Category Archives: Mail

Mail 690 Wednesday, August 31, 2011

re: Green Dreams: suppose that Climate Change is real?

I do not read Stephen King or other horror writers. I don’t have to. I got you.

What you wrote is truly frightening. Of course, climate change is real. That we know. The question is whether Global Warming is real and, if it is, is it Manmade.

The Greens affirm the answers are ‘Yes’ and ‘YES’ and act on that affirmation. In my experience, they have no interest in collecting more data or entertaining any argument opposed to their views. In other words, left to the Greens, the course you outlined will happen.

This means that if the Greens win, industrial farming will end; modern transportation will end; modern communications will end (no satellite launches); modern, densely populated cities will end. We shall be reduced to subsistence farming and chattel slavery will return.

You wrote in _A Spaceship for the King_ that horse collars ended slavery on earth (by dint of making horsepower a better bargain that manpower). Horse collars may have made slavery less economically viable, but slavery did not become a bad economic bargain until the advent of steam-powered machines.

If the Greens outlaw machines, . . . God, I can’t even complete the thought. You brought me a degree of horror beyond my imagining.

Live long and prosper

h lynn keith

If CO2 is really a pollutant and can cause runaway heat generation, then I think we are doomed: I do not believe there is any way that we can halt industrial development before the critical levels of CO2 are reached. My own conclusion is that the AGW hypothesis is at best not proven, and the likelihood is that it has a lot of factors wrong – and that there are remedies. The important matter is to be wealthy enough to implement those remedies. I do not know the optimum CO2 levels in the atmosphere. It may well be that the optimum level is higher than t present, perhaps as much as double. Still, before we allow that level to double, it might be well to have the means to reverse that level and bring it back down. Plankton blooms, some equivalent of kudzu that can be sealed away, or other biological methods; even a nuclear powered chemical/mechanical system; whatever, we need not build it until needed, but it would be well to know that we could do that. The alternative, it seems to me, is to submit to a Malthusian future.

And the data on AGW are not all in on just how true all this is.

A sad, sad day in the annals of science, when evidence is suppressed for political purposes.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100102296/sun-causes-climate-change-shock/

Jim

Re: Irene & Anthropogenic Global Warming

Jerry,

I’m sure you have already been apprised that global cyclone activity (hurricanes, et al, not meaning tornadoes) is at a 30 year low. The last significant storm that I recall moving up through that part of New England was hurricane Gloria in 1985, which made landfall somewhat farther East on Long Island than did Irene and was still a hurricane afterward when it made it onto the mainland.

Yesterday FoxNews interviewed a geologist by telephone, who has done research into an 1821 hurricane. That storm took roughly the same track as Irene had through Saturday, skirting the coast and striking many large cities along the way. He was not specific about where it made landfall with respect to New York City, and perhaps that exact information is not available now. He did mention that the storm surge caused the Hudson River and the East River (which are on the West and East sides of Manhattan respectively) to join across Canal Street (aptly named, I suppose!), temporarily cutting the island of Manhattan.

Given that CO2 did not rise until much later, we might presume the 1821 storm was not the product of human-caused global warming. Then again, I did once read in Scientific American that humans farming rice in Southeast Asia 10,000 to 12,000 years ago might have brought about an end to the last ice-age, so who knows? I’ve yet to see any word on what species were culpable for ending each of the previous glaciations. Given the precautionary principle, we should all hold our breath for a while, just in case! 😉

Regards,

George

Climate datum

Here in Austin today, we tied our all-time high temperature reading,

112 degrees F, which we hit once before, in 2000.

We’ve also blown well past the previous record of most days in a row

over 100 degrees.

Best,

Jon

Jonathan Abbey

Green Dreams Response

I am a bit surprised that you did not mention the Corn Laws of England. Remember when the King wanted to keep people at starvation levels to "save the forests"? We’ve seen this scam before.

