Category Archives: Mail

Mail 733 Monday, July 16, 2012

I have mail on the San Bernardino eminent domain proposal; more than I have time to deal with tonight. I am attempting to catch up.

H Clinton

Jerry,

Am I the only person to think that sending a woman to deal with Muslim nations is not only futile but maybe even insulting to their cultural beliefs?

Sure, I don’t like some aspects of certain other cultures but I don’t think we should be forcing our ways on people that have other lifestyles.

Hope Sable is faring better.

Take care

Alan

There is considerable controversy about this. Many realists have said that it is better to conform as far as possible to the customs of foreign relations, as for example, not sending Jewish ambassadors to Muslim states. Others have said that if some foreign power doesn’t want an American citizen as ambassador they can make do with someone of lesser rank as well as the indifference of the United States. The Cold War changed much of that, of course.

What exactly is the ATF and how did they get here?

An interesting short article on the history of the ATF. How they went from 3 Detectives in the Civil War to where they are today. A classic case of bureaucratic empire building.

http://cheaperthandirt.com/blog/?p=21028

John from Waterford

An interesting article. I had thought the ‘revenoors’ had been around in the earliest days of the whiskey taxes, which were well before the Civil War. Recall the folk song, with the line “we ain’t paid no whiskey tax since seventeen ninety two”.

"Damn It Jim, it is a Planet!"

Jerry,

Five moons for Pluto!

If that ain’t a planet, I don’t know what is. I am an unrepentantly a 9+ planet Solar System guy, although I can accept a Pluto demotion if you go to a 6 planet solar system where the planets are those objects easily visible with the unaided eye. (Ignoring Uranus and Vesta, but I could accept those too to make the Solar System 8 planets without Neptune or Pluto)

A nice picture of Pluto and its moons including P5 is at the website. I look forward to the New Horizons encounter with Pluto.

Regards, Charles Adams, Bellevue, NE

<http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120711123038.htm>

"Hubble Discovers a Fifth Moon Orbiting Pluto

ScienceDaily (July 11, 2012) – A team of astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is reporting the discovery of another moon orbiting the icy dwarf planet Pluto.

The moon is estimated to be irregular in shape and 6 to 15 miles across. It is in a 58,000-mile-diameter circular orbit around Pluto that is assumed to be co-planar with the other satellites in the system…."

There are at least nine planets in the solar system, and Pluto is one of them. Sister Elizabeth Ann told me that in second grade, and I have had no reason to doubt it.

Hi,

Alton Brown of Good Eats on the Food Network says that tomatoes should not be refrigerated. The low temperature shuts down some enzyme, IIRC, that turns off the tomato’s flavor. Warming up the tomato does not bring back the flavor.

No need to publish my name, just thought you’d like to know.

Darrell

I agree, and indeed the reason the tomatoes were on a counter is that we recently became converted to that view. But if you share your house with a wolf, you may find that it may be better to have bad tasting tomatoes than to pay the vet bills. Husky dogs are not precisely obedient. They are cooperative, and pretty well accept direct orders even if they think they don’t make sense, but their obedience tends to fade when there is no one around – and Sable is capable of reashing almost any place in the kitchen that we can reach.

Jobs, incentives, and used production equipment…

First, Dr Pournelle, let me share your hope that Sable is back to normal when you go to the vet for her. Absence or unusual behavior of my cat(s) also makes me dysfunctional.

I suggest that American businesses need certainty concerning government rules and regulations at least as much as they need relaxation of those rules and regulations. One is unwilling to make long term investments absent reasonable expectation that the investments can be well utilized long enough to repay their costs and provide profits sufficient to justify the risks taken. Before he took up fountain dancing, Wilber Mills of the Ways and Means Committee was greatly appreciated for insisting that revisions in tax law, once made, must stay in place at least five years.

As a current example of investments made excessively risky by ever changing government rules and regulations I offer the "roll your own cigarettes" machines.

http://www.lvrj.com/opinion/vin-suprynowicz-161707065.html

‘… a stroke of the pen on Friday, President Barack Obama put thousands of small "roll-your-own" tobacco shops out of business, throwing tens of thousands more full- and part-time workers on the streets.’

‘They thought they could rely on the law staying the same. It gives some definition to all that loose talk about "uncertainty."’

Charles Brumbelow=

As noted elsewhere Sable is back to normal. Thanks to you and all who inquired.

As to certainty and consistency in rules, of course. But we all know this, just as we all know that the Iron Law always prevails. Our masters no longer seem to care.

I’m thinking that it should be very possible to test whether your 2X suggestion on regulations would help. A simple question to someone who knows the stats, or is competent to find them: What is the distribution of American businesses, by number of employees? Is there a strikingly obvious spike and cliff, just short of 50 employees? Of 10?

Any regulation that is holding back growth should be causing such a pile-up on the graph.

I am assuming that the clowns in Washington don’t have regulations for every single number of employees between 1 and a thousand. Hopefully they like tens as much as the rest of us.

Best wishes, mkr

I don’t know the US statistics, but I am told that in Spain 99% of all business have 49 or fewer employees. It’s apparently cheaper to start a new company than to hire a 50^th worker…

An Increasingly Bad Deal

I’m sure this will make our children want to run out and join the workforce:

<.>

This year, Americans have to work until July 15 to pay for the burden of government, more than six months.

In a new report,  Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) has calculated that Americans will spend a total of 197 days toiling to pay for the cost of government.

"Cost of Government Day is the date of the calendar year on which the average American worker has earned enough gross income to pay off his or her share of the spending and regulatory burden imposed by government at the federal, state and local levels," reads the report.

The report, Cost of Government Day, shows that Americans will work 88 days to pay for federal spending; 40 days for state and local spending; and 69 days for total regulatory costs.

</>

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/americans-will-work-more-6-months-pay-cost-govt-2012

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

It will get worse.

Subject: UN arms treaty could put U.S. gun owners in foreign sights, say critic

UNITED NATIONS – A treaty being hammered out this month at the United Nations — with Iran playing a key role — could expose the records of America’s gun owners to foreign governments — and, critics warn, eventually put the Second Amendment on global trial

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/07/11/un-arms-treaty-could-put-us-gun-owners-in-foreign-sights-say-critics/?test=latestnews#ixzz20QRaHcqw <http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/07/11/un-arms-treaty-could-put-us-gun-owners-in-foreign-sights-say-critics/?test=latestnews#ixzz20QRaHcqw>

Troubling Educational Trends At The Top

Jerry,

I came across this article (http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/05/21/congressional-speech/) the other day and I thought I would share it with you. I know you have many issues with how the public school system is funded and operated (or more like mis-funded and not operated), but I believe we all agree that education is important to the successful operation of a representative democracy. I have often said that the downward trend in budgets for public schools is a reflection of a downward trend in the educational quality exhibited by our elected representatives. Perhaps I am not far from the truth.

Kevin L. Keegan

The purpose of the US Education system is to pay union teachers and to assure full employment to professors of education without regard to the accomplishments or capabilities of either. All other goals are subordinate to this. When there was local control of schools there were some that were unfair to teachers, but many which actually put the students first. None do now. We all pretty well know this, or should, but it is more important to protect incompetent teachers than to assure students of a competent teacher. Far more effort goes into protecting the income of the incompetent, and almost none goes to removing properly credentialed incompetents. What else can we conclude?

UAVs Tracking Civilian Cars

Since jihadis rarely have APCs, the Air Force would have to be stupid to not practice tracking SUVs.

And the New York Times continues its death spiral.

Nathan Raye

Samsung and Universal Search Question

I just read where Samsung must deprecate their product because if their use of universal search. I am curious as to why this is even patentable. Aside from its obviousness, I was on the team that implemented this idea back in the old MS-DOS days at Microsoft.

I was one of a team that implemented the on-line strategies for QuickC, QuickBASIC, QuickPASCAL, etc. for Microsoft. For my efforts I was awarded a Microsoft Innovation Award.

Back in those old days, we implemented a QuickHelp for the C language and libraries and for the product itself so that every context, every dialog box, every keyword, etc. was acccessible via on-line help instantly.

Our success led to the eventual common-place phenomenon today of only providing help files and on-line docs in lieu of printed manuals.

We further implemented the search in such a way that is proceeded from file to file to readme.doc in a universal fashion that was even extensible to user-supplied files.

In those innocent days of yore , no patents were applied for (if I receall correctly); or perhaps it was just too obvious to even consider patents.

