Category Archives: Mail

Mail 768 Sunday, March 24, 2013

I have a huge backlog of interesting mail. I will try to group it into subjects and clean it up this week. Except that it is tax season..

In today’s View https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=13050 we discuss fracking and natural gas flareoff.

flare off

Dr. Pournelle,

The flare off in Williston is similar to burned off gasses at almost every gas or oil well, and common to refineries, as well. They’re all over Texas, and here in West Virginia.

The oil and gas exploration was done in North Dakota and Eastern Montana beginning over 30 years ago — those farmers were getting rich selling their mineral rights in the late 70’s and early 80’s (while I was fooling around with Minuteman missiles in usually somewhat drier holes). The coal gassification and carbon sequestration that we corresponded a couple years ago was also begun at that same time. The lack of a pipeline in North Dakota is at least one reason partly given as justification for the road improvements that you were once critical of in your blog.

Reflecting, I seem to have followed the oil and gas industry around the country for 30 or 40 years without being directly involved with it. It has always my neighbors who were in it, even during my short stay between Lompoc and Santa Maria. Always the bridesmaid…

According to people I’ve spoken to, the overpressure light gas product that is burned off during the production and refining is too volatile to capture easily, and too dangerous to vent without combustion. It isn’t the commercial product that is wasted. I’ve always thought that a small steam generator could produce electricity to partly supply the sites intermittently, but there’s been none developed cheaply enough for common use.

-d

North Dakota lights

One of your readers says that the lights seen in North Dakota by satellite are from flaring. I would think that a well flare, which is essentially just a torch, would not produce enough light to be seen from space. Active well sites, however, look like small cities when the rig is lit for night drilling.

Best regards,

M Walters

There certainly is a lot of brightness across a one hundred mile stretch there in North Dakota. The important thing to note is that we have the technology and the resources to get out of this economic depression if we really want to; the fact that this effort is stalled says a lot about the state of the republic. The Framers would have left such matters to the states, and not have the federal government interfere so much. Perhaps we will rediscover some of the lost arts we once had.

In Spring of 1989 Roberta and I visited the Soviet Union for the first time. There had been a period in my career when I was forbidden from visiting the USSR, and another period when I would not have dared to, but we went with a party that included a number of others previously forbidden from going to Moscow, as well as political and journalist dignitaries, and I wasn’t worried; and indeed it was a pleasant excursion and quite enlightening. I was even honored with a formal dinner by the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Mr. Gorbachev was in power in the USSR, and he was desperately trying to thaw out the Cold Was and convert the USSR into a liberal socialist state similar to other European nations.

Many wished him well, including both me and President Reagan; indeed it had been the intention of the SDI policy to bring something like that about. The key to ending the Cold War was to allow the USSR to stand down from its mission to liberate the world in the name of communism, release the captive nations, and reduce its enormous inventory of nuclear weapons and delivery systems by running up the price of a big nuclear establishment. Mr. Reagan offered the olive branch of removing the medium range missiles from Europe and a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty at the same time that the US began serious funding of the Strategic Defense Initiative he proposed in his “Star Wars” speech. SDI was strongly advocated by the committee I chaired to prepare the space policy papers for the incoming Reagan administration transition team. But that’s another story. The point I am approaching was that as late as Spring of 1989 none of us thought that the Berlin Wall would fall by November of that year, and that the Soviet Union itself would come apart, freeing the captive nations of Europe not long after.

The Foreign Policy Research Institute often has good papers on both history and policy.

FOREIGN POLICY RESEARCH INSTITUTE

Dear Readers,

Taking note that on Sunday, April 7, Ignat Solzhenitsyn will conduct the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia in a concert commemorating the Fall of the Berlin Wall, we asked FPRI’s Ron Granieri, a historian of modern Germany, to reflect on the fall of the wall and German reunification. What he has produced — The Fall of the Berlin Wall, the Power of Individuals, and the Unpredictability of History <http://www.fpri.org/articles/2013/03/fall-berlin-wall-power-individuals-and-unpredictability-history> — is both illuminating and moving.

While this history is far from complete, it will remind older readers of things best not forgotten, and many readers may encounter much they were never taught in school. The fall of the Wall was sudden, and not anticipated by many. By 1989 Stefan Possony, who was one of the originators of SDI and one of the strategists of the protracted conflict had been disabled by a stroke. Whether he anticipated the fall of the wall is hard to tell: those of us who visited him including my son who was his godson were certain that much of the old brilliance was still in there somewhere, but the frustrations of trying to communicate often reduced him to tears. I am thankful that he lived to see the Wall come down, and the USSR dissolved. If he saw it coming he was the only one who did.

In June 1989, SPD Minister President of Lower Saxony Gerhard Schröder famously remarked: “After forty years of the Federal Republic we should not lie to a new generation in Germany about the chances of reunification. There are none.” In late July, Joschka Fischer of the Greens, future Foreign Minister, went one better, dismissing the demand for reunification as “a dangerous illusion” and called for removing the call for reunification from the preamble of West Germany’s Basic Law. Even later that fall, Fischer said “Forget about reunification; we should shut up about that for the next twenty years.”

Three months later the Wall came down, and the USSR was doomed.

Previously we discussed minimum wages. I have chosen some representative views:

minimum wage raise and consequences

I wonder about the " living wage " thing as has happened in San Francisco and elsewhere where now the minimum wage is over $ 10.00 an hour.

Of course, businesses will raise their prices to compensate for the raise in wages and the corresponding costs for paying for contributions by the employer to unemployment, social security and the like.

I do wonder why no one ever seems to mention what I think would be an obvious result of a $ 22.00 minimum wage,

Wouldn’t it cause food, energy and other costs to go way up thus raising inflation and therefore making the purchasing power of those suddenly " richer " employees even less ?

Heinlein is still right.

TANSTAAFL.

I do know that even in San Francisco which has a kind of rent control, rents continue to go up.

A studio apartment in the city’s Tenderloin ( not the best area to live in for sure ) that rented for $ 200 a month up to 1980 now rents for $ 1200 a month.

If you made $ 22.00 an hour you’d have to work 54 hours just to pay the rent.

If you make the " living wage " you’d have to work about 108 hours to pay the rent.

And that’s before deductions.

This is something the OWS types never think about.

I don’t know about the rest of the country, but here in the SF Bay Area it’s one of the most expensive places to live.

And with people having their hours cut below 30 hours a week to avoid the onerous provisions of Obamacare, it isn’t going to be any easier for lower paid workers.

george senda

Well, of course we can’t let just anyone live in the elite areas like San Francisco and Fairfax, can we? Although there must be someone to hew the wood and draw the water.

Jerry,

Note the chart here: http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/asha-bangalore/major-economic-reports-mixed-message-with-unfavorable-tone

Note the month in which the unemployment rate inflected: July 2007. The month of the second of three increases in the minimum wage enacted by the Pelosi-Reid Congress in 2006 and signed by President George W. Bush’s.

QED, and it’s only Bush’s fault because he didn’t veto their mad scheme to increase the minimum wage 41%in 24 months, which he should have. The economy absorbed the first raise (July 2006 from $5.15 to $5.85, a 14% increase) with fairly minimal effect on employment, but the second increment (July 2007, to $6.55) combined with the then-bursting housing bubble, were the (synchronized,synergistic, and with George Soros funding the Democrat Party, certainly intentional) two triggers of the current downturn. Given that unemployment remains high, another 25% increase in minimum wage (from the $7.25 reached in July 2008 to the $9.00 requested by the President) would pretty much shut the country down.

That’s a definition, not an opinion.

Jim

The following contains a short dialogue continued for some time.

More on minimum wages (possible duplicate – retrying after crash)

You covered this a bit over a year ago, and you were kind enough to print my observations on it then. (Those are at https://jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=4295, and I worked them up into an article at http://www.spectacle.org/0112/lawrence.html).

Revisiting the topic just now, you quoted Milton Friedman once saying that every economist knows that minimum wages either have no effect or create unemployment, and that this was not an observation, it was a definition. You added that that should also be self evident.

It turns out that Milton Friedman was oversimplifying. There are exceptions which are even covered in introductory economics texts, so that that self evident thing isn’t quite true after all. By chance, I recently went into this in a blog exchange at http://statelymcdanielmanor.wordpress.com/2013/02/12/adventures-in-obamaland-the-sotu-2013-condensed-version, which I append below for convenience. The take away point is that there is often a small, sweet spot, in which a low, mandated minimum wage really does help – that is, it improves take home pay rates, numbers of workers, and all up production. The catch is that the common sense result cuts in very early, and politicians usually go for that instead of doing it right. Brad Delong reports that the consensus in the economics trade today is "… the EITC and the minimum wage have different weak points–too high a minimum wage will have a substantial disemployment effect, and too high an EITC does create incentives to pad your hours. A mixed strategy helps attenuate both these flaws."

I also noticed your follow on about Distributism. As far as I know, only some Distributists advocate getting it the way you describe, by forcible redistribution. Although some do, possibly because they see it as the fastest path to their omelette and aren’t much worried about the broken eggs involved, there are others. These more philosophical Distributists have it mind as a standard or reference to steer by and try to get to, but they are more willing to consider less destruction and force on the way there (my tax break approach to wage support might serve as one beginning, since it would actually reduce current burdens). For some Distributists, it might be enough just to get rid of the institutional support for present arrangements, if they think that generational change would do the rest fast enough for their tastes; you can see where the temptation for a quicker fix hits the rest of them.

By the way, distractions including a dying computer have kept me from emailing you feedback lately – I had to compose this off line, saving between crashes. Would you like me to catch up on feedback once I get a new computer, and if so would you prefer individual messages or a big compendium one?

That minimum wage blog exchange follows:-

<BLOCKQUOTE>

In this case, common sense need not be our guide at all, or our sole guide in any case. The history of such political hikes makes quite clear that they reduce, not increase jobs.

