Tuesday, January 17, 2017
John Glenn must surely have wondered, as all the astronauts weathered into geezers, how a great nation grew so impoverished in spirit.
Our heroes are old and stooped and wizened, but they are the only giants we have. Today, when we talk about Americans boldly going where no man has gone before, we mean the ladies’ bathroom. Progress.
Mark Steyn on the death of John Glenn
[expletive redacted] [expletive redacted] [expletive redacted] [expletive redacted] [expletive redacted] [expletive redacted] [expletive redacted]
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/nation-now/2017/01/16/last-moonwalker-dies/96641846/
Gene Cernan, last man to walk on moon, dies
Retired astronaut Eugene “Gene” Cernan died Monday at age 82.
~Stephanie Osborn, “The Interstellar Woman of Mystery”
I always knew I would live to see the first man on the moon. I never thought I would outlive the last one.
The farce continues, with professional politicians explaining that Mr. Trump won the election only because the Russians interfered. They did not hack the voting machines; they influenced the voters, not by telling lies, but by revealing information that the voters should not have, although it was not asserted that the information was false.. When that was finally recognized as absurd the stories changed again. I’ve stopped listening to them.
My Surface Pro automatically updated, and now when I open Outlook it asks me if I want to open a mail account. It has forgotten that it has quite a large one. The outlook files all appear to be there, but if so, the latest version of Outlook doesn’t seem to be able to open them; the program acts as if Outlook has never been installed. I haven’t time to fool with it today, but my advice to users is DO NOT be part of the experimental program on a Surface Pro unless you are prepared to use a lot of time restoring things. None of my desktop machines including this one have problems. I love the Microsoft Surface Pro when it works properly, but my experience has been that it doesn’t work properly a significant part of the time.
I remember I once took my HP Compaq tablet/desktop to Comdex, or maybe CES, and although I also had another full laptop, I was able to get through everything including filing daily reports, with the tablet. Indeed, I found myself stuck in a motel without high speed Internet and was able to connect to Peterborough by modem, and thus to file my daily show report. I don’t think the Surface Pro would have lasted that long. Of course it has no modem, but nowadays you don’t need one. Of course the Press Room always has high speed Internet, and nowadays most all motels do.
The HP Compaq tablet was wonderful, but it could be fussy, and slow compared to modern equipment like the Surface Pro; but the software was far more reliable. You could get work done with it without fearing that an automatic update would cripple a vital program and leave you helpless. I do wish Microsoft would get its mud together.
I’ve got the back and jip problems under control although it does take about half an hour of stretching exercises in the morning, and repeated stretches (short, a few seconds) every time I stand up.
Lindy Sisk has extracted all the relevant entries on my brain cancer experience in 2008; there’s about 15,000 words which I will flesh out with introduction and comments, add how far I had come in December, 2014 when I had the stroke, and bring it all up to the present. I did not make anything like the detailed daily commentary in 2015 as I did back in 2008, but I think it is worth publishing; I’m not sure how. It will be about 20,000 words, probably more, and I think there are some good observations of interest to anyone over 70 on how to deal with major disabling events. I’ll be working in this for a couple of months; it should have been published earlier.
I’ve got the hip problems under control with the Anderson Stretching exercises, so I’m back to work, and I’m about over my cold so I have the energy to get some work done, Deo Gratria.
https://www.amazon.com/Stretching-30th-Anniversary-Bob-Anderson/dp/0936070463
NSA Hacked DNC? & Obama Intel Thoughts
Jerry,
Congressman Peter King, House Intel Committee, is now saying that the CIA has never said a word to the Committee about Russia favoring one candidate over the other.
Given last week’s leak of that alleged CIA position to the Washington Post, and this week’s extraordinary CIA refusal to brief the Intel Committee on the matter, he goes on to say
“It’s almost as if people in the intelligence community are carrying out a disinformation campaign against the President-elect of the United States.”
It begins to sound very much like I’m right that it’s Hillaryite bitter-enders at CIA behind this story. (I speculate that current CIA management isn’t quite ready either to repudiate or to publicly back this claim, and thus refused this short-notice Intel Committee briefing to buy time to get their story sorted out.)
I’ve mentioned privately to you more than once that, if he wants to get anything useful done, Trump will first need to go through the bureaucracies with fire and sword to root out the many burrowed-in militant progs.
