Will Never, Ever, Go Back to the United States

John, Long time fan, first time writer.

When I first saw this title, I had no clue what the story would reveal.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/niels-gerson-lohman/us-border-crossing_b_4098130.html <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/niels-gerson-lohman/us-border-crossing_b_4098130.html>

WOW,

USA treats people like this! Guess since 9/11 we have lost more than peoples lives.

This is the type of story that deserves a lot of press coverage. Maybe you?

I have also just finished a "story" written in 1994!

As Jerry mentioned in his writing, it is no longer "Our Government", it is "the government"

And sent the author (80 Years old) the following:

2013/10/15 08:39

Dear Doctor Pournelle:

I am an old (72) fan of Byte and unfortunately my entire collection was donated to the garbage. Sure miss those days.

During my cleaning I found a book bought at Crown Bookstores for $3.99 on 6/18/1996 "Future Quartet".

I never read it but find that I can not put it down. The ‘Democracy in the year 2042" was unbelievable!

I believe that "story" should be mandatory reading for every living being on the planet! I have sent the amazon link to my mailing list. I wonder if there is any legal and ethical way to publish only that story in a manor(pun) that would allow more people to read and comment. It is the type of article that should be published in today’s online world.

jerryp@jerrypournelle.com

http://www.amazon.com/Future-Quartet-Earth-Four-Part-Invention/dp/0688131735/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1381845164&sr=8-1-fkmr1&keywords=Democracy+in+the+year+2042 <http://www.amazon.com/Future-Quartet-Earth-Four-Part-Invention/dp/0688131735/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1381845164&sr=8-1-fkmr1&keywords=Democracy+in+the+year+2042>

By the way, I have finally found a replacement for Jack Mabley -YOU!

And, I love your WLS 9-11 program!

B

disturbing thoughts

I agree.

It does seem true that Social Security could be made sustainable without intolerable disruption, if we act soon. (Condition contrary to fact?) But will that be enough?

Although the deficit seems to be coming down rather well in the last few years, I remain concerned: the curve for the national debt looks too much like being asymptotic. Which can’t work. Even worse than a national budget aimed solely at entitlements and military expenditure, would be one that exists primarily to service debt.

I do remain concerned about health costs. Either we bring those down — somehow — or they break our economy.

Thank you again for your thoughtful insistence on maintaining a productive discussion —

Allan E. Johnson

—

SUBJ: Gomer Gestapo now holds humor is a terrorist act

To no one’s surprise, the TSA has now descended to the traditional last refuge of schoolyard bullies and tinpot tyrants: Laugh and us and we’ll GET you! We’ll fix you good!

http://www.infowars.com/tsa-loudspeakers-threaten-travelers-with-arrest-for-joking-about-security/

Dear God, it like something out of a Bertold Brecht screenplay.

I’m tempted next time I fly to wear my sweatshirt with the TSA logo on the front and "All Hail The Mighty Gomer Gestapo" on the back. Just to hear the flunkies grit their teeth. I might miss a flight, but the lawsuit settlement would likely bring full satisfaction. Sorely tempted, I am.

Cordially,

John

I was brought up not to mention rope in the house of a man who has been hanged, and I would not think that bombs were a very good subject for humor in an airport. I have little respect for the TSA, but many of them mean well. Making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep is a bit of an overstatement when applied to the TSA, but I think I would not go so far as you in denigrating them. My solution to all this would be to abolish them in favor of a less pervasive bureaucracy and privatizing the service while increasing the number of armed air marshals, but I haven’t done an in depth study. I do know that many know how to bring down an airplane if they don’t mind being killed in the act, and it is very hard to prevent that with the present TSA methods.

The Sounds of Silence

Dr Pournelle

For a time, I looked forward to the 2016 elections, because, I thought, the US would withdraw from Afghanistan in 2014, and we would witness the resurgence of the Taliban there in 2015. I thought the American electorate would blame the current administration for the catastrophe.

Then I thought, "Would the American electorate even know?"

So I cast around for an example and hit upon Iraq.

What has happened in Iraq since we left?

I find I do not know. ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, NBC — none of them is reporting on Iraq. Iraq is not in the news. Is this a case of ‘No news is good news’? Maybe, but I have doubts.

Here are my predictions for 2015:

1. The Taliban will depose the Mayor of Kabul.

2. Afghanistan will revert to its ancient tribal ways.

3. Helmund Province will again become the world supplier of opium.

4. Americans will be ignorant of the above events.

Your thoughts?

Live long and prosper

h lynn keith

We should have left Afghanistan as soon as the Taliban was defeated, leaving Afghanistan to the Afghani. Our current policy ought to be to get out as soon as possible, but leaving behind the promise that we can and will come back if it is used as a lair from which to plot against the United States. We have lost nothing there, and we cannot impose a just or kind society or government. The one thing that united Afghani is the sight of armed foreigners on their soil. This has been true since Alexander the Great.

Judge tells living man that he’s still legally dead |

Jerry

“Life can be tough, especially when a judge says you’re dead in the eyes of the law. That’s exactly what happened to Ohio resident Donald Eugene Miller Jr. on Monday when a judge upheld a 1994 court ruling declaring the 61-year-old legally dead.

“The Courier reports that 19 years ago, a court in Hancock County declared Miller legally dead eight years after he disappeared from his rental home. As a result, Miller has lost his Social Security number and his driver’s license. Judge Allan Davis called it a "strange, strange situation," but he also said the court cannot budge in its decision.”

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/judge-tells-living-man-that-he%E2%80%99s-still-legally-dead-201043615.html

The real reason for the ruling:

“His ex-wife, Robin Miller, asked for the initial death ruling so that Social Security death benefits could be paid to their two children. She reportedly declined to testify in court on Monday. … Robin Miller says she opposed overturning the death ruling, because she would then have to pay back the federal government for the benefits she received and does not have the financial means to do so. Donald Eugene Miller reportedly owed her $26,000 in child support at the time of his “death.”

It boils down to money, then. Of course.

Ed

It often boils down to money.

GOP claims that Pay Our Military Act of 2013 pays death benefit

http://thisainthell.us/blog/?p=37909

"The Washington Times <http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/9/gop-says-pay-act-covers-military-death-benefits/> reports that members of Congress claim that their Pay Our Military Act of 2013 that they passed earlier this week does indeed cover payment of the death benefit for the military and that the Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel is the fellow withholding funds from bereaved families;"

Now since then the Fisher House, a charity I enthusiastically support and have done so for years, is going to pay the money and get reimbursed later. But it appears to laymen reading the wording of the law that these payments were in fact covered in the act passed shortly before shutdown.

I will point out that the president’s preferred USAF golf course is apparently still operating despite the shutdown, and state that contempt and hatred are not overly dramatic words to use in the circumstances.

I still remember the idiots in my unit, and there were a couple, who supported Obama for election and claimed he’d treat veterans and military much better than the evil Republicans. They still believe so. I don’t know what the weather is like on that planet, but I’m suspecting it is warmer than here.

Serving officer

Health Care

I have a few comments about the Cardiologist.

———————–

One of the issues in medicine is that things simply cost more than they did and the care is much better than it was 30+ years ago when I started.

———————–

He is right on this. More expensive procedures to deal with conditions which had no cure exist now.

———————–

An attitude and culture of what’s loosely known as American Exceptional-ism. There is simply no other country on planet earth that can teach us anything.

———————–

Part of the problems we face now are due to us ‘learning’ from places like Europe. Some of these countries we ‘learned’ from are now facing bankruptcy and had to have bailouts by more prosperous countries.

———————

The fundamental mythos of American culture, is that no matter how poor or humble your birth, you can through grit, spunk and hard work become wealthy and prosperous.

———————

Mythos? I recall the story of the guy in Texas who wanted to open mine which would employ maybe 125 people. By the time he saw how much paperwork it would take and the time between the application and being able to open his business, he gave up. The admin costs were more than it was worth. How much of this was from what we have ‘learned’ as per the above?

A thought experiment –

Assume there are 60 people in Texas who have had the above experience?

Assume the same for each of 50 States?

Check my math, that works out to 37,500 jobs, right?

Not much out of 11 Million unemployed, unless you are one of those on the bench.

———————-

At the core of all the anti-health care reforms is the single concept "why should I pay for the healthcare of those losers."