</BLOCKQUOTE>

Actually, the history is mixed, with any general pattern lost in the noise. Current best research suggests – no more than that, in my view – that a mandated minimum wage can be moderately helpful as part of a larger strategy that also includes other measures. Brad Delong recently went into it <A HREF="http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/02/yes-thoughtful-economists-think-raising-the-minimum-wage-right-now-is-a-good-idea.html">here</A>, introducing it with "I would point out that the EITC and the minimum wage have different weak points–<I>too high</I> [emphasis added] a minimum wage <I>will have a substantial disemployment effect</I> [emphasis added], and too high an EITC does create incentives to pad your hours. A mixed strategy helps attenuate both these flaws." (My own view is that the best thing, if we start from here, is the tax break approach I discuss <A HREF="http://www.spectacle.org/0112/lawrence.html">here</A>, covered in more detail in the work of mine and of Professors Phelps and Swales that it links to.)

<BLOCKQUOTE>

Minimum wage jobs are essentially for teenagers, unskilled and inexperienced children, entering the workplace for the first time.

</BLOCKQUOTE>

No, not <I>essentially</I> but <I>accidentally</I> (in the U.S.A.). That is, it is an accident of recent U.S. circumstances. Things are different elsewhere, and more relevantly to your concerns, they are becoming different in the U.S.A., and indeed have already done so to a considerable extent.

<BLOCKQUOTE>

But as you noted, I suspect we essentially agree that now is not an appropriate time to raise the minimum wage.

</BLOCKQUOTE>

We don’t agree, because my position is subtler:-

– It would probably help a <I>little</I> to raise the minimum wage a <I>little, now</I>, because of the mechanism I will outline below.

– The actual proposals are probably for too great an increase to be constructive, because that’s what politicians usually go for.

<BLOCKQUOTE>

There is, to me, no appropriate time. It’s not the government’s business.

</BLOCKQUOTE>

Sort of. That is, the government should never have been in that game in the first place, and people’s personal resource bases should never have been destroyed over the generations. That ideal world would have been rather Distributist (google it), with people working for themselves or for others for low, free market <I>top up</I> wages and getting the rest of what they needed from their own private resources (if they were working for themselves, their drawings would fold both of those in together).

But it’s not like that. In the old phrase, they break your legs and give you a crutch. That creates dependency in a poison pill way: simply stopping government support just like that would leave people helpless, with just the metaphorical broken legs. So, on the principle of you break it, you bought it, it <I>is</I> the government’s business to provide support – only, not in the present, continuing way that perpetuates the cycle of dependency the government itself created but as part of a transition that gets us out of here (the tax break system I linked to would work as the first step of such a transition). Naturally, the government would never do that if it could help it, but it still owes it, morally speaking.

Now, as promised, for how mandated minimum wages <I>really</I> work out. Murray Rothbard’s <A HREF="http://lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard315.html">view</A> is typical of the faulty common sense understanding. It’s basically all bullshit because he doesn’t know what he is talking about, apart from his description of the unions’ interests in all this. It only works out like that when the mandated minimum wage is too high relative to the effect of ordinary hiring on the employers’ cost patterns. But when – as often happens – the employer is a significant one in a local area, or operates nationwide but is a big presence everywhere, and the mandated minimum wage is comparatively low, other things happen that change the outcomes. I already mentioned that Lipsey’s <I>Positive Economics</I> explains this quite well using graphs, but as I can’t do that here I will bring it out with a pair of tables using example numbers (I hope the tables are formatted OK! please reformat them if necessary):-

<BLOCKQUOTE>

Minimum wage

Number of Wage rates Total Incremental Total Total net Marginal

employees needed wages utility ($) utility ($)value value

0 9 0 0 0

1 9 9 15 15 6 6

2 9 18 14 29 11 5

3 9 27 13 42 15 4

4 9 36 12 54 18 3

5 9 45 11 65 20 2

6 9 54 10 75 21 1

7 9 63 9 84 21 0

</BLOCKQUOTE>

With this pattern of utility that each additional employee gives to the employer, a mandated minimum wage means that the employer is best off with either 6 or 7 employees (it comes out the same).

<BLOCKQUOTE>

Varying wages

Number of Wage rates Total Incremental Total Total net Marginal

employees needed wages utility ($) utility ($)value value

0 0 0 0 0

1 1 1 15 15 14 14

2 2 4 14 29 25 11

3 3 9 13 42 33 8

4 4 16 12 54 38 5

5 5 25 11 65 40 2

6 6 36 10 75 39 -1

</BLOCKQUOTE>

With this pattern of utility that each additional employee gives to the employer, a floating wage means that the employer is best off with just 5 employees. That’s fewer than with a mandated minimum wage!

What’s going on? Well, when each additional employee is hired, the employer has to increase what he gives to all the employees he already has as well, or they would just quit and re-apply and he would have to take them (or he would have to hire yet others who knew that they could hold out for that much). So the additional cost of each additional employee is <I>not</I> that employee’s wages but that employee’s wages plus the extra that has to be paid to all the others together. That’s not much more each, but it’s quite a bit for all of them together, and that decreases the optimum staffing level – so, with these numbers, a mandated minimum wage gives <I>both</I> more employment <I>and</I> higher wages!

Now, this doesn’t just happen because I found numbers in some sweet spot (in fact, these are the first numbers I tried). What the graphs and equations would tell you, if you could find them, is that under quite ordinary conditions there’s always a sweet spot of some size just above the "free" market wage – because those quite ordinary conditions aren’t actually a free market but a market with employers dominant enough that their own hiring affects conditions more broadly.

Yours sincerely,

P.M.Lawrence

The question is whether find the sweet spot is worth the price of letting the government camel have his nose in the tent. Once you concede that the federal government ought to tinker with such matters you have changed the nature of the Union. I have no objection to leaving it to the States to find the sweet spot you think is almost inevitably there, and I agree that the negotiation isn’t always equal; the question is whether the cure is not worse than the disease.

I wish your computer a speedy recovery and I apologize for the delay in getting this up; things have been a bit hectic here. I always appreciate your comments.

The death of our United States

Dr. Pournelle,

I have a lot of time to think during my daily commute now, and this is something that I think I think.

Historians will look back and mark as the death throes of the United States of America, the era when the meaning of the word "Freedom" changed from explicitly guaranteed personal liberty to an ever expanding list of invented rights and entitlements that must be provided by the government and paid for by someone else.

Everyone thinks their personal favorite cause is a "right", which must be not only protected but enabled by the govt. Our rule of law is therefore perverted to give legitimacy to a chorus of demands for special treatment. This is not equality nor freedom, but is the manifestation of the tyranny of the majority warned against by our founding fathers.

There’s more to it of course, but that pretty much sums it up for me.

Sean

It used to be that discussion of “positive” and “negative” rights was part of elementary civis discussion. In the USSR, for example, there were no “rights” but there was a series of duties and regulations governing the actions of the militia and the prosecutors that was supposed to ensure rights; but there was nothing like “Congress shall make no law” commandments enforceable by an independent judiciary.

Now there is little such discussion in any classrooms at any level. The usual academic assumption is that government ought to Do Good, not prevent evil. “Negative” rights are of no use according to the usual civics instructions now.l

A remarkably honest article about Harry Dexter White.

<http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/138847/benn-steil/red-white?page=show>

Roland Dobbins

White and those like him were part of the fuel that drove Senator McCarthy out of bounds.

Dinosaur Killer Likely To Be A Comet Not Asteroid

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21709229

In which case we can’t predict when the next one will turn up..

It is by no means certain which it was but this shifts the odds

Neil Craig

Of course we told you so…

Asteroid headed toward Earth? ‘Pray,’ NASA advises | Fox News

Jerry:

Hopefully this is a teachable moment.

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/03/20/asteroid-threat-earthly-budgets/?intcmp=features

We had a much bigger, not so near miss more recently. The improbability of so many near misses within such a short period of time suggests that God is trying to tell us something.

I believe that there is an error her regarding the size of near Earth objects that NASA has been tasked with detecting. Detecting objects 87 miles across should be easy while detecting objects 87 feet across is challenging. Objects smaller than 87 feet or ~ 25 meters across pose a significant danger.

Volume of 25 meter asteroid = 16,000 cubic meters.

Assumed density of a near Earth asteroid is 4

Mass of 25 meter asteroid ~ 60 million tons or 60 billion kilograms.

Impact energy at 40 kilometers per second = 5 eex19 Joules.

Equivalent to 11,000 Megatons yield.

It wouldn’t be Lucifer’s Hammer, but the scaling laws for nuclear weapons suggests that the probable lethal radius would be about 200 miles.

James Crawford=

And if we had twenty years?

But then I have :

faulty math in asteroid threat example

The Asteroid strike math is off by an order of 1000—math error ? double x meter^3 to Kilos?

11 mega ton strike not 11,000 Mega ton,

We’d never evolved if his math was correct.

Peter f Foley

It is still a formidable event…

Finally, maybe.

We know beyond a shred of doubt that portable electronic devices don’t interfere with aircraft electronics because the airlines are now putting iPads in the cockpit for use as aircraft manuals and so forth.

But we’ve known this for years, because aircraft aren’t falling from the sky.

People do not actually *turn off* their mobile phones, tablets, whatever. They simply blank/lock the screens of their devices. My guess is that maybe 1/10th of 1 percent of flyers actually truly turn off their electronic devices when traveling on airplanes.

So, given that aircraft aren’t constantly crashing, it’s pretty obvious that the claims of the airlines and the FAA are utterly without merit.

<http://www.technologytell.com/entertainment/14939/essay-electronics-devices-on-planes-is-the-madness-nearly-over/>

Roland Dobbins

It is getting obvious, isn’t it…

Almost in the same breath, I received an order from Ambassador Bremer’s office in Baghdad to cease the grain harvest and let the crops rot in the field.

———————

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

B

Karzai the US and the Taliban

Jerry,

Nobody ever said Karzai wasn’t crafty. By claiming an alignment between the US and the Taliban, he may be able to brand the Taliban as outside invaders and American collaborators, greatly reducing their acceptance. It isn’t about accusing the US of doing something wrong, because we are already western invaders and can’t get any lower in status. But putting the Taliban in our cultural category may be a masterful PR move. It sure won’t make us happy but it could help any non-Taliban govt quite a bit.

