Lest We Forget 20110830

View 690 Tuesday, August 30, 2011

I was going to write an essay on what we must do now, but I have a dinner appointment with my long time editor Bob Gleason and some of his friends, probably including George Noory, and it’s getting late. It seems to me that the first thing the Republicans can do is every month repeal the Dodd-Frank regulatory bill. The Senate won’t pass it, but it is well to keep drumming on it. We now have a report by Frank Keating of the American Bankers Association that in some banks there are now more employees working on compliance with regulations than there are those working on banking. The cost of regulations in this nation run to about a $Trillion a year. They also force smaller operations out of business since compliance officers often eat up the marginal profits. This concentrates industries into those large enough to afford the costs of regulation as a cost of doing business. Goldman Sachs with thousands of employees can manage; a Midwestern bank with 37 can’t manage the 4.870 pages of Dodd-Frank. One of the best things we can do to reduce the deficit is to cut way back on regulations. They may or may not be a good idea in boom times, but for now we can’t afford them. Go back to what we endured under Clinton.

It’s time to go. If you’re looking for something to read try http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/lessons.html in which I look at Ortega y Gasset and the 20^th Century. I wrote it some time ago, but it’s still readable.

I note from today’s Wall Street Journal that there will be no clergy participating in the World Trade Center 9/11 memorial ceremony on the tenth anniversary of the event. It is as if Roosevelt had rejected any religious presence at observances of Pearl Harbor Day. Of course Roosevelt would have done no such thing, and didn’t. In those times just about every public ceremony down to the dedication of the ground for a new dog pound was opened by an Invocation, generally by a Protestant Minister (Lutheran in Minnesota, Baptist in the South), and a closing prayer, usually a blessing by a Roman Catholic priest. More important ceremonies would include a local rabbi. There would seldom be a Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Animist, Wiccan, Zoroastrian, Sikh, Druze, or Druid, although after I got to college I heard stories of one or another of these groups trying to insert themselves into the invitation list, or appearing uninvited demanding to be heard. These things used to be sorted out locally. Now they are federal cases.

The Republic endured for some 200 years without the courts intervening into these matters.

I am sure that many readers are puzzled as to why this matters. It’s all a bunch of silliness and self-deception anyway. It’s a pointless waste of time to pray, give thanks, or any of that nonsense. Why that implies a right to forbid anyone else from doing so is a logical puzzle to me, although I can see a certain symmetry for those who can recall being belittled for atheism. I also suspect there are fewer and fewer of those: it has been a long time since we had heresy trials in the US. Perhaps not so long since employers tended to have a negative view of atheist job applicants, but I suspect few of those who are militant about excluding the clergy from public ceremonies have had any such experience.

It is less surprising to find minority groups moving from rejoicing in tolerance to demanding participation. I still find it hard to understand militant atheism like that of Mad Madeleine Murray O’Hair, but that’s another story. From her view all religion is a waste of time, but there are lots of things that waste time.

We are running an interesting and open-ended experiment on crushing all religious basis for national unity and patriotism. Clearly we are betting on the wrong side of Pascal’s Wager (wrong from the view of game theory, anyway). The Old Testament tells the story of one people who insisted on making that bet, with subsequent consequences.

The experiment we are running is whether a nation of people who are no longer encouraged to believe in anything, even so amorphous a concept as Judao-Christian ethics or the kind of Deism that Washington and Jefferson encouraged, has much of a chance against a culture and people who believe strongly. We are apparently determined to run that experiment.

Recessional

Rudyard Kipling, 1897

God of our fathers, known of old—
Lord of our far-flung battle line—
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies—
The Captains and the Kings depart—
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

Far-called our navies melt away—
On dune and headland sinks the fire—
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe—
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard—
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding calls not Thee to guard.
For frantic boast and foolish word,
Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!

Amen.

We have forgotten. Perhaps the Gods of the Copybook Headings will remind us.

Call Me Joe

At a Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society (LASFS) meeting a few weeks ago I mentioned to Karen Anderson that eBook publishing offers an opportunity for some supplementary income, and that some authors, including me, are getting small but steady sales of our older works. That can include novels, of course, but also short stories. Poul was one of my closest friends for forty years and more, and after he died Karen sold their Bay Area house and moved down here (just in time to be chased out of her house by the Station Fire evacuation, but that was just an area evac with no lasting consequences.) I note that there are a LOT of Anderson works available on Kindle, some I think rather overpriced: I suspect those were done by an agent or a publisher. I note that publishers often ssume they have eBook rights on older works even though there is not a word in the contract. One can hope they pay royalties to the author’s estate. Residuals from older stories are about the only pensions authors get other than Social Security, which we certainly paid into through the Self Employment Tax.