———————

Depends. Someone like me who is genetically inclined to High Blood Pressure and Elevated Cholesterol. Or my Mom, who was from a family who all had bouts with Cancer.

I say yes, help them out.

Someone like my Dad, who was a lifelong smoker even after warnings about that. Maybe not.

Where do you draw the line? How much of an unhealthy lifestyle is tolerable?

What about someone who follows all the Medical Recommendations and then it turns out Medical Science was wrong and screws him up?

———————-

One really, really good thing we should be doing is looking at the 39 countries who DO have universal coverage and see how they do it. For example, the national health service in Great Britain has great public support, their costs are something like 8 times less and their life expectancy is better. What do they do that we don’t?

———————

I would like to know this, too. Do they turn away people, deny or have extraordinarily long waits for essential services?

Since there is much politics involved, who can you trust to tell the truth?

The last question is the best one: we try to find truth through rational discussion. Sometimes we succeed.

The soft bigotry of unrealistically high expectations.

<http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-c1-cal-freshmen-20130816-dto,0,4673807.htmlstory>

Basically, this lad can’t write comprehensibly (which means that his reading skills are poor, as well). But at least he got an ‘A’ in ‘African American Studies’, so that he can return to a university environment which is obviously not appropriate for his level of actual education.

—-

Roland Dobbins

Mail 793 Tuesday, October 08, 2013

The following is by a highly successful cardiologist, and sums up some of the problems with health care; factors which must be considered.

One of the issues in medicine is that things simply cost more than they did and the care is much better than it was 30+ years ago when I started. As an example, when I started in medicine if your knee hurt because of arthritis, I gave you 2 aspirin 4 times a day. We knew that could hurt you, but it made the pain more bearable. Now we send you off for an artificial knee! We’ve gone from a cost of a few pennies per day to a cost of tens of thousands of dollars.

In my own field, when I started if you had a heart attack, I gave you nitroglycerin and spoke with your widow after it was over. Then I begin to give you thrombolytics (clot busters) and that put my conversation off with your widow for a few years. Now I rush you off the the cath lab, put in a drug coated stent and give you aspirin and Plavix and your wife is stuck with you for decades if you have a modicum of common sense. The care is staggeringly better!

The cost of all of this has increased and not in small way. This problem is worse in the US than anywhere else as illustrated.

<http://b-i.forbesimg.com/danmunro/files/2013/08/cost1.png>

Is universal health care part of the answer? (The below is stolen from Dan Munro)

* There are about 200 countries on planet earth – and only about 40 have a "formal" healthcare system (which includes access, delivery and payment for citizens within a given country).

* The U.S. remains the only country (out of the 40) without "universal access/coverage."

* All of the countries in the chart above, almost all of them except the US, have universal health care (note that they don’t all have the government paying for all of health care). The cost is less and the quality of care is mostly better.

Why don’t we have/approve of Universal Health Care in the US?

Fear – which is largely fueled by three things.

1. A false assumption (with big political support) that a system based on universal coverage is the same thing as a single payer system. It isn’t. Germany is a great example of a healthcare system with universal coverage and multi-payer (many of which are private insurance companies).

2. An attitude and culture of what’s loosely known as American Exceptional-ism. There is simply no other country on planet earth that can teach us anything. Our entire raison d’etre is to be the world’s beacon of shining success – in freedom, liberty, democracy – and really everything (but especially technology).

3. A fierce independence that has a really dark side. It took another Quora question to really help me see this one. The question was: P <https://www.quora.com/Positive-Rights/Why-do-many-Americans-think-that-healthcare-is-not-a-right-for-its-own-taxpaying-citizens> ositive Rights: Why do many Americans think that healthcare is not a right for its own taxpaying citizens? <https://www.quora.com/Positive-Rights/Why-do-many-Americans-think-that-healthcare-is-not-a-right-for-its-own-taxpaying-citizens> Here’s the #1 (395 upvotes) answer by Anon (a Brit):

The fundamental mythos of American culture, is that no matter how poor or humble your birth, you can through grit, spunk and hard work become wealthy and prosperous.

On the face of it, and from the perspective of a class divided Europe, that seems incredibly noble and empowering. The idea that there is that much social mobility, that anyone can forge their own destiny is a powerful part of the American psyche. When it happens, it is an incredible thing. Something Americans can feel proud of.

However, there is a dark side to this mythos. Which is this… if anyone can win through hard work and effort, anyone who doesn’t win, therefore deserves to be poor.

At the core of all the anti-health care reforms is the single concept "why should I pay for the healthcare of those losers."

Added together, these 3 things all contribute mightily to the runaway healthcare system we have today. Today – the NHE for USA is $3.5T per year – and it’s growing at (arguably) ~5% per year (for as far as the eye can see).

So can we fix this in the US? Not without some open discussion. There are a LOT of painful things that need to be done. We need Tort reform, we need to reduce the cost of medical education, we need to decide if EVERY person can have stents or artificial knees and how do we decide.

One really, really good thing we should be doing is looking at the 39 countries who DO have universal coverage and see how they do it. For example, the national health service in Great Britain has great public support, their costs are something like 8 times less and their life expectancy is better. What do they do that we don’t?

You are correct, in general Kaiser does a very good job controlling costs, so does the state of Oregon. What is done at Kaiser and in Oregon that could be applied elsewhere?

Complex issues, worthy of national discussion.

Best,

Mark

The question of deserving and undeserving poor is the heart of the matter: does government have the right to take money by force and distribute it to those who most would consider undeserving, and if so, from whence does the government derive that right? Note that I make no comment on charity: what one voluntarily gives for cultural or religious reasons is one’s own affair. The Biblical Command is that if anyone asks of thee, give; but that is not the basis of a government’s right to property for redistribution.

I reserve the right to post this again with a longer discussion. I had intended to do this a week ago but it has not been a great week and now I have this flu like thing sapping my energy so I will leave it to be thought about.

A not quite random selection from a vast amount of mail on the subject of the shut down.

Dr. Pournelle,

First, please use my pseudonym Terrier1.

I ran across the attached article today. Bluntly titled "Treasury Default = Depression," it outlines in three well-written pages what will happen if the U.S. government defaults on its debts.

Richard Bove, the author, concluded with the following: "It is actually shocking that I would write a comment of this nature. The devastation to the United States would be so severe that it would take decades to recover from the Depression caused by a default and the dumping of trillions of dollars of U.S. Treasury securities on the global markets…God spare us from the fools who lead us."

I work for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. I fear that a default, with a collapse of the dollar and the resultant spike in prices for food, fuel, and other essentials, will cause riots. We’ll be at the tip of the spear in dealing with those riots. I’d rather not see it happen, and I am infuriated that the "shutdown" hasn’t shut down the pay of that Washington crowd that has gotten us in to this mess.

Terrier1

The article is a pdf; mostly is it about terrible consequences of an actual Treasury Default.

Global Skills Outlook 2013,

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/secondaryeducation/10362749/Young-worse-at-maths-and-English-than-grandparents-and-behind-almost-every-other-nation.html

Report here:

http://skills.oecd.org/

http://skills.oecd.org/skillsoutlook.html

Our current education system is guaranteed to produce about 50% graduates unable to do anything useful enough that someone would pay money to have them do it. Some will recover from that. Others will go into lifelong debt to get, in college, the education they should have got in high school. This system will continue so long as we deliver them bound to the Iron Low bureaucrats of the Federal Department of Education. It makes for a serious situation, since a great number of our people are probably not needed in a real economy; possibly as many as half. Of course they will continue to vote. This is a situation unparalleled in history.

I do point out that Rome discovered that it was cheaper to give the masses bread and circuses than to recruit ever larger security and defense forces.

Dear Jerry,

This email is prompted by your comment about Obama’s "refusal to negotiate anything" being "small and petty". By way of a preface, let me say that I did not vote for Obama at either opportunity, nor is "ObamaCare" my favored approach to a "system" of healthcare provision. (Nevertheless, the conservative portrayal of Obama as either an incompetent bungler or a Machiavellian incarnation of Hitler and Stalin has puzzled, and, sometimes, amused me.)