Sean

Actually, I hope it works.

Mail 767 Sunday, March 17, 2013

Mark Steyn on Overreach

Jerry,

Mark Steyn in his piece "Axis of Torpor" starts with a sarcastic strafing pass on Hollywood international relations – "I greatly enjoy the new Hollywood genre in which dysfunctional American families fly to a foreign city and slaughter large numbers of the inhabitants as a kind of bonding experience" – but ends with something that sounds remarkably like he’s channeling you.

"As the CPAC crowd suggested, there are takers on the right for the Rand Paul position. There are many on the left for Obama’s drone-alone definition of great power. But there are ever fewer takers for a money-no-object global hegemon that spends 46 percent of the world’s military budget and can’t impress its will on a bunch of inbred goatherds. A broker America needs to learn to do more with less, and to rediscover the cold calculation of national interest rather than waging war as the world’s largest NGO. In dismissing Paul as a “wacko bird,”

John McCain and Lindsey Graham assume that the too-big-to-fail status quo is forever. It’s not; it’s already over."

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/343140

Porkypine

I suppose I have been saying things like that since this site began, and before; I hope someone has paid attention. There do not seem to be very many of us realists yet. I prefer a republic to empire. Incompetent empire is an absurdity, except, of course, for the obvious exceptions. Follow the money.

Competent empire frightens me, but I prefer it to incompetent empire. Competent empire doesn’t expend its own blood and treasure on liberating Iraq and then abandoning it. But that is another story.

The establishment Republicans seem enamoured of expending blood and treasure without favorable results.

Survival with Style — Water for More People!

Jerry,

This is very good news indeed.

<http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/03/16/lockhead-martin-throws-more-dirt-of-mathus-grave/>

"Cheap, clean water may soon be available for the whole planet. According to Reuters, defense contractor Lockheed Martin has developed a filter that will hugely reduce the amount of energy necessary to turn sea water into fresh water. The filter, which is five hundred times thinner then others currently available, lets water pass through but blocks all salt molecules. It will use almost 100 times less energy than other methods for making salt water drinkable, giving third world countries another way of expanding access to drinking water without having to create costly pumping stations…."

I remember your story about having "special ice cubes" to be used to make a point to Luddites. I always enjoy the image of them spitting out the drink after being informed the ice is made from the LA river water. Then the grand finale, "using the best filtering possible!"

Ain’t technology grand? For some things, yes, yes it is.

Regards, Charles Adams, Bellevue, NE

Technology won’t solve all problems but proper application of technology will reduce many problems to soluble multiple problems. A new source of fresh water would do that for a number of problem situations.

: Molten salt reactors

The molten salt concept is gaining in popularity as it does appear to have the passive safety and low-waste properties mentioned. Possibly even better is the LFTR (liquid flouride thorium reactor), a variant that uses thorium for the fuel instead of uranium. Thorium is much more abundant than uranium, and has the advantage of not producing any waste product that can easily be used in bombs. (This, by the way, is likely one of the reasons uranium was originally chosen over thorium). The ability to burn existing nuclear waste and to produce Pu238 (used to fuel spacecraft) are advantages the two concepts share. Another advantage is that because of the much higher melting point of the molten salt, there is no need for high-pressure vessels as in conventional reactors (the salt takes the place of water as the primary working fluid). This enormously increases the safety yet again. The main problem holding these concepts back seems to be the huge investment required for a new design.

Chris Barker

As I said in A Step Farther Out, cheap energy solves most problems; and if your philosophy is one of distribution of resources, then it helps to have a large pie to distribute. But it does require insight. The initial capital costs of Space Solar Power Satellites and a new nuclear power system are comparable. I’d prefer space solar power because the side effects are beneficial and large.

Random House eBook imprints offers contracts that would make a music executive blush

Jerry,

If you encounter aspiring writers who don’t have an agent, it’s worth noting that Random house has some eBook imprints that are trying to snare new writers with lousy contract terms. One is an SF imprint.

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2013/03/06/a-contract-from-alibi/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2013/03/06/note-to-sff-writers-random-houses-hydra-imprint-has-appallingly-bad-contract-terms/

Writers should understand that publishers want everything they can get. It is the writer’s job to see that they don’t get it.

RE: North Korea and the revealer rattling of cutlery by them to gain attention and goodies.

You often have said that you prefer a Republic, but if Empire we must, let it be Competent Empire.

I agree. However, which sort of Competent Empire? We have legions with auxiliaries and Pro-Consuls (usually inept hacks of the Bremer sort, but even Caesar had to put up with those), classic Latin Roman stuff in Afghanistan and Iraq, and most of Latin America is Classic Roman Ally sort of statecraft, down to the "poke A Stick In The Roman (Yanqui) Eye but don’t mess with Roman (Yanqui) Trade.

But then we have the OTHER Roman Empire model, the one Gibbon renamed Byzantine, though the "Byzantine" never called themselves anything other than Roman, though in Greek. Those Romans never had a problem doing the math on whether it was cheaper to Pay Off the Thugs and Barbarians rather than dispatch a Strategoi and several legions of cataphracts to crush them.

We seem to follow that policy with North Korea, and not just because they have a few Hell Bombs to rattle. We followed it long before they went Plutonium on us, for all sort of reasons involving our allies in the region and the Chinese Hordes ("Hey, Sarge, just how many Hordes are there in a Chinese Platoon, anyway?").

In life consistency is the most under rated virtue. In statecraft this is true Doubled in Big Casino with Spades.

The NORKs are hooked on our bribes. Now they want more, and we are going broke.

Oh well, with any luck one of those Horrible Anti-Missile programs the current regime in DC abhors will save us. By the way, doesn’t the current Caudillo in DC have a Pied A Terre in Hawaii? Well within range of even the Kaputnik level rocketeers of the NORKS.

Want to bet there is an AEFGS vclass destroyer/cruiser just offshore from that vacation home?

Petronius

Welcome back. For those wondering about the reference to hordes, it comes from Col Fehrenbach’s excellent history of the Korean War, This Kind of War, which is up there with Cameron’s Anatomy of Military Merit as a must read book for anyone interested in military theory and why men fight.

Competent empire does know how to use bribes, but the best way is to bribe one enemy to fight another. Aetius, sometimes called the Last Roman, understood this full well, to the point at which he kept his Gothic Allies from exterminating the Huns after Chalons: he knew he would have need of the Huns another time. His Emperor decided that he didn’t need Aetius and killed him with his own hand, a deed known popularly at the time as “Caesar has cut off his right hand with his left.” The Emperor did not last much longer: his soldiers watched as another general struck him down on the Campus Martius.

None of this would make sense to our current rulers, who have read neither Gibbon nor Macauley, and probably are not aware of their existence.

Tri-focal computer glasses,

Jerry

Like you, I use tri-focals for daily wear and bifocal computer glasses when I am at my computer. Thank you for inventing the latter. I go to A.J. Pone Optical here in New Jersey, where Dave Pone has been grinding me my custom lenses for several years. In formed they were ready, today I went to pick up new glasses in updated prescriptions.

And Dave had a surprise for me. “Ed,” he says, “You’re just the man for this. I’m trying an experiment on you.” He said he received some trifocal blanks from a lens supplier, and he thought he would try something new. Given that I surf the Net at 40 inches but I like to read papers and things at a normal distance, he sent a pair of blank tri-focal lenses to “the lab” to have them ground to my prescription for the far (40 inches) and near, with the middle magnification falling between them. Coated with anti-glare and finished with a hard layer, the lab sent them back to his shop where he ground them for my frames.

Glory be! They work! I can sit back and enjoy my browsing, sit forward and type at the screen, or look down and read, with the proper magnification for each. Seems like the best ideas are those that in retrospect you say, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Thought you’d like to know of an innovation on your invention.

Ed

I should say that I can make a case for having invented “computer glasses.” I have worn bi-focal glasses for more than sixty years. After I built Ezekiel, my friend who happened to be an S-100 Buss computer, I found bi-focals to be annoying and asked my optometrist to make me a pair of glasses in my prescription with a focal length of 28 inches. This worked well, and I wrote that up in one of my BYTE columns, and I believe I called them my “computer glasses.” Later I found they were ubiquitous. It may have been simultaneous invention – anyone with bifocals might find it obvious – but I think I was the first to publish the notion; and the 28 inches came from my sitting at the computer and using a tape measure to determine the distance from my eyes to the screen.  I have experimented with other distances and found that with my prescription it isn’t critical and 28 inches continues to work.

I never suspected that my computer glasses couldn’t be improved.

Modern slavery

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

I’ve been doing some research on slavery and learned a few things that may be of interest.

I quickly learned that there are more slaves today than at any time in our history. The great majority of these are debt contracted slaves (forced to work off a debt) or sex slaves.

That rang a bell. So I researched a little more and, sure enough, found that all these evils still flourish in the US among Mexican immigrants. All the laws about minimum wage, workplace safety, health and so forth are meaningless when they are applied to workers who have no legal existence in the first place. Many of them are forced to take debts and labor in backbreaking conditions for next to nothing. Not a few are sex slaves.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/30/world/americas/mexico-sex-slavery-ring-on-border-is-broken-immigration-officials-say.html?_r=0 <http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2013%2F01%2F30%2Fworld%2Famericas%2Fmexico-sex-slavery-ring-on-border-is-broken-immigration-officials-say.html%3F_r%3D0&h=4AQHxB4Yi&s=1>

http://www2.palmbeachpost.com/moderndayslavery/

http://www.mediamouse.org/news/2006/02/the-realities-o.php

Naturally, the people who oppose this state of affairs and insist that all residents of the US should be legal and have protection of American law are dubbed "RAAAACIST!" I would have thought that demanding brown-skinned people labor as slaves for white-skinned agribusiness would be more "racist" then demanding equal protection of law for all in the US, but this is America. Up is down, black is white.