Thought you’d like to know this brief bit of somewhat obscure "Universal Search" history and precedent.

(Mr.) Terry A. Ward

Microsoft (retired)

SMOE

It’s just a Simple Matter of Engineering but the pictures are pretty!

http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2012/07/11/airbus-explores-a-future-where-planes-are-built-with-giant-3d-printers/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/07/11/asteroid-mining-startup-planetary-resources-teams-with-virgin-galactic/

Peter Wityk

regarding the universe – epicycles and dark matter

Jerry,

You may be right that modern physics may be based on an incorrect theory. Last year I spent a few weeks listening to the Open Yale Course online for Astronomy 160: Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics. You can listen to the entire 26 one hour lectures plus download the course materials. Sadly, the class is a bit out of date (it was recorded in 2007), Professor Charles Bailyn makes some very complex material quite approachable. There is a lot of math in the class, but it is all algebra and trigonometry; I don’t think there was any calculus involved.

http://oyc.yale.edu/astronomy/astr-160

In the first lecture, Professor Bailyn discusses the time when people believed that the Earth was the center of the universe and how astronomers had to come up with explanations for the eccentricities in the movements of the planets across the sky. They used motions called "epicycles" to explain these eccentricities. Then came the theory that the Earth orbited the sun and the need for epicycles disappeared.

As Professor Bailyn was discussing dark matter and dark energy, it occurred to me that perhaps these concepts were modern versions of epicycles…that there was a problem with our basic theory for understanding the universe (in this case, general relativity theory) and that we were making more and more adjustments to keep the theory working. In the very last lecture, Professor Bailyn makes that very same point….that dark matter and dark energy may be modern versions of epicycles.

I hope that you will encourage your readers to check out Professor Bailyn’s course. I also hope that someday Yale will put an updated version of the class online.

Sincerely,

Hugh Greentree

I have always thought that the Special Theory of Relativity has needed epicycles upon epicycles to keep it viable. If you assume that there is an arther and that it is associated with gravity, and that the speed of light varies with the density of the aether, you get an entirely different expectation for the expansion of the universe, and a first cut suggests there may be no need for all that dark matter and dark energy. But do understand this is a cocktail party theory on my part. I no longer have the math skills to develop it – indeed, I have worked on one tensor in my life, and I would never want to do that again. Ever. Of course it may be my distrust in tensors that drives me toward trying to retain something of Newtonian physics…

It’s not just the Daily Mail

Jerry:

I admit The Daily Mail can make it difficult to separate good science from reports of Tom Cruise’s ability to teleport.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2171741/Tom-Cruise-believed-telekinetic-telepathic-powers-according-Scientologists.html

But the Daily Mail’s report of the tree ring study you mentioned on July 11 is reported more reliably at http://www.uni-mainz.de/eng/15491.php

and

http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1589.html

A good source for following climate reports is

http://www.climatedepot.com/

Best regards,

–Harry M.

Mail 732 Wednesday, July 11, 2012

On the San Bernardino County notion of using eminent domain to take over underwater mortgages at fair market value and renegotiate with householders to let them restructure the loan. Banks would have to sell at current value; owner/occupiers would start with zero equity but begin to acquire equity as they paid down the mortgage. This is under discussion in San Bernardino. We have a great deal of mail on this. Here is a selection.

Eminent Domain to solve the housing crisis

It seems to me that this is probably what most people had in mind when they heard all the various government figures talking about "a solution to the economic crisis". Instead we got a half billion dollars to guarantee that banks could still pay bonuses, and another half billion to prop up pension funds for a couple years.=

==

Thoughts on banks, counties, underwater mortgages…

I have a vague notion that one or more of the federal bailout schemes allows banks to carry on their books underwater mortgages as though they are not… If such is the case, having those mortgages seized by the county – even though the county pays current fair market value – will force the banks to recognize for accounting purposes losses which all have been pretending never happened. This could reduce a bank’s capital to the point it would be forced into bankruptcy or a takeover. Then the limits of FDIC insurance, if enforced, would pass the losses to depositors…possibly even that very county and it’s various pension/retirement plans.

And given the way mortgages were securitized and then sliced and diced, with state and local deed and mortgage recording requirements sometimes evaded to save recording fees and taxes, it might not be possible to seize a mortgage related to a specific property. In some instances banks have been unable to foreclose delinquent properties because they could not prove ownership of the mortgage.

http://www.massrealestatelawblog.com/2011/01/07/ibanez-foreclosure-ruling-upheld-an-indictment-of-the-securitized-mortgage-system/

And no one, to my knowledge, has been criminally charged over this. In fact, some who probably should have been charged and convicted have been bonused instead.

Charles Brumbelow

==

San Bernardino Theft

The fair market value of those homes that are being talked about in San Bernadino has never been established, because so much of the distressed property has not gone under the auction gavel. A great amount of it is owned by the federal government through loan guarantees put forward by Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac – and the Obama plan is to sell them in bulk to investment firms to rent out – again, not letting the market set the value.

In fact, this plan harms all home owners as well as home buyers – not only is the bottom of the market never created, but the natural upswing that would benefit those who are treading water at the moment will never come – A floor isn’t established, but the top of the market sure is, and homes that wouldn’t be ‘underwater’ become that way as neighbor’s house after neighbor’s house is seized, with the county becoming effectively a landlord.

More problematic is where does San Bernardino come up with the money for this plan? They’re already scraping the bottom to just cover the interest they owe to CALPERs for the losses from the dot.com bust – they’ve yet to pay back a penny of the actual losses to CALPERs, and just barely pay the interest on what those losses would have brought.

The most frightening words anyone can ever hear are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.

Gary

Gary Fuller

I think the San Bernardino proposal is a worthwhile experiment; this is precisely the kind of innovative thinking we need at the *local* level.

Like you, I instinctively a) saw a lot I liked about the San Bernadino proposal and b) felt that it was worth trying *as long as it was handled at the local level, not by the Federal government*.

Were the Federal government to propose such a scheme, I would be unalterably opposed to it. But if San Bernardino does something I don’t like, I can always move to San Diego, or Los Angeles, or Parsippany.

Because liberals believe in human perfectibility, they don’t understand the importance of the ability to escape governmental experiments gone wrong, and how Federalism provides such an escape hatch. Conservatives always look for an exit strategy.

——-

Roland Dobbins

Actually it’s more complicated than at first blush. Still not a good idea.

Ron Mullane

http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2012-07-07/california-cities-considering-legal-theft-private-property?tw_p=twt

Eminent Domain and the housing bubble

Jerry,

Bad idea for counties to try to "help" the underwater homeowner. Just as the federal government originally created the housing bubble by bankrolling a scheme in which everyone could be a homeowner, the county government will bankroll this latest scheme the same way – by plundering the taxpayers.

Morally this only makes sense if one can assume that housing is a right of some kind, and that rights are granted by the government.

The county government can really help the homeowners in only one way – by easing the property tax burden. Homeowners who bought in at highly inflated prices pay huge property taxes as Prop. 13 does not help them. But this would require a shrinkage of the county bureaucracy; a zero probability as Pournelle’s Iron Law shows us.

Regards,

Brian Claypool

I probably got more mail on this than any other subject this year. I have given some of the range of that mail above. My own view is that a county is very likely to be the proper level for such experiments. I am not sure what I would decide were it my decision to make. I do know that until the uncertainties are cleared out of this, the real estate situation will remain very bad. I do agree that there are complexities we probably have not thought out.

It is generally considered a good thing for a republic to have a large middle class: those who possess the goods of fortune in moderation. Housing ownership is economically an interference with the mobility of labor, but a very conservative influence on behavior and is usually considered a good thing. All that can be debated. No one is thinking entitlement here: the question is one of what to do about a particular disaster that has happened due in part to government activity – pressure on lending organizations to make loans to those who should not have been borrowing – and government injection of money into the market was a major cause of the bubble in housing. That bubble has burst and until its effects are cleared away there will be mounting problems, particularly as houses are abandoned and slowly destroyed. A giant potlatch is probably not a good idea.

XCOR Leaves California for Texas –

Are any of us surprised?

A commercial aerospace firm based in eastern Kern County announced Monday that it is expanding its operations to Texas, a move characterized by some observers as an avoidable economic loss to Kern County and the state as a whole.

XCOR Aerospace, a manufacturer of reusable rocket engines and the developer of the Lynx, a suborbital space plane designed to carry two persons or scientific experiments to the edge of space, announced the move Monday at a press conference in Midland, Texas, the site of its new research and development center.