Also, we have a way out of the game. We go to space. I didn’t need a global threat to want to go out there; I see nothing but clowns down here and a few people who have some sense. Most of us with sense want off this rock. We know that, someday, the Earth will either a) be swallowed by a red giant Sun or b) turn into a ball of ice if the sun doesn’t make it this far. So, save the planet, live at starvation levels, etc. if you like. I don’t want to wait around here with the squeeling mouths and bleeding hearts to die. Sorry, I’m not that stupid.

Nobody seems to think beyond the short-term when crating policy. This nihilistic view of global warming alarmists is not helpful. If the future is that bleak, why don’t these people do the decent thing and take a graceful exit? Let the rest of us who want to try give it a try and let those who want to die do so. I do not see why I have to hold their hands as they jump off a cliff.

You hit upon an important point in your essay as well; I will underscore it. The common factor in all this alarmism is the end of industry, the end of prosperity, the end of freedom, the end of security. That is their focus. Their focus is not ice ages or global warming, their focus is on the deindustrialization of humanity. No matter how the problem manifests, the solution is always the same — a nihilistic philosophy that might as well flow from a modern-day death cult.

Life is a contest. You won the first race when you were the first sperm to go into the egg that eventually became you. You kept winning again and again. Death stikes around you daily, yet you remains as though immortal. The voice of darkness always tells you that you can’t do it. It always says that it is hopeless and pointless. If that is true, then why should the voice of darkness speak at all? I yell back into the shadows, "Fine, maybe you are right. But, right now it is time for the light to shine and I will not kill the light inside when I can scatter the darkness." As you say, "Despair is a sin".

When in doubt, become elite or die trying.

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Pace ‘Ken’.

‘The Russians had much worse masters than we do, and with much tighter control – yet even they could not hold power forever.’

The new boss looks much the same as the old boss, to me – the main difference is that he isn’t preaching chiliastic communism (and has detargeted his missiles, although that takes only about 30 minutes or so to correct), but instead has fallen back on good, old-fashioned Russian nationalism and envy of the West.

Roland Dobbins

Without outside pressures, ‘hydraulic’ societies – those in which the state controls the means of food production and distribution – tend to be stable and could in theory last forever. Or so Wittfogel concluded. They don’t have to evolve.

I greatly prefer Putin to Stalin.

Ken Wrote in the mail:

<.>

You talk about our Masters, but that is where your argument falls apart: they may THINK they are our masters, but they cannot hold power. The Russians had much worse masters than we do, and with much tighter control–yet even they could not hold power forever.

</>

https://jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=1775

I wonder what the people who died in gulags or ended up in mass graves would have to say about this position?  Thank you for your input. 

—

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Civil Defense / FEMA

You are so correct, Jerry! As an advanced Civil Defense trained person in the 60s, we were able to handle many aspects of rescue and recovery during Hurricane Betsy bettern than FEMA did during Hurricane Katrina. We were taught municipal infrastructure, advanced first aid, setting up emergency hospitals and morgues, with appropriate processes to help relieve the ailing, injured and families of the deceased. We did not have the disasterous results that FEMA incurred in New Orleans. Our group, 16-18 year old Explorer Scouts, had 92 patients in an emergency hospital that we set up in a junior high school. We had three nurses to administer medications; but we performed all of the other treatments required to prepare our patients for transfer to hospitals, three days later, after rooms became available. We also trained the community in proper hurricane preparation so they would not be panic-stricken. Civilian Defense works. It much less costly, also.

Roger Bull

Juno Spacecraft Images Earth and Moon

Jerry,

Wowzers! The picture fills me with awe (in the old sense of the word).