What can we do about it? Well, I’m an educator by gift so that’s what I do — go out and learn things, then pass it on to others.

But i think the first, most revolutionary thing we can do is to believe the truth and refuse to believe lies. Believing and teaching truth is ITSELF a revolutionary activity, especially since so much of the world depends on lies.

And the truth is this: Illegal immigration to the US is all about exploiting cheap labor , NOT about charity.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

There are none so blind as those who will not see. The evidence for widespread slavery in this vale of tears is pervasive. Of course in the Roman Republic debtors were free to sell themselves into slavery to relieve their debt. Laws against prostitution often result in slavery to pimps as a side effect. Good intentions need to be applied with prudence…

Cubans evade censorship by exchanging computer memory sticks, blogger says:

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/03/09/185347/cubans-evade-censorship-by-exchanging.html

“Information circulates hand to hand through this wonderful gadget known as the memory stick,” Sanchez said, “and it is difficult for the government to intercept them. I can’t imagine that they can put a police officer on every corner to see who has a flash drive and who doesn’t.”

Tag. You’re it.

Ed

Jerry,

Unfortunately, the "whole number" method as described by Mike Flynn is hardly a joke.

When the kids (and the nieces) were in school I noted that in fifth grade a wholly inappropriate amount of the math coursework was devoted to estimating the answer to math problems instead of reinforcing the ability to do addition and subtraction.

http://www.glencoe.com/sites/common_assets/mathematics/math_review/Estimate_Whole_Num.pdf

Jim

http://www.thefederalistpapers.org/founders/washington/drones-wisdom-from-our-first-commander-in-chief

Roger Miller

Thank you. Very relevant.

McGuffey Readers

This link is about life of McGuffey and his books called "Eclectic Readers".

http://www.timesdispatch.com/opinion/their-opinion/columnists-blogs/charles-f-bryan-jr/the-man-who-taught-america-to-read-mcguffey/article_f768af21-6700-5377-ad01-650476d7b811.html

Bill Moore

The McGuffey readers helped unite the nation. They were excellent for their time, and still worth finding for home schoolers. They could never be adopted in a public school today. The first words of the Soviet first grade readers were “For the joys of our childhood we thank our native land.” The McGuffey readers began with “No man can put off the law of God” which instantly disqualifies them from public adoption.

Reaffirming the Net of a Thousand Questionable "Facts"…

Dr. P,

I know you generally can trust your readers to share facts instead of innuendo, but whoever forwarded the "All European Life Died In Auschwitz" article should have done at least a cursory search to verify the claims accompanying the article. A quick Google search turned up this 2006 blog entry critiquing the copies already in circulation – a little over a year before the claimed publication date of 15 JAN 2008:

who is Sebastian Vilar Rodrigez and who cares? <http://plancksconstant.org/blog1/2006/02/who_is_sebastian_vilar_rodrige.html>

By Bernie on 27 Feb 2006

I can tell a fake when I see one. Before I go into the details let me say that about 100 blogs in the past 6 months repeated the story below and a few like vodkapundit <http://pajamasmedia.com/vodkapundit/2005/11/30/ouch-11/> rightfully had qualms about its

authenticity: ‘With some reservations, I’m posting the translation in full. If it turns out this is a fake, let’s steal a page from the MSM and call it "fake but accurate."’

Here is the post, usually prefaced by Written by Sebastian Vilar Rodrigez, Spanish Writer or "This is a translation of an article from a Spanish newspaper":

All European Life Died In Auschwitz

I walked down the street in Barcelona, and suddenly discovered a terrible truth – Europe died in Auschwitz. We killed six million Jews and replaced them with 20 million Muslims.

In Auschwitz we burned a culture, thought, creativity, talent. We destroyed the chosen people, truly chosen, because they produced great and wonderful people who changed the world. The contribution of this people is felt in all areas of life: science, art, international trade, and above all, as the conscience of the world. These are the people we burned.

And under the pretence of tolerance, and because we wanted to prove to ourselves that we were cured of the disease of racism, we opened our gates to 20 million Muslims, who brought us stupidity and ignorance, religious extremism and lack of tolerance, crime and poverty due to an unwillingness to work and support their families with pride.

They have turned our beautiful Spanish cities into the third world, drowning in filth and crime. Shut up in the apartments they receive free from the government, they plan the murder and destruction of their naïve hosts. And thus, in our misery, we have exchanged culture for fanatical hatred, creative skill for destructive skill, intelligence for backwardness and superstition.

We have exchanged the pursuit of peace of the Jews of Europe and their talent for hoping for a better future for their children, their determined clinging to life because life is holy, for those who pursue death, for people consumed by the desire for death for themselves and others, for our children and theirs.

What a terrible mistake was made by miserable Europe.

________________________________

Here are a few problems.

1. The phrasing and syntax look like they were originally written in English but as if translated.

2. I disregard any post as true unless it gives me the name of the paper and date of publication.

3. Sebastian Vilar Rodrigez only exists in these posts.

4. And most importantly – there is no European Paper with the cojones [one can take a cojones test here

<http://www.queendom.com/jff_access/the_cojones_test.htm> ] to actually publish anything this provocative against Muslims. Indeed Spain has been on a push to encourage Muslim immigration since 2004, see Jihadwatch.

<http://www.jihadwatch.org/2004/10/spain-is-seeking-to-integrate-growing-muslim-population.html>

As to "fake but accurate"; it is undoubtedly true that almost all the sentiments expressed in this "article" reflect the Muslim reality in Europe. It is too bad that no paper actually published it.

Update: The email stating that this appeared in a Spanish Newspaper is false. It did however appear on the rightwing, pro-Israel, anti-Communist, Spanish language website Gentiuno <http://plancksconstant.org/blog1/2006/03/sebastian_vilar_rodriguez_turn.html> .

I noted that the source was unimportant; the question was whether the concept leads to any truths. It is a disturbing thought. Burnham said that liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western Civilization as it commits suicide. He said this during the Cold War. The Soviet Union imploded before the West could sink completely, but that does not mean that he was not correct.

Reaffirming the Net of a Thousand Questionable "Facts"…

Dr. P,

As an unapologetic propagandist, my focus is not on the source, it is on protecting fact-based credibility.

One of the most compelling ways to beat opponents in any public debate is to discredit them, and that can be done by showing where they have claimed something provably false. It doesn’t have to be important, it just has to be something they can’t deny saying that just ain’t so. Shifting the focus from what is right to who is telling the truth is akin to throwing dirt in someone’s eyes during a fist-fight — and usually just as effective. Death by a thousand fact-checks, as it were.

That’s why I like the blogger’s label of "fake but accurate" — I expect to find myself using that label frequently, because "apocryphal" seems to have faded from the common vocabulary.

So, when confronting folks denying that the Holocaust ever happened, I think it’s better to correct (or at least identify) known errors up front, even if it takes a little of the pungency away. Why make it easier for them to accuse you of spreading a Big Lie by passing along easily disproved little lies?

      Regards,

      William

"Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well." – John Gardner

Omnibus Bills, Madison & Goo Goos

Jerry,

I read a quote from Madison in the Federalist that is very apropos today and for the past few decades:

The internal effects of a mutable policy are still more calamitous. It poisons the blessings of liberty itself. It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood: if they be repealed or revised before they are promulg[at]ed, or undergo such incessant changes, that no man who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow.

Madison, Federalist 62

One of the more egregious examples in the last year or two is the Affordable Health Care Act–Choose your own example [even the bills for the major departments are great examples too.]

In its defense Speaker Pelosi memorably said:

"You’ve heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one or the other. But I don’t know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future, not just about health care for America, but about a healthier America, where preventive care is not something that you have to pay a deductible for or out of pocket. Prevention, prevention, prevention-it’s about diet, not diabetes. It’s going to be very, very exciting.

"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy. Furthermore, we believe that health care reform, again I said at the beginning of my remarks, that we sent the three pillars that the President’s economic stabilization and job creation initiatives were education and innovation-innovation begins in the classroom-clean energy and climate, addressing the climate issues in an innovative way to keep us number one and competitive in the world with the new technology, and the third, first among equals I may say, is health care, health insurance reform. Health insurance reform is about jobs. This legislation alone will create 4 million jobs, about 400,000 jobs very soon."

Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, at the 2010 Legislative Conference for National Association of Counties, March 9, 2010 <http://pelosi.house.gov/news/press-releases/2010/03/releases-March10-conf.shtml>

Here is a charitable report of interpretation of Speaker Pelosi’s remarks

"In the fall of the year," Pelosi said today, "the outside groups…were saying ‘it’s about abortion,’ which it never was. ‘It’s about ‘death panels,” which it never was. ‘It’s about a job-killer,’ which it creates four million. ‘It’s about increasing the deficit’; well, the main reason to pass it was to decrease the deficit." Her contention was that the Senate "didn’t have a bill." And until the Senate produced an actual piece of legislation that could be matched up and debated against what was passed by the House, no one truly knew what would be voted on. "They were still trying to woo the Republicans," Pelosi said of the Senate leadership and the White House, trying to "get that 60th vote that never was coming. That’s why [there was a] reconciliation [vote]" that required only a simple majority.

"So, that’s why I was saying we have to pass a bill so we can see so that we can show you what it is and what it isn’t," Pelosi continued. "It is none of these things. It’s not going to be any of these things." She recognized that her comment was "a good statement to take out of context." But the minority leader added, "But the fact is, until you have a bill, you can’t really, we can’t really debunk what they’re saying…."

Jonathan Capehart, Washington Post, 6/20/12, "Pelosi Defends her Infamous Health Care Remark",<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/post/pelosi-defends-her-infamous-health-care-remark/2012/06/20/gJQAqch6qV_blog.html>

Being a "good government type" (derisively described by the party regulars as a Goo Goo) I would suggest [It has been suggested before by others] to Speaker Pelosi and others of her ilk on both sides of the aisle that there be a public review period for each bill "… so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy."

