Category Archives: View

View 740 Sunday, September 02, 2012

The Reverend Sun Myung Moon, RIP

There are many official obituaries and I can’t add to them. The most sympathetic will be at the Washington Times http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/sep/2/rev-sun-myung-moon-founder-times-dies-92/ which thr Reverend Moon founded. The Times was no more a Moonie newspaper than the Christian Science Monitor is run by the successors of Mary Baker Eddy. You don’t generally rely on the Monitor for the latest in medical science breakthroughs, and one did not turn to the Washington Times for the latest news on missionary activities in Asia, but there was a time when the Monitor was among the best national papers on space science, and the Times was an excellent Cold War paper.

I have not thought about the Reverend Moon for more than a decade. The announcement of his death sparks irregular memories. Apologies for this ramble.

I met Mr. Moon in the early 1980’s when I received an invitation to attend and speak at a conference on the unification of the sciences to be held in Seoul. I would also participate in panels on science and society. The conference was chaired by a Danish physicist, and as far as I could see from the attendance and conference list there wasn’t a Moonie in the bunch. My friend and one time collaborator Dr. Charles Sheffield was also on the speaker list. Neither of us knew a thing about the Unification Church other than from popular press accounts of his mass weddings. On the other hand they were paying all expenses and a good honorarium. All told it seemed like a good deal.

It was. I discovered that I would be expected to attend one of the Reverend Moon’s mass weddings – about 22,000 couples, mostly Asian but some Americans – and attend a dinner at which the Reverend Moon would speak, and I would also meet the Reverend Moon. I wasn’t expected to participate or comment on those activities; I was there for the science. That was the first of my engagements with the Reverend Moon.

The conference was quite real. The International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences had many attendants, including several Nobel prize winners. It was conducted by scientists and not one of the participants – so far as I could tell – was part of the Unification church. Some of Moon’s religious trainees attended the various seminars and panel discussions, but they did so as students, not as participants. In the sessions I took part in there was absolutely no indication that Reverend Moon’s church was involved, other than some statements from the founder to the effect that there was a unity between religion and science and philosophy. I believe a similar sentiment was delivered by a Jesuit from Notre Dame. I am not sure what I learned from the conference, but I was glad I went to it. And the pay was good.

I attended other conferences sponsored by various organizations founded by but not run by Reverend Moon. One of them was in Korea, and my wife was a participant: Roberta was invited to conduct a session on reading education, a matter in which she has a great deal of relevant experience. I don’t know how the participants were selected or how Roberta and I became regulars at Reverend Moon’s international conferences. They seemed to be a mixture of people with impeccable credentials, and people with a lot of experience and practical ideas, some obscure, and I learned something from every one of them. I was once on a panel with Glenn T. Seaborg on the future of nuclear energy. He had the credentials. I like to think I had some good ideas.

Roberta and I also participated in the Reverend Moon’s conference in Moscow in 1989. By that time it was clear that the USSR was coming apart, but it had not yet done so. I had long been restricted from travel to Iron Curtain countries, but that passport had expired and my new one had no restrictions; and the group that Reverend Moon took to Moscow included a former US Senator, several Nobel Prize winners, well known journalists, and conservative political writers; it seemed safe enough even for a notorious anti-communist who was nevertheless popular with Moscow computer science people. I wrote about all that in the past, but most of that seems to be lost. I did find a reference about halfway through my mailbag for July 2001 http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2mail/mail162.html and I am sure there is more – I did at least one BYTE column from Moscow – but much is as elusive as the snows of yesteryear. I will always be grateful to Reverend Moon for making it possible for Roberta and I to see the last days of the USSR.

I attended one of Moon’s mass marriages in Seoul, and I know I wrote about it. Most of the participants were Asian, but there were more than a hundred Americans. The couples were matched by Moon himself. Some of them were meeting for the first time. I followed the statistics on those marriages – one of Moon’s organizations, not staffed by members of his church, kept track of them – and they claimed a far higher success rate than average. At another ceremony in Madison Square Garden Roberta and I were both present and apparently were remarried, although the State of New York was not involved. Including our renewal of vows at Cana in Galilee and participation in the Reverend Moon’s ceremonies we have been married at least four times.