Regards, Charles Adams, Bellevue, NE

<http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2011-271>

Jerry,

NASA Tech base "eroded"

http://fcw.com/articles/2011/09/01/agg-nasa-technology.aspx?s=fcwdaily_020911

Hun

Domino’s to serve pizzas on the Moon, apparently • The Register

Domino’s Japan revealed plans for a lunar pizza outlet, I think this means as much as Pan Am’s moon passenger list, but it’s cool, Tim Harness.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/02/pizza_chain_plans_restaurant_on_the_moon/

Tidbits

Jerry,

Four brief items. First, while this tale is even more serpentine, I find it stunning that you can work for a union but have your pension paid by the state pension system in Illinois:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/watchdog/ct-met-pensions-villanova-20110902,0,1997273.story

Study Points to WTC Cancer Link (at least possibly):

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904583204576544713561820254.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories

Dealing with hard questions, Cantor says we gotta pay for Irene relief by cutting something else. He’s being vilified:

http://www.politickernj.com/50668/christie-versus-cantor

Some historical items on South American leaders:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/argentina/8735411/Eva-Peron-kept-Nazi-treasure-taken-from-Jews.html

Regards,

George

Mail 690 Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Your pessimism is WAY overblown

I agree that cutting back energy will cause massive deprivation. That’s why it won’t happen.

You talk about our Masters, but that is where your argument falls apart: they may THINK they are our masters, but they cannot hold power. The Russians had much worse masters than we do, and with much tighter control–yet even they could not hold power forever.

Polls show that a huge majority of Americans now reject the radical environmentalist agenda. With the inauguration of President Richard Perry in 2013, that agenda will be as dead as Soviet Communism.

Incidentally, why is it that you assume that the USA is doomed because it mixes in socialism with its free enterprise system, but that China and India are the wave of the future because they mix in free enterprise with their socialist systems? We are still a far freer nation economically than those countries, and will most likely weather these economic storms better.

I was a big fan of A STEP FARTHER OUT, largely because it took up the optimistic view of technology that Isaac Asimov abandoned when he took up ZPG. Now you seem to have given up hope, right at the point when commercial space is taking off and environmental radicalism is on its deathbed.

Politics, from what I can see, goes in cycles. The 90’s and 00’s were, like the 60’s and 70’s, more or less statist decades. The 10’s, unless I miss my guess, will probably be conservative/classical liberal, like the 80’s. We are standing on the edge of raining soup. I wish you’d stop acting as if the only people in the world who matter are the left-wing chattering classes.

Ken

I scarcely know where to begin, but perhaps here: it is pointless to write warnings about a fate we cannot escape. I do not warn you of a future you cannot avoid. On the other hand I have for forty years warned that we are approaching a precipice, and yet we continue to move toward it. Sometimes I get discouraged.

In A Step Farther Out I described a world I thought we could and would get to in my lifetime. I wrote stories in that coming world. We are now in the time frame of those stories, but we are not really exploiting orbit and the Moon, much less asteroid resources. Alas. I had thought that the end of the Cold War would move us to a new world of expectation and hope. Instead we seem to be stuck on Hope and Change. My apologies if I seen unduly gloomy,

For years I have warned that we sow the wind. I see we are reaping now – and we continue to sow the wind.

I know that politics goes in cycles. We learned that from Aristotle.

Negative Mention of Federal Government at all-time High

<.>

Just 17% held a positive view of the federal government with another 20% being neutral. Meanwhile, a whopping 63% said they were negative about the government – an all-time low for a Gallup poll.

Gallup, which has conducted this survey each August since 2001, said that Americans’ frustration with politicians and Washington was amplified by the angry – and frustrating – summer debate over the debt ceiling negotiations.

This marks the first time that the government finished at the bottom, displacing last year’s winner of the booby prize, the oil and gas industry.

</>

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/08/29/scitech/main20098838.shtml

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Remarkable. Hope and Change.

You touched on FEMA in a comparatively recent view.  Ron Paul weighed in on the discussion:

http://www.infowars.com/ron-paul-why-we-dont-need-fema/

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

It should be obvious that we do not need FEMA, and we receive demonstrations with every disaster. The Republicans can restore Civil Defense. I don’t know if they will. FEMA has many lobbyist friends now.

