View 825, Wednesday, May 21, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

This was the first mail I noticed this morning:

Pournelle neighbor in the News 

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2014/05/okeefe-strikes-again-hollywood-progressives-duped-in-anti-fracking-sting-operation-video/

"James O’Keefe says he duped Ed Begley Jr. and Mariel Hemmingway into agreeing to get involved with an anti-fracking movie while hiding that its funding comes from Middle Eastern oil interests.

Journalist James O’Keefe, known for his controversial undercover sting operations aimed usually at liberals — is set to unveil at the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday the first of a group of videos that he says will reveal hypocrisy among Hollywood environmentalists.

In the video, obtained exclusively by The Hollywood Reporter and embedded below, actors Ed Begley Jr. and Mariel Hemmingway are duped by a man named “Muhammad,” who is looking to make an anti-fracking movie while hiding that its funding is coming from Middle Eastern oil interests.

Muhammad, accompanied by a man pretending to be an ad executive, seemingly has the two actors agreeing to participate in the scheme, even after he acknowledges that his goal is to keep America from becoming energy independent. The meeting, which appears to have been secretly recorded, took place a few months ago at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Nice people

Regards,

Paul Taggart

Later I got

More on James O’Keefe anti-fracking film sting

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2014/05/20/James-O-Keefe-Dupes-Hollywood-With-Fake-Anti-Fracking-Film

This has the actual film and is much more informative.

James O’Keefe is the conservative activist best known for his infiltration and secret videos of the actions of ACORN. His report caused Congressional funding of ACORN to be limited. While the tactics and accuracy of his documentary on ACORN has been disputed and is condemned by liberal journalists, his actions were politically effective. Few, including his supporters, would describe his work as journalism as normally understood. On the other hand, a number of his supporters have pointed out that his tactics are not much different from those used by liberal journalists in defense of their causes. If all this seems to be a commentary on the state of journalism, I would not dispute that.

O’Keefe apparently approached well known producers Josh and Rebecca Tickell, Sundance Festival award winners, with an offer to set up meetings with “Mohammed”, said to be the son of a Middle East Oil Company executive who wished to make an anti-fracking film. Mohammed was fairly open with the Tickells, telling them that oil fracking was cutting into the Middle East Oil sales and affecting their bottom line, and they wanted to finance a film that would stop fracking entirely.

This is from the narrative that accompanies the film:

The video features an undercover journalist from Project Veritas posing as "Muhammad,” a member of a Middle Eastern oil family, offering $9 million in funding to American filmmakers to fund an anti-fracking movie. He was joined by a second undercover activist posing as an ad executive.

O’Keefe entraps actor Ed Begley Jr., actress Mariel Hemingway, and director Josh Tickell, who agree to the film while promising to hide the source of the funds.

The undercover activist tells the group that "if Washington, D.C., continues fracking, America will be energy-efficient, and then they won’t need my oil anymore."

In a phone call to Tickell, the "ad executive" states, "My client’s interest is to end American energy independence; your interest is to end fracking. And you guys understand that?"

Tickell’s response: "Correct. Yes, super clear.”

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2014/05/20/James-O-Keefe-Dupes-Hollywood-With-Fake-Anti-Fracking-Film

Assuming that the video is of actual events, there is little question that the Tickells knew precisely what they were getting into. It is not so clear that Ed Begley, Jr., (my neighbor) and Mariel Hemingway (granddaughter of Earnest and Hadley Hemingway) were fully aware of what was going on. They are actors, and while I do not know Ms. Hemingway, Ed is very well known for his Green sympathies and his opposition to fossil fuels. Begley’s position on fracking was stated in his USA Today interview http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/video/perspectives-ed-begley-jr-on-climate-change-fracking-and-solar-energy/1852410717001 and while I do not agree with him, he discusses these matters with another neighbor, Bill Nye the Science Guy, whose views are not particularly different from Ed’s. He can say that his views can’t be unreasonable, else why would such a famous science guy agree with him?

Begley is an actor. It is not clear just how much of “Mohamed’s” part in the documentary was told to him; the line about , "My client’s interest is to end American energy independence; your interest is to end fracking. And you guys understand that?" is from a telephone call that Begley was not part of. Actors are generally not part of the negotiations about film financing. When they are, their part is usually to show up and say very little: they are there to help close a deal, and without the deal no film gets made. Hollywood is not really in the entertainment business; Hollywood is in the business of raising money to invest in entertainment enterprises. The difference is significant, and part of it accounts for why talented actors take so little part in the actual business operations.

A typical movie deal tends to be a series of lies which, if everything goes right, turn out to be retroactively true. As in, a producer tells an actor that his has a famous director lined up for a project, but the director wants this particular actor before he’ll come aboard. He then goes to a financial source and says he’s got a well known actor and a name director, but he needs financing. Once he has the financing he goes to an agent to buy the film rights, but he can’t pay for them just yet, so he buys an option. He then has his first meeting with the director, and he’s got it all: Script, Financing, Actor, and all he needs is this big name director and it’s all got the green light. Astonishingly, while this doesn’t always work, it works far more often than you’d think. Some really great movies have been made that way.

I doubt that O’Keefe duped Begley and Hemingway into anything. He had Mohamed go to the Tickells, sucked them into the project, and as their enthusiasm grew they got Ed Begley and Muriel Hemingway to come on board.

