IRS and the Iron Law; Phlogiston; Moon Base Defense; Rubik’s Cube; and other matters

Mail 776 Monday, June 03, 2013

A short selection of mail. There’s a lot more piling up. I’ll see what I can get to.  Previously today we had a View.  https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=14072

The IRS And The Iron Law

Jerry,

I gather you had distractions last week. I hope all’s well, or failing that, will be so again soon.

This article strikes me as the best summary of the problem at the IRS I’ve seen: "The IRS scandal as an example of runaway organizational culture", http://ace.mu.nu/archives/340553.php. He largely takes for granted capture of the organization by those more interested in perpetuating it than in properly carrying out its nominal task. The focus is on the organizational culture that then evolved. Money quotes:

"Liberal politics, statism, the primacy of the regulatory state: it’s just the water these people swim in."

"Instead of being a nonpartisan tax-collection and compliance agency, the IRS becomes an agent of Democrat Party ideology where tax compliance is the tool rather than the purpose of the agency."

"The organizational culture in American federal service has become not just partisan but positively messianic during the age of Obama — they’re doing it for your own good, whether you know it or not!"

"The tacit approval of Barack Obama and other powerful Democrat politicians removes any vestige of unease. It explains the near-complete lack of guilt or remorse shown so far by IRS management. In their minds, they are doing nothing wrong."

and

"The solution to this scandal is not to fire the likes of Lois Lerner (though that would be a good start). The answer is to abolish the agency entirely, and to make a concerted effort to shrink the size and reach of the entire federal government apparatus. For the federal government apparatus is not nonpartisan; it is and will continue to be predominately Democrat in culture. The federal government bureaucracy has been captured by Democrats in almost exactly the same way college campuses were captured."

More or less what I’ve been saying for decades: Decimate ’em. Place a ten-year Constitutional sunset on all Federal acts and agencies.

Stagger it randomly to start; each year one-tenth of the government is abolished. If there’s a defensible need for it, the Congress can re-authorize it and start it over. If not, good riddance. And in ten years, the Congress has to, very publicly, decide again. No more unfireable bunny inspectors, no more mohair subsidies outliving their usefulness by a century, no more bureaucracies generations removed from their nominal missions.

It will be occasionally disruptive and expensive, yes. But far less so than what we’ve got.

Porkypine

That would do the job, but I fear that I have no advice on how to make it happen. Elect a dictator for a nine year period, with a small political – not judicial – review committee with limited powers, and stand well back – but the problem there is whether the Emperor you have created will let go, and whether anyone will after that respect the limits of the Constitution. We have reached a pretty critical point in the constitutional history of these United States.

I hope to be recovering from distractions. Thanks.

Phlogiston and Vulcan

Dr. Pournelle

When I studied physics as an undergraduate, the search was on for quarks. I recall an article appeared in, oh, Omni or Analog that reported a physicist had found quarks. He reported that quarks were several feet in diameter and colored purple and green and yellow. All that was needed to see quarks was a warm Caribbean beach, a fifth or two of whiskey, and a great willingness to see quarks. In the ’70s, that was your basic quark detector.

In the 19th century, Urbain Le Verrier calculated the orbit of Mercury using Newtonian mechanics. Unfortunately, the measurements of Mercury’s passage differed slightly but measurably from Le Verrier predictions. Le Verrier posited the existence of a small planet inside the orbit of Mercury to account for the difference in order to save Newtonian mechanics. Lo and behold, astronomers came up with observations that purported to confirm the existence of Vulcan. One was awarded the Legion d’Honneur for his work. Le Verrier died happy, content in the knowledge that Vulcan existed. Except it didn’t.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_(hypothetical_planet)

Before Vulcan, chemists proposed the existence of phlogiston to explain combustion. Once it became possible to accurately measure the weights of materials before and after combustion, some chemists proposed that phlogiston had negative weight in order to explain the increase in weight of burned materials. The old chemists did not give up phlogiston. They just died. A new generation grew up with newly discovered elements and the theory of oxidation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory

When I was an undergraduate, my professors said that the equations for mass traveling faster than c yielded meaningless answers. We students replied, No, they yielded negative imaginary mass. The professors said, That’s meaningless. We students replied, No, it is not meaningless; we just don’t know what it means. I have waited many years for one of my fellows to ascribe meaning to negative imaginary mass. I still wait.

Now I read that there is more Dark Matter and Dark Energy in the universe than there is . . . Light Matter and Light Energy, I guess. And that, like String Theory, it is untestable. In the cases of DM and DE because we can’t get handles on them using the tools of our world. Question: If we cannot observe or manipulate DM or DE, how is it that they interact with our world?

A suggestion: Let’s give DM and DE the dignity they deserve and call them phlogiston.

Surely there must be a physicist or six who has thought similar thoughts. If modern physics require phlogiston to save the equations, perhaps the equations are not worth saving.

"All models are wrong, but some are useful."