Past government shutdowns most like the current situation, but with sides opposed, were during the period from 1981 to 1986, when we had a Republican President and Senate with a Democrat House. Reagan negotiated, yes. But he did not negotiate over a law that had been duly passed by Congress, signed by him, upheld by the Supreme Court, and, in effect, sanctioned by a subsequent election. Do you really imagine Reagan would have negotiated on any such law? If the law had been one that was as much a "hot-button" for the Right – say banning abortion (allowing for an alternate universe without Supreme Court umbras and penumbras) – as healthcare is the for the Left?

Obama might well be "small and petty", but I don’t see any evidence for it in this particular situation. If Obama negotiates on this, there will be more hostage taking in U.S. politics than has occurred in all the terrorist hijacking taken together.

Gordon Sollars

And your thesis is that Obama, who contrary to the " law that had been duly passed by Congress" suspended the provisions requiring businesses and some labor unions to comply with it, was moved to go to the trouble to put up barricades — which had to be brought in from a distance — to close off a turnaround at Mount Vernon? And thus he is the one to be commended?

Jerry Pournelle

Chaos Manor

Dear Jerry,

It’s not my intention to commend Obama for anything in this situation -except for not negotiating. As to the suspended provisions, of course, those who wanted them to go into effect immediately want ObamaCare to fail, not succeed. And, I hope you will agree that Republican presidents have also used their powers to skirt laws in the past – and will do so again. Obama is wrong, but that is not the same as being unreasonable or "small and petty". If you had not made a comment about negotiating, I wouldn’t have bothered you with an email.

The Mount Vernon barricades were not my concern. Perhaps that was a deliberate strike by Obama against the Republic, or perhaps it was a decision by a mid-level functionary about how to best protect a closed facility. In any event it is only one small matter in the current context.

Gordon

I would say that sending Park Rangers to close a WW II memorial which is not fenced and is normally viewed by anyone walking through the Mall just as a bus load of WW II veterans arrives comes under the heading of mean and petty. It cost more to do than doing nothing. And the vets police their own areas when they leave. No, this wasn’t an accident.

The Shutdown Government: Powerful, Punitive And Petty http://thefederalist.com/2013/10/08/the-shutdown-government-powerful-punitive-and-petty/

"Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy. This brilliant “law” has two parts. First, “in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself.” Second, in every organization, it’s the people in the second category who always end up running things, while “those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.”"

HD

We keep hearing about the government shutdown, but did you know that 83% of the government continues operating during this shutdown?  http://tinyurl.com/pnthn9q

Other than protecting the public and POTUS from deranged drivers, what is the unpaid 83% — now guaranteed back pay when government resumes — doing that is so essential and must occur in these times of crisis? 

While we have no word on the bunny inspectors, we do know that it is a priority to ensure that an 80 year old man and a 77 year old woman, whose home is on federal land, cannot access their home during the government shutdown.  They’ll have to live elsewhere until the government resumes.  http://tinyurl.com/qx2nu43

Also a major priority, enforcing an embargo on privately owned businesses — even to the point of posting guards — to ensure that no economic activity occurs at these places during the shutdown.  http://tinyurl.com/mlyspym  This is because government cannot afford to allow these institutions to generate profit while 17% of government is shut down; so it only makes sense to expend resources on an embargo of these businesses. 

Also a major priority is ensuring that an immigration rally planned to take place at the National Mall, which is closed for the government shutdown, occurs as planned. http://tinyurl.com/m8dv2nl

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

And the beat goes on.

Kill the F35 FIRST, put the money into feeding hungry kids. THEN we can talk about other things.

Otherwise, the hypocrisy of crying poverty while continuing to fund that waste of money makes all the other discussion nothing more than a pathetic joke.

Money Talks, and B.S. Walks.

Park Service OKs immigration reform rally on ‘closed’ National Mall

http://washingtonexaminer.com/park-service-oks-immigration-reform-rally-on-closed-national-mall/article/2536908

"A planned immigration reform rally will take place on the National Mall on Tuesday even though the site is closed due to the government shutdown <http://washingtonexaminer.com/section/government-shutdown> ."

Let me see if I have this straight. Ninety year old, wheelchair bound veterans flown in cannot be allowed to commemorate their honored dead, because the government is closed. However, an event which is blatantly political and to the advantage of the current ruling party, with the support of the SEIU and AFL-CIO, is perfectly acceptable. How stupid do they think we are?

Serving Officer

Hello Jerry,

You had written you were unable to source the statement: "The determination of which services continue during an appropriations lapse is not affected by whether the costs of shutdown exceed the costs of maintaining services."

I found the original in a pdf from the Administration.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/memoranda/2013/m-13-22.pdf

Continued health and good cheer to you.

Michael Crow

Florence, KY

MIT Technology Review: The First Carbon Nanotube Computer

Jerry,

Interesting! It was announce last week.

Regards, Charles Adams, Bellevue, NE

<http://www.technologyreview.com/news/519421/the-first-carbon-nanotube-computer/>

"Materials News

The First Carbon Nanotube Computer

A carbon nanotube computer processor is comparable to a chip from the early 1970s, and may be the first step beyond silicon electronics.

By Katherine Bourzac on September 25, 2013 .

For the first time, researchers have built a computer whose central processor is based entirely on carbon nanotubes, a form of carbon with remarkable material and electronic properties. The computer is slow and simple, but its creators, a group of Stanford University engineers, say it shows that carbon nanotube electronics are a viable potential replacement for silicon when it reaches its limits in ever-smaller electronic circuits.

The carbon nanotube processor is comparable in capabilities to the Intel 4004, that company’s first microprocessor, which was released in 1971, says Subhasish Mitra, an electrical engineer at Stanford and one of the project’s co-leaders…."

Phyllis Chesler is in most people’s minds the quintessential feminist. She bared some of her past yesterday in the New York Post, of all places.

It seems she spent some 6 months in hell as an American bride – in Kabul, fourth of four wives of a rich Afghan. This naive little orthodox Jew fell for a typical Muslim line and became another trophy for a rich Muslim.

She tells about the treatment she received, her near death, and her escape

here:

My life of hell in an Afghan harem

http://nypost.com/2013/09/21/my-life-of-hell-in-an-afghan-harem/

NOW I can understand her a whole lot more. I suspect she has conquered a fair amount of shame admitting all this. If so that explains a lot of her silence about Islam and Muslim treatment of women. It may also explain why she dove so deeply into the "feminist cause". While I cannot support her cause very much at all or agree with her politics I can respect her more now. This woman has been through hell and escaped. That has to affect people and color their life from then on.

{^_^}

Administration incompetence

I’ve recently read rather a lot of comments assuming the incompetence of the Obama administration. Perhaps so. However, two things occur to me.

First, I see little evidence for greater incompetence than normal. Invasion of Iraq? Dismantling of the Iraqi army? Earlier, fumbling of Watergate? Bay of Pigs? Things go wrong. A lot. "Nine tenths of everything is garbage."

Second, a few months ago I heard over NPR a comment from President Obama that I thought made sense, and increased my confidence in, at least, his level-headedness. The gist was that any problem which actually reaches the President’s desk is almost by definition intractable. If there had been a clear solution, it would have been solved before it reached him. Therefore all presidential decisions will be based on insufficient information, and with no reasonable assurance of the outcome. Yet decisions have to be made.

Or, as Mr. Rumsfeld put it in a much-mocked (and yet intelligent) comment: there are the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns. That’s simply the context in which we operate.

Yours,

Allan E. Johnson

This requires either no comment or a fairly long one. I have not time for a long comment. Readers will recall that I was not in favor of the invasion of Iraq, and I was in favor of throwing the Taliban out of Afghanistan and going home after a couple of thousand American warriors and support troops expelled the Taliban from power. Leave Afghanistan to the Afghanis. The American policy seems to be one of Incompetent Empire. I prefer Competent Republic (We are the friends of liberty everywhere but the guardians only of our own), or of competent Empire using auxiliaries rather than Legions to govern out provinces. And I prefer a Republic to Empire. But Incompetent Empire is not attractive.

NASA’s Plutonium Problem Could End Deep-Space Exploration

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/09/plutonium-238-problem/

Too bad Newt wasn’t elected president. He wanted to divert NASA’s mission to going back to the moon and establishing a permanent presence there. If we were doing that, we could go back to those moon landing sites and salvage the plutonium that was left behind back then. There were five Snap-27’s at 8.4 pounds of plutonium each which is 37 pounds. NASA’s current inventory is 36 pounds. So making the moon our space program’s priority would more than double their plutonium supply.