Understand, this is all my speculation. I haven’t discussed this with Ed or anyone else. Apparently O’Keefe is a very persuasive young man, and whomever he hired to be “Mohamed” is likely to be a very good actor as well; and of course producers like the Tickells, and talents like Begley and Hemingway, already convinced of the importance of their causes and their fundamental truths, are eager to take part in something that might be effective in furthering the cause. That they will be paid well to do it doesn’t harm their enthusiasm, but it’s not the sole reason for them to get on board. While Hollywood is really about investments and money, at the talent level it is about movies and their magic, and none of that would happen without the smoke and mirrors of the producer teams who make these things come true.

O’Keefe has done well to show some of the realities in the Great Climate Debate. Note that there is no debate, really: every study that questions the accuracy of the Consensus Theory of Climate Change will be challenged as biased and financed by people with a financial interest in being a Denier; but as the Consensus tightens down, every study financed through universities will find results consistent with the Consensus, or all those tenure track post-docs involved will have to find new jobs when the next grant proposal is denied. I have seen this happen in many research fields; this is the best known of them. Long time readers will recall that I have often argued that on scientific issues important enough to be supported with large amounts of public money, should by law have at least 10% of that money reserved to finance contrarian theories. We can argue over the percentages, but I think it important that there be reliable and publicly financed tests of Big Important Highly Financed Theories. The contrarian research may find questions that ought to have been asked but haven’t; and they are far more likely to find unexpected results even if the established theories are true. But that is a matter for another essay.

I will say that I have known Ed Begley long enough that I would be astonished if he were truly sucked into an actual scam. I am sure he believed that this would be an honest film about an important subject, one that he could be proud to have been a part of. I doubt that he paid much attention to the rest of what was being said in that Arab owned Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills hotel.

As an aside: when Niven and I had an important meeting with a senior official of Simon and Schuster in the Polo Lounge, the hotel had not been sold to the Sultan of Brunei; last I heard Loretta Young and Pat Frawley were involved in the ownership, but that was 34 years ago. It is my understanding that the Sultan has owned the hotel for about twenty years, although I don’t recall anyone knowing this until the recent flap over Sharia Law being imposed in Brunei provoked a boycott movement of the hotel and its famed Polo Lounge. In our case we were told (by our militantly pro Israeli publisher) that our upcoming novel OATH OF FEALTY would become a best seller. He made that as a personal promise, and the only provision is that we would leave that to him, and we’d cooperate as needed in promotion. He did just that. It’s not always smoke and mirrors.

It’s dinner time. Later.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 825, Tuesday, May 20, 2014

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

I have it from a reliable source that the Russian Spetsnaz troops who took over the former Ukrainian bases in the Crimea were sadistically and needlessly rough on the Ukrainian Marines, bad enough to make grown men cry at the sight of their mistreatment.

This is enough of a blunder than I suspect it has infuriated Vladimir Putin. Ukrainians are not Russians – not quite – but they are about as close to being ethnic Russians as anyone can be, and Putin needs Russians. He won’t be able to find enough, so he will have to seduce other Slavs into becoming Russians – and Ukrainians are by far the best prospects. This is sufficiently obvious that Putin must know it, and we can assume he is intelligent enough to understand that needless violence against Ukrainian military people isn’t going to help his long range plans.

Soviet Education

Recently I tried discussing soviet education with another friend, and got nowhere. He says the focus is on providing everyone in the USA the same education.

Tests in the USSR were to find who would benefit from being sent to a better school. Leaving behind those who would be sent to fill the unskilled and semi-skilled jobs in factories and farms.

Tests in the current USA are to find if students have learned what they are being taught.

Scott Rich

If we are interested in improving our schools so that our system of education is no longer indistinguishable from an act of war, the first thing to do is get rid of Federal Aid to Education. All of it. The problem is that with Federal money comes Federal control and the Federal Bureaucracy, and the Department of Education has proven over the years that it can do only harm, not good. The Constitution doesn’t give the Federal government power or control over education, nor does it give Washington funding power; and prior to Sputnik American education got along just fine without Federal Aid.

Sputnik scared some people and the social theorists who were certain they knew better than the loutish local school boards that had built the best public education system in the world used that fear to get the Federal camel’s nose into the tent. Full control followed, and the more money the Feds pumped into the schools, the worse they got. There also social theorists who thought the solution to the science and technology problem was to see that every American got a world class university prep education, and that became the goal. This was done just as another set of education theorists decided that since readers – people who read with ease and understanding and facility – do not pause and “sound out” words as they read, the whole notion of phonics was not only unnecessary, but in fact harmful. It only slowed pupils down. Since those who read well read by “whole words”, then the proper way to teach reading is to teach them to recognize and read whole words; you don’t need to tell them that letters have sounds, and syllables have sounds, and letters and syllables can be combined to teach you to say words. Just recognize the words as words and be done with it.

That, after all, is the way these professors of education read. It’s the way you and I read. Why should it not be the way that beginners read. And as the Department of Education was taking over the whole process of teaching, this was forced upon the schools, while Departments of Education in the various teacher’s colleges and universities no longer taught teachers how to teach phonics and phonetic reading. We entered the era of “See Spot run” said Dick. “Run Spot run,” said Jane. This required expensive new textbooks, a great windfall for publishers, with “controlled vocabulary” so that children would not be exposed to too many new words all at once – since they had no way whatever to read a word they had not been taught, even if it were a word they had been using all their lives.