…

Indeed, Greason has described the growing space port in eastern Kern as "the Silicon Valley of the private space industry" and the premier location for civilian flight research and testing in the United States.

But California’s less favorable tax and regulatory environment — and its inability to pass timely liability protection for companies planning to invest in commercial space tourism — made it easier to make the move, he said.

"We did look at three or four other sites," he said. "Each had different strengths. But the folks in Midland were very persuasive."

Gov. Perry was on hand Monday to welcome XCOR.

http://www.bakersfieldcalifornian.com/business/local/x920645887/Texas-lures-pioneering-space-firm-from-Mojave

And where is Jerry Brown? Pitching pie-in-the-sky trains and tax initiatives.

Dave

(Krecklow)

Astonishing. Who would have seen that coming? Mojave once had a future as a spaceport but I do not think it will for long. Oklahoma and Texas want such companies.

On Roberts: A Dialogue

Roberts

Hi Jerry,

Your analysis is the best I’ve seen to explain why Roberts did what he did, and I agree that this election is critically important.

I just wish we were running Reagan and not Romney. We sorely need a statesman with grand vision (not just the guy who’s turn it is) right now.

Cheers,

Doug

–

I doubt you could find many among my readers who do not wish we were running Reagan rather than Romney. But wishing you had a full house when what you’ve got is three kings is not the best poker strategy. One plays the hand one is dealt. I have been here before.

I was a County Chairman for Goldwater…

Jerry Pournelle

Chaos Manor

–

I’m not sure that Romney is as good a hand as three kings, but if there were ever a year he could win this is it. I’m in the ground game here in Colorado too – precinct vice-chair. There’s a lot of despair here because the CO GOP is controlled by hard-right social conservatives who believe that we’re in a bright red state (it’s actually very purple). They pulled some shenanigans with civil unions at the end of the session that has the (rich) homosexual lobby riled up. It was like throwing fresh meat to rabid dogs (or a vulnerable republican to the liberal media).

As my dad always says, the Republicans never fail to miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

In the end though, my real question is this. Can we actually roll back socialism? It now appears that even Reagan only put it on pause for 8 years, and then it continued its march towards serfdom. The only thing that comes to mind as a true rollback was, ironically, Clinton’s welfare reform, which now has been totally reversed by Bush II and Obama.

The real issue is how to change the culture. That takes a very very long time, and involves both a selfless (I’m going to take care

of myself) and selfish (I want to keep what’s mine) attitude that is sadly lacking among a growing majority of Americans. It’s

hard to get people to stop voting themselves someone else’s money, you know?

Cheers,

Doug

Changing the culture requires changing the schools which requires modifying towards abolition of credentialism. The more bureaucratic crap you put in the way of becoming a teacher the more bureaucrats you get as teachers. When they are then told to promote equality over merit they will do it. The result is what you are seeing.

Read Ortega for more.

But I think this is a year of big setback for the left. It will give us a chance to reassess and rebuild.

Eternal vigilance and all that, you know

Be of good cheer

Jerry Pournelle

Chaos Manor

Thanks Jerry – and you’re exactly right. I hadn’t put together why the left so adamantly opposes vouchers (when the primary beneficiaries are lower income folks). That’s the last piece in the puzzle.

We’ll do what we can for the ground game out here. If California ever gets too much for your family, Colorado is still a nice place to live!

Cheers,

Doug

Higgs

Jerry,

Regarding your brief note on the Higgs. I’ve been frying other fish this weekend (as usual) but looked up the press releases when they come out. (I will be presenting at least some analysis in my presentation at LibertyCon…)

What they have said is a very conservative:

1. Each detector has an apparent particle with a five standard deviation excess of events over background, summed over the decay modes that the detectors can observe (2-photon and two-charged-lepton-pair decays, the former with high statistics and high background, the latter with low statistics but low background).

2. In that set of detectable decay modes, with significantly reduced statistics because of the systematic effects contributing to detection of the individual decay modes, the ratio of events is consistent with a Standard Model Higgs.

Just to confirm whether this is a Standard-Model Higgs, a NON-Standard Model Higgs, or something else will require from 10 to 20 dB more data, in my estimation. That includes picking up additional decay modes (one of the detectors sees a modest excess of events in a third decay mode).

As for me, I am certainly interested but I remain …well, prejudiced, is probably the best term — that the conventional Higgs does not exist as such. In part because I believe that energy and mass are intimately coupled, and the presence of mass does not require an ad-hoc additional field to provide it given that we know the system has energy present in other quantum fields. See the Feynman Lectures for more information (at http://www.feynmanlectures.info/FLP_Original_Course_Notes/, Physics 2, Summary S-28).

"Doc" Jim Woosley

This whole matter is far beyond my level of competence in physics, of course. I have always been a generalist meaning I know less and less about more and more until eventually at the limit I know nothing at all about everything.  Still, I remain skeptical of modern physics, which seems to postulate that some great portion of the Universe is composed of stuff we can’t see and can’t detect but we infer from theories so complex that few understand them. Then we find that we live in a nearly unique corner of that universe that doesn’t have so much of the dark stuff.

I have the horrid suspicion that much of this comes from accepting a relativity principle that isn’t true; that is, there is something like an aether in which light waves, and it has something to do with gravitational fields, which do in fact pervade the universe – and light travels at different velocities in those gravitational fields because the aether has different densities depending on how far away they are from big gravitational field sources.. But that’s my cocktail party theory and I certainly won’t try to argue it. I was recently exposed to two PhD particle physicists, both of whom were convinced of relativity but knew less about it in general terms than I do, because it doesn’t impact on what they work on. Me, I am still trying to figure out why my watch slows down if you move toward me, and yes, I am being frivolous. On the other hand I don’t know if clocks in Denver keep different time when a burst of mesons heads toward the city at near light speeds. Of course if Denver isn’t moving and those mesons are it’s easier to comprehend why Denver doesn’t change so much.  But that’s relativity for you.

And a remarkable achievement:

Shadow of an Atom!

Jerry,

Another great feat of legerdemain! A team led by Dave Kielpinski at Griffith University in Australia images an atom’s shadow

<http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-07/first-time-snapshot-single-atoms-shadow?cmp=tw>

Regards, Charles Adams, Bellevue, NE

: One small step for SSTO

Dr Pournelle

Masten Xaero climbs 444 meters and lands. <http://masten-space.com/2012/07/03/xaero-444-for-the-4th/>

(The sound is piercing. I muted my speakers when the Xaero returned to land. YMMV.)

Live long and prosper

h lynn keith

Ghost Cities

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

You asked about the phenomenon of ghost cities. I believe these articles do a good job of explaining the phenomenon.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/06/why-chinas-ghost-towns-matter-for-our-economy/240629/

http://grist.org/cities/2011-03-31-chinas-ghost-cities-and-the-biggest-property-bubble-of-all/

Three paragraphs sum it up, I think:

"Back in 2009, filmmakers Sam Green and Carrie Lozano made a beautiful short film about the New South China Mall called “Utopia: Part 3 <http://www.pbs.org/pov/utopia/> .” It tells the story behind the mall’s construction: a local businessman who had gotten fabulously rich in the new Chinese market economy wanted to make his mark in the world by building something fantastic. No matter that the site, which was farmland, had no good access – by road or rail or any other conveyance.

Once the mall got built, it was “too big to fail,” and has been propped up by government-backed investors, a chilling example of useless infrastructure and wasted resources.

…

And yet around the globe, governments and business interests continue to build projects like these (see this report <http://www.urbanindy.com/2011/03/30/pre-conflict-an-american-in-libya/> from pre-conflict Libya, for instance). They should look more closely at the Chinese example — beyond the GDP numbers to the bricks-and-mortar reality. Because when economic growth is pursued for its own sake, without regard to the needs and capabilities of the humans inside that economy, it is only a matter of time before the bubble will burst"

So there you have it. Not that we should take any lessons from this with respect to ‘stimulus’ projects. Didn’t I hear Paul Krugman or Friedman say how much he admired China? Why, why, why do people who admire such catastrophes never actually want to *move* there?

Respectfully,

Brian P.

* * *

Chinese Ghost Cities

They are failed real-estate ventures. In China, a person with a lot of guanxi (pull, influence, something like that) can get a bank loan, hire thugs to expropriate farmers (sometimes paying them nominal amounts so it looks legal), then build real-estate that, from the air, appears to be complete. Often they are unfinished shells. It is customary when buying chinese real-estate to have to install major appliances (like heaters), refinish interior walls, etc. If anything fails during this process: i.e. the developer becomes over-extended, a farmer happens to have -more- guanxi, the bank calls in a loan (banks are arms of the government, remember, so often a "frienclly" loan has no repayment schedule), or a government official needs an "example." Then the development fails, and becomes a ghost.