Even if it were possible to still buy it from the Russians for $45,000 per ounce, which it isn’t, getting some for free as a by-product of a space mission appeals to the frugal side of me. 37 pounds of plutonium at that price would be $26,640,000 which appears to be a lesser cost than manufacturing it.

Please withhold my name as I still want no attention from the IRS auditors. Please instead refer to me as "Bowman".

Dealing with the Gomer Gestapo-eh?

"Crows are of the same color everywhere." – German Proverb

http://libertycrier.com/3-important-lessons-from-a-canadian-border-crossing/

But hey, a police state’s GREAT if you’re the police, eh?

Cordially,

John

Re: Yochai Benkler on the NSA

Jerry,

Found this through Bruce Schneier’s blog.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/13/nsa-behemoth-trampling-rights

Some excerpts:

"We have learned that in pursuit of its bureaucratic mission to obtain signals intelligence in a pervasively networked world, the NSA has mounted a systematic campaign against the foundations of American power: constitutional checks and balances, technological leadership, and market entrepreneurship. The NSA scandal is no longer about privacy, or a particular violation of constitutional or legislative obligations. The American body politic is suffering a severe case of auto-immune disease: our defense system is attacking other critical systems of our body."

"What did we actually know about what we got in exchange for undermining internet security, technology markets, internet social capital, and the American constitutional order? The intelligence establishment grew by billions of dollars; thousands of employees; and power within the executive. And we the people? Not so much. Court documents released this week show that after its first three years of operation, the best the intelligence establishment could show the judge overseeing the program was that it had led to opening "three new preliminary investigations". This showing, noted Judge Walton in his opinion, "does not seem very significant"."

"Given the persistent lying and strategic errors of judgment that this week’s revelations disclosed, the NSA needs to be put into receivership. Insiders, beginning at the very top, need to be removed and excluded from the restructuring process. Their expertise led to this mess, and would be a hindrance, not a help, in cleaning it up. We need a forceful, truly independent outsider, with strong, direct congressional support, who would recruit former insider-dissenters like Thomas Drake or William Binney to reveal where the bodies are buried."

So, predictions and suspicions that the NSA has been lying about the supposed fruits of all this invasive surveillance have been shown true. Hardly surprising, and still disconcerting. If anything, in fact, I think that the NSA’s and Administration’s claims have been shown even more untrue than most of us suspected.

Regards,

George

Librarian fired after speaking up for child who read too much  – NY Daily News

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/new-york-librarian-fired-speaking-child-read-article-1.1460319

When a meritocracy is no longer a meritocracy.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, per omnia secula seculorum.

American Thinker: Memo to Hillary

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/09/m-memo_to_hillary_clinton_what_a_difference_at_this_point_a_year_makes.html

<snip>

America’s progressives have lost the tether of well-controlled lies and public perceptions that anchored their decisions in cool calculation. …The progressives have entered a nightmare world of their own making, in which the respectable veneer — the well-creased pant leg — has given way to a relentless series of distractions aimed at preventing everyone from hearing that pounding American heart beneath the floorboards. Calculated corruption is giving way to madness. …

In practice, this means that their tactics will become more aggressive, and even less restrained. Benghazi and its aftermath are just a hint of what is to come. It will henceforth be "go for broke" time, all the time. The scandals, authoritarian lurches, manufactured crises, and open breaches of faith with their oaths and their nation will become ever more intense and brazen. And there will be no joy in this unraveling for constitutionalists, who will be not onlookers, but victims.

The smooth, soporific drift into the abyss is officially over for America. From here on out, the ride gets very, very rough — that is what happens when progressivism’s wheels come off. Hold on.

Jerry

From APOD, Rotating Moon from LRO (a video):

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130916.html

Don’t miss.

Ed

Subject: Not Enough Money for Education?

The Glendale, California school district will now monitor the social media activities of all 13,000 public school students. There is much wrong with this on many levels. One is the expense.

I never ever again want to hear that there is not enough money to teach reading, writing, and math.

—

Dwayne Phillips

I am prepared to argue that our Capleville school with two grades to the room gave better education than our $13,000 per year per student California school. And by better I mean in all ways better.

The best way to make the schools better is to fire the worst 20% teachers. Then start the reforms,.

Syria Infelix

Dear Jerry:

As I occasionally publish in journals of archaeology as well as the physical science , I have a duty to report something that seems germane to the catfight over nerve gas in Syria, now that Rand Paul has raised the false flag issue.

At the 2009 Archaeological Institute of America annual meeting, Simon James of the University of Leicester recorded finding a pile of bodies in a tunnel dug during a siege of the Syrian city of Dura, on the Euphrates circa 250 AD.

He laid out physical evidence that the intact skeletons he found were Roman soldiers killed by the release of poison gas, specifically an acid cloud of sulfur dioxide. His slides showed why- sulfur crystals and pitch were found on the tunnel walls where the countermine dug by the besieged Romans intercepted the Persian attackers tunnel beneath the city walls.

It’s a chemical slam dunk that igniting such a mixture can yield lethally asphyxiating gas.

James expressed the view that after gassing the Romans,the Persians stacked them like cordwood in a heap, then set fire to their tunnel props. He also pointed out it was nothing new, citing the usual Classical texts describing the use of poison gas, but concluding that third-century Persian warriors were technologically precocious in that they pulled it off in terms of the operational art.

This much is sure : they did conquer. and abandon Dura, which then lay undiscovered for 17 centuries, albeit the Persians reportedly once again deployed toxic fumes again in 1256, against the Mongols attacking the Alamut, the ancestral stronghold of the Shiite sectaries then called Assassins, from whom descend the Alawites in charge of Syria today.

If you want to go abroad in search of monsters, it’s a very promising direction.

Russell Seitz

Mail 789 Friday, September 13, 2013

Folding our hands

Jerry:

An e-mail you posted on September 2, 2013, called attention to Jack Williamson’s 1947 story "With Folded Hands". I had no memory of reading it, but apparently I did so 40 years ago as it was reprinted in "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. II", which is somewhere in my boxes of books waiting to be unpacked.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Science_Fiction_Hall_of_Fame,_Volume_Two

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Science_Fiction_Hall_of_Fame,_Volume_Two> You mentioned the story terrified you, as the robots take care of us for our own good. It is an old fear of free men as summarized in the frequently repeated quotes from G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis.

“The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.”

G. K. Chesterton, cited by the American Chesterton society as coming from a broadcast talk 6-11-35

http://www.chesterton.org/discover-chesterton/quotations-of-g-k-chesterton/

<http://www.chesterton.org/discover-chesterton/quotations-of-g-k-chesterton/>

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

–C.S. Lewis, "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment", reprinted in "God in the Dock", Part III, Chapter 4, where it is said to have appeared originally in "20th Century: An Australian Quarterly Review," Vol. III, No. 3 (1949), pp. 5-12.

Best regards,

–Harry M.

Space Power Satellite

Dr. Pournelle,

Some questions about space-based solar power (sorry for the late comment):

1) This would have to be a satellite with very large solar panels in order to provide a substantial fraction of the power consumed by the U.S. Wouldn’t such large solar panels be vulnerable to space junk?

2) As you know, Russia and China, our major international competitors, have demonstrated the ability to shoot down satellites. In fact, it seems to me that any country or private organization that can put something in orbit can also shoot something else down. If the U.S. became dependent on space-based solar power, we would be very vulnerable. It’s easier to repair ground-based power plants, and there are many of them.

3) What are the effects on the atmosphere from the constant microwave bombardment used to transmit the gathered solar energy to receiving stations on Earth? Wouldn’t this heat up the atmosphere rather a lot locally, like a big microwave oven?

I’m not a Luddite. I just want to make sure that potential problems are addressed.

Regards,

Michael Jabbra

There is a lot of literature on this object and I haven’t time to write a primer again tonight.  There’s a lot out there. Yes, the structures are large, but they don’t mass much and space is large. Hoover Dam is big on Earth; not so large in orbit. I don’t mean to give you short shrift, but there is neither time nor room to write a general introduction to the subject here, and there’s plenty of material out there.  Regarding the vulnerability of space power satellites to military strikes, they are no more so than oil wells and refineries are to air strikes: as the strategic campaign to deny Germany fuels would indicate.