One suggestion I like for a review period is to have a day of review for each 20 pages (I define a page as 250 words) of a bill. The Affordable Health Care Act has about 363,000 words

See <http://computationallegalstudies.com/2009/11/08/facts-about-the-length-of-h-r-3962/>

and thus would require about a 73 day review period.

I would even recommend that the bill be in "final form" so that one would not have to bounce around the US Code to following the references.

I have always been an unrepentant Goo Goo. The party regulars’ tactic has always been to outwait the Goo Goos as they generally have to go back to their life and cannot remain long in the arena thus allowing the party regulars to continue unhindered as before.

Regards, Charles Adams, Bellevue, NE

The origin of the term “goo goo” for the Good Government clubs goes back a long way. It is discussed extensively in Boss Flynn’s “You’re the Boss”, still one of the best accounts of how machine politics works. (Flynn died in 1953 so our ridiculous copyright laws decree that the book, which is long out of print, won’t be public domain for ten more years, and I suspect that my copy has long vanished into the coffers of the book borrowers. ) Flynn’s point was that the goo goos come and go, but the machine is around for the long haul.

We seem to be building a national machine. The Democratic Party had such in the South from the time I was born until the Solid South went from solidly Democrat to somewhat reliably Republican. Oddly enough the Negro vote, which would have been solidly Republican (the GOP freed the slaves) had it existed in the early part of the 20^th Century was won over by Roosevelt to be Democrat.

Of course Madison knew precisely what he was talking about: make the law so complex that no one can understand it or even know it, and you have effectively finished off the republic. This is one reason why the words of Dick the Butcher in Shakespeare’s Henry VI is so popular: “First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” Of course Dick the Butcher is a revolutionary and wants to bring chaos. On the other hand, at one time at least the Constitution of the Republic of Andorra (a small county sized micro-nation nestles in the Pyrenees between France and Spain which supports itself on smuggling and tourism had these words. “Those black robed ones whose profession is to stir disputes are forever banned from this Republic on pain of instant death.” I think they may have changed that n the last decades. Probably at the instigation of the lawyers?

John Adams considered the lawyers the aristocrats of the republic. It was an aristocracy one could enter by hard work and intellectual merit.

re: "reading education"

Jerry,

Read and pondered all of the bits and pieces on the topic in the recent stuff, set me to looking back into my own past….

My world didn’t have this current debate over method/style to educate the little ones and I can’t speak as to the effectiveness of 50’s/60’s era "Dick and Jane" books that were the norm at the time, I pretty much disregarded them as trivial. What I do know and remember quite well was that, by the time I was 4 I knew:

a) What a dictionary was

b) How to use it

c) Where in my house the thing was located And I was so massively curious that I knew full-well that, if I was to understand something unfamiliar on a printed page, that my very best friend was that honkin’ big book chock full ‘o words that I had to climb up on a chair to fetch down with both hands…..

Perhaps some thought into something so basic as teaching kids dictionary use?

Craig

Rev. C.E. Aldinger

Subj: Failure analysis: Failed steam tubes were too-perfectly manufactured!

http://atomicinsights.com/2013/03/san-onofre-steam-generators-honest-error-driven-by-search-for-perfection.html

>>At just the wrong condition – 100% steam flow – a combination of relatively dry steam, precisely manufactured anti-vibration bars (AVB), and densely packed u-tubes resulted in a few hundred (out of nearly 10,000) tubes vibrating with a large enough amplitude to make contact. The unexpected vibration and contact resulted in accelerated wear and caused one tube to fail while the steam generator was operating.

…

Surprisingly enough, the reason that the condition does not exist in Unit 2 is that the anti-vibration bars (AVB) in Unit 2 were made with enough less precision that they prevented the perfect pitch situation.

Instead of being virtually perfectly round holes through which the steam generator tubes could penetrate with tight tolerance but no contact, the AVB’s in unit 2 had enough manufacturing variation that they made contact with the penetrating tubes with an average force that was twice as high as the minor, incidental contact achieved in Unit 3.

…

That extra contact force, which was considered to be undesirable by the designers at the time they designed and manufactured the tubes, provided enough unplanned disruption to the tube bundle that the harmonic vibration could not get started and could not reach enough of an amplitude to cause tube to tube wear (TTW).

It is instructive to learn that the tighter tolerances in unit 3 were purposely chosen because the supplier was seeking continuous process improvement. MHI engineers had determined that a small change in the manufacturing process could improve the repeatability of the AVB holes.

The design team agreed that the tighter tolerances resulted in a design that was “significantly more conservative than previous designs in addressing U-bend tube vibration and wear.” (page 48 of MHI’s root cause

analysis)

Because the computer models used for the design process were not perfect fidelity reproductions of the complete environment of the steam generator, simulation runs did not reveal the potentially detrimental effect of the tighter tolerances.<<

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

Mail 766 Monday, March 11, 2013

NASA warns ‘something unexpected is happening to the Sun’ in year that is supposed to be the peak the sunspot cycle

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2290289/NASA-warns-unexpected-happening-Sun-year-supposed-peak-sunspot-cycle.html

The solar wind’s energy source has been discovered:

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/08mar_solarwind/

And the probe with the data? "After all these years, Wind is still sending us excellent data," says Szabo, the mission’s project scientist, “and it still has 60 years’ worth of fuel left in its tanks.”

And then there is the next one: “Solar Probe Plus, scheduled for launch in 2018, will plunge so far into the sun’s atmosphere that the sun will appear as much as 23 times wider than it does in the skies of Earth. At closest approach, about 7 million km from the sun’s surface, Solar Probe Plus must withstand temperatures greater than 1400 deg. C and survive blasts of radiation at levels not experienced by any previous spacecraft. The mission’s goal is to sample the sun’s plasma and magnetic field at the very source of the solar wind.”

"With Solar Probe Plus we’ll be able to conduct specific tests of the ion cyclotron theory using sensors far more advanced than the ones on the Wind spacecraft," says Kasper. "This should give us a much deeper understanding of the solar wind’s energy source."

Ed

Maunder Minimum approaching

This is a year old but I managed to miss it (possibly by milliseconds) when I was working on it last January.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/25/first-estimate-of-solar-cycle-25-amplitudesmallest-in-over-300-years/

The expected peak sunspot level of the next solar cycle is a monthly average of Wolf Number (SSN) of 7.

Note that since the SSN is calculated to have a minimum value of 11 (10 x number of sunspot groups + number of observed distinct spots), this means that a "typical" peak month will have at least 10 spotless days.

These are definitely Maunder Minimum – Little Ice Age numbers.

Jim

And we continue to learn more about the energy economy of the solar system, while pretending that our current models of earth’s energy exchanges are accurate.

Dr. Pournelle, this is my favorite example of security nonsense.

In November of last year I was going to fly to LA and, among other things, meet a model there for some photography. She’s a big comic book fan and so we planned some shoots around comic book characters and concepts. As part of this, I put a plastic but semi-realistic toy gun in my luggage. While turning it in to the airline, I informed them there was a plastic toy gun in the luggage and they should so inform the TSA so they could confirm it was harmless. Naturally a half hour later I was paged to report to the front and was told that I had to be escorted into the TSA area so they could speak with me about my luggage. Once back there I was informed that I couldn’t fly unless I either got rid of the toy or cleared it so they could see there were no real cartridges in the "weapon." I pointed out that it wouldn’t matter, it was not going to be in the cabin, so I’d have no access, I couldn’t fire it by telekinesis and if the nonexistant cartridges did fire in a plastic chamber before a plastic barrel, they’d break both and have no noticable forward thrust to be dangerous. The guards and the policeman on site agreed with all of this, but it couldn’t be resolved without a set of tools so we could take the thing apart and verify there was nothing in there other than a spring. I’d have thought the x-ray machines could have told them that. All concerned knew it was nonsense, so why were we trapped into that waste of time?

A couple said that they’d be interested in seeing the shots afterwards. Naturally, once I got to LA the model called in sick…Good thing I had other projects planned.

I’m not convinced it is possible to be hard enough on the TSA, much less "piling on."

Graves

Domesticated Dogs

Hi Jerry,

I didn’t think it was "piling on" to ask why TSA picked 2.36 inches, I just wanted to know.

However, if there is going to be a TSA pile-on I’d be happy to make time to join it. Not so much because I have been selected several times for pat-down screenings, but because at the Minneapolis airport the TSO thought it would be funny to begin by explaining, "I’m going to give you a full-body massage," an innuendo that made it even more unpleasant than usual.

On a more worthwhile topic, I always enjoy reading discussions about dogs on Chaos Manor, so I am sending along this news item —

http://news.yahoo.com/dogs-domesticated-33-000-years-ago-skull-suggests-220437160.html

A canine skull found in the Altai Mountains of Siberia is more closely related to modern domestic dogs than to wolves, a new DNA analysis reveals.

The findings could indicate that dogs were domesticated <http://www.livescience.com/20480-dog-domestication-mystery.html> around 33,000 years ago. The point at which wolves went from wild to man’s best friend is hotly contested, though dogs were well-established in human societies by about 10,000 years ago. Dogs and humans were buried together in Germany about 14,000 years ago, a strong hint of domestication, but genetic studies have pinpointed the origin of dog domestication in both China and the Middle East.

–Mike

I fly every week (and opt-out from the body scanners), and am absolutely sure that the recent policy changes make no material impact on airplane security. Someone at the TSA probably made the judgment that if an incident occurs, it would be better if the policy allowed it, than if the security screenings failed (which of course, they do for items like this).

Now that may seem cynical, but I believe it also is designed to protect the traveling public from even more onerous screening requirements. Now if something happens, they just re-introduce the ban. If something had happened with the ban in place, the searches and restrictions would have reached untenable levels due to political and media pressure to ‘do something’.