Between this and the recent DOE refusal to answer Trump transition-team questions (I won’t even mention DOJ or the IRS) it sounds to me as if the politicized bureaucrats are doing their unintentional best to get Congress to back the new President in that.
More on the DOE matter, including the actual quite reasonable list of questions asked, over at
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/12/10/the-doe-vs-ugly-reality/
Porkypine
health care
Dear Mr. Pournelle,
I found your comments on health care very much worth reading, and I’d like to continue the discussion. Not with any notion that I have an answer; but there are some things I’d like to probe.
I’d begin with your comment “speculation on what’s fair begs the main question: how did my health concerns become your problem? “That’s a legitimate question; but I don’t see much likelihood of an a priori answer. “Fair” is, in any event, a shaky word: it often means only “the biggest piece of cake is MINE!” For that matter, I’m not sure “justice” and “rights” can be defined without some reference to absolutes, such as the will of God. (It relates, I think, to the earlier question “do all people value the same things?”)
For example: we assert an inalienable right to life and liberty; and I affirm that, and would defend it. But on what basis are these rights “inalienable?” We do not, in fact, act as if they are; they can be, and are, suspended by the judgment of a jury of our peers. So this claim seems to me to be not so much a provable conclusion from first principles, but an assertion about the sort of society we want to live in.
Moving closer to health care: it’s my understanding that under the Roman Republic, while the courts would pass judgment on a civil suit, it was entirely the plaintiff’s responsibility to enforce that judgment. Modern “law enforcement” is a very recent, and historically idiosyncratic, development. One might ask: how did your loss of property become my problem? The only answer I see a way to defend is: it becomes my problem, and I will support a police force with my taxes, because that’s the sort of society we want to live in.Which leads to the question: who is “we”? The last few years have made it clear that not every community in the United States is convinced the police are there to protect them; and yet we are all of us taxed to support law enforcement. Our position seems to be: we claim the right, as a society, both to maintain a law enforcement system and to insist that everybody has a duty to help pay for it. Societies could be managed differently; I wouldn’t want to live in them.
Another parallel, from the ’60s; I don’t remember that people who believed the Vietnam War was immoral and refused to support it with their taxes had much success with the argument.
Now, bring this round to health care. I don’t think I could defend an a priori right to, or entitlement to, health care. And, for that matter, as medicine becomes both more effective and more expensive I don’t think any society can in practice provide all the care that would be desirable. Neither private wealth, private insurance, nor public health care will change that. We hit limits.
But that leaves the question: what sort of society do I want to live in? And do enough of us agree with me that we can make a community decision?
I’d be prepared to defend public health care as a public policy decision. Consider reports that drug-resistant tuberculosis is breeding in inner city slums. That does NONE of us any favors. Nor is it helpful to leave uninsured people with no recourse but expensive emergency rooms. But that’s a different set of arguments. The question I’d propose at this point is: is it in fact useful to pose this as a question either of fairness or entitlement? I’m not convinced it is. But I would argue that a society which finds ways to offer at least basic health care to all its citizens has much the same values as a society which supports a community police force. We could rely on private guards. I don’t want to.
Yours,
Allan E. Johnson
But we never debate on those terms, and the Constitution does not precisely do so. In guarantees the states a republican form of government and forbids titles of nobility, but doesn’t say much more. Given that and the amendment that says all powers not granted to the Federal government remain with the states would suggest that it is a matter for the states; meaning that California cannot compel Iowa to pay for health care for aged California immigrants…
Dear Mr. Pournelle,
It occurs to me that much of my approach to health care (as well as other issues) may come from spending much of my life in Midwestern farm country. It isn’t what it was; the days of communal barn-raisings are long gone, and co-ops drift toward behaving like ordinary businesses. But it is still assumed that if a farmer falls sick during planting or harvest, the neighbors WILL pitch in. And if someone in the community suffers catastrophic illness, there WILL be fundraisers. These are communities which have assumed that I am indeed my brother’s keeper.
That’s not government. It’s probably something rather better. But it’s also not “I am responsible for myself, and that’s it.”
From this perspective, much of the last half century seems to me like a story of slow corruption. Co-ops turn into businesses, small operations are bought out by “bottom line” conglomerates, religious and community hospitals are bought up by for-profit organizations which insist that doctors see an ever-increasing number of patients per hour, religious fraternal organizations mutate into garden variety insurance companies… Grump. So speaks the curmudgeon.