The Einsteinian model is still useful, but so is Newtonian mechanics. You can plot a course to the Moon and back without resort to Einstein’s theories. But at the boundaries, the Einsteinian model requires contortions that are literally incredible.

Perhaps as happened with phlogiston and Vulcan, advance will come when the current generation of physicists — who have their careers invested in this model — die. A younger generation will work up new theories to deal with the discrepancies at the boundaries. And those new theories will work until they find a new boundary. And then we shall begin the round again.

"Vanity of vanities. All is vanity! . . . and there is nothing new under the sun." Ecclesiastes 1:2 & 9

Live long and prosper

h lynn keith

Well done. I will add that if you assume that gravity has a propagation velocity of the speed of light (local speed of light; no need to assume it is universal through the Universe) then the shift in the Perihelion of Mercury is predictable and explained; you don’t need either General or Special Relativity to explain that observation.

I am working on a presentation of the evidence for and against the Expanding Universe. Meanwhile Tom Bethell’s presentation of Petr Beckmann’s aether theory, Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessary? () is a very good non-mathematical explication of the Beckmann theories. Beckmann contended not that Einstein was wrong, but that every observation used to confirm Einstein Relativity could be accounted for by Backmann’s assumption of the local gravitational field as the aether, and could do so with enormously simple math, simple algebra and calculus, no tensors required. Hilton Ratcliffe, an astronomer, in The Static Universe Exploding the Myth of Cosmic Expansion makes the case that there is very little observational evidence in favor of the hypothesis that large objects are moving away from each other at rates of 70 kilometers per second, but this applies only to relatively distant objects. It’s 70 km/second time the distance from Earth in megaparsecs. If you take this literally you will end up with objects moving away from each other at speeds approaching the speed of light. Ratcliffe makes the observational case well. More on that another time.

I can’t quite make myself believe that most of the universe is invisible.

An alternate view of what ended the war with Japan –

Jerry –

This essay makes a pretty compelling case that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had essentially nothing to do with ending the war with Japan.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/05/29/the_bomb_didnt_beat_japan_nuclear_world_war_ii

–Gary P.

You have to subscribe or register or something to read the article, so I didn’t bother, but before the login screen covered everything I saw the headline “The Bomb didn’t defeat Japan, Stalin did,” which as been the communist party line since my undergraduate days. I find it unlikely that it has any new data that we haven’t had for a long time. Given that even after the Emperor ordered them to lay down their arms thousands of Japanese Army officers committed ritual suicide, it’s unlikely that the predictable Russian entry into the war would have done the job – and it’s not at all certain that Stalin would have entered the war at all without the bomb. In any event, Truman had little choice. He was President of the United States.

Derbyshire: The Vast and the Tiny

http://spectator.org/archives/2013/05/29/the-vast-and-the-tiny/print

Well written book reviews.

100,000 Christian Martyrs A Year 

Jerry,

"A top Vatican official has said around 100,000 Christians are killed every year for reasons linked to their faith…" "Monsignor Silvano Maria Tomasi was quoted by Vatican radio on Tuesday as saying that the figures were "shocking" and "incredible"."

http://www.breitbart.com/system/wire/CNG—4fd7225a1fea039d4d9f6435239389ed—6b1

"Another senior Vatican figure, the secretary of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Mario Toso, said recently that discrimination against Christians "should be countered in the same way as anti-Semitism and Islamophobia"."

Hmm, ultimately that’s the Israeli Defense Forces and al Qaeda he’s talking about. Knights Templar II, anyone? One would hope closer to IDF style than al Qaeda…

Seriously, I’ve been wondering just how long we’ll keep on turning the other cheek to the growing outrages against local christians in various third-world hellholes. It’s getting harder to ignore in recent years.

Porkypine

I’m going to let you think for a bit before answering this. Most modern accounts of the Crusades are heavily biased against them just as most of those I read when growing up were romantically in favor. I still remember Scott’s Talisman. One book worth reading is Harold Lamb’s Iron Men and Saints, and its sequel The Flame of Islam; the two were collected into the composite work The Crusades, ut I have not seen any copies of the combined work for sale. The first volume is the best. They give a pretty good picture of what things were like at the time. Lamb was not a professional historian, which is to his advantage since he was a good writer.

SUBJ: US Moon Base Defense Manual 1959

https://www.smallarmsoftheworld.com/content/pdf/S00110.pdf

{Download PDF, 9.5MB}

"Moon Base project, US Army, 1959. Project Horizon- Phase I Report “A US Army Study for the Establishment of a Lunar Military Outpost” Volume

III: Military Operational Aspects (U). 8 June, 1959."

"This military manual/report analyzes the USSR threat to US interests on a Lunar base, and methods and weapons to defend and fight on the moon.

Trajectory of projectiles under the light Lunar gravity is addressed."