And the Education Professors, bless them, neatly set back the art of reading several thousand years to before the invention of the phonetic alphabet, and turning English, a 90+% phonetic language, into an ideographic language. And they were proud of doing it.

The resulting disaster should be sufficient reason for never having a national education system again.

The local school boards with school supported by local school taxes built the American system of public education. There were abysmally bad school districts under that system, but the overall national result was the envy of the world. And the problem with “helping” the bad school districts was that with that “Help” came control. Up through World War II, the number of male conscripts who could not read was considerably lower than the illiteracy rate in today’s United States – and the number of conscripts who had been through fourth grade and could not read was very low. Essentially everyone who had made it through fourth grade could read well enough to pass the Army’s literacy tests and take the Armed Forces Qualification Test. (The famous old test in which a score of 120 or above qualified you to apply for Officer Candidate School. We don’t do that sort of thing any longer.)

When I was growing up, the University of Tennessee accepted all Tennessee residents who graduated from an Academic Preparation program in a four year high school. Tuition was low. Dropout rate from the academic prep program was relatively high, but not from high school itself – you simply took a different high school program not geared to college prep. Dropout rates from UT itself was fairly low. Other states had different programs. And somehow the United States went from having no military and few arsenals and munitions factories to become the Arsenal of Democracy, building the strongest army, the largest navy, and the largest fleets of aircraft ever seen. And all of this without any Federal Aid to education.

What a nation has done, a nation can aspire to.

This comment on Jim Bludso:

Poetry

". . . back in the late 1800’s when poetry was more widely read (and better constructed) than it is now. . ."

Hear, hear!

If it has no meter or rhyme it isn’t real poetry in my book. It can be marvelously good prose, and good prose has more literary merit than doggerel, in any event. But if a "verse" can’t be distinguished in any meaningful sense from prose, then the word "poetry" has no useful meaning. You could take the preamble to the Constitution and arrange it as free verse, but that wouldn’t turn it into a poem.

Sheesh!

Richard White

Austin, Texas

I confess that I tend to agree. I have admired some “free verse”, particularly some of the works of Sylvia Plath – I read just about everything she wrote when we decided to use her as a character in Escape From Hell, the sequel to Inferno, and if you haven’t read those you might think about getting them; they’re good reads.

But I remember in high school when I first encountered free verse I had a lot of trouble seeing the point. Shakespeare’s plays have a rhythm and meter that adds much to them, but they are prose, not poetry. I subscribe to Poetry magazine, but I confess that I read little of it. I prefer good old fashioned rhyme, rhythm, and meter. But it is seldom taught in schools now, and students are not exposed to epic poems and do not learn to enjoy them. I think the culture has lost something.

There’s a joy in reading poetry, but it does take some practice. Best to start with poems that are pure fun and have provided us with some language idioms. As for instance Oliver Wendell Holmes and the wonderful one horse shay. http://www.legallanguage.com/resources/poems/onehossshay/

The Future of Work; a short reply

Dear Dr. Pournelle;

It seems manners have not kept pace with our science: Attention has been drawn to the fact that I have less to offer a debate concerning the future than Messrs. Farmer, Kipling and Pohl. As admirers of these worthy gentlemen I can only agree. I am, I think, flattered the list is so short.

I would like to respond, however, as though the criticism was intended in the spirit of friendly debate. The observation regarding my entertainment value compared with the masters of prose just mentioned is surely an exercise in the obvious and will be disregarded as a side issue not worth pursuing.

This leaves the issue of originality. Here I think my detractor and I have an unintended accord; I said nothing new. I made a basic statement: The technology we are developing will make every old model of civilization and the activities of it’s members obsolete and it will do so in an astonishingly short span of years. I posed a basic question: How does the Human Race avoid being rendered likewise obsolete by it’s own creations? I have no answer for this. I could speculate, but if I try to follow the threads of each emerging technology and predict the manifold reactions and counter-reactions of our civilization as it’s know-how grows exponentially, I discover that my inadequacy is comical. Many minds might make a better effort.

Science fiction occasionally takes a stab at the future. The best of these stories are elegant, brilliant and as prediction…almost certainly wrong. Authors who pen their musings set far enough forward in time have a certain latitude, whereas futurists and prophets making near-term predictions are on dangerous ground indeed. Pity the poor doomsayer that has a short handful of days to guide the pocket books of the faithful, for soon he will either be right or he’ll be traveling light to South America and they are never right.

Ah, but I am rambling. To get back on topic I would like to point out that given the nature of the subject and the luminaries that have grappled with it in the past, I can hardly be held to task for not developing an entirely new conceptual framework for understanding the future and predicting it’s impact. The deeper down this rabbit hole I travel, the more I come to realize that much of what I understand…many of the intellectual tools I employ are rooted in old paradigms.

Of how much use are these tools in understanding the future? These ‘thought tools’ are cultural artifacts which comprise concepts common to all of us. They form the common core understanding of our civilization. But can I, or anyone, understand a future so potentially different from our present with the ‘understanding’ that forms the basis for our judgment and analysis? Without these artifacts of thought it would take us forever just to write a grocery list; we would have to redefine all of the terms and relationships. Absurd! We spent our formative and elastic years absorbing hundreds, no thousands of basic concepts. As we grew, these concepts also grew, layer by layer and spread their web of links from one to another in bewildering complexity. They are uniquely designed to help us function in our society, our civilization. We are all citizens of now. Change breaks links, forms new ones, creates new concepts. Change is destructive, sometimes violent. With sufficient time, people adapt. Civilization adapts; never proactively, always in response. Change that comes too fast overwhelms and destroys.