Ray Van De Walker

Actually I put a link and comments on this in View, but for the record

Climate was HOTTER in Roman, medieval times than now,

Jerry

Climate was HOTTER in Roman, medieval times than now, according to a new study:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/10/global_warming_undermined_by_study_of_climate_change/print.html

“A new study measuring temperatures over the past two millennia has concluded that in fact the temperatures seen in the last decade are far from being the hottest in history. A large team of scientists making a comprehensive study of data from tree rings say that in fact global temperatures have been on a falling trend for the past 2,000 years and they have often been noticeably higher than they are today – despite the absence of any significant amounts of human-released carbon dioxide in the atmosphere back then.

"We found that previous estimates of historical temperatures during the Roman era and the Middle Ages were too low," says Professor-Doktor Jan Esper of the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, one of the scientists leading the study. "Such findings are also significant with regard to climate policy." They certainly are, as it is a central plank of climate policy worldwide that the current temperatures are the highest ever seen for many millennia, and that this results from rising levels of atmospheric CO2 emitted by human activities such as industry, transport etc. If it is the case that actually the climate has often been warmer without any significant CO2 emissions having taken place – suggesting that CO2 emissions simply aren’t that important – the case for huge efforts to cut those emissions largely disappears.”

And more, of course.

Ed

We have known all this since 7^th grade, but apparently many continue to forget such things. What is important about CO2 is that those with the right lobbyists get rich, and the regulatory environment keeps upstart startup companies from competing with big important corporations. Capitalists will always conspire with government to restrict entry into their fields of endeavor. Always.

This was part of a set of charts sent. Note that the last days of the Roman Republic brought in subsidized and finally free grain. Weep.

How the surge was squandered

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

It’s pretty rare that ABC News and the Washington Post take President Obama to task, so I think it wise to point it out when they do.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/war-zones/little-america-excerpt-obamas-troop-increase-for-afghan-war-was-misdirected/2012/06/22/gJQAYHrAvV_story.html

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/07/how-obama-squandered-the-surge/

There’s a new book which demonstrates why the Afghan surge was a failure while the Iraqi surge was a success. To be blunt, if you send 40,000 troops to the middle of nowhere, as opposed to the location where there’s actually an insurgency, you achieve nothing. Bedford Forrest’s dictum to "hit ’em where they ain’t" isn’t applied this way.

I’m reading through the referenced book on Kindle now, so I haven’t got to the point mentioned in the interview where infighting in both the administration and the Pentagon paralyzed the effort and put it at permanent cross purposes. We were so busy fighting each other we forgot about the actual enemy in the field.

For the Pentagon, I’ll wager the solution is to simply give all those responsible a rifle and put them in Kandahar until they have a better sense of priorities. Dealing with the administration is less simple, but I suspect the phrase "ballot box" figures prominently.

The book is worth it for the first few chapters alone, which discuss American adventures in modernizing Afghan agriculture in the 1950s and 1960s, and how a great deal of money and effort was spent to achieve nothing. The Afghan farmers weren’t interested in changing, you see.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

We won in Afghanistan within 90 days of going in. Then we decided to stay to remake the place. Alexander the Great caught on much quicker, as have all the rest who have ‘conquered’ Afghanistan over the centuries.

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

If I may crave your indulgence but a bit longer. I’ve already linked to the book under discussion earlier

http://www.amazon.com/Little-America-The-Within-Afghanistan/dp/0307957144/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1341935286&sr=8-1&keywords=little+america

but I’m reading through this book on Kindle and I believe it merits further comment. It is *extremely* enlightening albeit depressing, especially when discussing reconstruction of Afghanistan. A better title might be "Good Intentions".

Some case examples:

1) Opium is Afghanistan’s principal crop and a major source of Taliban income. So we gave away wheat seeds to Opium farmers so they would grow wheat instead.

Know what happened? The farmers took the free seeds, then turned around and sold them, using the money to buy fertilizer for their opium fields. You have any idea how much more opium sells for than wheat? You think they’re going to put that low-profit junk in their fields? Not hardly.

2) Tried to open a cotton farm, because cotton DOES offer a better profit margin than opium and is legal besides. The US government stepped on it. Why? Because that would mean competition with American domestic cotton. That’s a no-no! So the cotton effort was stillborn.

3) Tried to grow saffron, which is also a high-profit crop. It couldn’t be exported. Why? Because the fecal content in the saffron was a thousand times higher than in Saffron from Iran next door. I leave it to your imagination to guess why that would be so, but the word "hygiene" should figure prominently.

4) Tried, at the last, to burn down opium fields. Well, it turns out that opium is only A source of Taliban money. It is not THE source of Taliban money. They also get a heap of money from our "allies" in the Gulf and Pakistan. We didn’t hurt them much, but we did utterly beggar the small farmers who had put their livelihoods into those fields and lost it all. They joined up with the Taliban, who offered them wages with which to recoup their losses and feed their families. And they had no reason to love the US or the Afghan government anyway, given we’d just taken from them everything they had.

*Sigh*. Just remember, we’re from the government and we’re here to help.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

It has never been clear to me what we want from Afghanistan. They make nothing we want to buy, and what they grow we are forbidden to buy; and they are far from us and expensive to occupy. Competent empire looks for more lucrative targets of conquest.

I am not sure why we want the Mayor of Kabul to be the Master of Afghanistan. I never have been. Iraq had oil. Not that we got any of it, but it was at least there.

Subject: Historic bridges of Yosemite Valley under siege

These guys are not going to be happy unless they tear down anything man made, I guess

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/07/07/historic-bridges-yosemite-valley-under-siege/?test=latestnews

Tracy

Babies With Pet Dogs Or Cats Have Fewer Respiratory Tract Infections –

Providing additional support to the Pournelle ‘ It takes a dog to raise a village” theory.

Babies who are in close contact with dogs or cats during their first twelve months of life were found to enjoy better health and were less likely to suffer from respiratory infections, compared to those without any pets in the house or no close contact with these animals, researchers from the Kuopio University Hospital, Kuopio, Finland, reported in the journal Pediatrics…………The protective effect on infants from having a pet cat was also detected, but it was not as strong as with dogs. (LOL, edit.)…… http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/247591.php

John from Waterford

Subj: Drones and GPS Spoofing

http://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/aerospace/aviation/-drones-and-gps-spoofing-redux

>>[R]esearchers led by Professor Todd Humphreys of the University of Texas at Austin Radionavigation Laboratory successfully demonstrated that a drone with an unencrypted GPS system could be taken over by a person wielding a $1,000 GPS spoofing device (pdf). Recently, … [Bob Charette, the editor of IEEE Spectrum magazine’s Risk Factor blog, spoke] with Professor Humphreys about GPS spoofing and its implications not only on UAVs, but other systems like financial systems (pdf) that use GPS for tasks such as data time stamping.<<

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

Dr. Pournelle

"Dimmocrats and mainstream Republicans differ only slightly on the subject of Big Government. Both are willing to cut your throat, but the dimmocrats want it to be done by public employees and the country club Republican set want it to be done by private contractors." <http://mostlycajun.com/wordpress/?p=18297>

Live long and prosper

h lynn keith

Despair is a sin. And the country club Republicans can sometimes be tamed.

Jerry,

Subj: Forbes: Five lessons for business startups — from Buffy the Vampire Slayer

http://www.forbes.com/sites/calebmelby/2012/06/24/5-lessons-for-start-ups-from-buffy-the-vampire-slayer/

Now that is downright amusing. Thanks.

Subject: How do you say "libertad económica" in English?

Some good comparisons of differences in the economy between Europe and the U.S.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/07/america-and-spain?fsrc=nlw|newe|7-11-2012|2752294|59501144|NA

Tracy

airforce spying on Americans:

<.>

Holloman sits on almost 60,000 acres of desert badlands, near jagged hills that are frosted with snow for several months of the year — a perfect training ground for pilots who will fly Predators and Reapers over the similarly hostile terrain of Afghanistan. When I visited the base earlier this year with a small group of reporters, we were taken into a command post where a large flat-screen television was broadcasting a video feed from a drone flying overhead. It took a few seconds to figure out exactly what we were looking at. A white S.U.V. traveling along a highway adjacent to the base came into the cross hairs in the center of the screen and was tracked as it headed south along the desert road. When the S.U.V. drove out of the picture, the drone began following another car.