Is turning things over to government my first choice? Hardly. But in this century, that seems to be how we organize community enterprises. That, or let corporate oligarchs run riot.
So: how does this relate to health care? An assumption that we OUGHT to be on our own, and that the community we live in has no involvement, is simply not the America I thought I knew. Working in the church, I’ve spent rather a lot of time over the last decades trying to encourage community. As a culture, we seem to be drifting away from that. Not business-like enough, I suppose. Well, if government involvement is the way in which we choose to accept responsibility for each other, then that may be the best we are able to do just now.
Yours,
Allan E. Johnson
= = =
Dear Mr. Pournelle,
It occurs to me that much of my approach to health care (as well as other issues) may come from spending much of my life in Midwestern farm country. It isn’t what it was; the days of communal barn-raisings are long gone, and co-ops drift toward behaving like ordinary businesses. But it is still assumed that if a farmer falls sick during planting or harvest, the neighbors WILL pitch in. And if someone in the community suffers catastrophic illness, there WILL be fundraisers. These are communities which have assumed that I am indeed my brother’s keeper.
That’s not government. It’s probably something rather better. But it’s also not “I am responsible for myself, and that’s it.”
From this perspective, much of the last half century seems to me like a story of slow corruption. Co-ops turn into businesses, small operations are bought out by “bottom line” conglomerates, religious and community hospitals are bought up by for-profit organizations which insist that doctors see an ever-increasing number of patients per hour, religious fraternal organizations mutate into garden variety insurance companies… Grump. So speaks the curmudgeon.
Is turning things over to government my first choice? Hardly. But in this century, that seems to be how we organize community enterprises. That, or let corporate oligarchs run riot.
So: how does this relate to health care? An assumption that we OUGHT to be on our own, and that the community we live in has no involvement, is simply not the America I thought I knew. Working in the church, I’ve spent rather a lot of time over the last decades trying to encourage community. As a culture, we seem to be drifting away from that. Not business-like enough, I suppose. Well, if government involvement is the way in which we choose to accept responsibility for each other, then that may be the best we are able to do just now.
Yours,
Allan E. Johnson
You address the real problem; we must decide such things. But the Constitution may give the States the power to make the people in general responsible for paying for the needs of each citizen, but I find nowhere in my studies of the Philadelphia Convention any notion of positive entitlements from Congress; quite the opposite. The Constitution limited what Congress – i.e. the Feds – could do. If California wants to bankrupt itself paying for health care – as the state of Washington once did adopting the Townsend Plan – then let it do so; and let it negotiate what it san save from the wreckage. At least it will have bankrupted only itself… I may well have a moral obligation to be charitable, but I have no armed agents to require you to be so; nor should I have.
Health Care
Dr. Pournelle,
I read with interest your examination of ObamaCare and/or its possible replacements (1/15/17). I agree with most of your analysis; however I think you are missing something in your discussion of the obligation of entitlements. Yes, entitlements confer a disproportionate power to the recipients and a corresponding burden upon the taxpayers. But this argument is to place far too specific a lens over the issue of health care at the cost of ignoring involuntary support of a multitude of adventures of dubious value to the country at large.
I suspect that most taxpayers, given the option, would far rather their tax dollars went to creating universal health care for all citizens of the “greatest country in the history of the world” rather than to spend trillions in pursuit of never-ending military actions which further no real national benefit but which do much to enrich the bottom lines of multi-national corporations and co-laterally the war chests of the political parties.
Anecdotes follow: Both I and my wife owe our lives to the combination of Medicare and Tricare for Life. Medicare we have as an earned benefit of 50+ years in the workforce. Tricare for Life (a Medicare supplement) was accrued as a by-product of spending the cold-war years in a missile system on mountainsides in Germany with freezing rain running down my neck. Those were the years when my peers were getting degrees, building careers, buying homes¦ the opportunity costs of serving my country were high. Now at this point in our lives I worry that political whim could pull the rug out from under us. Would we then be undeserving of medical care? I played by the rules and I expect the rules to pay off for us¦ but I can appreciate that they could change. What then?