Perhaps, though, we don’t need to predict the future. Perhaps that’s the wrong strategy. Maybe we need a new science; a Human science that defines our place now and later, regardless of the wonders we create. A science that creates change and time tolerant concepts for Human identity and purpose. This is not a new concept: Gordon Dickson’s Exotics in his Childe Cycle had something similar. Kenneth E. Boulding predicted the need for such. I’m musing now, but I suspect that a prerequisite for such a science would be a greater homogeneity for our species.

But enough. I have been indulged and I thank you. My consideration of this subject has mired. I freely admit it. I run into unsalable cliffs and trackless jungles. If someone out there has something to add, please do. I won’t even mind if you think I’m wrong. If you think I’m an idiot, please keep that to yourself, but all other comments are welcome.

With respect,

Eric Gilmer

Prairie Belle, faith and works

Jerry:

I’m a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and we Mormons have long been attacked by Protestants over the "faith vs.

works" thing that you mentioned regarding this poem. While mainstream Christians believe that a Mafia hit man is "saved" if he "comes to Christ" on his death bed, true Christian doctrine is that faith without works is dead.

Note that I did not say "death" — it simply is true that if you have the faith, you will do the works. You don’t do the works to GAIN salvation, you do them because doing them becomes part of your nature when you UNDERSTAND salvation. The Boy Scout doctrine of doing a good deed every day is not an obligation to help an old lady across the street, it’s an excuse for having done so if other boys jeer.

I am reminded of Heinlein’s address to the Annapolis graduates, printed in Analog about 40 years ago. He describes the true story from his childhood of a young woman whose foot gets caught in a railway track, and the struggles of her husband to free her. He is assisted by a hobo who happens along. All three are killed by a train, and eyewitnesses testified that neither man tried dodge. Heinlein said that it was the husband’s duty and privilege to give his life trying to save her (just as Bludso gave his life to save those for whom he was responsible), but the hobo had no such obligation. He gave of himself because it was the right thing to do.

As Heinlein observed: "This is how a man dies. This is how a MAN . .

.LIVES!"

I can’t think of any other way to put it.

Keith

Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned,
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonored , and unsung.

Sir Walter Scott

 

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 824, Saturday, May 17, 2014

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

There is a meeting of the local MWA in the Studio City Library this afternoon at 3:PM and I am going to it. I used to go to MWA meetings a lot. My first published novel was Red Heroin, an action/adventure novel, and I joined MWA when it met in the Los Angeles Press Club building. I think the first guy to welcome me to the meeting was Ed McBain. Not everyone in MWA is part of the pay it forward tradition, but he was.

Anyway I haven’t been going to MWA recently and since this one is just a few blocks away I hardly have any excuse to miss it.

I’ll say something about the meeting tonight. Meanwhile:

Wade’s book "A Troublesome Inheritance" reviewed by Fred…

http://www.fredoneverything.net/Wade.shtml

"Differences among people are actually small, he asserts, and only in cumulative effects on societies do they really count. Yet he puts the mean IQ of Sub-Saharan Africans at 67, of Europeans at 100, and of Jews at 115. He also says that four of every thousand Europeans have IQs in excess of 140, but 23 Jews. These are huge differences and, if real, have equally huge implications."

Charles Brumbelow

Fred is, as usual, blunt and direct, and hard to refute. I’ve never met Fred, although we are on-line friends, and hi often has things to say that everyone ought to read whether they agree or not. Nicholas Wade is more subtle and data oriented. I met Nicholas Wade at AAAS meetings back when I went to them in the last Century (I am really thinking of going back to the practice of AAAS meetings: it’s still the best place to get a general view of what’s going on in science, and sometimes you get to see interesting things, such as the special session convened to condemn The Bell Curve, conducted by an esteemed professor who opened the session by stating that he had never read the book, never would, and didn’t need to. I’ve also heard Morrison give one of the best lectures I ever heard in my life, and Freeman Dyson give a fascinating talk that ranged from artificial intelligence to SETI to settling the galaxy. And some years ago Rolf Sinclair and I co-chaired a session on Science and Science Fiction. Guest included Dyson, Carl Sagan, Larry Niven and Greg Benford, and other notables. Last I heard it had the largest attendance of any non-plenary session in the history of AAAS, but I can’t cite my source for that so it may just be a welcome rumor. Anyway, I have always enjoyed AAAS and I think I’ll start arranging to go to the meetings again.

But today it’s the local Mystery Writers of America meeting that has attracted me. And you’re well advised to read Fred’s review of Wade’s book, and the Kindle version of Wade’s book is about $13.00. I’ve just ordered it and I’ll have my own review at some point.

While I’m recommending books, get Tales from our Near Future by Jackson Coppley. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00K8WDEIU Don’t look at blurbs or peek inside, and don’t try to find out what’s going on. Just start reading. It will take you a bit to figure out what he’s doing, but the mental effort is fun, and after you finish the first section, just keep going. I can pretty well guarantee that if you read this place regularly, you will be glad you read the whole thing.

And yes, I have some critiques, but almost any discussion of this work will be a bit of a spoiler, and while the book is worth your while even if you know what you’re getting into, the experience of figuring it out was highly pleasurable to me, and I expect it will be for you.