The Moon organization bought the bankrupt University of Bridgeport in Connecticut. This was greatly disturbing to the faculty. I was asked to meet with the faculty, and I did: I described my experiences with some of Moon’s organizations, which was about all I could do. I didn’t think they had much to fear, but I couldn’t reassure them about possible Unification plans because I knew nothing about them. I did propose to the faculty and to the Moon organization an academic program, namely an experimental school that would start with first grade to give a real head start: teach all the children to read in first grade. That would of course have to be run by my wife, not me. There was some interest in that from both Bridgeport and the Moon organization but nothing ever came of it; and in fact not long after that the Unification organization began to come apart, even as the Soviet Union came apart. Perhaps without the Cold War there was less need of it. It was about then that Reverend Moon began to claim, or appear to claim, that he was a messiah, and much of the cooperation he had enjoyed from other religious organizations began to wane. In any event that was about the end of my participation in organizations sponsored by Revered Moon, although I continue to enjoy friendships with people I met through his groups.

But in its day, the Reverend Moon sponsored but did not control – did not so far as I can see attempt to control – an astonishing array of organizations and publications. There was The World and I, an excellent magazine run by Morton Kaplan. I first met Morton when he was an associate of Herman Kahn, and participated in Kahn’s presentations to the Boeing Company advanced planning staff in 1960. The Washington Times under Armand de Borchgrave was an interesting newspaper, hardly non-partisan but certainly independent of Unification. And Moon’s conferences were informative and enjoyable.

I have no right to an opinion about the Unification Church and its beliefs because all I know about it came from listening to speeches by the reverend Moon, and those were all in Korean. It was understood that if he paid your way to Seoul, or Moscow, or elsewhere, you would attend his speech. While I was in Moscow I received a dinner and award from the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and one of the Academicians accompanied and sat with me during Reverend Moon’s presentation. Neither of us understood Korean, nor did we discuss our host’s views, and as usual I found it difficult to understand the translator. In person Mr. Moon was an impressive man who radiated great energy, but I spent very little time in his company. I will always be grateful to him for introducing me, through his organizations, to Glenn Seaborg, Georgie Ann Geyer, Tom Bethel, Richard and Daniel Pipes, Nikolai Tolstoy, and dozens of others, some of whom remain friends to this day.

I realize that it is a bit odd that I have written more about the Reverend Moon, who I met only a few times and never knew well, than about others, some friends, or Neil Armstrong. I can say that I am unlikely to know or say anything about Neil Armstrong that dozens of others do not know better than me. In its time the Reverend Moon and his groups were important in the Cold War, and his death has stirred up many old memories.

View 739 Friday, August 31, 2012

Blue Moon tonight. For a good explanation of what that used to mean, and what it means now, see

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/08/31/last-blue-moon-until-2015-lights-up-night-sky-tonight/

Look up tonight and remember Neil Armstrong.

Romney was presidential. His speech went well, and there were no mistakes. The Republicans now have the advantage. And I thought Eastwood was hilarious. It’s time for our walk. More later.

Does grammar matter? When I first got into this racket, Mr. Heinlein was kind enough to critique some of my work. He was not only specific, but included some generalities. One of them involved grammar. His position was that meticulous use of proper grammar was important, not because he was a grammarian, but because those who cared about proper grammar cared a lot, and those who didn’t would not be offended by good grammar. I suspected that he was more ardent about the subject than that, but I ever had that conversation. He did require me to pledge that I would get Skillin and Gay Words Into Type, and read it once a year until I was familiar with it. It was good advice and I have never regretted keeping that pledge. When text editors acquired the art of spelling and grammar checking I immediately turned them on. It’s not that I am a slave to them. I generally decline the advice that Microsoft offers. I use Word,. Its grammar check isn’t awful, but the old Word Perfect had a better grammar checker. I don’t ignore the little green lines, but I don’t ignore them.

