View 689 Tuesday, August 23, 2011
I don’t do topical news, but today seems dominated by it, and I ought to be aware:
The topical news is the continued “Tripoli has fallen, sort of,” news from Libya. It seems only a matter of time, and perhaps the delay is a good thing, giving the West time to think how to respond and giving the sane rebels time to organize. We can wish them well.
And I will say that Obama’s reluctant response, assuming the position of hindmost, turned out well. Britain had a long tradition of muddling through that often worked; and Obama’s strategy of providing air power and some logistics while being involved minimally produced results at low cost. Qadaffi appears to be doomed. There is open looting in Tripoli, a sure sign that the security forces of the government are not in control in large areas of the city.
A tyrant is out, and unlike in Afghanistan and Iraq, we are not in. It happened on President Obama’s watch and he deserves the credit: without the US strike forces the rebels would long ago have been snuffed out.
Of course the concentration on Libya was interrupted by an earthquake between Richmond and Washington. At least one person is known to have motion sickness from this 5.9 quake between Charlottesville and Spottsylvania Courthouse. As a result three New York airports have been shut down, sections of the Pentagon evacuated, and there was an hour of great concern and reaction along the eastern seaboard.
A 5.9 magnitude earthquake jolted the East Coast, rattling people from Martha’s Vineyard to Washington, D.C. to North Carolina, prompting the evacuation of Congressional buildings, slowing rail and air traffic, and taking two nuclear reactors offline.
The earthquake sent people pouring out of office buildings, hospitals, the Pentagon and the State Department. The pillars of the capitol in Washington, D.C. shook. Alarms sounded in the FBI and Department of Justice buildings, and some flooding was reported on an upper floor of the Pentagon as a result of the quake.
Presumably they will have fewer problems than Los Angeles did with the 6.6 Sylmar earthquake about 9 miles northeast of my house in 1971. One of my grandchildren is in pre-school in Washington. One presumes that life will return to normal along the east coast.
I have heard that there are some consequences, and of course most of the reactions were to what people thought might be a terrorist attack; it’s not astonishing that security agencies might think so. They have got themselves a live fire test, apparently without serious consequences. There is talk of allowing government workers a day off. Shut down the government because of a 5.8 40 miles away. It tells us that we can do without the government for a day or two.
![clip_image002[1]](https://jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/clip_image002132.gif "clip_image002[1]"){kind=small}
Aliens may destroy humanity to protect other civilisations, say scientists
Rising greenhouse emissions could tip off aliens that we are a rapidly expanding threat, warns a report
A NASA study reviews scenarios for alien contact, and it’s not pretty
Scientists say aliens could decide to destroy humanity to save other civilizations
News DeskAugust 20, 2011 04:48
Air & Space
Aliens Could Attack Earth to End Global Warming, NASA Scientist Frets
Published August 19, 2011
| NewsCore
I have had considerable mail about a brief Internet storm asserting that NASA has published a report about aliens attacking the Earth because we aren’t green enough. It turns out that didn’t happen: there was a paper,
Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? A Scenario Analysis
Seth D. Baum, Jacob D. Haqq-Misra, & Shawn D. Domagal-Goldman
Acta Astronautica, 2011, 68(11-12): 2114-2129
The third author lists affiliation with NASA Planetary Science Division. The paper was not sponsored by, or submitted to, NASA. It was just a speculative paper by some postdocs looking for a publication. Not easy reading – a bit dry and academic for my taste – but it attempts to cover the subject raised earlier about contact with Extra-Terrestrial Intelligences, and deal with logical sequences. If this is your subject it may be worth your time.
The more interesting story is the big Internet reaction to it.That story is told here:
BEHIND THE Aliens-Will-Smite-Us News Story
It isn’t every day that a research paper published in an obscure academic journal attracts its own, full blown article in a major newspaper. It isn’t every day that a science correspondent writes an article that merits a headline as bizarre as the following: Aliens may destroy humanity to protect other civilizations, say scientists.