Not everyone in the TSA is an idiot – many good people are trapped by a flawed system under immense political pressure to have impossible perfect security. Congress shoulders far more blame than the TSA. =

Americans on American soil

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

I’ve seen the stuff going around the blogosphere claiming that the president reserves the right to kill Americans on American soil. Here is, so far as I can tell, the actual position:

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/03/05/eric-holder-yes-in-extraordinary-circumstances-the-president-can-order-americans-killed-on-americans-soil/

"

As members of this administration have previously indicated, the US government has not carried out drone strikes in the United States and has no intention of doing so. As a policy matter moreover, we reject the use of military force where well-established law enforcement authorities in this country provide the best means for incapacitating a terrorist threat. We have a long history of using the criminal justice system to incapacitate individuals located in our country who pose a threat to the United States and its interests abroad. Hundreds of individuals have been arrested and convicted of terrorism-related offenses in our federal courts.

The question you have posed is therefore entirely hypothetical, unlikely to occur, and one we hope no president will ever have to confront. It is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the Constitution and applicable laws of the United States for the President to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States. For example, the president could conceivably have no choice but to authorize the military to use such force if necessary to protect the homeland in the circumstances like a catastrophic attack like the ones suffered on December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001."

So, if I’m reading this right, what he’s saying is that the President can order American fighters to shoot down another hijacked airliner even if it still has American civilians aboard.

That’s not exactly controversial, is it? The President has had the power to act in emergencies since Washington suppressed the Whiskey Rebellion. Congress has the power to not fund his actions (Lincoln didn’t have to ask them to authorize him to reassert the lawful authority of the US in 1861, but he DID have to ask them for money, volunteers, conscription et al) and Congress has the power to impeach him if he exceeds his authority.

So I think this is a tempest in a teapot, where conservatives are trying to find a club to beat the President with. There are sufficient legitimate clubs to beat him with, so there is no need to resort to imaginary ones.

Still, it does raise a question. Assasssination of military targets is legitimate in wartime. I don’t think anyone is going to argue shooting down Yamamoto was any violation of the laws of war. Problem: Our enemies in the war on terror don’t wear uniforms. Often, we are dependent for targeting on the same intelligence agencies which reassured us Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. You can see why I would not find this reassuring.

The other problem is that the war on terror is never going to end. "Terror" is not one single organization that can be brought to terms on the battleship Missouri. It’s a tactic used by many different groups, and it’s one we’re going to have to deal with for the foreseeable future.

Which means war powers and wartime emergencies are not adequate for combatting terror. Terror is now part of the normal world. Which means we need normal peacetime protocols for dealing with it.

Which means we need some way to apply Magna Carta’s principles to drone strikes.

The question I have … and this is serious, not rhetorical .. is how do we do this and maintain a free society? The closest historical analog I can think of is the Protestant hunting of Jesuit priests as infiltrators back in the days of Elizabeth. I’m not convinced that’s necessarily a model we want to follow, but I’m at a loss to think of a better one at this time.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

I would have thought that interception of an enemy admiral in time of war was not controversial; but execution of American citizens without trial certainly is. Ex parte Milligan settled that, or I would have thought so. There is a difference between actions against terrorists, citizens or not, when they are are not subject to arrest and detention; but on American soil while the courts of law still exist and the authorities retain power, the army is not permitted to try and execute citizens even when taken in actions against the United States. Arrest and detain, yes, but not execute. This goes to the heart of the power of the state. We may have an inherent right to pass an ultimate decree, but that has not been done here. The Nazi saboteurs landed on Long Island in WW II were executed (at least some of them were) after trial by a military tribunal, but they were not shot down like dogs on the court house steps.

Inter armes, silent leges; but that is not the case in America in this year of grace 2013.

Chickens

Jerry,

Your post on the gleaming chicken processing plant in Iraq reminded me of the TV series "The Walltons" where Ike Godsey decided to buy all those refrigerators for the folks on Walton Mountain, none of whom had electricity at the time. That brilliant move resulted in John Walton re-mortgaging his home he had just paid off to bail out Ike and Cora Beth. Classic…

Regards,

Gnawbone Jack

Jack Collingsworth

HMS Friday: The Legend of Hugh Williams.

<http://thescuttlefish.com/2010/12/hms-friday-the-legend-of-hugh-williams/>

Roland Dobbins

A very strange story indeed. And of course we want to find things like this…

And within an hour of posting this, I got

Jerry: The Hugh Williams Shipwreck Coincidence tale doesn’t stand up to scrutiny: July 16, 2012

<http://open.salon.com/blog/rick_spilman/2012/07/16/the_unsinkable_hugh_williams_truth_behind_the_legend>

LTM

which I suspected from the start; but people want to believe stories like this. That includes me.  Ah well.

TSA exposé…

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/confessions_of_tsa_agent_we_re_bunch_OhxHeGd0RR9UVGzfypjnLO

Charles Brumbelow

Frack the Chinese

Dear Jerry –

From http://www.cnbc.com/id/100531212?__source=xfinity|mod&ticket=ST-100688-wOANG9T1fBrrjnhpFfM7pb52ESm2kQELAvA-20&rememberMe=null

"With oil production at a twenty year high and predictions of a manufacturing renaissance for the U.S. economy, one of the world’s largest investment banks has detailed how the "shale revolution" will negatively affect emerging markets such as China."

If true, it’s still a ways off, but it’s an interesting projection.

As for the title, I just couldn’t help myself. No biscuit for me.

Regards,

Jim Martin

Energy is the key ‘element’ in modern world history.

Sowell: ‘And public alarm is what can get budget cuts restored.’

<http://washingtonexaminer.com/will-obama-turn-the-united-states-into-the-worlds-largest-banana-republic/article/2523217>

Roland Dobbins

‘Like Martel’s campaigns before them, the Crusades were defensive actions designed to stave off Muslim aggression.’

<http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/03/we_might_be_muslim_today_if.html>

Roland Dobbins

The siege of Vienna in 1529 was a major turning point in history. It could have gone the other way. Fletcher Pratt calls it “The failure to compete the crescent,” and makes it one of the key battles that changed history. Another was Las Navas de Teloso, in 1212. Those not familiar with Pratt’s Battles That Changed History are unfortunate; it is one of the best summary histories of Western Civilization that I know of.

Lengthy but interesting…

…report considering psychiatric medicines and school violence. Includes a number of references to specific situations.

http://www.fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/psychiatric-meds-prescription-for-murder/37091/

Charles Brumbelow

Army tuition assistance suspended

To they whom joined for the college money:

<.>

The Army announced Friday it is suspending its tuition assistance program for soldiers newly enrolling in classes due to sequestration and other budgetary pressures.

“This suspension is necessary given the significant budget execution challenges caused by the combined effects of a possible year-long continuing resolution and sequestration,” Paul Prince, an army personnel spokesman at the Pentagon, wrote in an email to Stars and Stripes. “The Army understands the impacts of this action and will re-evaluate should the budgetary situation improve.”

The Army’s announcement follows a similar move by the Marine Corps.

The Army’s tuition assistance program was available for troops to complete a high school diploma, certificate program or college or master’s degree. Under the program, the Army paid 100 percent of the tuition and authorized fees charged by a school up to established limits of $250 per semester hour or credit hour or up to $4,500 per fiscal year.

</>

http://www.stripes.com/news/army-suspends-tuition-assistance-program-for-troops-1.210999

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Of course one could argue that given the economy we do not need more incentives to fill a volunteer military – at least in the army. Career navy enlisted may be a bit harder to come by. It depends…

Sunstone.

<http://www.gadling.com/2013/03/07/fabled-sunstone-discovered-in-english-shipwreck/>

Roland Dobbins

Interesting UAV drone RPA article

Jerry,

This article is from last year and it focuses more on RAF Reaper flying than USAF, but it’s a pretty good read and given the political discussion of the week, it’s timely.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/9552547/The-air-force-men-who-fly-drones-in-Afghanistan-by-remote-control.html

Sean

– near-term reliable fusion

Jerry,

I haven’t seen this in your blog, and think it is a reliable competent group (skunk works) that seems to be on to a better way to get to fusion affordably in the near term.

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-02/fusion-power-could-happen-sooner-you-think

r/Spike

One can hope, but I do not think we are much closer to economically useful fusion energy than we were thirty years ago.

Holocaust Memorial Museum is not on the National Mall

Jerry:

It has been many years since I visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, but I don’t remember it being on the National Mall. Rather it is on 14th Street south of Independence Avenue, which is the southern boundary of the Mall in that area as I read Google Maps (see below) and the Wikipedia article about the Mall. That article describes the Museum as a nearby attraction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Mall

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Mall> Emacs!

Best regards,

–Harry M.

Indeed. I have visited the Holocaust museum but long enough ago that my memories are confused on the location.

In your March 6, 2013 mail you reprinted an e-mail from someone that includes what purports to be a long article published in a Spanish newspaper in 2008 by one Sebastian Villar Rodriguez.

One thing that should make you immediately suspicious is that there is no source given for the article despite the claim of an exact date of publication. Almost always claims of this type are false in my experience.

The simplest search will pull up tons of claims regarding this article over the past decade.

This one may or may not be the original from 2004. I don’t remember enough Spanish from high school (it was a long time ago) to say much about it.

http://www.gentiuno.com/articulo.asp?articulo=1865

I have not found any earlier posts about it.

The e-mail you posted includes other statements that have circulated in other e-mails for some years.

Researching the truth and original sources for the myriad claims are left as an exercise for the reader (as they used to tell us in school.)

Best regards,

–Harry M.

The lists of accomplishments have circulated for many years because so far as I know they are true. It may well be that the source is not; I found the subject matter worth thinking about. Since I do not know who Sebastian Villar Rodriguez is I wouldn’t regard him as an authority to begin with. Sometime it is not the source but the subject matter that I find worth contemplating.

And do note that I do not necessarily approve every statement made in mail. I publish what I think is owrth thinking about, or is amusing, or which just struck my fancy at the time. And I very much invite people to do their own research.

Mail 765 Wednesday, March 06, 2013

Drone Strikes On US Soil Possible

Jerry,

The Obama administration just keeps getting more interesting, with the US Attorney General telling Congress that drone strikes could be ordered against Americans on American soil. http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/05/politics/obama-drones-cia/index.html?hpt=us_c1

Will it read your Miranda rights first? Or is this strictly a shoot first and ask questions later thing?