The atmosphere is constantly bombarded with radiation of many frequencies and wave lengths.  As to atmospheric heating, all the heat from the burning coal goes into the atmosphere. With solar power satellites only the solar energy converted to useful energy reaches the earth. The initial capital costs of SPS are very large, with no income return until much of the project is completed. The same is true of dams, and like dams, there are no fuel costs once they are running.  There’s considerably more in my A Step Farther Out. http://www.amazon.com/A-Step-Farther-Out-ebook/dp/B004XTKFWW

Syria

Every time I try to write a long piece on Syria, disaster strikes.  I’ve given up!  It’s not worth it!  I’ll make a few points:

1.  The posture toward punitive strikes was encouraging as another military adventure will work in service of harming our country rather than helping it and I can back up that argument with geopolitical evidence.

2 .  Kerry proved that he was a poor choice with his sarcasm, his attempt to take back the sarcasm, and Putin’s use of his lack of skill to create this situation: 

<.>

Apparently, once again with respect to Syria, the White House was caught off guard by events they are frantically reacting to instead of shaping. Speaking to CNN’s Jake Tapper, a White House official publicly responded to Russian President Vladmir Putin’s New York Times op-ed with the admission that Putin "now owns" and has "fully asserted ownership" of America’s current foreign policy focal point….

</>

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/09/12/White-House-Putin-Owns-worlds-syria-strategy

3. If the latest act in the circus ends without an escalation of the conflict in Syria, I hope they give Putin a Nobel Peace Prize since they gave Obama one.  Why did Obama get a Nobel Peace prize again?  I’m not asking that as a joke; I really have no idea.  The best explanation I read was that he got it because he was not Bush.  That makes sense to me, but I do not believe it justifies a prestigious award.      But, for me, until I get a clear explanation on that — and other matters — the award means about as much to me as the MTV Music Video Awards or the Pimp of the Year award.  —–Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

The limits of intel

Dr Pournelle

Someone said Assad ordered the use of Sarin in a Damascus suburb <https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=15344> .

You and I both know that there are limits to what sigint can reveal. Misinformation comes over the airwaves as easily as information.

Like you, I am not persuaded that the intel we have is actionable. Seems like a couple of thousand civilians were gassed. Okay, I can accept that, but what does the death of a couple of thousand civilians mean? Who gassed them? Who is responsible? (And those are two different questions.) I do not believe our sigint assets can answer those two questions.

I posed this argument and was told the President has access to better intel than I. I agree that he does, but I used to work on an asset from which he gets his sigint. I know what it did, I know what it could not do, and I know its capabilities have not changed since I left that program.

The intel boys are capturing voice commo. Are they capturing all voice commo? No. Error one. They have to have that commo translated. Is any meaning lost, added, or misinterpreted in the translation? Error two. Are the speakers speaking truth or lying? Error three. Are the speakers who think they are speaking truth misinformed? Error four. There are only a few examples.

Saw a hypothetical posted on a blog. Assad happily agrees to turn over all his WMDs for audit and destruction, but he conditions his surrender of WMDs on Israel’s surrender of its own WMDs. How does that scenario play out?

BTW, a year has passed since the Benghazi tragedy. What has the House of Representatives — the national grand inquest — done about it? Not a bloody damned thing. Boehner should resign. If I still counted myself a Republican, I would be ashamed.

Live long and prosper

h lynn keith

Sarin and Syria

Jerry – I can see several possibilities for how people were exposed to Sarin in a Damascus suburb:

1) Assad ordered its use. Not bloody likely, for all the reasons you’ve explained

2) A lower-level government commander ordered its use. Not likely, but there are always a few dumb-asses with command responsibilities.

3) Someone on the government side fucked up, and launched Sarin instead of regular artillery by mistake. I don’t know how plausible this is. If it was American-supplied, probably almost impossible to do by mistake. If it’s Soviet-supplied, or Soviet-designed and locally-made, who knows?

4) Someone on the government side is secretly a rebel agent, and intentionally used Sarin to trigger international action against Assad.

5) Someone on the rebel side launched the attack and missed.

6) Someone on the rebel side launched the attack to trigger international intervention against Assad.

7) The rebels have Sarin, and Assad’s forces hit it, in a reprise of the incident at Bari in 1943 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_raid_on_Bari>

The last three require the rebels to have Sarin, which doesn’t seem plausible, but there are rumors that the Saudis have supplied them with it. On the other hand, the threat of some sort of action has pressured Assad to admit he does have chemical weapons. (Presumably for retaliation against Israel, of course.)

We’re too "civilized", but if we were going to take an "incredibly small" action against Assad, couldn’t we assassinate him? It wouldn’t take a sniper – we could drop a cruise missile on him. There would still be *some* Syrian government command structure, but it might decide to try to cut a deal with most of the rebels and calm things down, which would be a better outcome than an all-out rebel victory or an all-out government victory. And maybe the Syrian government would fragment, which would probably lead to the rebels fragmenting, and a much more intractable, but probably less bloody, civil war continuing for the foreseeable future.

Anthony Argyriou

Dr. Pournelle,

One of the things that bothers me about the current flap over the NSA is the almost constant reassurance that the people there look at the data collected only for very specific items. As you have often written, we can believe as much of that as we want to.

Congress, among others, is forgetting the basic precept that capabilities, not intentions, are what matter. Even if the NSA is pure as the driven snow, there’s so much power there that someone is sure to abuse it. As to repeated statements about protecting U. S. citizens’ privacy, Mr. Heinlein often noted that security agencies virtually can’t help snooping on their bosses. I wish someone would point this out to oh, say, Harry Reid. Congresscritters might be surprised to know how little privacy they have from the Executive Branch.

I cannot imagine why Reid’s constituents aren’t out for his hide. "Calm down! This has been going on for a while" delivered in a papa-knows-best tone remarkable for its utter arrogance was what he said when news of the Snowden/NSA matter first surfaced. If he were in my state, I’d be collecting signatures for petitions–employees who talk to their employers in that tone get fired–as should Reid.

Secure communications will henceforth involve physical copies, not digital, written by hand as there’s no other way to trust that one’s writing won’t be spied upon–and even that’s no guarantee–and Committees of Correspondence.

Maybe someone’s planning the Third Continental Congress?

jomath

Schneier on the NSA

Bruce has several good articles this week – all are worth reading. Here’s one of them: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/the_nsa_is_brea.html#comments

: Flashback: Governor Palin’s Five-Point Requirements on Military Action, familiar to you?

Jerry:

It appears that Governor Palin has been learning from either you or the founding fathers about foreign policy. The use of the phrase "dragons to slay" is telling.

http://conservatives4palin.com/2013/09/flashback-governor-palins-five-point-requirements-on-military-action.html

James Crawford=

What works in America

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

I thought you might appreciate this article about an Indian international student’s observations in America: To wit, he strongly appreciated the integrity he found here, something not seen in China or India.

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-weirdest-things-about-america-2013-8

… So maybe there’s hope for us after all?

Oh, yes. He also notes that American girls aren’t nearly as promiscuous as Hollywood would leave you to believe. Heh.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

An interesting thought,

Jerry

I left my subscription renewal to Av Week go until the last minute. So three August issues were delayed. At the end of the August 19 issue I found this:

“Speaking at the Risk and Network Threat Forum in a City of London pub, Sarb Sembhi, a director at business security consultants Incoming Thought, suggested it made little commercial sense for private companies to store customer data—call logs, e-mails, SMS (short message services, aka texts)—if the NSA was doing so. Why not then just let the government cache the material, so industry can concentrate on providing better applications and services, he asked.

“I was being tongue-in-cheek—it was meant to be a light-hearted look at the issue,” Sembhi tells Aviation Week. “But applications are valued by the public. They value getting these for free, and . . . completely overlook privacy. They’re up in arms about what their government is doing, but don’t realize that the information the government is getting comes from these same organizations they willingly supply it to.”

Aviation Week & Space Technology Aug 19, 2013 , p. 53

(http://www.aviationweek.com/awin/ArticlesStory.aspx?id=/article-xml/AW_08_19_2013_p53-605191.xml)

Food for thought.

Ed

‘For this pro-Israel American Jew, it is unacceptable for AIPAC to use the funds of donors like me to lobby Congress to go to war, especially in a situation where even President Obama admits there is no imminent threat either to the U.S. or to our allies, where the risks have been poorly thought out and the costs lied about, and where the primary beneficiaries would be Islamists’ murderous ambition and Barack Obama’s unsalvageable credibility.’