I happened to be reminded of John Hay’s poetry yesterday, so I took a few minutes off to read a few of them. His Pike County Ballads were nationally popular back in the late 1800’s when poetry was more widely read (and better constructed) than it is now; and everyone of my age encountered him in the eighth grade and sometimes in high school, along with a lot of other poetry and stories and fables that made up the transmission of western values and civilization down the ages. Most of that has gone away in our modern school system. If you’ve never read about Jim Bludso and the Night of the Prairie Bell, you should have; and I can pretty much bet you haven’t lately. So enjoy this while I go off to the MWA meeting.

JIM BLUDSO, OF THE "PRAIRIE BELLE."

Pike County Ballads

by

John Hay

Wall, no! I can’t tell whar he lives,
Becase he don’t live, you see;
Leastways, he’s got out of the habit
Of livin’ like you and me.
Whar have you been for the last three year
That you haven’t heard folks tell
How Jimmy Bludso passed in his checks
The night of the Prairie Belle?

He weren’t no saint,—them engineers
Is all pretty much alike,—
One wife in Natchez-under-the-Hill,
And another one here, in Pike;
A keerless man in his talk was Jim,
And an awkward hand in a row,
But he never flunked, and he never lied,—
I reckon he never knowed how.

And this was all the religion he had,—
To treat his engine well;
Never be passed on the river;
To mind the pilot’s bell;
And if ever the Prairie Belle took fire,—
A thousand times he swore,
He’d hold her nozzle agin the bank
Till the last soul got ashore.

All boats has their day on the Mississip,
And her day come at last,—
The Movastar was a better boat,
But the Belle she WOULDN’T be passed.
And so she come tearin’ along that night—
The oldest craft on the line—
With a nigger squat on her safety-valve,
And her furnace crammed, rosin and pine.

The fire bust out as she clared the bar,
And burnt a hole in the night,
And quick as a flash she turned, and made
For that willer-bank on the right.
There was runnin’ and cursin’, but Jim yelled out,
Over all the infernal roar,
"I’ll hold her nozzle agin the bank
Till the last galoot’s ashore."

Through the hot, black breath of the burnin’ boat
Jim Bludso’s voice was heard,
And they all had trust in his cussedness,
And knowed he would keep his word.
And, sure’s you’re born, they all got off
Afore the smokestacks fell,—
And Bludso’s ghost went up alone
In the smoke of the Prairie Belle.

He weren’t no saint,—but at jedgment
I’d run my chance with Jim,
‘Longside of some pious gentlemen
That wouldn’t shook hands with him.
He seen his duty, a dead-sure thing,—
And went for it thar and then;
And Christ ain’t a-going to be too hard
On a man that died for men.

That poem caused considerable controversy and discussion among Protestant Evangelicals in its day; after all, it looks hard at the question of salvation by faith vs. salvation by good works. Vatican I was past when it was written. Vatican II had not yet happened. I doubt John Hay was read by anyone at Vatican II but perhaps it should have been.

The MWA meeting turned out to be a panel of five authors talking about the sorts of things panels of authors talk about to audiences of beginning writers (as opposed to what they’d talk about if they were simply talking to each other, at, say, the bar before the meeting.  Interesting stuff, but nothing that most professional writers haven’t heard and probably said at one time or another.  One of the speakers is a shrink, but since he isn’t into forensic psychology he couldn’t say anything on that subject (although he does in his books, I think.  I may even get one.).

I enjoyed getting out, but I’d rather have taken the panelists out for a drink than listen to the panel.  I’m a bit behind on what’s going on in the mystery world, and I’d like to catch up a bit. The topic was psychology in mystery writing, but there wasn’t much of that in the discussion. One of the audience said something to the effect that the DSM is the biggest fraud going in American, and everyone laughed, and no one commented.  I could have, but I saw no purpose to it.  I wasn’t hearing everything said, and of course no one there ever heard of  me. I did comment once that all my graduate studies in psychology were in the 50’s and were now useless because we were required to pretend that Freudian analysis had something to do with science, and was worth studying.  Everyone laughed but since no one knows what Freud actually taught (other than what you might learn from Psychology Today in a whimsical article) it wasn’t much of a laugh. 

I may buy one or another of the books the panel of authors was pushing – two were said to be best sellers, but all seemed to have printed book markers pushing their books, and two even had copies to sell in case anyone wanted to buy one – but we’ll see.  I don’t usually read much dark psychology mystery, and noire seems to be the big theme for everyone now.  One of the authors has a “homeless dysfunctional detective” as the focus of a series of books – I would not have thought that would sell well, but apparently it does, and I may yet buy one just to see why. Psychology and mystery, but I don’t think I’ll be inspired.  Mystery is more and more about character now, and that means character of the detectives as well as the criminals and witnesses and such.  I don’t see anything out there as intriguing as Nero Wolfe was, though.  Pity.

And one chap has a custom card that proclaims his name and “Noir fiction, not for the faint of heart.”  I’d expect there’s a good market for that, but alas I am not likely to be part of it. If If I can get up the energy to write fiction I’d rather tell people how good things can be, or even that justice does often prevail, or at least that the old fashioned virtues still have a place in the universe.  Of course I don’t set out to tell that story, but it does seem to work out that Ad astra per aspera themes tend to take over…

When the subject came to god vs. evil vs. psychology, I did say something to the effect that the modern explanation seems to be “Compulsive murder disorder”, but I am not sure who got the point.  The chap who denounced the DSM of course, and I think the author who is also a psychologist.  But I haven’t paid enough attention to the DSM recently to be able even to make fun of it.