Maybe what ought to happen here is that instead of just saying "EVERYONE LEAVE, NO EXCEPTIONS", the communities involved should develop building codes and resources that *would* survive these major storms. Maybe if the houses weren’t cheap junk slapped together to capitalize on the value of beachfront real-estate, they’d be able to shelter the occupants.

—

Mike T. Powers

The economy: it’s our fault

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/consumer-fears-put-economy-on-the-brink/2011/08/26/gIQAVbzclJ_story.html?hpid=z1

Which immediately reminded me of a poem you first introduced me to

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2006/brecht140806.html

Steve Chu

Brecht’s redemption.

The Solution
Bertolt Brecht

After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writer’s Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts.   Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

On demand, and consumers

Something has been very clear to me for some time; a point which seems not to be considered important (or not considered at all) by some. Iron rusts, glass breaks, food is eaten. Through necessary use, natural decay, or intentional destruction, the things of value in this world are constantly consumed. If it weren’t for constant creation, the world would rapidly become hellish. Even a slight tipping of the scales toward destruction over creation would lead to a world many would find intolerable.

The creation of true value should be encouraged. Creation must outpace consumption and destruction. Anything else is suicidal. (Of course, this raises the question of what is of true value. I’m not among those who think that it’s anything people are willing to pay for — drugs have destroyed many lives, for example. It’s a question I’ve wrestled with for some time, and haven’t found a satisfactory answer.)

On a related note…

Even in the face of empty store shelves in almost any time of panic, there are many who believe we’re in, or near, a post-scarcity world. If there is abundance (in this view), then there is no need for incentives to create, and the only reason for concentrated wealth is class exploitation. And one way to remedy the injustice is to burn and loot. It seems our society has not done enough teaching of the Gods of the Copybook Headings. Experience is likely to be a more cruel teacher. But if we learn the right lessons, we’ll come out of it a society worthy and able to take to the stars.

Thanks for the education your site provides.

— Steve Carabello

Some lessons are very costly.

California Diaspora, Weather and Chas Theory

Dear Jerry,

You and I have corresponded (that is, I’ve written and you’ve published my comments on Chaos Manor) much to my delight. These days I’m one of the folks who has been part of the great Diaspora out of California. That, of course, is the tragedy that California brought upon itself, the loss of the well educated, middle class mature adult professionals (I am perhaps in the last generation of engineers to be trained at a CSU – a EEE at CSU, Sacramento).

These days I live just outside Seattle and am much the happier for it. While I may have the insanity of the Federal government to contend with, I also live in a state that requires itself constitutionally to live within its means. This has led to WA being the only "blue state" to have population growth, growth in jobs and employment AND actual growth in wealth. When compared to our southern neighbors of Oregon and California, we are veritable paradise.

I am one of many millions of Californians who have fled to low tax, high growth refuges such as Texas, Colorado, Nevada and Washington. While much more difficult, I think that eventually we will see a diaspora of this nature happen from the USA if we don’t solve our federal government problems. The lack of religious and economic liberty, after all, resulted in the same thing happening from Europe to America (I am simplifying, of course, but not too much I think).

About AGW aka global warming aka climate change. As I recall, strange attractors and chaos theory emerged from the work of first Poincare and later Lorenz and Mandelbrot. And specifically, Lorenz was doing computer modeling of weather and discovered that extremely minor changes in his input data resulted in wildly varying outcomes of the modeled system. At the same time Mandelbrot was looking at things like cotton prices and discovering that scale mattered in how you measured your subject, leading ultimately to Fractal Geometry.

It bothers me (especially with that EEE background) that we seem to so arrogantly assume that we can predict the outcomes of a complex system. Modern system theory says that we can only predict general possibilities of outcomes and that the attractors (strange attractors, Lorenz attractors, etc.) will determine the possible variation. Admittedly I haven’t worked on this problem, since these days I work in Information Security. We have our own sets of issues to deal with and they occupy most of my intellectual energy. I’m sure, having read you for many years now, that you are painfully aware of those issues. That said, with a reasonable undergraduate background in math, physics, computer science, electrical engineering I am having a hard time seeing how reasonable and well qualified scientists were so blinded to the fact that computer modelling complex systems means you end up with a range of possibilities?