<http://spectator.org/archives/2013/09/09/aipac-gone-wild>

—

Roland Dobbins

‘Perhaps the most crucial, piercing question that the people in academia should ask themselves is this: “Are we really needed?”’

<http://crypto.junod.info/2013/09/09/an-aspiring-scientists-frustration-with-modern-day-academia-a-resignation/>

—–

Roland Dobbins

National Geographic Channel and an other Dr. Pournelle

Dr. Pournelle,

I am watching a Nat Geo archeology piece "Diving into Noah’s Flood" with a segment partly featuring the work and an appearance by Dr. Jenny Pournelle. Of course, I was slightly familiar with this subject from links from your blog and from her fiction, but this was a pretty good presentation. Very interesting show and interesting work.

-d

The episode Diving Into Noah’s Flood is interesting; the last half hour is Dr. Jenny

abated vs. bated

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

I have been a long time reader (Science Fiction, Byte, and I don’t know why a Radio Amateur magazine keeps coming to mind) and was enthralled recently to find Chaos Manor still operative – and yes, I am now a subscriber.

English is my native language, though having been born in The Bronx, that might be open to debate.

I am trying to write a novel (doesn’t everyone?) and have found that nuances (and double [and treble] entendres) can be very important to the more educated reader.

So, when I run across a word used by an author I respect, that doesn’t quite fit the the sentence as I understand it, I analyse the word very closely to see what I’m missing.

Your usage of the underlined word in the following paragraph has me at a loss:

"The only problem here is the Federal government which is being furiously lobbied by the existing health technicians unions (one can hardly blame them; perhaps they deserve some early retirement plan?) which seeks to protect their jobs. We can watch the outcome with abated breath…"

unless it’s just a typo for the usual: "bated".

Gary D. Gross

Not a type. Affected perhaps.  But I get so weary of seeing ‘baited breath.=’… 

Sally, having swallowed cheese,
Directs down holes the scented breeze,
Enticing thus with baited breath
Nice mice to an untimely death.

But see   http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2010/Q1/view607.html#**

Twerking Fail Becomes Media Fail

http://patterico.com/2013/09/12/twerking-fail-becomes-media-fail/

Twerking is VERY sexually suggestive dancing thrusting the hips around.

There is a video that is supposedly a twerking fail. The girl catches her pants on fire when she falls over.

It acquired 9 million views almost instantly starting with no publicity.

It was staged.

The full story takes way too many words. View the videos involved at Patterico’s site. It’s a MAJOR MSM fail with darned near all media picking up on the story and never checking it out.

{^_-}

Jerry,

This is necessarily somewhat long, to explain my off-consensus view of the current state of the Syrian war.

It’s chancy trying to understand this war from what can be gleaned on the net – much is disinformation and much more is wild rumor, speculation, and panic. In particular, I distrust the current common perception that the Assad regime is now steadily winning (and to a lesser extent the perception that the rebels are entirely dominated by

jihadists.) Some very skilled propagandists (including the people who invented "disinformatsiya") have a strong vested interest in selling those lines.

(And the benefits of sleep-before-send on long contentious pieces manifest here unusually clearly – strategypage.com just posted a piece paralleling and amplifying many of my points, at http://www.strategypage.com/qnd/syria/articles/20130911.aspx. Of particular note: "Iran has apparently told the Assads that the economic sanctions on Iran (for its nuclear weapons program) mean that the Iranian cash canno[t] keep coming indefinitely. The Assads have to either crush the rebellion or come up with a peace deal." And "The rebels don’t lack for volunteers, with over 80,000 armed men in action.

About 10-15 percent of these are Islamic radicals and they get a disproportionate amount of publicity. This is intentional, as Russia, China and Iran have their foreign language news organizations pumping out stories (some true, most not) about Islamic radicals fighting for the rebels." And "Syrians are resigned to another civil war after the Assads are gone, to deal with the Islamic terrorists.")

The perception of ongoing Assad regime progress seems to largely stem from Lebanese Hezbollah a couple months back sending 5000 or so of their best-trained fighters to assault some rebel-held towns on a key rebel western supply route. The rebels sent in hundreds of fighters from elsewhere to help the defense, but lost anyway.

The common assumption became that this would be the new pattern, but that missed three points: The Hezbollah brigade was there because Syria is desperately short of their own infantry well-trained enough (and politically reliable enough) to conduct successful urban assaults, the Hezbollah brigade took significant casualties in that operation, and Hezbollah doesn’t have many more such well-trained troops at all – they had to thin out their forces opposite Israel considerably to gather these, and they risk their entire position in Lebanon if they send more.

I take it as indicative that there has been a distinct lack of such ambitious operations since. (FWIW, some recent reports now have the Hezbollah soldiers complaining that the rebels are using tactics against them that they’ve used against the Israelis.) My estimate is that, after some initial gains, the situation is again largely a stalemated attrition war. Much then depends on the Assad family’s assessment of how long they can keep feeding the grinder. I would not assume their public display of confidence necessarily reflects their private numbers.

It is possible – not proven, but possible – that they’re a lot more desperate than they appear. (Addendum: Strategypage asserts that Iran has in fact told the Assads that their funding is not endless and Syria needs to settle this thing soon.)

The rebels still hold a significant area of eastern Damascus suburbs.

They seem to have been pushed back in recent months from immediately threatening the airport or major ground supply corridors, but they’re still in position to do so again on short notice given a shift in the balance of resources. Unskilled Syrian troop assaults just get expensive armor destroyed by rockets, the government can’t spare enough skilled troops to take the area, and random artillery bombardment

(historically) mainly just improves the defenders’ fighting positions.

What’s a badly overstretched ruthless family oligarchy to do?

I generally trust western intel leaks not to be knowing falsehood.

Slanted and selective, yes, misinterpreted, often, occasionally gullible swallowing of deliberate misdirection, but not usually made up out of whole cloth. Recent leaks (or outright releases) seem to say: It was sarin (IE short-persistence, suitable for preparing the way for assault troops), it was definitely delivered by artillery rockets, and those rockets may actually have been spotted being fired from government-held areas. A rebel false-flag is not impossible, but seems the less likely explanation.

Recent leaks also say there were multiple (German) comms intercepts before the attacks of Assad himself denying requests by local commanders to use gas, and also an unattributed comms intercept post-attack of the Syrian defense ministry phoning the local chemical warfare unit to ask what the hell is going on.

Among the leading possibilities I see: There actually was strong pressure from local commanders (themselves under strong pressure to get results with scant resources) to let them use gas to solve their local tactical problems, and one local commander then used gas without orders.

Or, a senior Assad in a fit of impatience broke consensus and decided to solve their eastern suburb problem with gas, bypassing the defense ministry and giving the order directly. Or, (I think most likely but far from certain) the permission denials were deliberate disinformation, the gas use deliberate policy, and the chain-of-command bypass covert SOP. Or, things could just have gotten confused enough in the field that some junior artillery captain fired the wrong batch of rockets.

Or, a rebel faction could have acquired the chemicals, mixing and filling facilities, specialized rockets, and launchers, figured out how to operate it all properly, then transported and fired the rockets correctly (and completely covertly) from a location within a few miles of the Government’s chief stronghold. I see that as very unlikely, absent a covert foreign power sponsor – who? The Saudis? Us? (That last possibility is just too barking mad to contemplate, not that the net hasn’t already thrown it up also.)

Some local casualty estimates indicate 50-100 of the dead were rebel fighters, fwiw. The attacks may well have been intended to be decisive and just failed – lack of coordination with ground troops seems a likely problem under a lot of the possibilities. I’ve seen no mention at all of any ground assault following the gas, which could be a major clue or could just be the press being clueless and distracted. But then WW I experience was that gas attack effects were too variable and unpredictable to be decisive most of the time even when they were properly coordinated with a ground assault.

Would senior Assads have read that history? Quite possibly not. Could hard-pressed Assad regime types have convinced themselves despite that history that their strategic deterrent against Israel was also their miracle weapon against rebels? Quite possibly so. Or, respecting their rationality more, might the Assad regime have thought it worthwhile to do the attacks not to be tactically decisive, but rather to induce terror, reduce rebel morale, and boost their own side’s (likely

slipping) morale? If they privately see their days as numbered (how much longer can Iran afford them?) quite possibly so.