Reference :

The Fight Over the Bundy Cows Will End as Civics 101, Not Fort Sumter II –

http://news.yahoo.com/fight-over-bundy-cows-end-civics-101-not-134743601.html

The Bundy Standoff —

The Yahoo article is probably right. Bundy and his supporters are not white-hat good guys though they aren’t exactly the evil, ignorant scofflaws the Left would have us believe. The BLM did very definitely attempted to bully them with potentially lethal force, which should give us all something to think about.

Most people have little understanding of the true nature of our federal system and the issues of sovereignty and jurisdiction involved. Many on the Right have a rudimentary grasp, but I think hardly anyone on the Left does. And it differs, state-by-state, due to the different ways in which they became states. Sadly, I also believe few judges, being, after all, a subset of the set of lawyers, have an understanding that doesn’t do violence to the rights of individuals.

That said, Bundy was right about one thing: it is the county sheriffs and local police forces who are best able to stand between their neighbors and the increasingly (and alarmingly) well-armed federal Gestapo . . . uhm, excuse me . . . agents. It takes will and imagination to do it, though.

I wonder how much they have.

Richard White

Austin, Texas

I think that almost all federal enforcement ought to be through the local sheriff. Waco would have been much more satisfactory, for example, if they’d just got the local sheriff involved. We do not need small armies of federal agents operating routinely in the states.  Let federalism work. It helps freedom – and often local authorities know the situation better to begin with.

The Future of Work

Dear Dr. Pournelle;

I have noticed, here on your blog and elsewhere, that discussions of the future similar to the ongoing debate on the future of work seem to invoke a consistent set of responses.

One common response is to reduce the argument to something much smaller and more manageable and to argue for or against some aspect of it in light of the old paradigms. While I can appreciate the desire to exercise some intellectual control over an issue, I think this reaction is the least predictive. Whatever the future holds, it will almost certainly not be business as usual.

Another is to assume (and they may well be right) that we are undergoing yet another generational shift; that just as we could not fully appreciate the changes the electronics revolution would bring when it began in the sixties and seventies, or the more profound changes wrought by the Renaissance or the industrial revolution, we, too, are simply experiencing another game change. We are still the players, but we won’t know what the rules will be ahead of time. Were it not for the warning in my heart and the logical implications of the technology being developed, this is the position I would like to take. I say ‘like’ because it is the most hopeful extrapolation of current trends. Whatever comes I want Humanity to remain relevant…and dominant: For despite our many sins and shortcomings, we are the only game in town.

Which brings me to another common reaction and one I have recently encountered on your blog: Disapproval. As many times as I have encountered it you would think that I was immune to surprise, but my first reaction is invariably a momentary incomprehension. I find it difficult to reconcile my intent, which is to help stimulate debate by offering my thoughts, expecting, even hoping for some new thought, even if it conflicts with mine, only to find hostility instead.

After my initial setback I intended to respond in kind; to lash out with corrosive and hurtful comments and make my best effort to dismantle my attacker. A wiser head prevailed, however, and I would now prefer to respond to the criticisms as though they were intended in the spirit of friendly debate, for upon reflection, I believe my detractor may have, intentionally or not, hit upon something quite important.

The criticism leveled that I was not entertaining will be discarded as irrelevant. I would like to focus on a gem of rare quality: I was accused of not having anything original to add to the debate and I believe this is quite correct. A list of authors, masters all, and their works were cited as evidence for my lack of originality. That these men grappled with a similar debate and have minds that I am not equal to is not in dispute. I could add to the list if it would help. These men, and many others, have my infinite respect, but they had the luxury of an unwritten future to pen their musings. Our future has begun to unfold and any conjecture on our part is restrained by the facts as we know them.

But where are these original thoughts that my critic scorned me for lacking? He didn’t offer any up, so who has them and would we even recognize them if we encountered them? The term ‘Singularity’, as any reader of this site will be well aware of, is the term given to the moment an A.I. becomes self aware and begins to learn and expand it’s consciousness. Any prediction of what happens from this point forward becomes impossible. No model previously made will be adequate. Another way of putting this may be that no old idea or set of ideas will provide a conceptual framework for understanding what happens next.

I think that far short of this point (It still remains to be seen if we can create an artificial mind), given the complexities of converging technologies and abilities, our capacity to predict the future with any degree of success runs up against a similar problem; the barrier of insufficiently novel ideas. Our concepts are driven by past experience. If the future draws little from the past, is the gestalt of our Human experience to this point up to the task of visualizing an entirely new future?

I am reminded of the Chilcotin, where I grew up. When the first white settlers came, the Natives thought their horses were large dogs. They had no frame of reference for ‘horse’, so they fell upon an old concept they understood: ‘Dog’. I apologize for the sloppy metaphor, but what if the best any of us can do is call a horse a dog?

