Category Archives: View

View 727 Tuesday, June 05, 2012

There’s E3 today and tomorrow but I don’t think I’ll be going. I may get up the gumption to go to Steve Leon’s Show Stoppers tonight, but that’s a fight into traffic. We’ll see. Probably not. I’m having trouble getting that interested in what’s going on in electronic entertainment. Everything is getting bigger, faster, and better, and one of these days I’ll probably get in on some of it, but just now my problem is getting some words down on paper – well, into bits on a drive, and that just goes to show that I started in the writing racket when it was words on paper. Ah. Well.

The crucial election today is in Wisconsin. The Republicans will have to win about 5% more vote because we can expect fraud and deception in plenty. The stakes are very high here. Recall shouldn’t be a contest on fund raising, which is what it amounts to. Those who can afford to get the recall on the ballot will be able to devil those who don’t so that eventually you have a one party state. It’s not quite the same as having the bully boys beat up people or feed tham castor oil, but the effect is pretty well the same. The result will be that those with the money – or with paid union workers who can go gather signatures – will be able to drive those who can’t out of political life.

Given that this usually means increasing deficits and greater entitlements, and that isn’t sustainable – see Greece as an example – which will mean – well, what?

We now have more people getting benefits from government than paying taxes.

It can’t go one forever. When something can’t go on forever, it will stop. What comes then? Well, traditionally, you get a friend of the people to become emperor.

More death by drone. The wars of assassination by UAV continue. And the price of do it yourself drones continues to fall. We live in interesting times.

Lines out the door in Wisconsin. Heavy turnout. My guess is that the media would be making a great deal more of this if it were thought that this is indicative of a heavy vote for recall, and thus it indicates the recall’s failure. We can always hope.

Niven and I went up the hill yesterday, and I remain a bit tired. I need to do that more often. It’s good for me, but it does tend to wear me out. And it’s lunch time.

It’s official. By at least 8 percentage points, the recall in Wisconsin has been defeated. I am sure there are many boxes of uncounted ballots ready to be discovered, enough to swing the election to the Democrats even by two percentage points, but this is just too large for them to overcome. Obama and the socialists have lost and the Republic has won this bout.

Wisconsin went heavily for Obama in 2008. It is a state key to his reelection, and he seems to have lost it, first in 2010 when the Democrats lost the state house, and now after the all out effort to recall the governor, by even more. A blue state no more. The Republic may survive after all. If that sounds excessive, apologies; but I am exhilarated. I had hoped for this, and all the indications – including the mainstream media’s reluctance to talk about what was happening – pointed to a larger victory this time than in 2010, but it was not certain. And as I said, there is little doubt that there are undiscovered boxes of ballots – now not ever to be discovered – in reserve had the vote been close.  Or perhaps I am paranoid, and being too hard on the Democrats?  But I don’t think so.

Onward to November. It may be a good year for the Republic. And it is just possible that candidate Romney will take some heart from this. He is the least establishment oriented of the establishment Republicans, and his has the right instincts and principles, and he said

"Tonight voters said ‘no’ to the tired, liberal ideas of yesterday, and ‘yes’ to fiscal responsibility and a new direction. I look forward to working with Governor Walker to help build a better, brighter future for all Americans," he said.

Could it be that he means it? This was a maximum effort mission for the public employee unions and the Democrats, and in a state that they had won in 2008.

So it was a good day.

View 726 Friday, June 01, 2012

The Dragon has landed, an important step in the development of America as a spacefaring nation again. We did not develop the airlines by having the FAA build and operate freight and passenger airlines.

Dragon was developed with some government market guarantees, but it was a fixed price pay on performance contract. Some of the cargo was also pure capitalism: My son Richard is an executive with a company that sells experiment space on the International Space Station (http://moonandback.com/2012/04/09/moonandback-interview-with-richard-pournelle-part-1-nanoracks/ ) and part of the Dragon cargo – both ways – were some of those experiments. Most of it was food, water, and underwear, but there were other commercial aspects to the flight. And now anyone can design and operate experiments in space. Some of them are even cheap. For more on all this, see the rest of Richard’s interview at http://moonandback.com/2012/04/09/moonandback-interview-with-richard-pournelle-part-1-nanoracks/. And then look into his company http://nanoracks.com/.