“Wait, you guys practice tracking enemies by using civilian cars?” a reporter asked. One Air Force officer responded that this was only a training mission, and then the group was quickly hustled out of the room.

</>

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/magazine/the-drone-zone.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

I remarked that I was hardly surprised.

Of course not; that doesn’t mean that we should not act astonished for public consumption and then display outrage.

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Ransom: Just Say No!

http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/johnransom/2012/07/07/economy_saying_no_to_second_obama_term/page/full/

<snip>

And despite Obama’s claims, nothing in Dodd-Frank actually makes illegal any of the unethical or damaging behavior, taken either in Washington or Wall Street, which created the financial mess caused by the easy availability of credit for real estate purchases. Nor does Dodd-Frank make our banking system safer as Democrats claim.

Actually quite the contrary.

As the bankruptcy under Democrat uber-genius Jon Corzine at MF Global shows, despite repeated attempts at reform through Dodd-Frank and Sarbannes-Oxley, thieves will always do what thieves will do

And while the left likes to blame Wall Street for the problems and the right likes to blame Washington, both sides were not only culpable, but in cahoots.

They still are.

If we are going to make real progress on actual reform, we have to break up the federal regulatory cabal, not codify it through ineffectual and dangerous legislation that makes no attempt to actually reform anything, but rather just gives stealing the soft name of lobbying.

In fact, Dodd-Frank will make our national banking system even more dangerous and much more likely to fail in the future no matter how much bragging Obama does about it.

And the next time we have a systemic crisis in banking in the US is the last time we will have a systemic crisis in banking.

The stakes are that grave. <Snip>

The stakes are indeed high. Repeal of Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley is nearly as important as repeal of ObamaCare. The Republican leadership needs to be reminded of this, early and often. I know that Newt was aware of the importance of these measures. I am not privy to the beliefs of the others.

George Leopold ee times

6/6/2012 5:42 PM EDT

WASHINGTON — As if another example were needed, here’s the latest illustration of why Washington is dysfunctional.

There was great rejoicing last week over the highly successful commercial space mission to the International Space Station <http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4374186/Slideshow–Pinpoint-splashdown-ends-first-visit-to-space-station> . The successful docking of a cargo ship designed and launched by Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, was a great advance in terms of maintaining U.S. access to low-Earth orbit. It was a bit of good news amid the steady stream of bad economic news and man’s inhumanity toward his fellow man and women.

Now, a pissing match has erupted over who should get the political credit for the success of the SpaceX mission.

The commercial cargo and crew program under which SpaceX and other competitors operate was created, according to the chairman of the House Science Committee’s space panel, by the Bush administration in 2005. Congress authorized funding for the program, and SpaceX received its contract the following year.

Good for the Bush administration, which did not fund a successor to the space shuttle, and the Congress. Point for them.

At a hearing on Wednesday (June 6), space panel chairman Steven Palazzo, attacked the Obama administration for taking credit last week for the success of the SpaceX mission. Palazzo charged that John Holden, the White House science advisor, made “misleading” statements in claiming credit for the successful test flight.

We’ve got some news for the petty politicians: The credit for the success of the SpaceX first test flight goes to the engineers, designers, technicians, code jockeys, metal benders and managers at SpaceX along with NASA program administrators. If not for the months of testing and retesting, weeks of painstaking validation of the software code needed for spacecraft navigation and communications with the space station, this test flight would not have achieved all of its goals.

SpaceX and its visionary founder Elon Musk did what they set out to do. The politicians who control NASA’s budget and profess support for commercial space should drop the partisan crap and provide the funding necessary to build on the success of the first commercial flight to the space station.

Mail 731 Tuesday, July 03, 2012

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

I will open with this in a spirit of fairness:

Canadian Crude

Dear Jerry:

Reading your header , " Gaia guru derides Warmist believers; <https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=8162> my eyes rolled skyward before beginning to search the page for the National Inquirer masthead.

It turned out instead to be the Toronto Sun, which has a lot in common with its London namesake If you want to know what James Lovelock thinks , there are better ways to find out than letting one newspaper edit what he had to say to another, especially when the subject is oil , and the second hand journalism is cut to fit the taste of Canada’s tar patch.

Here’s a link to the full transcript of what Sir James actually said, as opposed to Charles Brumbelow’s take on the wishful thinking of Watts Up with That.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2012/jun/15/james-lovelock-fracking-greens-climate

It appeared under the no less interesting title,

James Lovelock on shale gas and the problem with the Greens

Russell Seitz

Well, my headline did go further than Sir James’ text, but I will plead that my exaggeration is mild compared to those of the True Believers.

Roberts

Hi Jerry,

Your analysis is the best I’ve seen to explain why Roberts did what he did, and I agree that this election is critically important.

I just wish we were running Reagan and not Romney. We sorely need a statesman with grand vision (not just the guy who’s turn it is) right now.

Cheers,

Doug

You are hardly alone in wishing that we had Mr. Reagan instead of Romney. But wishing will not make it so. We must play the hand we have been dealt. Mr. Romney won the primary. I was not thrilled with his attacks on my friend Newt Gingrich, but I never had a hope that Newt would win in the first place. Romney has been through every mill there is. He remains the most solidly states rights candidate other than the governor of Texas, and that is one big plus. He is more Mormon than Establishment, and self-reliance is strong among Mormons. So is states rights.

Health care gloom

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

A bit more serious than the last email, but I wish to direct your attention to the following two articles.

http://blogs.ajc.com/jay-bookman-blog/2012/07/03/romney-puts-that-sleeping-giant-back-to-sleep/?cxntfid=blogs_jay_bookman_blog

http://www.redstate.com/erick/2012/07/03/the-truth-it-hurts/

I share their concern. Romney’s criticism of Obamacare has been muted. I have a nasty suspicion that "repeal and replace" simply means "make a symbolic vote, make some cosmetic changes, then continue with Obamacare with a shiny new ‘Romneycare’ label". Sort of like what they do on cars when they turn a Chevrolet into a Cadillac by changing the hood ornament.

Or do we truly expect the author of Romneycare to be anxious to undo something that closely resembles his signature achievement?

My concern is that there is insufficient fire in the belly of Republicans in power to repeal Obamacare even if they do get all three branches in November. ‘Compassionate Conservatism’ or something similar is more likely.

Do you have any suggestions? The only one I can think of is ‘light a fire under the Republicans running for office’.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

The key is what kind of majority Romney gets. If it is clear that the Republicans owe their win to the tea party, then non-establishment Republicans will have far more influence than if the Republicans think they are winning on their charm and merits. Since most of them are terrified, a shift in the leadership can be important. We’ve been through all this before. The Reagan/Ford primary election that resulted in Carter is in some senses the predecessor of the 2010 election.

As to Romneycare, I have never heard him suggest that what was correct and constitutional for a state is either constitutional or desirable as a federal program; and I have often heard him say that Romneycare was never intended as a federal program. Why impute to him a desire to implement something that he has repeatedly said was a state matter and has never proposed for national implementation?

The conservative cause is not going magically to take control of the government no matter what happens; but I would rather negotiate with the Republican establishment than with the Democrat establishment.

I do not pretend that the situation is not desperate. Mr. Roberts has made it so, whether deliberately or for some other reason. (I will not accept that he has lost his senses.) This election will be a referendum on entitlements. I think the Republicans will win, because Obama care is not popular; but for the conservatives to win we need to turn out every sympathizer we have. We must be seen to have finally decided to act. Those who want self government must make some effort at governing themselves.

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

‘This means that Chief Justice Roberts is right. There is no short cut to reforming the welfare state and ending its reign of injustice and oppression. It must be accomplished through the expression of the American popular will.’

<http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/07/roberts_hands_a_poisoned_chalice_to_the_president.html>

Roland Dobbins

Madison made it very clear. You cannot have a special institution designed to protect the rights and liberties of the people. Qui custodiet and all that. Kemal Ataturk thought to entrust the liberties of the Turkish people to his comrades in arms, and made the Army the guardian of Turkey as a secular state. They did that remarkably well for four generations, but it is unlikely that this will continue. Timocracy is viable but it generally will not last.