Give me the option and I will bring all the troops home, terminate the United Nations, demand that all NATO signatories pay their fair share and see our tax dollars spent on Americans first and foremost. Obama Care is an abomination, but that doesn’t mean it is the only one the taxpayers are saddled with.
Thanks,
John Thomas
It is obvious we have created obligations that must be met; I do not think the coming President doubts that for a moment.
The Ancient Foreign Policy
http://victorhanson.com/wordpress/the-ancient-foreign-policy/
Victor Davis Hanson
Nations are collections of human beings, and human nature has not changed, despite Obama’s pleadings.
For the last eight years, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Samantha Power, Ben Rhodes, and Susan Rice have sought to rewrite the traditional approach to foreign policy. In various ways, they have warned us about the dangers that a reactionary Trump presidency would pose, on the assumption that their new world order now operates more along the lines of an Ivy League conference than according to the machinations and self-interests of the dog-eat-dog Manhattan real-estate cosmos.
It would be nice if the international order had safe spaces, prohibitions against micro-aggressions, and trigger warnings that warn of hurtful speech, but is the world really one big Harvard or Stanford that runs on loud assertions of sensitivity, guilt, apologies, or even the cynical progressive pieties found in WikiLeaks? [snip]
This is how Professor Hanson begins an essay on modern foreign policy. I recommend it to anyone who has an interest in the matter. Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it…
It is full of wise observations. Here are a few:
[Snip] Ancient American foreign policy that got us from the ruin of World War II to the most prosperous age in the history of civilization was once guided by an appreciation of human nature’s constancy across time and space. Diplomacy hinged on seeing foreign leaders as roughly predictable — guided as much by Thucydidean emotions such as honor, fear, and perceived self-interest as by cold reason. In other words, sometimes nations did things that seemed to be stupid; in retrospect their actions looked irrational, but at the time, they served the needs of national honor or assuaged fears.
Vladimir Putin, for example, in his effort to restore Russian power and regional hegemony, is guided by his desire to recapture the glories of the Soviet Union, not just its Stalinist authoritarianism or geographical expanse. He also seeks to restore the respect that long ago greeted Russian diplomats, generals, and leaders when sent abroad as proud emissaries of a world-class power.
In that context, talking down to a Putin serves no purpose other than to humiliate a proud leader whose guiding principle is that he will never allow himself to be publicly shamed. But Obama did exactly that when he scolded Putin to “cut it out” with the cyber attacks (as if, presto, Putin would follow his orders), and when he suggested that Putin’s tough-guy antics were sort of a macho shtick intended only to please Russians, and when he mocked a sullen Putin as a veritable class cut-up at photo-ops (as if the magisterial Obama had to discipline an unruly adolescent).
Worse still, when such gratuitous humiliations are not backed by the presence of overwhelming power, deft statecraft, and national will, opportunists such as Putin are only emboldened to become irritants to the U.S. and its former so-called global order. We should not discount the idea that leaders become hostile as much out of spite as out of conflicting national interests.[Snip]
[Snip] From Vegetius’s Si vis pacem, para bellum to Ronald Reagan’s “peace through strength,” the common wisdom was to be ready for war and thereby, and only by that way, avoid war, not to talk bellicosely and to act pacifistically. Our rewrite, Si vis bellum, para pacem (“if you want a war, then prepare for peace”), is not leading to a calm world.
[snip]
“If you want peace, be prepared for war” has been relevant advice since Appius Claudius the Blind said it to the Senate of Rome.
There is more, and you should read it. If Mr. Trump has not, you may be sure that many of his advisors have.
music to your ears
One paragraph:
“I share President-elect Trump’s view that it’s time to shift the debate from what the system thinks is best for kids to what moms and dads want, expect and deserve,” she plans to say, adding that she is “a firm believer that parents should be empowered to choose the learning environment that’s best for their individual children.”
Finally….
Phil
more on DeVos
The nominee is also expected to say not all students should pursue a four-year college education.
“President-elect Trump and I agree we need to support all post-secondary avenues, including trade and vocational schools, and community colleges,” she plans to say, adding, “Of course, on every one of these issues, Congress will play a vital role.”
Phil
and even more on Devos
President-elect Trump and I know it won’t be Washington, D.C. that unlocks our nation’s potential, nor a bigger bureaucracy, tougher mandates or a federal agency. The answer is local control and listening to parents, students and teachers.
—
Phil Tharp
No comment needed.