Kevin L. Keegan

Senator Rand Paul (R, Kentucky) has been conducting a one-man filibuster to draw attention to this. He says his goal is to get a statement from the President on the subject. Proscription lists were a major part of the downfall of the Roman Republic, and the cause of the death of Cicero, whose head was displayed in the Forum.

[Apologies: I earlier said ‘conscription’ which is an entirely different discussion. Mr. Heinlein always said that a nation that needed conscripts to defend it wasn’t worth defending. Machiavelli believed that Republics that did not employ conscription probably would not survive. Having the children of rich and poor alike involved in war affects whether or not a republic goes to war. The US ‘solution’ to this for most of its lifetime was to keep the Marines a voluntary organization and employ the Marines when it was an operation short of war. The Corps was kept rather small.  Marines and the Navy belonged to the President, but if you needed to involve the Army that was the Department of War and required Congressional action.  Conscription was needed in preparation for actual wars, as in the leadup to WW II. But it’s another discussion.

Senator Paul was discussing drones and proscription lists, and unlike most filibusters, what I heard in random trips to the live broadcast was relevant to the subject.]

Auschwitz – This is fascinating

How’s this for controversy…

The following is a copy of an article written by Spanish writer Sebastian Vilar Rodriguez and published in a Spanish newspaper on Jan. 15, 2008. It doesn’t take much imagination to extrapolate the message to the rest of Europe – and possibly to the rest of the world.

REMEMBER AS YOU READ — IT WAS IN A SPANISH PAPER

Date: Tue. 15 January 2008

ALL EUROPEAN LIFE DIED IN AUSCHWITZ By Sebastian Vilar Rodrigez

I walked down the street in Barcelona , and suddenly discovered a terrible truth – Europe died in Auschwitz … We killed six million Jews and replaced them with 20 million Muslims. In Auschwitz we burned a culture, thought, creativity, talent. We destroyed the chosen people, truly chosen, because they produced great and wonderful people who changed the world.

The contribution of these people is felt in all areas of life: science, art, international trade, and above all, as the conscience of the world. These are the people we burned.

And under the pretense of tolerance, and because we wanted to prove to ourselves that we were cured of the disease of racism, we opened our gates to 20 million Muslims, who brought us stupidity and ignorance, religious extremism and lack of tolerance, crime and poverty, due to an unwillingness to work and support their families with pride.

They have blown up our trains and turned our beautiful Spanish cities into the third world, drowning in filth and crime.

Shut up in the apartments they receive free from the government, they plan the murder and destruction of their naive hosts.

And thus, in our misery, we have exchanged culture for fanatical hatred, creative skill for destructive skill, intelligence for backwardness and superstition.

We have exchanged the pursuit of peace of the Jews of Europe and their talent for a better future for their children, their determined clinging to life because life is holy, for those who pursue death, for people consumed by the desire for death for themselves and others, for our children and theirs.

What a terrible mistake was made by miserable Europe.

The Global Islamic population is approximately 1,200,000,000; that is ONE BILLION TWO HUNDRED MILLION or 20% of the world’s population. They have received the following NobelPrizes:

Literature:

1988 – Najib Mahfooz

Peace:

1978 – Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat

1990 – Elias James Corey

1994 – Yaser Arafat:

1999 – Ahmed Zewai

Economics:

(zero)

Physics:

(zero)

Medicine:

1960 – Peter Brian Medawar

1998 – Ferid Mourad

TOTAL: 7 SEVEN

The Global Jewish population is approximately 14,000,000; that is FOURTEEN MILLION or about 0.02% of the world’s population. They have received the following Nobel Prizes:

Literature:

1910 – Paul Heyse

1927 – Henri Bergson

1958 – Boris Pasternak

1966 – Shmuel Yosef Agnon

1966 – Nelly Sachs

1976 – Saul Bellow

1978 – Isaac Bashevis Singer

1981 – Elias Canetti

1987 – Joseph Brodsky

1991 – Nadine Gordimer World

Peace:

1911 – Alfred Fried

1911 – Tobias Mi chae l Carel Asser

1968 – Rene Cassin

1973 – Henry Kissinger

1978 – Menachem Begin

1986 – Elie Wiesel

1994 – Shimon Peres

1994 – Yitzhak Rabin

Physics:

1905 – Adolph Von Baeyer

1906 – Henri Moissan

1907 – Albert Abraham Michelson

1908 – Gabriel Lippmann

1910 – Otto Wallach

1915 – Richard Willstaetter

1918 – Fritz Haber

1921 – Albert Einstein

1922 – Niels Bohr

1925 – James Franck

1925 – Gustav Hertz

1943 – Gustav Stern

1943 – George Charles de Hevesy

1944 – Isidor Issac Rabi

1952 – Felix Bloch

1954 – Max Born

1958 – Igor Tamm

1959 – Emilio Segre

1960 – Donald A. Glaser

1961 – Robert Hofstadter

1961 – Melvin Calvin

1962 – Lev Davidovich Landau

1962 – Max Ferdinand Perutz

1965 – Richard Phillips Feynman

1965 – Julian Schwinger

1969 – Murray Gell-Mann

1971 – Dennis Gabor

1972 – William Howard Stein

1973 – Brian David Josephson

1975 – Benjamin Mottleson

1976 – Burton Richter

1977 – Ilya Prigogine

1978 – Arno Allan Penzias

1978 – Peter L Kapitza

1979 – Stephen Weinberg

1979 – Sheldon Glashow

1979 – Herbert Charles Brown

1980 – Paul Berg

1980 – Walter Gilbert

1981 – Roald Hoffmann

1982 – Aaron Klug

1985 – Albert A. Hauptman

1985 – Jerome Karle

1986 – Dudley R. Herschbach

1988 – Robert Huber

1988 – Leon Lederman

1988 – Melvin Schwartz

1988 – Jack Steinberger

1989 – Sidney Altman

1990 – Jerome Friedman

1992 – Rudolph Marcus

1995 – Martin Perl

2000 – Alan J. Heeger

Economics:

1970 – Paul Anthony Samuelson

1971 – Simon Kuznets

1972 – Kenneth Joseph Arrow

1975 – Leonid Kantorovich

1976 – Milton Friedman

1978 – Herbert A. Simon

1980 – Lawrence Robert Klein

1985 – Franco Modigliani

1987 – Robert M. Solow

1990 – Harry Markowitz

1990 – Merton Miller

1992 – Gary Becker

1993 – Robert Fogel

Medicine:

1908 – Elie Metchnikoff

1908 – Paul Erlich

1914 – Robert Barany

1922 – Otto Meyerhof

1930 – Karl Landsteiner

1931 – Otto Warburg

1936 – Otto Loewi

1944 – Joseph Erlanger

1944 – Herbert Spencer Gasser

1945 – Ernst Boris Chain

1946 – Hermann Joseph Muller

1950 – Tadeus Reichstein

1952 – Selman Abraham Waksman

1953 – Hans Krebs

1953 – Fritz Albert Lipmann

1958 – Joshua Lederberg

1959 – Arthur Kornberg

1964 – Konrad Bloch

1965 – Francois Jacob

1965 – Andre Lwoff

1967 – George Wald

1968 – Marshall W. Nirenberg

1969 – Salvador Luria

1970 – Julius Axelrod

1970 – Sir Bernard Katz

1972 – Gerald Maurice Edelman

1975 – Howard Martin Temin

1976 – Baruch S. Blumberg

1977 – Roselyn Sussman Yalow

1978 – Daniel Nathans

1980 – Baruj Benacerraf

1984 – Cesar Milstein

1985 – Mi chae l Stuart Brown

1985 – Joseph L. Goldstein

1986 – Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini]

1988 – Gertrude Elion

1989 – Harold Varmus

1991 – Erwin Neher

1991 – Bert Sakmann

1993 – Richard J. Roberts

1993 – Phillip Sharp

1994 – Alfred Gilman

1995 – Edward B. Lewis

1996 – Lu RoseIacovino

TOTAL: 129!

The Jews are NOT promoting brain washing children in military training camps, teaching them how to blow themselves up and cause maximum deaths of Jews and other non Muslims. The Jews don’t hijack planes, nor kill athletes at the Olympics, or blow themselves up in German restaurants. There is NOT one single Jew who has destroyed a church. There is NOTa single Jew who protests by killing people.

The Jews don’t traffic slaves, nor have leaders calling for Jihad and death to all the Infidels.

Perhaps they should consider investing more in standard education and less in blaming the Jews for all their problems.

Muslims must ask ‘what can they do for humankind’ before they demand that humankind respects them.

Regardless of your feelings about the crisis between Israel and the Palestinians and Arab neighbors, even if you believe there is more culpability on Israel’s part, the following two sentences really says it all:

"If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel ." Benjamin Netanyahu

General Eisenhower warned us it is a matter of history that when the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, General Dwight Eisenhower, found the victims of the death camps he ordered all possible photographs to be taken, and for the German people from surrounding villages to be ushered through the camps and even made to bury the dead. He did this because he said in words to this effect:

‘Get it all on record now – get the films – get the witnesses – because somewhere down the road of history someone will get up and say that this never happened’

Recently, the UK debated whether to remove The Holocaust from its school curriculum because it ‘offends’ the Muslim population which claims it never occurred. It is not removed as of yet. However, this is a frightening portent of the fear that is gripping the world and how easily each country is giving into it.

It is now more than 60 years after the Second World War in Europe ended. This e-mail is being sent as a memorial chain, in memory of the 6 million Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians, and 1,900 Catholic priests who were murdered, raped, burned, starved, beaten, experimented on and humiliated while the German people looked the other way.

Now, more than ever, with Iran , among others, claiming the Holocaust to be ‘a myth,’ it is imperative to make sure the world never forgets.

This e-mail is intended to reach 400 million people. Be a link in the memorial chain and help distribute this around the world.