I don’t yet assume it’s proven that Syrian government forces fired the gas rockets, but I see that as the way to bet. Given that, I see somewhat better odds that it was a top-level covert decision than a rogue local commander, given it happened right there in Damascus. As for the stupidity of such a decision, well, at this point they apparently have a decent chance of not just getting away with it, but benefiting from it, thanks to our wondrously dexterous diplomacy. (Our statecraft deficit, alas, is now a predictable enough factor to very likely have been included in the Assads’ risk/benefit calculations.)

Two things I am in no doubt about whatsoever: The Syrian situation is an unholy mess. And until we install competent management again we should stay as far out of it (and any such messes) as possible.

Porkypine

We certainly agree on the conclusion.  I suspect that if you could offer the Iraqis the chance to go back to where they were before the US invaded, Saddam Hussein might win a fair election…

ALERTS TO THREATS IN 2013 EUROPE

From JOHN CLEESE

The English are feeling the pinch in relation to recent events in Syria and have therefore raised their security level from "Miffed" to "Peeved." Soon, though, security levels may be raised yet again to "Irritated" or even "A Bit Cross."

The English have not been "A Bit Cross" since the blitz in 1940 when tea supplies nearly ran out. Terrorists have been re-categorized from "Tiresome" to "A Bloody Nuisance." The last time the British issued a "Bloody Nuisance"

warning level was in 1588, when threatened by the Spanish Armada.

The Scots have raised their threat level from "Pissed Off" to "Let’s get the Bastards." They don’t have any other levels. This is the reason they have been used on the front line of the British army for the last 300 years.

The French government announced yesterday that it has raised its terror alert level from "Run" to "Hide." The only two higher levels in France are "Collaborate" and "Surrender." The rise was precipitated by a recent fire that destroyed France ‘s white flag factory, effectively paralyzing the country’s military capability.

Italy has increased the alert level from "Shout Loudly and Excitedly" to "Elaborate Military Posturing." Two more levels remain: "Ineffective Combat Operations" and "Change Sides."

The Germans have increased their alert state from "Disdainful Arrogance" to "Dress in Uniform and Sing Marching Songs." They also have two higher levels:

"Invade a Neighbour" and "Lose."

Belgians, on the other hand, are all on holiday as usual; the only threat they are worried about is NATO pulling out of Brussels.

The Spanish are all excited to see their new submarines ready to deploy. These beautifully designed subs have glass bottoms so the new Spanish navy can get a really good look at the old Spanish navy.

Australia, meanwhile, has raised its security level from "No worries" to "She’ll be right, Mate." Two more escalation levels remain: "Crikey! I think we’ll need to cancel the barbie this weekend!" and "The barbie is cancelled." So far no situation has ever warranted use of the last final escalation level.

And as a final thought, Greece is collapsing, the Iranians are getting aggressive, and Rome is in disarray. Welcome back to 430 BC.

Life is too short…

Regards,

John Cleese

British writer, actor, and tall person

Pritchard

Citizens vs. Cartels

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

I thought you might find this interesting: Citizens in Mexico are forming up into self-defense groups to take on the cartels, doing for themselves what the government won’t.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/in-central-mexicos-hills-a-battle-against-a-drug-cartel/2013/09/09/3d7b7258-1433-11e3-a100-66fa8fd9a50c_gallery.html#photo=1

This is what our second amendment was originally for, yes?

Respectfully,

Brian P.

The problem with self government is that it requires the governed to do some works at governing.  This is one of the attractions of aristocracy.

Mail 788 Monday, September 02, 2013

behind

Jerry,

Leading from behind Congress

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324009304579047431684838844.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

An important caveat: "From the start of the Syrian uprising, these columns have called for Mr. Obama to mobilize a coalition to support the moderate rebels. This would depose an enemy of the U.S. and deal a major blow to Iran’s ambition to dominate the region." (Emphasis added.) The question becomes: (a) how does one decide, and (b) even if one can arm the moderate rebels, are the moderate forces sufficient to overcome BOTH Assad and the Jihadists? I might even agree with this as a strategy, but I see it as impossible of implementation without direct military intervention, and nobody is going to sign up for that under the President who has trashed whatever good might have come out of the intervention in Iraq. PARTICULARLY when a large number of people are beginning to see him as siding with the Jihadists.

J

Doesn’t fit King Barry’s agenda

http://tinyurl.com/ph7st6o

In a report that is sure to be considered blockbuster news, the rebels told Mint Press Reporter Yahya Ababneh they are responsible for the chemical attack last week.

In that report rebels allegedly told said Ababneh the chemical attack was a result of mishandling chemical weapons.

This news should deflate the accusations, against the Assad regime, coming from the U.S., Britain, France and the Arab League.

\More on Syria

Additional reports suggesting that the Obama Administration supported Al-Qaida and the Moslem Brotherhood in conducting the attacks to plant a false flag against Assad:

http://www.wnd.com/2013/08/video-shows-rebels-launching-gas-attack-in-syria/

http://www.livetradingnews.com/un-official-syrian-rebels-used-sarin-nerve-gas-assads-army-6636.htm

Note that I consider these sources less credible than the report from Ms. Gellar which you were unable to confirm and generally discounted yesterday. But there is a consistent theme, and it’s not from the far extreme of the blogosphere even if it’s not from any of the fully accredited sources yet.

I have not rejected the hypothesis that the gas attack was a false flag operation, but I do so on logic, not on evidence, of which I have none. I do not believe Assad is stupid enough to have used a small gas attack that did him no good in taking the territory attacked. The down side is large and the up side seems negligible.

Better King Log

Jerry,

I’ve been following the Syria fuss closely. For what it’s worth, at this point it looks to me quite likely the Assad government really did bombard a rebel neighborhood with sarin – I could make a plausible case they saw this as a net plus for their position in the Syrian civil war (and also that they may end up right about that) but that’s not what I’m writing about.

Many of the pundits and powerbrokers on TV today have been going on about how essential it is that, despite all doubts, Congress authorize the President to Do Something, lest we be seen as irresolute and weak.

My current take: Congress should do everything they can to prevent this President taking further overseas military action, because frankly, with him at the helm we ARE irresolute and weak. Far better to do nothing at all than to do things in the manner that now seems near-certain coming from this White House: Shambolic half measures taken only after extended public leak-fest debate has removed all chance of surprise.

Better to do nothing overseas at all for the remainder of this term than to continue semi-randomly Doing Something this badly, I fear. The best we can hope for at this point is King Log – actually, not so much King Log, as King Stork chained to a log by Congress. A bad way to spend the next three years in a volatile world, yes – but not as bad as our current course. I very much fear where our current course is taking us, far too quickly.

Porkypine

Britain Pulling Out Of Syria War

If the special relationship were that Britain always does what the US wants (and the US always does what the US wants), which it sometimes feels like from here, then it would be over, and good riddance.

But it isn’t. It is primarily a cultural and linguistic relationship. We both have Parliamentary governments derived from George III’s.

In that case the relationship may be strengthened. One of the changes from George III’s government is that they have a Constitution, which is literally and correctly venerated. The right to declare war is reserved to the Congress – one of the differences they introduced from George III. In Britain, up till now it has been the Royal, i.e. PM’s prerogative.

To Quote Abraham Lincoln on the right to declare war:

“This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings <http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln>

have always stood.” <http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln>

Thus Britain deciding that Parliament must approve war making is not a repudiation of our special relationship but a massive endorsement of it as a cultural success. Which is far more important than the issue of the day.

Paradoxically this part of the Constitution has been breached since at least the time of the Kosovo war which Clinton waged without reference to Congress.

The reason for this is that the Imperator/Duce/President/Generalissimo/PM needs to be able to threaten war credibly if he is running an imperial state. For a century and a half after George III we did. Now the US is such and we aren’t.

It is a tension which goes to the heart of whether a country is an Imperium or a Republic.

The best thing Obama could do is the ask Congress’ permission too. If he doesn’t get it he is off the hook. If he does he will have the support nationally, and indeed internationally, he needs.

Despite having the money, ships, aircraft and bombs the US is not a very good imperialist because their heart isn’t really in it. That is their saving grace.