The liberties of the American people are entrusted to the whole of the people. Courts can delay, courts can warn, or, as with the Warren Court, they can be something to fear. But liberty must be won continually; it is not something you can win once and go back to sleep. As we are finding more and more.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free. And eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Those clichés were once more than clichés and slogans; they were learned in the cradle and nurtured in grade school. We have forgotten them, and for some they are corny old clichés. They are not. They are the axioms of liberty.

Hello, Jerry –

So, according to Justice Roberts, ObamaCare is a tax. OK, I’l buy that. What,exactly, is being taxed?

My understanding of direct/indirect taxation is that a direct tax is one levied on property, while an indirect is one levied on the transfer of property (or wealth). In the case of health insurance, it seems unlikely that this would be an indirect tax, since the point of insurance is that you pay your premium even if you received no benefits.

If ObamaCare is then a direct tax, why is it not subject to the apportionment requirement, and so invalid in its present form?

Regards,

Jim Martin

What Mr. Roberts is trying to tell you is that such matters are important only if you believe in the Constitution; and the Court can only prevent the political branches of government from doing as they will for so long. He says he can no longer protect us from the consequences of our political actions. For things like the apportionment requirement to be important you must first decide that such legalisms are more important than compassion and entitlement.

Subj: Ray Bradbury: "Reagan was our greatest president"

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/kevinglass/2012/06/06/recentlypassed_ray_bradbury_reagan_was_our_greatest_president

I recall rereading the book publication of Bradbury’s essay "Apollo, the Sun Goes Out," arguing for the continuation of the space program instead of canceling it to pay for welfare programs; it has been a subtle influence on my life and thought ever since. So I can’t say I’m surprised. It appears to have originally been published in the LA Times, 17 May 1972. (The reprint was published in Perry Rhodan 18, Ace Books, 1972). But while I think I’ve seen it on the web in the past, it doesn’t turn up on a web search now, so there are probably no legitimate copies out there.

Some of his thoughts which went into that essay are captured here:

http://www.astronautix.com/articles/iftndies.htm

Yes. Ray was too thoroughly entwined with the Hollywood establishment to be very open politically, and he talked politics very quietly and confidentially. He had a lot at stake. But he was also very much pro space exploration.

Political campaign lost, knowledge won…

http://lewrockwell.com/kwiatkowski/kwiatkowski286.html

"Having completed a political campaign, and lost, I’ve gained a new awareness of the nature and vulnerabilities of incumbent politicians in the current era of American national socialism. More importantly, I’ve glimpsed the unlimited possibilities and glorious impact of individual decisions to challenge the illusion of central authority and to live free, by no man’s leave and as we wish."

Charles Brumbelow

I’ve won campaigns and I have lost campaigns. I was a county chairman in the Goldwater presidential election (and we did carry the state for George Murphy but not for Goldwater) and I was manager of Barry Goldwater Junior’s first and successful campaign for Congress.

Freedom is not free, and there is always a campaign.

Apple and the Strategy of Technology

Dear Jerry,

After reading the article you linked about McNamara and the Strategy of Technology, I was struck by a thought. For fifteen years Apple has conducted the commercial equivalent of a Strategy of Technology. They understand that technology is a stream, and they seek to swim with it. They perfect their logistics and operations, but only in the service of their strategy, and that strategy is based on a similar understanding of technology to SoT.

The three of you wrote: "To make the enemy counter each move you make, and dance to your tune, is the aim of a Technological War strategy."

I think that’s a fair summary of life at Google, Microsoft, RIM, Nokia, Samsung, Asus etc. recently. I wait to see what happens next. (And at least in commercial competition, the fallout is only metaphorical.)

Steve Setzer

An insightful observation. Thank you.

Subj: Charles Murray: The BA is a Work of the Devil

http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/06/more-reasons-why-i-think-the-ba-is-the-work-of-the-devil/

>>As long as the piece of paper called a BA remains the emblem of educational success, it will lead to colleges and community colleges that collude with students to provide that piece of paper without regard to anything that is learned. …<<

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

As usual, Murray is very much worth reading. I am working on several essays on what to do about the education crisis, but that involves understanding what education is. Most people can never be ‘educated’ in the true sense of the word; yet civilization depends on their being a core of educated and influential men and women.

Any discussion of education must also include Ortega y Gasset, Revolt of the Masses, and its implications.

“we distinguished the excellent man from the common man by saying that the former is the one who makes great demands on himself, and the latter the one who makes no demands on himself, but contents himself with what he is, and is delighted with himself. Contrary to what is usually thought, it is the man of excellence, and not the common man who lives in essential servitude. Life has no savour for him unless he makes it consist in service to something transcendental. Hence he does not look upon the necessity of serving as an oppression. When, by chance, such necessity is lacking, he grows restless and invents some new standard, more difficult, more exigent, with which to coerce himself. This is life lived as a discipline — the noble life. Nobility is defined by the demands it makes on us — by obligations, not by rights. Noblesse oblige. ‘To live as one likes is plebeian; the noble man aspires to order and law’ (Goethe) (quoted in http://pypaik.wordpress.com/2010/09/23/ortega-y-gassets-defense-of-elitism/)

And from years ago:

Hamilton, the bastard son of a Scots peddler, would have been content to have an hereditary Senate, and primogeniture, and in general the trappings and makings of aristocracy in the United States of the Framers. And Ortega y Gasset said that a civilization is a civilization only so long as it is aristocratic. Most people find the rather mobile aristocracy of the later British Empire, especially after the reforms of Macaulay, to have been one of its more admirable points: it wasn’t that they were all virtuous, in the old sense of the Four Cardinal Virtues, but that they aspired to be, and admired that kind of virtue — and admitted that there were virtues, which our present day equalitarian society does not, lest we discover that they are not as wide spread as we like, and we have to pass judgment on someone.

Prudence, Temperance, Courage, and Justice: if the British aristocracy that perished in the Boer war and then in The Great War did not all exhibit those virtues, they all admired them and found them desirable. Even Flashman finds himself being virtuous despite himself…

If we cannot be a republic, then the aristocratic empire of the Widow of Windsor may be what we must aspire to. What other models do we have? (Sparta, perhaps: an idealized Sparta was the founding myth of my Empire of Man in the series you mention; for those interested, The Prince  is relevant.)

But recall that my CoDominium series was intended as a warning…

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2mail/mail227.html#Sunday

Subject: SCOTUS Ruling Means Bigger, More Intrusive IRS

http://www.foxbusiness.com/government/2012/06/29/scotus-ruling-means-bigger-more-intrusive-irs/?intcmp=fbfeatures

It certainly will if Obama wins the November election. If the Republicans win, that will not be so.

Thought you might enjoy this.

http://www.duffelblog.com/2012/07/starcraft-game-added-to-officer-training-curriculum-offers-realistic-leadership-simulation/

DM

David March

Indeed. Thanks.

Mail 689 Saturday, June 23, 2012

I am down at the beach and on dialup, so this will be mostly short shrift…

James Lovelock – now he says that doomsday predictions, including his own (and Al Gore’s) were incorrect.

http://www.torontosun.com/2012/06/22/green-drivel <http://www.torontosun.com/2012/06/22/green-drivel>

Green ‘drivel’

The godfather of global warming lowers the boom on climate change hysteria

Lawrence

This is an important defection from the Warming Alarmists. Lawrence has a lot of followers. And we have:

Amazing, NASA talks climate change and does not mention anything man made about it.

http://www.dump.com/sunearth/

Roger Miller

EPA blasted for requiring oil refiners to add type of fuel that’s merely hypothetical buffy willow

Subject: EPA blasted for requiring oil refiners to add type of fuel that’s merely hypothetical

Federal regulations can be maddening, but none more so than a current one that demands oil refiners use millions of gallons of a substance, cellulosic ethanol, that does not exist.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/06/21/regulation-requires-oil-refiners-use-millions-gallons-fuel-that-is-nonexistent/#ixzz1yWwmCgVU <http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/06/21/regulation-requires-oil-refiners-use-millions-gallons-fuel-that-is-nonexistent/#ixzz1yWwmCgVU>

T

Right up there with bunny inspectors on usefulness. I love this president’s promise to use a laser-like focus on the budget to eliminate all needless costs. He’ll get at it Real Soon Now.

Climate change 4,000 years ago…

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/05/29/4000-years-ago-climate-change-caused-massive-civilization-collapse/

And to think it all happened without burning massive amounts of fossil fuel to power electricity generation and transportation vehicles!