Aha. Found the JPL news release. (I didn’t find it by hunting on their site, but by clicking on the link in a USAToday report on it. It’s apparently buried deep on the JPL site.)
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4742
I also note that that press release contains NO predictions whatsover. They are using some historic quakes around LA to refine a model of the fault systems and ground movement in the area.
But that link gave me a link to the actual article in the journal Earth and Space Science.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015EA000113/full
It’s also worth noting that this article was originally published in September 2015, so it’s hardly new news.
…This…is getting interesting. It…guys, if I’m reading this journal article correctly, they may have ALREADY PREDICTED a couple of quakes. Not in terms of timing; I don’t think that’s where they’re going with this at all. Rather, they seem to be attempting to identify the deformations that lead to quakes, and associate them with the structures causing them.And here is the predictive paragraph:
“The Gutenberg-Richter relation for a 100 km radius circle around the La Habra earthquake epicenter for events beginning just after the 1994 M6.7 Northridge earthquake shows a deficiency of earthquakes M > 5 (Figure 5), which is consistent with our analysis of the geodetic data. The deficit of earthquakes having ~ M5 and larger can be seen relative to the scaling line. The B value shown here is consistent with B values for Southern California determined by Mori and Abercrombie [1997] for earthquakes > 9 km depth. For the Gutenberg-Richter relation to be completed, this deficit must eventually be filled with large earthquakes, up to M6.2, which is consistent with the above analysis. We assign a probability to these large earthquakes using a Weibull distribution [Weibull, 1951] and the assumption that over long times and large regions the Gutenberg-Richter magnitude-frequency relation is linear [Rundle et al., 2012; Holliday et al., 2014; Rundle et al., 2016]. The calculated probability for a M ≥ 6 earthquake within a circle of radius 100 km, and over the 3 years following 1 April 2015, is 35%. For a M ≥ 5 earthquake within a circle of radius 100 km, and over the 3 years following 1 April 2015, the probability is 99.9%.”And here is their full conclusion:
“Our results indicate that significant ground deformation and infrastructure damage can occur beyond the epicentral region of a moderate earthquake near Los Angeles. Identifying specific structures most likely to be responsible for future earthquakes is difficult for this intricate network of active faults and presence of weak slip planes. The observed widespread and largely aseismic slip may be because the Puente Hills thrust and related faults are structurally immature [Dolan and Haravitch, 2014]. Geodetic imaging of active structures, however, can be used to identify the full extent of slip and provide a time-independent means of estimating a lower bound of future earthquake potential. In the La Habra and Puente Hills area observed here, the lower bound for a potential earthquake is M6.1–6.3.”Offhand I see nothing wrong with their methodology, and they just might be on to something. Unfortunately it sounds as if the news media has rather blown things all out of proportion, as they are wont to do. One guy in the USGS seems to be dissing it because he is claiming that he doesn’t see any methodology in the article for arriving at the prediction. However, the methodologies are outlined in the referenced articles.
I’m backing off my earlier criticism, and taking a “wait and see” attitude. After all, that kind of prediction is easy to prove or disprove — if something happens between now and the end of 2018, then they were right. If not, they were wrong. If it happens, but occurs after the end of 2018, then they may need to adjust their model.
Stephanie Osborn
“The Interstellar Woman of Mystery”
Intelligence Operations Against Trump
The intelligence operations against Trump continue. Well, of course, since it’s happening in this country I’m a conspiracy theorist. If it were in Egypt, I’d be a geopolitical analyst. Anyway, here is my
evidence:
1. Continued statistical biases in the corporate media, which acts as a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party:
2. Someone is renting protesters at 2,500 per month to agitate during the month of Trump’s inauguration; this rent-a-mob approach is something we do when we overthrow small countries, the unions also did it during that Occupy Wall Street charade. I saw it on video but that’s old news:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jan/17/ads-two-dozen-cities-offer-protesters-2500-agitate/
It doesn’t really matter who does it; what matters is that it happens and will persist and we must be more clear in our thinking and less accepting in what were told by public people who say we can trust them. What this does is undermine American trust in the media; it undermines national power. Once more the Democrats attack US national power in the name of their misguided, infantile idealism.
Full disclosure: I am an independent voter.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Most Respectfully,
Joshua Jordan, KSC
Percussa Resurgo
Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.