The revised economic figures are out, and things are worse than reported. Hardly a surprise. Economic reports are always more optimistic than the reality, and they are always revised downward, usually on a Friday, and generally with language that makes it look as if it’s all trivial and routine. So it goes.

And some Democrats are defecting from the attack on capitalism. That would be a very good thing: I would be enormously pleased if there were two political parties who could be trusted with majorities in Congress as well as holding the White House. Alas, there aren’t – indeed, given the performance of the establishment Republicans after Newt Gingrich left Congress, there’s not even one. The only good things I have to say about the Republican regime after the Clinton/Gingrich period is that even a disaster like Obama doesn’t make it look very good.

Anatole France once said that a thief is much to be preferred to a fool, for a thief may upon occasion take a vacation. Substitute ideologue for fool and you get much the same thing. I prefer thieves to ideologues – and given Pournelle’s Iron Law you will not be far from both.

The good news is that it is possible – almost likely – that we’ll have a chance to straighten out this mess after next January. The enemies here are despair and triumphalism. It is possible to win, and to have in both White House and Congress people who understand that Jefferson – said to be founder of the Democratic Party – was right in observing that governments who govern best govern least.

It is also possible to lose. The election will be hard fought, the Democrats will have a ground game that will include questionable tactics, and some actual fraud. Some of us have not forgotten how Cook County delivered Illinois and the presidency to John Kennedy on election night.

The news from Wisconsin is good: no layoffs, no runaway spending, and some success in turning the school system around. What Wisconsin has achieved others can aspire to. And we note that Obama is not going to Wisconsin, even though the recall election is just a few days away. The Democrats started that recall fight. They now wish they hadn’t. But even that one hasn’t been won yet. The unions will have their ground game going, and they play that well. Wisconsin Republicans and Independents and Tea Partiers can’t relax yet.

There’s more good news. On line education is working, and more and more institutions are putting up textbooks and lectures on line. Free. I will have more to say on that presently.

It would now be possible for someone to open an unaccredited University built around a few tutors who work with students, and who direct the students to various on-line books, lectures, demonstrations, and even classes. Were I younger I would contemplate doing that myself – in many respects my undergraduate education was that way, seminars with George Mosse and others, who sent me to various classes. The same later happened with Paul Horst at the University of Washington.

There are good classes out there, from beginning calculus to highly advanced physics, and not just in the sciences. I think it cannot be long before we have great mentors accepting a few students who work with them to coordinate their studies, and students who end up with a far better education than they can obtain anywhere in the world (with a few exceptions: there are, after all, still some places who have great teachers who see students; it’s just there aren’t many).

What we don’t yet have is a means of credentialing; but that will change. As an example, I cannot think that any sane employer would not consider a student mentored online by, say, Jacques Barzun and given a certificate by him to have the equivalent of a degree from Columbia. I made that example up, of course. Another: suppose the late John McCarthy had accepted a half dozen students with whom he met online for an hour a week individually, and perhaps in a general 2 hour conference seminar; and who specified what on-line lectures and courses his charges should take. That, I think, would be superior to most anything Stanford can offer. It’s easy to make up other examples.

We don’t have anything like that yet, but I cannot think it is many years coming. As to fees, those would be negotiable between the mentor and the student. You can speculate on those for yourself.

It’s just a thought.

View 726 Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Over the weekend, we recorded Hemingway and Gellhorn, the HBO movie about Ernest Hemingway and his third wife Martha Gellhorn, and watched it last night. I’m not sorry to have seen it. There was little remarkable about the performances except that Nicole Kidman showed great versatility in being both younger and much older than her present age. If you like sex scenes there were plenty of them, not quite hard core but certainly what would have been called pornography only a few years ago. They went on longer than I cared for, but there were plenty of them with lots of intensity. The real life Martha Gellhorn once made a point of saying in interviews that she didn’t enjoy sex, and Kidman almost says that in her comments to the viewers done, supposedly, thirty years after Hemingway’s death, but that hardly comes through in the sex scenes.

Much of the film takes place during the Spanish Civil War, and much of it purports to be an objective account of the war as seen by Gellman and Hemingway, who were of course Republican sympathizers and dedicated anti-fascists. Neither Gellman nor Hemingway was a member of the Communist Party, but both were ardent supporters of the Republican side during the civil war, and their reporting from Spain contributed to the nearly universal intellectual view that there is only one respectable view of that war, and anyone not for the Republican cause must be a fascist sympathizer. This is of course the communist party line on the war, and it has been so successfully promulgated that few know there is any other possible view.