I’m curious what you think about my comments on the Diaspora as well as weather and chaos theory.

thanks for Chaos Manor, one of my favorite sources of thought on a daily basis.

Eric

Eric Cowperthwaite

Some processes are chaotic. They cannot be modelled. They certainly cannot be modelled when one does not know all the factors.

"People see that and assume we can predict everything."

But isn’t that what the Warmists – sorry, Changeists – have been telling us?

<http://apnews.myway.com/article/20110828/D9PDAF0O0.html>

Roland Dobbins

America Gives China A Mineral Monopoly

August 16, 2011: Complaints from the Congo are growing about the U.S. legislation intended to stop illegal mineral sales. The Dodd-Frank bill (also called the Obama Law) has a clause that prohibits the sale of so-called conflict minerals may have been well-intentioned but it was not well-thought out. Rather than run the risk of buying any minerals that might have been smuggled from the Congo, many major mining companies are simply refusing to buy minerals from central Africa. The result is a de facto embargo. There are few buyers for Congo’s valuable minerals, especially tantalum and tungsten which have many hi-tech uses. This has damaged the Congo’s economy, because the nation relies on mineral exports. According to some sources, China, which does not have to meet Dodd-Frank standards, is snapping up many minerals at very cheap prices.

The road to Hell…..

John from Waterford

But we can’t do anything about that It might be in the US interst, and we have to act impartially when we go break things and kill people and spend money and borrow more money so we can spend more money.

But of course

http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/article/york-spending-not-entitlements-created-deficits#ixzz1VrBaD18e

Mail 689 Friday, August 26, 2011

Value Added Tax

Dr. Pournelle:

As I understand it, the Value ADDED Tax is seen as a sales tax only by the end user.

All the rest of the way up the production, distribution, and sales chain, the value ADDED at each step must be computed. The businessman is supposed to get credit for his costs and pay tax only on his contribution to the value of the product. This sounds to me like a full employment program for tax accountants and government auditors.

It is probably a small matter in comparison with the easy-to-swallow-in-small doses shift of our money to government coffers that the VAT offers. But, like the Bunny Inspectors, these are people we should not have to pay.

I think Dr. Smith, E.E. Smith, that is, had something to say about low taxes due to restriction of the government to its proper sphere of authority. With the remark that if it were not for the space piracy problem it would be necessary to reduce taxes even further to keep too much money from accumulating in the accounts of the Galactic Patrol.

Jim Watson

If government gets more money it will simply spend it, and continue the 7% exponential rise in the size of government. Canada and some Latin American countries seem to be able to reduce their deficits without disaster. Why can’t America?

Food "insecurity"

"As many as 17 million children nationwide are struggling with what is known as food insecurity. To put it another way, one in four children in the country is living without consistent access to enough nutritious food to live a healthy life…"

What you have to do is look for the keywords in this statement. Such as "insecurity", and "nutritious", and "healthy".

What they’re saying here is not that people can’t get enough raw calories to stay alive. What they’re saying is that they can’t get the *right* *kind* of food, i.e. the food that the government thinks you ought to be eating instead of the food you actually prefer.

Or, in the case of most lower-income folks, the food that’s all you have *time* to eat. When you have twenty minutes to get from your first-shift job at the law office to your second-shift job at Safeway, you haven’t got time to prepare and cook a meal with plenty of vegetables and few starches or saturated fats. You’re going to buy something you can eat with one hand while you drive.

—

Mike T. Powers

When bunny inspectors just won’t do

I am so glad the feds are available to save us from ourselves.

http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/news/general_music_news/gibson_factory_raided_by_fbi.html

A.S. Clifton

Housing

Jerry,

You said,

"I do not know the origin of the right to have a house, nor of the obligation for someone else to pay for it."