"Lunar weapons recommended to use against the Soviet threat are a pistol that fires a buckshot round to maximize spacesuit penetration; Handheld directional mines on a stick because “The rapid fall off of blast pressure in the vacuum” would not cause danger behind a stick held claymore type device. Claymore type weapons; and of course, the Davy Crockett nuclear launcher. The illustrations are outstanding, from the short-sleeve spacesuits to the “Deely-bobbers” on the helmets, assumed to be for communication. This manual is from the collection of the late Dr. Edward Ezell, and Col. John Starling discovered it in the reference library at Shrivenham, and shared it with us. It’s not a Confidential Report anymore, so enjoy! LMO Working Reference Library"

I hadn’t known that particular document had been declassified. Actually I haven’t thought about it for decades. Interesting. The only phrase I particularly remember from it was the conclusion that blast was not a good kill mechanism for the lunar environment. It was all pretty well speculation, of course.

: HSV-2 Swift,

Rode hard, put away wet, and still kickin’:

http://dams.defenseimagery.mil/lightbox/assetcolcreate.action?name=previewcol&id=ba219eae2788ce3cec5d21fc3a88751f66dda5f8&scope=request&nextpage=/vims_lbox_preview.jsp

Intelligence cubed

Truly, he must be the kwisatz haderach !

http://youtu.be/K_gHa2x2OQA

Russell Seitz

Fellow of the Department of Physics Harvard University

Depends on where you rank the ability to solve the Cube.

SUBJ: Cheesed off

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/10076336/Grandmother-wont-make-Double-Gloucester-for-cheese-rolling-event-after-heavy-handed-threats-from-police.html

"For some 200 years, people have chased a large rolling cheese down a steep hill each year in Gloucestershire, England. And for the past 25 years, Diana Smith, 86, has made the cheese wheel they chase. But Smith says she won’t make the cheese this year, after getting threatened by police. Three officers showed up at her home and warned her the event was dangerous and she would be held liable for any injuries suffered by those taking part in the chase."

Will there ever again be an England?

Cordially,

John

Which may explain why the Scots want their own Parliament and laws…

Subject: cold fusion

Jerry,

I haven’t had a round tuit yet to look at that article, I had it by email from a friend before you published and set it on the back

burner, and there it sits…

I’ll note that in the US, Blacklight Power (www.blacklightpower.com) has continued to impress investors, make press releases (though

the most recent is a year old), and publish papers on the web site ever since I first heard of them 17 years ago, with its claim of

a non-fusion based energy source which literally defies conventional quantum mechanics.

Jim

I am willing to believe that low temperature fusion is possible. I am not willing to believe that if it is achieved it can be kept a secret and needsto be surrounded by hocus pocus, and alas, all the cases I have heard of turn out to have reasons why the press can’t take some meters and thermometers and go have a look…

I wish it were all true but I also knew Bussard pretty well. He was an honest man — and didn’t try to hide what he was doing.

Jerry Pournelle

Chaos Manor

Low temperature fusion IS possible. We’re doing it every day in our laboratory, using commercially purchased apparatus. But it is not a breakeven device, by orders of magnitude.

Roger that – if they won’t let someone else make an honest measurement, it’s not a honest result.

Jim

Forbes

Hi Jerry,

Forbes moved to a "contributor" model last year. Anybody can sign up and get approved to be a "contributor", and at that point they have their soapbox under the Forbes brand name. See http://onforb.es/M8zjVk

That’s why you’re confused why "Forbes" is excited about the cold fusion guy. Forbes is not; there’s just a "Forbes contributor" who is excited about him. Forbes doesn’t edit the Forbes "contributors" at all, is my understanding.

I see this as really unfortunate; Forbes basically has sold out its name to be a blog hosting site.

Regards,

B

Thanks. I hadn’t realized that.

A word about the Oklahoma tornado, from Oklahoma

There has been much disinformation and propaganda in the national press that global warming somehow played a part in the recent devastating tornado in Moore, Oklahoma. However, quite the opposite is the case.

I have lived in Oklahoma for all of my 58 years and this has been the coolest spring in recent memory. The thunderstorms that spawn tornadoes here in Oklahoma are the result of cold air from the North (Rockies) colliding with warm moist air from the South (Gulf of Mexico). This spring we have had an abnormal amount of strong cold fronts coming down from the North as well as arriving much later in the season than usual.

Apparently this is not a local anomaly either. There is a report out that the mean temperature of the Northern hemisphere was in fact cooler in April than in March:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/04/uah-global-temperature-down-significantly/

Of course not much has been said about this cooler weather. After all, who wants a visit from the IRS?

Blair

Norman, Oklahoma

London Terrorists

Dr. Pournelle:

Regarding "Mons Meg" and [presumably] your idea of reviving the Indian Mutiny era practice of "firing from [not OUT of] guns", I have a far better idea.

We’re both old enough to remember that great cheesy Viking movie, "The Long Ships", with Richard Widmark and Sidney Poitier. I propose that all such terrorists, including Nidal Hassan and Dzhokar Tsarnaev, be given a ride on the "Mare of Steel". Since in the movie, it was the concoction of a Moorish prince (Poitier), it can hardly be called "Islamophobic". I see great pay-per-view potential…

Chris Morton

It does not appear likely…