Charles Brumbelow=

The Earth was once an ice ball, and once it had so many dinosaurs that their fossils provide all that oil and none of it with DNA contaminants assuming you believe that theory. And all that happened without human activity. We do not understand climate, we do not understand El Nino and La Nina, we really don’t know how to construct a reliable average temperature for some arbitrarily large area, but we are supposed to bet trillions on academic bureaucrats. And we never catch wise.

Error 451

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/145381/

" There is currently no HTTP status code to indicate you can’t access

content because it’s been prohibited by a government agency. Tim Bray, a Google engineer, has proposed the status code “451,” in honor of the recently deceased author of Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury, for use when an ISP is ordered by the government to deny access to a certain website.

Cute, though not consistent with the current error-numbering scheme."

Sad to think we might actually need such a status code, but clearly that’s the way we are trending, domestically and internationally.

G

Indeed. And it’s a good idea.

War Crimes

I was wondering when people would start to think about this.  I could get into the types of distance involved in killing; I recommend reading of LTC Grossman’s work on the subject.  It is most interesting; I will save you my words on the matter.  But, I will offer words related to the present conditions.

People are starting to see past the mechanical distance offered by the drones.  Mechanical distance makes it easier to kill.  A person looks different through a thermal imaging scope than the do at the sexual range.  Physical distance also makes it easier to kill; one can more easily kill someone with a bayonet than a knife or with one’s bare hands, for example. 

But, what is the difference between using drones and sending a man into a village with a gun, telling him to kill certain people who have not been convicted of any crime and telling that man that it’s okay if he accidentally kills people who aren’t on the list but might be sitting next to the people he’s shooting at?  The difference is, primarily, in method and in mechanical application. 

As much as I do not want the United Nations having any say in anything we do, I cannot deny the validity of U.N. concerns about the drone strikes — in principle:

<.>

A UN investigator has called on the Obama administration to explain under what legal framework its drone war is justified and suggested that “war crimes” may have already been committed. 

Christof Heyns, UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, urged Washington to clarify the basis under international law of the policy, in a report issued to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

</>

http://news.antiwar.com/2012/06/21/citing-potential-war-crimes-un-official-questions-legality-of-drone-war/

It will be interesting to see what comes of this.  Certainly, the concerns are valid and people in this country should be discussing this, but — like everything else — we just ignore it until it becomes severe crisis and then we overreact to it and wonder why we are met with consequences we did not expect and wonder why we can’t aptly deal with the same.  It wasn’t always like this, but since the Boomers took over it has been par for the course. 

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

There was a time when Great Powers claimed a customary international right to bombard the ports of smaller Powers who owed them money and refused to pay, kidnapped their citizens, or otherwise offended them. They could blockade, or they could simply bombard. They could also issue letters of marque and reprisal to private warships.

It is not clear how drones fit into this sort of thing. The customary boundary of a nation extended to sea about the lengthof a long cannon shot on the grounds that this is what nations could control. When the custom began this was a 3 mile limit, but it grew and grew as connon got better. Now the ICBM has made that a bit obsolete as a basis for boundary determination. The drones follow the ICBM – and any nation can afford drones although all cannot afford ICBM’s.

I believe that the letter you posted titled "The Mess" is absolutely correct in pointing to the arrival of the Pelosi-Reid Congress in January 2007 as the actual start of the current fiscal death-dive.

George W. Bush did a number of things I wasn’t happy with, but blaming our current budget mess on him is tendentious partisan nonsense. I’ve tried to make this point publicly myself a number of times in the last few years, but till now nobody seemed interested. Thanks for the

(hoped-for) loan of your soapbox.

Proving this point, now, that gets interesting. Do an image search on "us budget deficit by year" and you’ll run into an astonishing variety of charts claiming to "prove" that one party or the other is at fault.

Just about all of these (on both sides) are misleading, for reasons ranging from oversimplification through honest confusion to outright mendacity. What can a poor boy do? I recommend a strong cup of whatever best keeps your eyes from glazing over, then a walk with me through some background.

Power Over Federal Spending

It may come as a shock to some – spending is routinely blamed on whoever happens to be President that year – but Congress has far more control over how much gets spent in any given year than all but the strongest Presidents. Blaming spending primarily on Presidents is simplistic and misleading.

LBJ at his peak had appreciable say. George W. Bush in his last few years pretty much signed the spending bills Congress sent him. Most Presidents end up doing the same – the veto is a blunt instrument, very hard to wield effectively, and the bully pulpit isn’t all that bully when a President’s popularity has faded.

Timing Of Federal Spending

There’s close to a year’s lag (two years nominal lag) between a new Congress getting elected and its first new budget taking effect.

The key example: The Democrats won back majority control of both House and Senate in November 2006, then took office in January 2007. Did this give them control of the 2007 budget? No. Federal Fiscal Year 2007

(FY’07) had already started back on October 1st 2006, so the FY’07 budget had already been decided by the previous Republican Congress. The new Democratic Congress’s first budget was FY’08, starting October 1st

2007 – eleven actual months (and two nominal years) after they were elected in 2006.

Federal Income

Take a look at the chart at

http://www.heritage.org/federalbudget/current-tax-receipts. (Pull it up in a separate window if you can.) Federal tax revenues have been amazingly constant at right around 18% of GDP since WW II ended in 1945.

They peaked at over 20% just twice (in 1944/45 under wartime taxes, then in 2000 at the height of the dot-com boom) and dropped as low as 15% just twice (for two years in 1949/50, and now for four years in

2009/10/11/12) but always previously returned to the 18% average. This despite huge variations in nominal tax rates since WW II.

The current revenue dip is due to some (hotly debated) mix of the

2001-2003 "Bush tax cuts" and the ongoing economic downturn. Note in that regard that this graph shows that historically revenue dips correspond closely to recessions (see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_United_States)

but that revenue always returns to the 18% average. Always, including under those very same "Bush tax cut" rates – federal revenue had climbed back to 18.5% of GDP by ’07. (Always, until now. More on that in a bit.) 18% of GDP looks remarkably like some sort of practical tax-rate-independent structural limit on Federal revenue in the modern US economy – at least when it’s healthy.

Federal Outgo

OK, pull up the chart at

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/07/government-spending-as-a-percentage-of-gdp-2/.

(I’d give a pointer to just the raw chart, but the "Comments"

guidelines are priceless, and some of the comments are pretty good too.)

The key thing to note here is that since the early 1930s, various wartime peaks and post-war dips notwithstanding, the overall trend has been for spending as a fraction of GDP to ratchet upwards. (It’s also interesting that by standards of the Republic’s first 140 years, we’ve been spending on a war footing since the 1930’s, but that’s another essay.)

From the fifties through the seventies, spending was only modestly (in

hindsight) above that 18%-of-GDP post-WWII revenue average. National debt reached a trillion dollars total toward the end of this period.

(See

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/the-debt-ceiling-and-the-balanced-budget-amendment/

for a year-by-year national debt chart.)

In the eighties, we had a Cold War to finally win, and borrowing was easier than opening a second battle front to cut domestic budgets.

Spending rose to 22%-23% of GDP, and the national debt piled up to almost $4 trillion by the time the USSR disintegrated.

Then in the nineties, the Cold War was over and spending as a fraction of GDP fell – slowly. Spending didn’t drop back down anywhere near the 18% long-term revenue average until the end of the decade. Combined with the dot-com revenue boom this was enough to produce a few years of small surpluses, and a momentary leveling-off of the national debt at just under $6 trillion.

Then, on top of the 2001 dot-bomb recession, came 9/11. Spending rose for the next several years, peaking at 20.1% of GDP in 2006, then in

2007 falling back to 19.6% of GDP – you can just barely see the 2007 downblip on the chart. (For precise year-by-year numbers see

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=200.)

Lies, Damned Lies, And Deficit Blame

Yes, in countering the combined dot-bomb and 9/11 recession and fighting the Afghan and Iraq wars, George W. Bush and the Republican Congress were responsible for a series of deficits from FY’02 through FY’07 that ran the national debt up another 50% to $9 trillion. It is arguable whether they actually needed to spend that much – it certainly wasn’t an improvement in our fiscal position – but it is not what set us on our current fiscal death-dive.

Take a look at the deficits-by-year chart at http://wac.0873.edgecastcdn.net/800873/blog/wp-content/uploads/edwards8-2-11.jpg.

Those Bush deficits peaked at $413 billion in FY’04, and after that declined again every year, down to $161 billion in FY’07. That Republican Congress’s last budget, FY’07, increased only 2.8% over FY’06. Deficits were dropping fast, and the total debt at about 2/3rds of GDP was not great, but still manageable.