Byte had a full crew of both technical and style/grammar editors, and indeed that was a good part of BYTE’s strength. The magazine began by taking scholarly articles by engineers and academics and hammering them into readability, and one reason I was popular with the editorial staff was that it didn’t take much work to make my columns publishable. It took some, and I benefitted from them; I tend to use run-on sentences, and to make sentences far too long. I suppose I got into that habit from reading Macaulay. And even after we worked very hard on Mote in God’s Eye we were astonished at the number of changes the Simon and Schuster copy editors wanted in the manuscript. Some of them were simply due to misunderstanding: S&S wasn’t a science fiction house, and some of our constructions were both ungrammatical and confusing. We rewrite those and when we had to we insisted on saying it our way rather than the way some style manual wanted us to say it; but I will have to say that the result was a much better story. I know that most authors believe that copy editors are the class enemy, and all of us complain about stodgy old grammarians turning our dynamic prose into stodgy gump, but I for one am grateful to my copy editors at BYTE and at my publishing houses. Indeed one of my major concerns about the eBook era is that many books will now be published without any copy editing, and the result may not be all that good.

Of course some authors disagree. Today I saw a short screed from an author celebrating the eBook publication of his first novel, this time with the author’s original words rather than the copy editor’s. He calls it an author’s cut. Moreover, he’s a professor. And in his exposition he says he rejoices in his new edition because *I accepted too many copy-editor ticks (though much less than in my earlier works).”

I suppose the world has changed, and it no longer matters.

For those who don’t know what I am talking about, a copy editor would have insisted on changing that to read (though many fewer than in my earlier works). Which probably illustrates Mr. Heinlein’s point: fewer and fewer readers will care about grammar, but some, including old fogies like me, will notice.

I expect there’s a serious essay lurking in this, but day is getting hotter, and I do have other work to do.

CBS predicted last night that the talk shows would concentrate on Clint Eastwood’s odd ad lib performance, and ignore everything else that happened in Tampa last night. That seems to be happening in some cases, but I don’t see how that will affect the election. Romney was presidential, everyone else was supportive, and it was a great night.

The President has the prerogative to leak anything he likes. A Chief Petty Officer does not. The White House formally released part of the bin Laden story and leaked a lot more of it. I haven’t read the Mark Owens book, but apparently it doesn’t give away any classified information that the President hasn’t already revealed. But now the DOD wants all the royalties from the Mark Owns book. I knew the country was desperate broke, but are we that bad off?

I confess mixed emotions on all of this. When there was a serious effort to have me write the Delta Force story with Charlie Beckwith we had many discussions about this. There are conflicting principles involved. I wish the Chief well, but he did sign a contract to allow the Agency to review the book. Of course if he had submitted it for review there might have been fewer than a thousand words (none consecutive) left when they got through with the manuscript. But you knew the job was dangerous when you took it….

View 739 Wednesday, August 29, 2012

It has been oppressively hot in Los Angeles the past few days, and even trivial errands eat up a lot of time. We went to the Hollywood Bowl last night for Carina Burana, which was energetically done by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, The Chorale, and the Children’s Chorale. Well done, and they had some English subtitles to go with much of it. Of course if you’ve read the libretto you pretty well know what words go with what music, but this was the first time I’ve seen it all in context. The baritone Hugh Russell had a great time with the lament of the roasting swan in the tavern section, and soprano Laura Claycomb was charmingly flirtatious in her sections. Nicholas Phan did the tenor parts with considerable gusto.

I can also understand why a few decades ago a prosecuting attorney might think that having a children’s chorus even hear this, much less perform in it, might be an indictable offense. Probably not in Hollywood, though.

Last night’s Republican Convention was snuffed out by Hurricane Isaac, and we have this amusing headline. Apparently there are limits to mainstream media bias. Not many, but apparently there are some.