How many years will it be before the attack on the World Trade Center ‘NEVER HAPPENED’ because it offends some Muslim in the United States? Do not just delete this message; it will take only a minute to pass this along.

I was not fully in favor of building the Holocaust Museum on the Washington Mall, but now I wonder if there will not be pressure to close it.

Hello Jerry,

I thought you might enjoy this piece of security theatre reported in the Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/new-tsa-rules-allowing-small-knives-on-planes-draw-fire-from-some-sept-11-family-members/2013/03/06/2bd2e188-86be-11e2-a80b-3edc779b676f_story.html

The best part of the article:

………Burlingame suspects the TSA decided to allow folding knives because they are hard to spot. She said the agency’s employees “have a difficult time seeing these knives on X-ray screening, which lowers their performance testing rates.”

Stay well,

J

P.S. please don’t publish my name/email with this article as I fly a lot and would prefer not to incur the wrath of the TSA.

The TSA says it cannot hire new gropers to harass travelers at the airports and will have fewer gropers working at any given time; therefore, we will have delays at airports while we wait to be groped.  This is all blamed on the "sequester crisis" that was Obama’s brainchild, but this President blames the GOP.  However, we note — once again — more activities at TSA that do not pass the common sense test. 

<.>

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration will let people carry small pocketknives onto passenger planes for the first time since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, along with golf clubs, hockey sticks and plastic Wiffle Ball-style bats.

</>

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-05/tsa-will-permit-knives-golf-clubs-on-u-s-planes.html

I don’t think I need to delve too deeply into that point; I’ll say that I think it may become a fund raiser for TSA.  What I mean is, allowing these items increases the likelihood of an "incident", which will result in much crying by certain sections of the general public.  The mother figure or father figure bureaucrats will come in and request more funding to deal with the new bogey men. 

<.>

The impending sequester did not prevent the Transportation Security Administration (TSA)  from acting in late February to seal a $50-million deal to purchase new uniforms for its agents–uniforms that will be partly manufactured in Mexico.

</>

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/tsa-sealed-50-million-sequester-eve-deal-buy-new-uniforms

So the TSA managed to arrange a bailout for the Mexican gropers’ garment industry to save the TSA from unfashionable uniforms.  But, I realize that point will not mean much to most people; so let’s add some context and put this into perspective, shall we?

<.>

Under their new collective bargaining agreement, Transportation Security Administration officers get to spend more taxpayer money on their uniforms every year than a United States Marine Corps lieutenant can spend in a lifetime.

</>

http://washingtonexaminer.com/tsa-uniform-perks-more-expensive-than-marine-corps/article/2513111

One has to ask just what leverage the employees at TSA have to secure such nonsensical agreements?  I took a course in labor relations — specifically on bargaining and negotiation — and I’m wondering what these employees offer that warrants such an expense by the management?  After all, we’re talking about people who could not get a job at Starbucks or Walmart, that have no law enforcement training, and are, basically, unskilled workers who grope people and rummage through their undergarments while harassing a number of people they may meet in the course of the day.  What value could they possibly bring that we cannot just hire someone else with fewer benefits and lower salaries? 

While writing this email, another thought struck me.  We have unions for several federal entities; what would happen if we had unions in the military? 😉

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

: Probably not funny, but…

I suppose there is a logical reason that TSA settled on 2.36 inches as the dividing point for allowable and unallowable carry-on knives. However, NBC didn’t report why this precise-to-two-decimal-places measurement was chosen, and that makes it seem rather silly. You or your knife-savvy readers may be able to explain — is this just a conversion from metric length (where the metric number is nice and round)? Or an industry standard blade in some respect?

It’s not the most helpful newswriting, that’s for sure.

–Mike

http://www.nbcnews.com/travel/tsa-allow-passengers-carry-small-knives-planes-1C8700194

According to the TSA, passengers will be able to carry-on knives that are less than 2.36 inches long and less than one-half inch wide. Larger knives, and those with locking blades and molding handles, will continue to be prohibited, as will razor blades and box cutters.

We have a number of comments on correlation and causation. Here are some of them:

correlation

From the time (long ago!) when I studied at the Helsinki University of Technology (now part of the Aalto University) I remember an even better (because simpler) example of point 3 in ‘The Causes of Correlation’: At least in Finland, there’s a clear correlation between ice cream consumption and deaths through drowning, with both peaking in summer. So which causes which? Neither; what happens is that warm weather makes people eat more ice cream and also go swimming and boating much more, increasing their opportunities to drown.

Frej Wasastjerna

Correlation and causation

Dr. Pournelle,

Thanks for publishing the essay on statistics, and to the author. I’m convinced (again) that I should have spent more time on the subject in school.

Perhaps apropos:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/03/climate-change-volcanoes/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/03/06/as-carbon-dioxide-levels-continue-to-rise-global-temperatures-are-not-following-suit/

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/02/ice-age-chicken-and-egg-did-warming-precede-carbon-dioxide-rise/

I think that the lesson I might take is that global temperatures seem to correlate more with volcanic activity than to anthropogenic release of CO2. But it would be very important to pay attention to the details of the case studies before making such a conclusion.

-d

Subject: Postscript on correlation

This is too good.  By sheer coincidence today’s Dilbert (6 Mar 2013) addresses the problem of causation vs. correlation:

http://www.dilbert.com/

Mike Flynn

Here is a paper by Brian Joiner on lurking variables in correlation, anent the comment that to develop a causal hypothesis from a correlation, one needs information from outside the correlation.

http://www.claremontmckenna.edu/pages/faculty/MONeill/Math152/Handouts/Joiner.pdf

Mike Flynn

Correlation and Causation

In the strict logical sense, correlation does not imply causation. I admit that in general parlance the word "imply" has a looser meaning than that.

To use correlation as a starting point for causation, one needs two things; the correlation (finding of which can be done statistically) and a plausible mechanism by which the causation could be achieved. Ideally, the proposed mechanism should be testable. Testability is not the case for the correlation between CO2 and global warming, at least in a practical sense and at current CO2 levels. IMHO neither is the case for the correlation between saturated fat intake and cardiovascular disease. Testing this in humans is impractical due to ethical considerations and far too high time cost, and there is no plausible mechanism so the hypothesis (high fat ruins your heart) fails on both grounds.

I’ve used an imperfect and somewhat silly/OTT example of the "correlation implies causation" fallacy: There is a strong correlation between the number of men in American shopping malls (at least in the northern parts) wearing white-and-red suits, big belts, big boots, fat suits underneath the red, long white wigs and fake beards – and the amount of snowfall outside. Do the men in red suits cause the snow?

Regards

Ian Campbell

The Professors’ Big Stage – NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/opinion/friedman-the-professors-big-stage.html?hp&_r=0

Tom Friedman’s NYT article on Massively Open Online Courses. Friedman tends to always be very excited by technology and the changes it affords us. Some quotes I like from the article:

Institutions of higher learning must move, as the historian Walter Russell Mead puts it, from a model of “time served” to a model of “stuff learned.” Because increasingly the world does not care what you know. Everything is on Google. The world only cares, and will only pay for, what you can do with what you know.

and

We have to get beyond the current system of information and delivery — the professorial “sage on the stage” and students taking notes, followed by a superficial assessment, to one in which students are asked and empowered to master more basic material online at their own pace, and the classroom becomes a place where the application of that knowledge can be honed through lab experiments and discussions with the professor.

and my favorite…

We demand that plumbers and kindergarten teachers be certified to do what they do, but there is no requirement that college professors know how to teach.

Having matriculated at a post-secondary school that is chartered as a research institution I can attest to the fact that a goodly portion of the professors I encountered could not teach.

John Harlow

The original California higher education master plan – I worked on it as a consultant – understood this and mandated that the California State Colleges be teaching institutions and not be able to grant advanced degrees. The University of California would have a limited number of campuses – Berkeley, UCLA, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz – and be primarily graduate schools although they would have limited undergraduate classes. Naturally the professor unions got the State Golleges first the right to give master’s, then PhD, then call themselves Universities… With the result that few of them can teach well, and they are generally lousy at research also. The big name UC campuses do have good grad schools but as they begin offering ethnicity and diversity higher degrees they sink into the muck of having undergraduate classes taught by uninterested grad students, and research degrees in subjects that have no market. And the beat goes on.

One can get a decent education without the awful classes with their crippling debts, but the universities still have the credentials monopolies.

"North Korea is a major threat because of the massed artillery along the border. The location of most of the guns is well known and plotted by both US and South Korean gunners and pilots."

A couple of sentences, while both true, are juxtaposed in such a way that would seem the threat of the artillery is mitigated by the knowledge of their location for counter-battery/attack. This would be foolhardy to accept at face value. The NK artillery placement is sophisticated with all of the locations hardened and dug in – mostly in tunnels with multiple firing positions (not to mention deceptive false positions/guns). The guns can be run out, fired, and retired back into to the tunnels and behind blast doors. Don’t get me wrong, I’m in no way indicating that these positions are impervious to US & SK counter activities. However, there is no possible way to stop a NK first strike, nor any way to successfully insure a 100% neutralization of the NK artillery/rocket/mortar capability quickly (i.e. initial counter-battery/attack). At best, incremental reduction of the NK capabilities would require some hours, maybe as long as 96 (my own semi-educated guess). In the meantime, significant death and destruction will be dealt civilians and infrastructure to Seoul and surrounding areas. Make no mistake, the NKs will lose the complete military exchange but the first sentence of the above quote stands.

s/f

Couv

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

Of course, which is why deterrence is the strategy; when the time comes one expects China and South Korea to arrange the denouement. It’s not really a US affair.

Re: _Stalin’s Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War_.

On Mar 4, 2013, at 9:11 PM, Roland Dobbins wrote:

> <http://www.amazon.com/Stalins-Curse-Battling-Communism-Cold/dp/0307269159>

Kindle link:

<http://www.amazon.com/Stalins-Curse-Battling-Communism-ebook/dp/B00BG73FTE/>

Roland Dobbins