Then in January 2007, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid took over control of the Congress. I won’t try to prove the assertion in "The Mess" that Barney "Fannie Mae" Frank and Chris "Friend of Angelo" Dodd taking over the financial oversight committees caused the financial markets to implode 20 months later, but it didn’t help. Nor was the new Congress’s first full budget (FY’08) a confidence-builder, with a 9.3% increase over ’07 producing a big new upwards jump on our deficits-by-year chart, at $459 billion almost tripling the previous year’s mark.

Then came FY ’09, with a fiscal crisis that couldn’t be allowed to go to waste, a lame-duck Bush who went along with whatever the Pelosi-Reid Congress wanted during the heart of the crisis, then a triumphant Obama inclined to spend even more. The ’09 budget rose 17.9% on top of the previous year’s 9.3% (a 29% total increase since ’07), the deficit tripled for the second year straight to $1.413 trillion, and overall Federal spending hit 25.2% of GDP – a level we’d NEVER seen before outside of WW II.

And that’s pretty much where we’ve been ever since. It seems quite likely to me that raising spending from 2007’s 19.6% of GDP to 2009’s 25.2% of GDP (unprecedented outside WW II) and keeping it there ever since has a great deal to do with the economic stagnation that’s keeping tax revenues down around 15% of GDP (and unemployment/underemployment up around 15% of the workforce) for far longer than in any other post-WWII recovery. But what do I know? Lay me end-to-end and you still won’t reach an economist – I just read a lot, and think a bit.

Whatever the reasons for the crippled recovery, the fiscal hole we’re in now was dug by Pelosi, Reid, and Obama. The "level Obama budgets" they recently tried to brag about are all at the ruinous 25%-of-GDP level they set with those 9% then 18% (29% overall) increases. They may still be responsible for less than half of the total current national debt, but that’s only because their effective tripling of the annual deficit from the (already too high, yes) average of the Bush-Republican years has only had a few years to work. It’s the tripling of the rate at which they’re digging the hole deeper that’s deadly.

Worse, they believe (as a matter of "fairness") that this 25%-of-GDP level of spending is the way it should be permanently, never mind the utter lack of precedent and all the indications it’s crippling the recovery. They’re fighting with everything they’ve got to build it permanently into the structure of government.

Bottom line, "Bush did it" is patent nonsense, a blatant attempt to fool enough voters to give them another four years to dig the hole we’re in so deep that we’ll never get out.

The experiment of raising federal spending to 25% of GDP has obviously failed. Myself, I’d love to see lowering it to 15% of GDP experimented with. I suspect the result would be spectacular growth. But realistically, I’d be satisfied to see federal spending drop below 20% of GDP before the next Presidential term is over – that would at least give us a chance of surviving as a recognizable descendant of the country I grew up in.

if you print this, sign me

Porkypine

It is well to remind people of the historical facts once in a while. The Republicans after Gingrich spent wildly, but nothing like what the Democrats did when they got hold of the purse strings. Surprise.

Comments on Mail 729

Re: copyright inertia: Mike Powers only sort of gets it. When he says <i>It’s like a fence. We all know what a fence means, and that acting to circumvent the access control implied by a fence is Not Allowed</i>, he’s describing the way the law ought to be, but isn’t.

IP rights <b>ought</b> to be "like a fence" in a lot of ways that they actually aren’t. (1) The rights an author or publisher holds ought to be well defined and never change (Congress seems to extend them every few years, sometimes to please Hollywood, sometimes to create jobs for lawyers and copyright trolls). (2) Reasonable uses such as copying your records to digital format aren’t allowed, or at least Hollywood lawyers will come after you for them and try to extort you as if they were not allowed. And (3), DRM too often extends to "protecting" non-rights the publisher only wishes he had (such as making you view a long commercial every time you load your DVD of a Disney movie).

Because these things are true, both the hardware and software "fences" of DRM and the virtual "fence" of copyright law actually enclose so much territory the fence builder doesn’t rightfully own that no one respects them.

All laws should be simple, well defined ("bright line rules") and above all fair. Make them so, and all but a tiny minority will obey. Make them vague and unfair, and not only will people disobey en masse but juries will stop convicting. Needing, or trusting, lawyers to explain the law to us belongs on the scrap-heap of history alongside needing priests to read the Bible to us (before it was printed in languages other than Latin).

Re: taxpayer’s union: I believe the intended reference is to the National Taxpayers’ Union (ntu.org), a group which has been around since the Nixon administration and rates the members of Congress before every election according to their votes on spending bills. It’s not a perfect rating system (and not a perfect group either — they refused ever to criticize Reagan even though he increased spending by record amounts, just as has every president since Nixon), but if you want federal spending to be cut back (or even to stop increasing) it’s a good place to start.

Another good group is ClubForGrowth.org, which wants not only less government but also less unnecessary regulation, especially the environmental sort. They also publish ratings, both of Congress and of presidential candidates.

John David Galt

I have supported the Club for Growth since its inception, but not slavishly. I do pay attention to their recommendations.

: STEEEEE-rike – TWOOOOOOO!

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_SUPREME_COURT_UNION_FEES?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2012-06-21-10-12-54

Cheap energy = prosperity!

Drill here, DRILL NOW!

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

We can hope.

Russia looks to microsatellites for science and shipping buffy willow

Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/19/russia_plans_microsatellites/

Russia looks to microsatellites for science and shipping

Like Sputnik, only better

By Richard Chirgwin <http://forms.theregister.co.uk/mail_author/?story_url=/2012/06/19/russia_plans_microsatellites/>

Posted in Space <http://www.theregister.co.uk/science/space/> , 19th June 2012 23:51 GMT <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/19/>

Russia is showing interest in the growing push to design and launch microsatellites, according to Voice of Russia.

The news site says <http://english.ruvr.ru/2012_06_14/78115896/> [1] Russia’s Space Systems Company hopes that microsats – satellites which, like its original Sputnik, weigh less than 100kg but are much more capable – can gather data to help predict natural disasters and monitor shipping movements.

The company’s head, Yuri Urlichich, is quoted by Voice of Russia as claiming that RSSC detected a surge in free electrons in the ionosphere, seven hours ahead of last year’s disastrous Japan earthquake. He suggests that microsatellites would be a better way of collecting such data than trying to establish earth-bound monitoring stations to try and predict earthquakes.

The other application identified by Urlichich is to identify ships in proximity to each other, to make passage of narrow straits easier and safer.

Microsatellites – satellites weighing less than 100kg – are attracting increasing attention as shrinking and lower-power electronics reduces the bulk of systems that satellites have to carry. They bring their own challenges, however, since their small size reduces the availability of the fuel needed for maneuvers to keep the satellite on-station.

That hasn’t stopped growing international interest in applications of microsatellites, since at 100kg or less, they’re much cheaper to send to space than satellites weighing tons. For example, a microsatellite system is proposed <http://antarcticbroadband.com/> [2] as a solution to the looming bandwidth crunch in the Antarctic, with increasing scientific activity generating more data just as the ageing satellites now serving the frozen continent approaching their end of life.

Subj: Best movie of 2012: Act of Valor

OK, I’ll byte: here’s an alternative to _The Avengers_:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1591479/

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

Air and space museum

Place has developed a liberal bent. Instead of technical descriptions of rockets, there is now social commentary on the cold war. Just wasted 18 bucks watching "dynamic earth" a global warming propaganda piece that try’s to tell the audience we will end like Venus if we don’t curb man made carbon emissions.

Phil

I am sorry but not surprised to hear this.

Student Loan Bailout

The United States government is bailing out banks that meet certain conditions with certain students:

(1)  The student must have at least one loan with the Department of Education.

(2)  The student must have other loans with banks; these loans must have been used for education or related expenses.  

The terms are, financially, a small break for students:

(1)  The student receives .25% reduction in interest rates when consolidating the loans.

(2)  The student may sign up for an automatic, montly debit and recieve another .25% reduction in interest rates.

The terms, financially, for the banks are even better:

(1)  No more financial liabilities. 

I suppose this would also leave students the mercy of Department of Education SWAT teams, but — since they already had a loan with that department — they were already at the mercy of said teams anyway.  A fifty basis point reduction on interest rates is a welcome development for anyone with a loan.  It seems like a good deal for students and a better deal for banks.  I was in contact with someone who works at Sallie Mae and got the information from her. 

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

A cheap way to buy votes with other people’s money. Look for more of this.