She tells me they have recently put up “Call Me Joe,” a novelette from some fifty years ago, for the Kindle minimum price of 99 cents. You can’t get Amazon to carry anything at all for less than that, and actually Amazon encourages authors to have a minimum price of $2.99. Since credit card companies have a minimum transaction price, there has to be a minimum. Anyway, you can get Call Me Joe for 99 cents, and it’s still a good read. I remember reading it in Analog – it might have been back far enough that it was still Astounding Science Fiction – either in high school or as an undergraduate. I expect someone else read it way back when too: James Cameron. Call Me Joe would seem a great candidate for the work that inspired Cameron to write Avatar; if it wasn’t, I’ll bet you that whoever wrote the work that inspired Cameron had read Call Me Joe. The story has held up well over the years. It’s still a good read. You also get a copy of the original Frank Kelly Freas cover illustration.

http://www.amazon.com/Call-Me-Joe-ebook/dp/B005H7LJJM/ref=sr_1_31?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1314744452&sr=1-31

The Alien Menace

We mentioned this a week ago, but I guess Rush didn’t read my site that week. I have minor evidence that somone in his staff checks here periodically, but they didn’t get this one, because I heard Rush railing about the NASA staff paper on the threat of alien invasion for our Green sins. I can’t blame him for getting it wrong, because on the surface all the evidence pointed to the story being authentic, and of course there was a paper that did mention the possibility of aliens attacking Earth to prevent us from destroying the planet (Klaatu barada nikto!), and it was written by some Ph.D.’s one of whom is sort of associated with NASA; but the facts are much less exciting. The junior co-author of the paper is a post-doc (a position that didn’t exist when I got my Ph.D.; in my day if you had the degree you would get a real job, not an internship) at NASA. The paper is about why we haven’t heard from the aliens and goes through all the logical possibilities the authors can think of. This one isn’t presented as very probable. And so forth. For all the details, see the rather charming treatment by Donna Laframboise:

http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2011/08/19/behind-the-aliens-will-smite-us-news-story/  which is a good way to get a taste of her interesting web site. And don’t be too hard on Rush. It’s the kind of story no talk show host could resist, and most fact checkers would see the mainstream press smoke and wouldn’t dig deep enough to find there’s no fire, just some smouldering rags…

I must have a dozen letters on this one, and at some point I’ll comment:

Better than bunny inspectors–DOJ agents raid Gibson Guitar

Jerry:

Here’s a great addition to your Bunny Inspectors list:

http://youtu.be/O_-taqM5Sk0

Best regards,

Doug Ely

It may be a good cause, but can we afford this sort of thing? Each inspector has to cost at least $100,000, so a dozen is more than a million dollars, and there have to be twenty such groups or units or whatever they call a gaggle of Bunny or Guitar Wood inspectors.

Subject: Bureaucratic priorities

Jerry, I just read an article on Navy Insider

(http://defensetech.org/2011/08/29/the-fate-of-museum-ships-during-a-recession)

about how one of the last Fletcher Class destroyers from WW II (USS Cassin Young) may end up getting scrapped because the National Park Service can’t afford the $18.7 million needed to repair its hull. The Navy has implied that it could do the repairs for less, but doesn’t want the ship back. The administration’s motto, here, seems to be "Millions for Bunny Inspectors but not one cent to preserve our history."

Joe

I am not sure we can afford to preserve the Cassin Young either, but surely that is more worth doing than inspecting stage magician rabbits? I suspect you can if you must raise twenty million among WW II tin can vets if the alternative is losing the last of the Fletcher Class; but I suspect you couldn’t raise a grand for enforcement of federal stage magician bunny permit requirements.

Of course there are important matters that get mishandled:

How can it take three-and-a-half years to repair a single aircraft?

<http://www.dodbuzz.com/2011/08/29/the-air-forces-b-2-deception/>

Roland Dobbins

At least that is a jpb worth doing. A job not worth doing is not worth doing well.