Neil Craig

WMDs in Iraq

Dr. Pournelle,

I have to toss the "BS flag" when anyone says that no one found any sort of VX, Sarin, or whichever sort of nerve agent in Iraq. I

personally met soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division that not only stumbled upon bunkers of 55 gallon drums full of it, they had

to go through the complete decontamination procedures, to include the extra long swabs rammed up into their sinuses and all other

orifices. Painful to say the least.

I’m sure that, for whatever reason, our military was directed to report that no WMDs were found. I cannot come up with any good

reason why this was so, but suffice to say, that statement is not correct. I lump it in the same category with the stories from

Vietnam when our military claimed that Agent Orange had no side effects and from the Gulf War, as is still maintained that Saddam

did not use chemical weapons on our soldiers, even though the chemical detectors were repeatedly set off from the "smoke" drifting

in on my unit’s positions. Our chem NCO told us that his direction was to wear NBC suits and masks until told otherwise.

In short, I was in Kuwait and spoke with the 4th ID chemical guys and know the people that experienced the chem attack in the Gulf

War. The all stick by their stories.

Keep up the good work,

Bill R.

PS – I can’t wait for "Mamelukes" to be published.

I keep hearing these stories, but I never see direct evidence. Others in Navy ops in Kuwait have the opposite story. What I don’t have is a direct account. Which is not to say I don’t believe it, but it was sure in Bush’s interest to take a New York Time reporter to any given cache of war gas including mustard that was found — and I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t do that.

Preferably a reporter who had written about how there were no MWD found. And take Johnny Depp with them…

Jerry Pournelle

Chaos Manor

WMDs in Iraq

I am at a loss why any sort of news like this could be ignored or buried. Perhaps the 55 gallon drums found by the soldiers in Iraq were full of Roundup and gave off false positives like the claim about the aspirin factory in Sudan when Clinton authorized the strikes there.

I do know that CNN was not interested in continued Serb, Croat and Bosnian atrocities up until 1998, when I was over there. I do know that Special Ambassador Holbrook was incensed each and every time we made a report. In my case he demanded that I be confined to base when I submitted a report with photographic evidence. In my case it was Serb "Special Police," formerly 10th Special Forces, conducting illegal roadblocks. My commander blew off the ambassador’s demand and I continued doing my job, but from that point on I had to submit all of my reports for "review" prior to them being placed onto the old Warlord report/database system.

In the case of WMDs in Iraq, perhaps the case is still open.

An example:I do know that the internet was scrubbed in the past year regarding a spy case, a guy named Bergeron, because, my thought and mine only, is that the case is nowhere close to being closed.

Perhaps there were WMDs in Iraq, perhaps they are no longer there, and perhaps they are still being traced to their present end users, or there is some other type of operation going on that involves them. That is the only thing that would make sense to me, but I agree to having a narrow point of view of the situation

Bill

The World’s Most Vulnerable People

Jerry,

John Kerry’s quote near the top of your column today:

"President Obama believes there must be accountability for those who would use the world’s most heinous weapons against the world’s most vulnerable people."

Would seem to apply to the current Executive Branch using the IRS against American Tax Payers that oppose the Current Administrations Politics and Policies.

Bob Holmes

An off-take from ‘A Nation of Sullen Paranoids’

Jerry

Noonan’s piece included this:

I heard this week from a respected former U.S. senator, a many-termed moderate conservative who was never known as the excitable type. He wrote in reaction to Nat Handoff’s warnings regarding the potentially corrosive effect of extreme surveillance on free speech. “All this scares me to death,” the man wrote. “How many times do we have to watch government, with the best of intentions, I am sure (or almost so), do things ‘for us’? Now ‘security’ and ‘terrorism’ argue for and justify the case for ever more intrusions—all in the name of protecting us . . .”

I recalled the Jack Williamson story, “With Folded Hands.” Written in 1947. Nice summary in Wikipedia. Brrr.

Ed

Williamson’s story has scared me from the day I read it when I was still in high school. It seemed to me that Williamson had found the flaw in the Asimov Three Laws (although confess I don’t recall which came first). And a robot does not care.

These people are going to govern themselves?

http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/08/31/egyptian-authorities-detain-suspected-spy-bird/

A migrating stork is held in a police station after a citizen suspected it of being a spy and brought it to the authorities in the Qena governorate, some 450 kilometers (280 miles) southeast of Cairo, Egypt.

Busted! Your car’s black box is spying, may be used against you in court

http://blogs.computerworld.com/20109/busted_your_cars_black_box_is_spying_may_be_used_against_you_in_court

Busted! Your car’s black box is spying, may be used against you in court

"As IEEE pointed out <http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/embedded-systems/the-automotive-black-box-data-dilemma/0> , "In the 37 states without EDR laws, there are no ground rules preventing insurance companies from obtaining the data-sometimes without the vehicle owner ever knowing that the data existed." John Tomaszewski, general counsel at TRUSTe, said "People should not relinquish their Fourth Amendment rights merely because of the location of their information." What about your right to plead the Fifth Amendment and not witness against yourself?"

I’d wondered why they were so excited about destroying old cars in cash for clunkers. A political party which pretends to be all about the poor, destroying cars destined to provide the poor with transportation they could afford. It makes far more sense now. It is all about the surveillance.

Niven fusion thruster

Dr. Pournelle:

NASA has awarded a grant for research into a fission/fusion thruster — PuFF. Details at

http://www.nasa.gov/content/pulsed-fission-fusion-puff-propulsion-system/

Pete Nofel

“Waiting in line each morning for our bread was already practically a suicide mission with all of Assad’s airstrikes, but now we have to watch out for bears who are just there for the bread. Things were better when it was just a ruthless government onslaught.”

<http://www.theonion.com/articles/syria-conflict-intensifies-as-bears-enter-war,33659/>

—

Roland Dobbins

Police not interested in brutal beating on tape

Jerry,

The lack of police response is the salient issue in this incident.

http://www.wnd.com/2013/08/police-not-interested-in-brutal-beating-on-tape/

James Crawford

Wisdom from Newt — SPS made simpler

http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/27/opinion/gingrich-syria-stay-out/index.html Former Speaker Gingrich shows once more his brilliance

http://scinotions.com/2013/08/harvesting-solar-power-in-space-and-sending-it-back-to-earth/ A simpler design for a SPS that scales well

—

73s/Best regards de John Bartley K7AAY CN85qj "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." – RP Feynman

SPS will eventually be built and make energy cheap; but it takes a lot of capital investment.,

Harvard concludes gun control does not work

Bruce McQuain was understating the conclusion from a world wide study of gun bans vis a vis murder rates. The report itself suggests that gun bans usually lead to higher murder rates even if the gun related crime numbers decrease.

Harvard gun study concludes gun bans don’t reduce the murder rate http://hotair.com/archives/2013/08/28/harvard-gun-study-concludes-gun-bans-dont-reduce-the-murder-rate/

Russia with very strict control has 4 times the murder rate of the well armed United States.

Norway, Finland, Germany, and France have remarkably low murder rates while Lumembourg with no handguns and few other guns was 9 times worse than Germany in 2002.

Bruce thoughtfully includes pointers to both the study’s summary and the full study.

Our gun grabbing leaders are trying to kill us off.

{^_^}

Fast Food Strike

Hi Jerry,

Boy Michael Bloomberg must be having his liberal head twisted over this:

http://www.foxbusiness.com/personal-finance/2013/08/29/just-beginning-for-fast-food-strikes/

A choice between artificial wages and union support, versus his war on fast food. A strike might cause people to lose weight! Oh what’s the liberal nanny state to do?

Seriously, these are unskilled workers. If they want to earn more money, get a skill and change jobs. My first job was at a McDonald’s – $3.35 an hour if I remember right, but all it did was motivate me to work harder in school so I’d never have to do that kind of work again! They market pays minimum wage, because the skills and job aren’t worth more than that (and I’ll bet there would be people willing to work for less, if the artificial floor wasn’t there).

For someone to aspire to ‘make a living wage’ at fast food is just unbelievable. Do these people really want a career flipping burgers? But of course, that’s the result of having ‘a world class college prep education for every student’ instead of vocational/technical/shop training in the high schools. A good plumber or auto mechanic makes far more than a 17th century French literature major – and without the loans.

Cheers,

Doug