In the real world matters are not so simple.

The film shows John Dos Passos and other western intellectuals, all supporters of the Republican cause, and it does show, without much emphasis or explanation, some of the actions of the Russian communists who operated as allies of the Republic. It shows Nationalist atrocities in plenty, but barely mentions the communist operations against the anarchists and their frequent purges. There is no mention of George Orwell’s accounts.

It is highly unlikely that neither Hemingway nor Gellhorn was aware of the violent divisions within the Republican cause (at one point a near civil war between POUM and Communist forces). There is some hint of these activities, with John Dos Passsos’ friend shown kidnapped by NKVD agents causing Dos Passos to question the Russian involvement, but it is not given much emphasis. Actually, Dos Passos moved from being a committed left wing writer to a libertarian position. He retained much of his sympathy for the IWW and some of his old comrades, but also recognized that not all good comes from the left, and in fact the old slogan that there is no enemy to the left was false and dangerous. The result of all this, not mentioned in the film at all, is that Dos Passos wrote Midcentury, his last and some would say his greatest novel. Like his earlier trilogy collectively called U.S.A., Midcentury is a “collage”, consisting of many scenes and viewpoints woven together to form a story as seen from many angles. I read it as an undergraduate and it had a great influence on me, presenting a viewpoint I had not seen before. The film merely dismisses Dos Passos as having moved to the right. That too is the standard left view – Dos Passos has become an unperson in modern academia, and Midcentury is never discussed in intellectual society.

But Hemingway and Gellhorn does a reasonable job of showing the standard intellectual view of the Spanish Civil War, and particularly the period before the Hitler-Stalin pact that united the Communists and the Nazis. That happened after the Franco victory in Spain, when Hemingway and Gellhorn were together. The film makes no mention of that pact and what followed with communists proclaiming the fall of Paris to the Wehrmacht as the victory of the working class. If Hemingway or Gellman has ever written of that event I am unaware of it. It was traumatic to many left wing intellectuals, and played a massive role in converting Trotskyite leftists toward libertarianism and what became “neoconservatism”.

The film is, as nearly all major films are, mostly sympathetic to the left wing cause, and while purporting to show a distance between the communists and the anti-fascist popular front, it doesn’t do much of that, and shows none of the stresses that resulted from the massive change in the party line the day after Hitler invaded Russia. Of course there is no reason why a biographical film should cover such intellectual events unless they impacted on the principals: but one does wonder why there is so little information on that period in the lives of Hemingway and Gellhorn. They were certainly together then.

All told it’s a good film with good performances, and shows something of the intellectuals in America in that formative period. And if you like sex scenes, there’s plenty of them. Maybe Julianne Moore will be jealous.

View 726 Sunday, May 27, 2012

Memorial Day Weekend

I found the following at Chaos Manor Views for May 26, 2003.

In Memoriam. RIP

"It was a noble cause."

    Ronald Reagan, on the Viet Nam War.

And indeed, a million people did not flee South Viet Nam until it fell; but for many years, there are those who fled to South Viet Nam from Tonkin.

Freedom is not free. It is bought at a high price. It can be squandered cheaply.

I also found this essay on our Iraqi adventure. When Bush Sr. entered the White House as president he fired every Reagan supporter he could identify, so there were few left to listen to people like me when we went into Iraq the first time, and fewer when Bush II was inaugurated. Even so, I wish someone had listened back then. I suspect the United States would be better off.

We mourn our dead, in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On establishing democracies:

If you establish a democracy, you must in due time reap the fruits of a democracy. You will in due season have great impatience of the public burdens, combined in due season with great increase of the public expenditure. You will in due season have wars entered into from passion and not from reason; and you will in due season submit to peace ignominiously sought and ignominiously obtained, which will diminish your authority and perhaps endanger your independence. You will in due season find your property is less valuable, and your freedom less complete.

Benjamin Disraeli

Government by public opinion poll is about the same as plebiscitary democracy. America was established as a Republic. The States could have democracy if they so chose. The Federal government had not that power and for good reasons, the Framers in 1787 having already known what Disraeli tried to tell Parliament some fifty years later.

On that subject:

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Sunday indirectly confirmed recent remarks by the Ambassador to Israel that the U.S. is “ready from a military perspective’’ to stop Iran from making a nuclear weapon if international pressure fails

http://www.nationaljournal.com/nationalsecurity/panetta-u-s-is-ready-to-stop-iran-from-creating-nuclear-weapons-20120527

It may become a very hot summer.