The Realpolitik answer is Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, et al’s desire to buy votes with the public purse.

I have to agree that the Constitutional basis is murky…let me see:

It has nothing to do with laying taxes or providing for the common defense.

In the short term, it certainly is beneficial to the welfare of those of receive this largess, but is detrimental to the persons who have paid the bill (and in the long term, most of the ostensible beneficiaries have also suffered), so it is hard to argue that it has provided for the general welfare.

It has certainly benefited from the power to borrow money, but one should not borrow money just because one can.

Building materials are articles of commerce, but there is a large step from regulating commerce to stimulating or mandating it (as several Courts have pointed out in re: Obamacare).

A lot of the beneficiaries hare further benefited from lax enforcement of the laws of naturalization and laws of bankruptcy, but again it is hard to see how not enforcing the law is a power of Congress.

If the intent has been to inflate the value of the coin of the United States, then it’s been a winner.

For that matter, it has also empowered the Fed to counterfeit money (aka quantitative easing, whereby the counterfeit is given the same value — deflated — as the previous fiat money).

Given the number of homes in Hollywood which have been forced into foreclosure, I guess for a time it promoted the Useful Arts.

I will say the one can make no argument one way or the other about Piracies committed on the high seas. There are other, metaphorical Piracies which one might claim to have benefited, but again, I don’t think the purpose of the enumerated power was to help the pirates.

Again, I don’t see how the war powers are enforced by this.

And last, they might have done this for the District of Columbia, but not for the rest of the country.

Jim

As a general principle, let Washington demonstrate its superior abilities by demonstrating them in the District of Columbia, where the Congress has the power of dictatorship if it wants it; and certainly has the Constitutional right to spend money on things like education. When DC has the best schools in the country then we might well want to listen to the Department of Education on how to run the schools in the states. Last I heard, Congress isn’t doing any better job of educating its direct subjects in the District than any State is doing. Perhaps they just don’t know how?

Glen Reynolds today

http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&mpid=86

An excellent presentation on government intervention in the economy.

Phil

Glen is always worth paying attention to. I don’t as a rule watch many presentations, though. I’m a word man…

Free people are not equal, and equal people are not free

Jerry,

You comment that you could not find a source for this made me curious. This lead me to Lawrence Reed and the “Seven Principles of Sound Public Policy”

http://www.gppf.org/pub/seven_principles.htm

1) Free people are not equal, and equal people are not free.

2) What belongs to you, you tend to take care of; what belongs to no one or everyone tends to fall into disrepair.

3) Sound policy requires that we consider long-run effects and all people, not simply short-run effects and a few people.

4) If you encourage something, you get more of it; if you discourage something, you get less of it.

5) Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own.

6) Government has nothing to give anybody except what it first takes from somebody, and a government that’s big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you’ve got.

7) Liberty makes all the difference in the world.

Mike Plaster

I have been saying that Free men are not equal and equal men are not free for long enough that I do not say “people”. The English language has always recognized that “men” and “mankind” includes both sexes, and I have known these principles from well before the fad of saying “his or her”, or Damon Knight’s made up pronoun yeye came into use. The general principles can be gathered from Aristotle and Cicero, but they are not in that succinct form. I learned that concise form a long time ago, probably in a political philosophy seminar.

The dose is the poison

Hello Jerry

I believe there is a saying that suggests it is not the substance itself that is poisonous but the amount. Feed a lab rat enough of any substance and cancer, liver/kidney failure, blindness, etc… will result.

Could it not be the same way with government borrow and spend? too much is a bad thing?

—

Numquam satis – slogan of the Obama administration

"Politicians are worse than thieves. At least when thieves take your money, they don’t expect you to thank them for it." Walter Williams

The dose makes the poison is an old maxim of pharmacy. I hadn’t thought of it as applying to government, but of course it does.