Yahoo fires bureau chief for Romney/blacks remark

Yahoo News fired its Washington bureau chief on Wednesday, less than 24 hours after he was caught on an open microphone saying that Mitt Romney and his wife, at the Republican convention in Florida while a hurricane was approaching Louisiana, were "happy to have a party with black people drowning." http://seattletimes.com/html/entertainment/2019017552_apuscvnyahooromney.html

Tonight, Condoleezza Rice ‘brought down the house’ according to the Washington Post, with a policy lecture delivered from notes – no teleprompter – that demonstrated that she understands what she is saying. She’s a bit more hawkish and somewhat more inclined to interventionism than I am, but she’s also fairly cautious, as befits a realist. And of course it is important that the United States remain militarily powerful in a dangerous world. As Walter Lippmann used to say, diplomacy for Great Powers is a bit like writing checks – there has to be power in the bank to back up policy.

Foreign policy," wrote Walter Lippmann in 1943 in an oft-quoted phrase, "consists in bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation’s commitments and the nation’s power." If this balance exists, the foreign policy will command domestic support. If commitments exceed power, insolvency results which generates deep political dissension. http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/42795/samuel-p-huntington/coping-with-the-lippmann-gap

Santorum and Huckabee made good presentation endorsements, and provided a Catholic and an Evangelical ‘nihil obstat’ to the Romney Ryan ticket. Quite well and subtly done.

The star of the show was of course Paul Ryan. His main task was to make this election turn on economic policy while retaining the image of being nice guy presidential, that the ticket is likable, but they also know how to solve the economic problems. He invoked Jack Kemp and supply side economics as the basis for the Republican program. Ryan was a speech writer for Kemp. I noted that Newt Gingrich was in the audience as Ryan spoke, and seemed quite pleased with what he was hearing, which isn’t surprising since Gingrich began as a Kemp colleague and has always referred to Kemp as a mentor.

We have had this debate before, back in the 1980 election, with Reagan espousing the need for “supply side” economics – lower taxes, more incentives to create wealth – vs. Keynsian ‘stimulus’ economic policies. We will have it again. I need to dig out some of the essays I wrote for that election – many of them are relevant to this day. The notion that you can increase government revenue through lower taxes has been demonstrated several times, but it is usually at first rejected as defying common sense. In fact, though, raising taxes seldom produces the revenue increases expected, while the right tax cuts can often produce an actual revenue increase. They did for Reagan. More on that another time.

So far the Republican convention has done what it was intended to do: show that Romney and Ryan are presidential as well as nice guys, and refocus the election issue on economic progress. Romney has to nail it with his acceptance speech.

I am working on an essay on mercenaries and politics in a republic. Machiavelli pointed out that republics which hire their defense so that the citizens need not serve in the military take great chances, for hired soldiers can ruin you, either by losing a battle, or, perhaps more likely, holding out for higher and higher pay.  The Framers understood that in a republic citizens must take their turns in government office; hiring professionals can be dangerous. And it has become true of electoral politics. If the citizens don’t take part in electoral politics, and leave it to professional consultants, they will find that their political choices are often subject to the Iron Law. This explains some of the rule change fights in the Republican Convention. The Democrats have long handed over control of much of the political process to professionals (I consider union leaders professionals as are political consultants). The Republicans have also done so but to a somewhat lesser extent, but as fewer and fewer citizens insist on taking part, and the work needs to be done – well, that’s the starting point of what I am working on. Taking back your government requires taking back some control of party activities as well. That’s one of the Tea Party functions, and one reason the professional consultants dislike the Tea Party.

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

And you did build that…

View 739 Monday, August 27, 2012

Went hiking with Niven today. I’ve been a bit depressed about having outlived the first man on the moon, but as Niven points out, our book in progress may have some influence over such events. We like to think that we’ve had some impact on keeping the dream alive. Managed some work today. And John Dvorak was in town and stopped by for a quick hello on his way back to the airport. More shortly. We have a lot of mail on interesting subjects.

The President’s web site shows his tribute to Neil Armstrong. http://barackobama.tumblr.com/post/30199041207/neils-spirit-of-discovery-lives-on-in-all-the-men It consists of a picture of President Obama looking at the Moon. Given that Obama cancelled the return to the Moon it is probably fitting.