My 40” Samsung television has developed a strange problem: when you turn it on, it fails to find a valid signal source, and it won’t listen to the controls. Over time, it will suddenly work for a few seconds, then go off again. This continues for about fifteen to twenty minutes after it will suddenly act as if nothing were ever wrong, and operate perfectly after that although it doesn’t always listen to the TV clicker (nor to the cable clicker when it is being told to act as if it were the TV clicker). The cable clicker works, digital recording works, indeed the TV works just fine, and of course the simplest remedy to our problem would be simply not to turn the TV off. For reasons I won’t go into, I’m generally not so comfortable with doing that..

TV’s similar to our four year old Samsung now sell for about $500, and since I doubt that anyone repairs televisions any more I think it is probably time to replace this one. When we went online to look at modern TV we were offered a bewildering variety of High Definition sets at around 40” diagonal (which is plenty big enough for our TV room, some Samsung and some “major brands at prices too low to advertise”, some LED and some Plasma, and I have to say that I now wish I had gone to CES this year.

I thought while we were at it we’d replace the bedroom TV, a very very ancient flatscreen low definition 20” TV with something around 25” HD at whatever low price we can find.

It used to be that the guy I’d ask advice from on this would have been me, but I haven’t paid much attention to that end of the electronics revolution for a while. I’ve never been much use as a judge of audio quality, and as far as I am concerned the 40” Samsung HD we have is at least Good Enough in both size and video quality, so I’, more interested in reliability and price than blacker blacks and other such things. Recommendations appreciated, but please, either know the subject or have personal experience worth sharing; my mailbox is pretty full lately, and every day I have to write yet one more set of rules for my spam filters. Who’d have thought I’d be getting hundreds of emails ostensibly from myself about Rolex watches (or at least they say they are about Rolex watches; whatever they are, they get deleted if they are “from” me and mention Rolex… All the rules slow my mail reception down something awful, but the good part of the computer revolution is that the electronic brainpower keeps getting better and better..

Anyway. If you know much about 20” and 40” TV sets please let me know.

Actually, since I wrote that I sent copies to a few friends and Marty Winston has pretty well brought me up to date on this stuff. LED sets cost about $40 more and last years longer. As I suspected, nobody repairs TV’s now – I can remember going down to the drug store and using the tube tested to find out what was wrong with my old TV and that would take care of its problems as long as the bottle hadn’t died. And I lugged an early color TV to a repair shop. Now it’s just pointless. It costs about the same to repair a TV as to buy new, and new is better. Moore’s Law in action. So we’ll be off to see what looks good and replace the TV with something about the same size but better.

Doesn’t mean I won’t read comments from readers, but there’s no necessity unless you know some reason to challenge Marty on those conclusions.

All this will be in an upcoming column, and yes, that’s overdue. We really like our new Sandy Bridge system built in the stunning Thermaltake box, and we’re set to build an Ivy Bridge system for Windows 8 sometime along the line. I need to write up Alien Artifact (named because of the Thermaltake box, actually). Here are two views of Alien Artifact in action, complete with a solid state USB 3 external drive. The case is well designed for access, convenience, and air flow, and is very quiet. I’ll have a full report presently.

While I was looking for photos I found some shots I took of Sable after she went to a new groomer last week. Her old groomer has lost her lease and closed, and we had to find a new one, which in fact worked out well. Here’s Sable just home telling us about her experience.

The final result was pretty good. Sable likes the place. I used to wash and groom our dogs – Huskies all for the past three decades – myself, but over time that got a bit harder to do, and wasn’t particularly kind to the dog, so we have it done now, not as often as we should probably, but Sable looks pretty good. We sort of judge the quality of the place by her attitude when we take her there – if she doesn’t seem eager to go in after her first experience we look for somewhere else – but this time it was really interesting. As soon as we got to the parking lot, a place she had never been before, she got eager to get out of the car and go in there. We think she must have smelled happy dogs. Whatever it was, she likes the place, and she looks pretty good.

If you were looking for something to worry about, try this:

Backdoor found in Chinese-made US military chip

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sps32/sec_news.html#Assurance

—

Eric Smith

I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone.

Bjarne Stroustrop, Developer of C++ programming language