Mail 689 Thursday, August 25, 2011

Governor Palin and the Return of Jacksonian Foreign Policy, Condi Crush

Jerry,

I thought you might be interested in this article on Gov Palin’s Jacksonian foreign policy and the link to her facebook post.

http://conservatives4palin.com/2011/08/governor-palin-and-the-return-of-jacksonian-foreign-policy.html

IMHO, the Gov is doing a masterful job of backpedaling from being the first to advocate imposing a No Fly zone. Someone, perhaps you, must have explained what was involved in destroying a country’s air defenses so that our aircraft can operate safely. I would be pleased if any of the candidates aside from Ron Paul would ask why we have reneged on the peace settlement negotiated with Gadaffy after the capture of Saddam inspired him to surrender his WMD. Everyone seems to be focusing on their outrage about the Lockerbie bomber being released. None seem to remember that it was Obama rather than Bush who signed off on that.

On another note, FOX News reports that Gadaffy had a large photo album devoted to Condi Rice who negotiated the peace with him. One cannot fault him for taste. I suspect that no world leader will develop a similar infatuation with Hillary.

Jim Crawford

Palin has indeed made a clear statements of principle. In general I tend to agree with her, but with reservations. There are times when it is necessary to use force without exerting the power of the Republic. In the long forgotten past we dealt with that sort of thing by having a Department of War and a Department of the Navy. Navy was junior to War. By custom Navy including the Marines belonged to the President, and he could do pretty well what he thought was needed; but if he wanted to involve the Army, which was the Department of War, he had to go to Congress. We managed pretty well on that principle for a long time.

I am neither isolationist nor interventionist, but I do agree that sending in the troops in matters of less than vital interest needs careful consideration, and all these things require more cost/benefit analysis than we seem to be giving. The problem is Viet Nam: we were right to go there, and as Reagan observed it was a noble thing to do, defending the liberty of the South; after the South fell came reeducation camps and other recriminations. That is all fading now. But of course there was a hard to explain US interest. If containment was to work the USSR had to be contained. Viet Nam was a long way from the USSR, expensive to supply, and easier for us logistically. It became a long war of attrition and it did a lot to drain the Soviets (Afghanistan did a lot more). As a Campaign of Attrition in the Seventy Years War it was in fact a success, but a damned expensive one – wars of attrition always are. And we did win it. By 1972 North Viet Nam could send 150,000 troops south, and despite surprise they were utterly defeated. More than 100,000 troops lost, two armored divisions lost, fleets of trucks lost; all at a cost of a few hundred American casualties. The Army of the Republic of Viet Nam held fast under that hammer, and with US support won a big victory. That was all thrown away in 1975 when the Congress voted to support South Viet Nam with 20 cartridges and 2 hand grenades per troop, and forbade US air support, so we saw the pictures of helicopters pushed into the sea and the shameful flight from Saigon; had the US provided the support in 1975 that we provided in 1972 the outcome would have been different. Note that in both 1972 and 1975 the wars were the result of an invasion from the north, not Viet Cong insurgents.

The Cold War ended, and the US has since made friends with Viet Nam; we may yet return to Cam Ranh Bay. Meanwhile we replaced the conscript army with the new Legions, all volunteers. Supposedly we adopted new rules as well, but over time we began to commit the troops piecemeal into places where our interests were murky and the goals unclear. Now we are in the longest war of our history and the goals are still unclear.

The US conscript army in Viet Nam bears little resemblance to the modern Legions. It is more powerful than the armies Jackson would have known, and American obligations world wide are deeper and more complex than any Jackson faced.

At present, though, the greatest threat to America comes from the 7% exponential growth of government spending; until that is contained, we will not get out of the wretched morass we are stumbling into. The Legions can’t take us of this trap. We built it ourselves. Palin’s Jacksonian policy is one we can afford; it is not clear that we can afford anything else. We have to conserve and rebuild our military power, because we can’t afford not to. There are growing threats to American interests – to vital interests—and we have to keep the strength to meet them. A Jacksonian policy has that advantage.