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2011/08/19/behind-the-aliens-will-smite-us-news-story/
If you’re not familiar with the web site, it’s worth your attention.
![clip_image002[2]](https://jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/clip_image002222.gif "clip_image002[2]"){kind=small}
There is a Wall Street Journal op-ed “The Joy of Reading ‘Pinocchio’ – on Paper” but it hides behind a pay wall, at least for me. I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal paper edition, but they want more money for on-line access even for those who subscribe to daily paper delivery, and that infuriated me enough that I didn’t bother to find out how much more they want. I understand that newspapers need revenue and they can’t survive if they give everything away, but in my experience they don’t pay much for op-ed – the real expense is in salaried reporters and data gathering – and I’d have though that allowing access to that sort of thing might be a good advertisement for full subscription. In any event, WSJ seems to have come up with a way to aggregate Google findings in such a way that you can find a refernce to the article, but you get the paywall teaser if you click on it. At one time Google insisted that if you want to be in Google you have to give some kind of access. I haven’t been following that closely enough, and perhaps I ought to look into it. I’m all for newspapers surviving, and I understand the need for some kind of paywall, but it’s still annoying when I subscribe to something I can’t access on line.
Just now I tried to get hold of their customer service to upgrade the darned subscription, and so far I have wasted considerable time. Their log in is designed to look sophisticated but in fact is primitive. The whole system sucks dead bunnies. I get a rep who said she had changed my password, but of course I hung up before trying it. Now I am back on the phone waiting.
They are trying to commit suicide.
I had better post this because I may be here all day. Actually it’s worse. I’ll be here all week.
Update. I seem to have a username and password that the Journal online finally recognizes. I am unsure of why all this took so long. Twice I got people whose first language is not English and that may be part of the problem; last time I got a young lady in upstate New York who understood what she was doing, and all went smoothly.
The article is
The other morning, our daughters woke up clamoring to hear Pinocchio before breakfast. I’m not one of those who vows to always cling to the printed page. Before we left for California, I topped off my iPad with a dozen new titles. I accost strangers on airplanes to show them how dandy it is to load thousands of pages (including this newspaper) onto something the size of a shirt cardboard.
But part of the connection our daughters make with Pinocchio seems to be that he’s a little puppet-boy in a book they hold, hide and run to find in the morning, not digits in a download.
It’s rather charming, and refers to a later edition of an illustrated Pinocchio that I may have encountered about the time I was in first grade. I agree that books have a panache that online doesn’t always have.
![clip_image002[3]](https://jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/clip_image002315.gif "clip_image002[3]"){kind=small}
Finally there is “Off the San Francisco Rails”, about a new entitlement called New Starts that appears to be a way for the people of Joplin, Missouri to pay taxes to pay for a $2 billion subway from Chinatown San Francisco to a quarter mile from the BART station on Market Street. The project doesn’t appear well designed to me, but it’s San Francisco, and thus not my business – except that apparently all of us get to pay for it if the Department of Transportation approves. Just why we should pay for a San Francisco subway (well, they’d pay for SOME of it, but we get to pay for a lot) is not clear to me, but this seems to be an entitlement we can do without, at least so long as we have to borrow money to pay for it. One may make a case for federal subsidies of Interstate Highways and such like, but a subway from Chinatown to the Ferry Terminal (well, most of the way) does not seem to be anything vital to the interests of the United States as an entity, or even to California. If San Francisco needs it let San Francisco pay for it, just as I would not expect San Francisco to pay for a Los Angeles Subway that actually goes to our airport.
This is an inevitable consequence of the 7% exponential growth of government spending that is at present built into our system. We are $Trillions in debt and the debt is growing: why should the children of kids in Joplin, Missouri be required to pay for a Chinatown, San Francisco, subway? At what point do we return to transparency and subsidiarity?
If you have not subscribed, or renewed your subscription in a while, this would be a great time to do it. Just Go Here.
![clip_image002[4]](https://jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/clip_image002415.gif "clip_image002[4]"){kind=small}