If we accept the possibility that our rapidly developing technology will create an unprecedented future, (this is clearly not so for everyone) then we must also accept the possibility that our knowledge and creative faculties may not be adequate to the task of detecting the future before it arrives. The clues are all around us, of course, in the machine intelligences appearing in labs, in the work of molecular biologists, and legions of other sciences and disciplines that blend and hybridise and blur the distinction of one science and another. As one discovery follows another and the implications of each barely perceived before another breakthrough comes and another and another…

Even Mssrs. Farmer, Pohl and Kipling, whose ideas were elegant, brilliant and as prediction…almost certainly wrong, if even these gentlemen, given up as evidence of the fact that I don’t belong where the air is rare call a horse a dog, what hope do we have? Well there is no doubt that some here have, at there disposal, all the qualities of the aforementioned gentlemen, but these are faculties that we all possess to some degree, taken to a higher pitch. As worthy as their thoughts would be, pressed to the task of divining the future and producing something…new, I daresay that they are unlikely to achieve it.

Let’s imagine for the moment that we have a small window to the future…say 70 years ahead. This future of ageless Humans and super-intelligent machines. We eagerly press our faces to the window to try to ascertain where Humans fit in this monstrously complex civilization. Do our creations serve us, or have we been swept from history? What drives progress when machines think faster, more creatively and with a greater insight than a Human mind could ever hope? What gives us purpose? What are those purposes? What sort of home is the future to the Human race?

Now let’s say we spy one of the inhabitants of the future and we attempt a dialogue. As long as our being from the future responds to our feverish queries with our own level of competence and with similar aspirations we may all be rewarded with stunning revelations and unheard of wonders, all still firmly rooted in our conditioning, experience and imagination. But what if our denizen of 70 years ahead speaks of goals and methods unrelated to our experience and imagination? How could our future-ite distill 70 years of rapidly accelerating and compounding changes into an answer we would understand, especially, as seems likely if we are to survive, that future generations will be designed to be Homo Superior?

There is an unbridgeable divide between today and tomorrow. Complexity is the root cause of this divide: it’s been the goal of our Human civilized development for millennia. Another word for it is ‘information’, and I don’t simply mean an accumulation of tax laws and ice cream flavors, I mean ‘information’ as a sum total of Human activity and capability. In a few short years, Human civilization will represent orders of magnitude greater complexity, or information than now exist.

Long ago, our paleolithic ancestors new damn well what each generation would bring and it didn’t require a genius; this year: hunt, find shelter, make babies. Next year: hunt, find shelter, make babies. Year after…you get the picture. As our civilization began to slowly pick up speed, it picked up mass, or complexity, or information as you prefer. Each advance in science, every new socio-cultural idea added to our complexity and added, with glacial slowness at first, to the acceleration of civilization.

Then one day, long after the paleolithic gave way to the beginning of agriculture, and then the rise of cities, to greater and greater complexity and information, it became increasingly difficult to understand what tomorrow would bring, and increasingly difficult to imagine communicating current ideas and knowhow to our earlier race.

And now here is our generation, riding the crest of the wave that began thousands of years ago, slowly picking up speed along the way, imperceptibly at first, but now racing along at a bewildering and frightening pace, and not slowing a jot, nosiree; we are just getting faster, more complex and adding information at a greater rate than ever in our history. Where once you could be assured that barring an exceptionally hard winter, an invasion from your neighbors ‘over there’ or a volcano, that next year and the year after and the one after that would be the same and that this sameness would extend to all the years one could imagine going forward. Now no one can say where our sciences will take us or when, just that they are taking us somewhere. And soon.

So 70 years from now will not be anything like 70 years in the early years of our race. All the work of thousands and thousands of years are finally kicking in. In fact, given the the rate of our acceleration, 70 years from now may be as unknowable to us as the the 20th Century was to our Paleolithic ancestors. It seems fantastic, doesn’t it? The implications of the data are easy to see, but difficult to accept.

And here I am at the end, as usual no closer to an answer to any question, but this should come as no surprise. I’m proud to say that I have in common with the great men and women of our time the tendency to call a horse a dog and to have no clue about what the future holds. If at some time in our future, Humans acquire the ability to sift the clues of the present and paint a picture of the future, they will have developed an entirely new technique, undoubtedly with it’s own lexicon to support it. Watching these future scientists work a science we don’t yet possess and speak a language we cannot yet understand would look like magic to us. And what was it one of our great minds said about a sufficiently advanced technology and magic?

We don’t know because we simply cannot know: we are too light. We lack the complexity (you could say we are too simple, but this contains a connotation I am trying to avoid), or the ‘information mass’ to understand a civilization that in a few short years will be as different from us today as we today are from our distant ancestors.

I’m not sure I buy the logical extension of my own arguments, so feel free to disagree. I’m also not entirely practiced at this kind of forum…I may not have presented my ideas in the same fashion I would if I had more time. Since my essay was a rush job, I make no claims for it’s quality. The ideas I have expressed may even have been espoused by others before me; I would be astonished if they had not, actually and in all likelihood with greater skill and insight. Go ahead and kick the crap out of my essay, but please be considerate of me. If you think I’m an idiot, please keep that to yourself: I’m not interested. What I am interested in are your thoughts on the future. If you disagree with me please tell me why. I will listen with interest and without judgment.

Thank you for your patience.

With respect,

Eric Gilmer

I had thought that the future we live in now would look like the one I described in A Step Farther Out and in some of the asteroid mining spacefaring nation stories I wrote in the 870’s and 80’s.  That didn’t happen but it could have: we have the technology. We just don’t have the will.  At least not yet. In any event, I was wrong in my prediction.  Yet – we now live in a time that is changing far more rapidly than any of us predicted.  I don’t know if we will reach the singularity – I doubt we will – but we will certainly learn a lot about the limits of artificial intelligence.