Excuse the ramble. It has been a very long day.

Not that it seems to matter, but…

…is a VAT constitutional?

Charles Brumbelow

I would think so. We have had federal excise taxes for a long time,

==

VAT

Canada has the GST, a value added tax, AND the conservative government is cutting government spending to balance the budget. A responsible government can do both.

The US problem is the automatic increase in government spending. The VAT is a separate issue.

I’m for reducing income tax and adding a VAT. Make users pay tax on what they consume, not on what they earn.

John Galt

I would be in favor of consumption rather than income taxes myself, limiting income taxes to incomes over, say, $100,000 a year. But I have no confidence that imposition of consumption taxes would accompany reductions in income tax. Rather they opposite, I would say; and just now feeding the beast is the worst thing we can do. Adding new revenue just gives them more to spend. But yes, I agree, it is better to shift tax burdens to consumption tax rather than income. Encourage savings and investment and earning. You want less of something, fine people for doing it.

Dr. Spencer on global warming

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvObfrs3qoE&feature=player_embedded

A very good presentation. About 9 minutes.

Phil

It becomes clear over time that we simply do not understand what forces climate. It now appears that solar activity has much greater effects on clouds than the models suppose. There are other factors we have ignored that keep inserting themselves. Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get; and it’s pretty clear we can’t predict the weather. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/25/cern_cloud_cosmic_ray_first_results/ 

As for me, I’d want a way to turn back the CO2 climb if we find it produces harm, but so far I have not seen evidence of harm. CO2 is good stuff if you’re a wheat plant.

1 in 4 American Children Go Hungry?

I have a hard time believing this, but here it is:

<.>

In high school, Katherine Foronda trained herself not to feel hungry until after the school day had ended. She wasn’t watching her weight or worrying about boys seeing her eat.

She just didn’t have any food to eat or any money to buy it.

"I thought, if I wasn’t hungry during class I’d be able to actually focus on what we were learning,” said Foronda, now 19.

Every day, children in every county in the United States wake up hungry. They go to school hungry. They turn out the lights at night hungry.

That is one of the stunning key findings of a new study to be released Thursday by Feeding America, a network of 200 food banks and the largest hunger charity in the country.

As many as 17 million children nationwide are struggling with what is known as food insecurity. To put it another way, one in four children in the country is living without consistent access to enough nutritious food to live a healthy life, according to the study, "Map the Meal Child Food Insecurity 2011."

Those hungry children are everywhere, and with the uncertain economy, the numbers are only growing, experts say.

</>

http://abcnews.go.com/US/hunger-home-american-children-malnourished/story?id=14367230

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

And yet the latest nanny state war is on obesity. I don’t know. My Boy Scouts used to cook Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, and the local church sponsors delivered some of the dinners to locals, but we never knew to whom; we also took the Scouts in uniform to the skid row missions to deliver holiday dinners, on the theory that this would be beneficial to both the recipients and the Scouts. I don’t know just who does go hungry in the US; certainly there are enough free school meals and Food Stamps given out to alleviate most of it? I am sure there are some residual needy, but surely we have gone about as far as one can on this?

Fannie, Freddie Takeover Could Be Key To Obama Jobs Plan | FoxNews.com

Jerry,

This is astonishing.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/08/25/fannie-freddie-takeover-could-be-key-to-obama-jobs-plan/#ixzz1W2zVZyOX

Would it not be better for the govt to recapitalize the banks by buying up the bad mortgages then offer the borrower a favorable loan modification?

Jim Crawford

Housing is going to fall again, and until it does the bubble can’t be burst nd ended and a normal market restored. If the government becomes the landlord does that help? Should we tax those who have paid their mortgages in order to support those who did not? Who laid that obligation on those who have retained their jobs and made their payments? I do not know the origin of the right to have a house, nor of the obligation for someone else to pay for it.