The times are exciting. They are also dangerous as we sow the wind,  but do not prepare to reap the whirlwind.  Moore’s law seems inexorable now. Indeed there is a sort of Moore’s Law operating in the general technology now. Machines can produce more, and quicker. And on it goes.

Government education system perfect for society with no useful work

Dear Jerry:

I read your concerns about the 50% of the population who will have no useful work in America’s future.

https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/work-and-citizenship-and-education-and-the-iron-law/

It occurred to me that our deplorable government education system has evolved in perfect response to that possibility.

Schools first adopted a diminished view of what it means to be human.

In particular they teach that man has no inalienable right to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness.

Clearly a child has no right to life. He is born only by the permission of the mother who chooses not to kill him in her womb.

Indeed, as I described in previous e-mails, ObamaCare leads inevitably to government-coerced abortions.

https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/2013/11/20/

https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/2013/10/09/

Soon the mother will be allowed to kill her baby during its first twelve months after birth. Princeton and other prestigious universities already teach this as an appropriate ethical choice.

An adult’s right to life is increasingly under attack by proponents of socialized medicine and euthanasia. Bureaucrats will assure that medical treatment is given only to those with sufficient future social utility to justify the expense. It is already argued that some are obligated to die rather than be a burden on those who see them as a burden.

Once the schools adopted this diminished view of humanity, it was inevitable that such trivial rights as those of liberty and the pursuit of happiness would also be discarded.

Law was once taught as the pursuit of justice. Today it is taught as a technique for gaining power over others in furtherance of some social or political agenda.

Science was once taught as the pursuit of knowledge and truth. Today it is taught as a technique for manipulating others in furtherance of some social or political agenda. Those daring to present scientific results that falsify the elite’s claims suffer career loss and other forms of personal destruction.

The schools indoctrinate students in the government’s currently fashionable social and political agendas. Students learn that their highest goal should be to make a difference, to save the planet as a government regulator.

Those lacking the talent or inclination to control others come to see their own well-being as dependent on regulation by others. That they themselves will be regulated seems not so onerous. Many of my college classmates from decades ago think it perfectly normal that the government should forbid them to protect themselves from criminals and that the government should sexualize their five-year-old grandchildren, and that the government should encourage their teenage grandchildren to engage in a variety of perverted and dangerous sexual practices.

The schools are thus succeeding in turning out the perfect citizens for our new society. For that they will get the full support of the government.

Still, it may be necessary to create various make-work jobs for citizens who desire a sense of purpose. The science fiction I grew up on had many stories about such societies. (I recall one story about a man who works the nightshift tightening the bolts that hold up his city. One day by accident he ends up working the dayshift where the job is to loosen the bolts. I’m sure I still have this somewhere in my boxes of old 25 cent paperbacks and copies of The Magazines of F&SF. Forster’s classic "The Machine Stops" may be familiar to many of your readers. Of course Asimov’s "The Feeling of Power" might lead us to hope for a Rediscovery of Man.)

So we end up with the perfect school system to train the regulators to exercise their petty tyrannies and to train the remainder to work, not as telephone sanitizers (a now obsolete profession), but as tattooers and fingernail decorators among other tasks that someone might pay someone to do.

Best regards,

–Harry M.

I was just at a panel of five authors of noire, so I can appreciate your view; but I do not think things have got quite as bad as that.  Or have they?

Subject: Climate

Jerry,

It seems obvious to me at, this point, that we should be spending our resources on studying Climate and what drives it. It is much too early to be spending time, effort and money on solutions to a problem we do not understand. In fact, applying "solutions" at this point may create much worse problems than they might solve.

A cursory look leads me to believe that the Oceans are a primary driver of Climate. The various Streams, Currents and La Niña/Niño have more effect on Climate by orders of magnitude than anything Man has done. We need to learn the causes and effects of these things.

Ocean temperatures seem to affect these things. What causes the changes in Ocean Temperatures. As Jerry has commented many times, it would appear that sub-sea volcanic activity was a major factor in Ocean Temperature increase. It does not seem that any major effort has been launched to monitor this volcanic activity and correlate the results with Climate.

A look at historic Climate conditions reveals that much of the Earth’s surface was covered by ice during the last Ice Age 12 to 20 Thousand years ago. The Level of the Oceans was much lower then since the water was being stored in the ice covering the land. What caused the Ice Age to start?

One possibility is a significant increase in Ocean Temperatures leading to increased evaporation, leading to increased cloud cover, leading to reduced surface temperatures and increased precipitation, leading to increasing areas with snow cover, leading to increased reflection of Solar Energy, leading to decreasing temperatures ad infinitum until something stopped the feedback loop.

So, is our ultimate fate higher temperatures or our houses under hundreds of meters of ice?

There are some possibilities of taking action to break the Ice Age feedback loop. The most obvious would be to spread carbon black on the snow and ice fields ala crop dusting to increase the amount of solar energy absorbed, but even this might have unforeseen complications.

What we need to do now is spend our research funds to try and understand climate. Not cripple our economies trying to solve a problem we do not understand.

Bob Holmes

Simple Bayesian analysis would indicate that the optimum strategy is to invest in lowering uncertainties: which is to say, refining data gathering techniques and investigating alternatives to the “consensus” theory before investing a lot of money on remedies indicated by any current prediction.  We just aren’t certain enough to bet all our money on our predictions.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.