View 823 Wednesday, May 07, 2014

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

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

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

The big news today is that a report prepared by 300 climate change experts supervised by 60 climate change scientists – I quote from an approving account – are telling us that climate change is here, now, and the news is not good.

Climate change is here, action needed now, says new White House report

By Kevin Liptak, Jethro Mullen and Tom Cohen, CNN

http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/06/politics/white-house-climate-energy/

Climate change report warns of frantic future for Florida

A federal report released Tuesday shows much of South Florida could experience dramatic, damaging effects of climate change and rising sea levels within just a few decades.

The Third National Climate Assessment, compiled by more than 300 national experts over the last three years, says climate change threatens Florida’s tourism industry, water supply and public health. Sea levels will rise between 1 to 4 feet by 2100.

http://www.news-press.com/story/news/2014/05/06/climate-change-report-warns-frantic-future-florida/8787807/

It is disputed, of course:

‘Climate Hustle’ or ‘American Doomsday’?! Obama climate report panned by scientists – ‘Pseudoscience’ ‘sales pitch’ ‘follow the money’ ‘total distortion’ ‘false premise’ ‘outdated & wrong’ ‘failure’

Heartland Institute’s James Taylor: Obama climate report exposed: ‘Leading authors of this report include staffers for activist groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists, Planet Forward, The Nature Conservancy, and Second Nature’

http://www.climatedepot.com/2014/05/07/climate-hustle-or-american-doomsday-obama-climate-report-panned-by-scientists-pseudoscience-sales-pitch-follow-the-money-total-distortion/

US physics professor: ‘Global warming is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life’

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100058265/us-physics-professor-global-warming-is-the-greatest-and-most-successful-pseudoscientific-fraud-i-have-seen-in-my-long-life/

Readers here will not find any of this surprising. We all know that the trend has been toward global warming since about 1812. Prior to that was the Little Ice Age during which the Thames and Hudson froze over so hard that not only were there skaters, but farmer’s markets set up on the ice. The Little Ice Age set in about 1320, ending the Medieval Warm period during which the Vikings settled Greenland, Domesday Book showed vineyards in York, Nova Scotia was called Vineland and supported fierce Skraelings who drove the Viking settlers out after lengthy attempts to form Viking settlements in the New World well before Columbus, and monasteries across Europe reported longer growing seasons and better crops. And before that there was another cycle of warm and cold, with rising seas flooding coastal cities during the warm periods, and bad crops and shorter growing and sailing seasons during the cold.

In other words, the Earth has in historic times been warmer and colder than now; and while CO2 may have a warming effect, it certainly was not the cause of the Roman Warm period, nor of the Viking Warm period; nor was lack of CO2 the cause of the cold period that contributed to the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the migrations of the Goths, Visigoths, Huns, various Slavs, and other invading tribes that changed the face and composition of Europe.

The current weather patterns are attributed to La Nina and El Nino, but no climatologist understands the causes of those ocean circulation events, and few even purport to. And my weatherman has predicted rain for our area for weeks, any day now, but so far there hasn’t been much, and Niven and I will go hiking when he gets here.

There is neither new data nor new science in this report, and the assertions that we now know how to predict future hurricane and tornado seasons are absurd. The sea levels have been rising for years, but the seas haven’t reached the levels they were at in 1066, and from my visit to Thermopylae and the distance of those Hot Gates from the Aegean Sea I’d say the seas are considerably lower than they were in the time of the Persian War. In any event they are not rising faster now than they were in 1850.

We will be asked to pay lots more money to avert this new climate disaster, and the costs will be enormous because the effects of the remedies on the economy will be enormous, and cause famines in Africa. Now that they might get in on this industrial progress we are closing the gate in their faces, but that’s the way the climate changes.

At least there are jobs in climate change analysis. So long as you come up with the accepted results. If you don’t, well, you must work for an oil company.

It is pledge time at Chaos Manor. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html This site operates on the Public Radio principle. It is free to all, but it stays open only if it gets subscribers. I don’t bug you daily with exhortations to pay except during pledge weeks chosen by KUSC, the LA good music station: when they beg, I beg. If you haven’t subscribed, you should. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html If you have subscribed but have renewed in a while, this is the right time. And if you can’t remember when you last renewed this is certainly a good time. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html

Niven is here and we’re off for a hike. More later, on how to get eternal youth, and the problems that new discovery will have,

We’re back.  Good hike.  Stopped 1/2 mile and 200 feet climb from the top today, as I was a little unsteady.  We need to do this more often so that we get to the top every time.

BREAKING: Massive Explosion in Qazvin, Iran – May Have Nuclear Origins …Update: Roads Blocked Off for 2km | The Gateway Pundit

Jerry,

My heart bleeds for Iran.

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2014/05/breaking-massive-explosion-in-qazvin-iran-may-have-been-nuclear-origins/#!

James Crawford=

Most nuclear enrichment facilities don’t explode.  Of course by now the NSA will know all about the nature and characteristics of the explosion, and there may even be a fly-through to get air samples…

ETERNAL YOUTH

Young Blood Renews Old Mice

Rejuvenated. Reconstructions of blood vessels in an old mouse’s brain (left) and in an old mouse that received young mouse blood.

Could the elixir of youth be as simple as a protein found in young blood? In recent years, researchers studying mice found that giving old animals blood from young ones can reverse some signs of aging, and last year one team identified a growth factor in the blood that they think is partly responsible for the antiaging effect on a specific tissue—the heart. Now, that group has shown this same factor can also rejuvenate muscle and the brain.

"This is the first demonstration of a rejuvenation factor" that is naturally produced, declines with age, and reverses aging in multiple tissues, says Harvard University stem cell researcher Amy Wagers, who led efforts to isolate and study the protein. Independently, another team has found that simply injecting plasma from young mice into old mice can boost learning.

http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2014/05/young-blood-renews-old-mice?rss=1

Repeated from yesterday’s View (which see)

Methuselah’s Children?

http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nm.3569.html

>>[E]xposure of an aged animal to young blood can counteract and reverse pre-existing effects of brain aging at the molecular, structural, functional and cognitive level.<<

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/05/science/young-blood-may-hold-key-to-reversing-aging.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/10807478/Vampire-therapy-could-reverse-ageing-scientists-find.html

Larry Niven long ago postulated that his teleportation booths might be the secret of eternal youth: each time you teleport, waste materials are not carried along with you, nor are aging compounds, and thus you get renewal and eternal youth.  Science fiction.  And Heinlein’s Methuselah’s Children had something of the sort, enough young blood into an adult will arrest aging. Of course the Medieval Vampire legends suggest much the same thing.

But it has long been suspected that enough youthful blood exchanged into mature adult will arrest aging  in that adult.  Indeed, it has long been suspected by conspiracy theorists that this is well known to insiders, but of course the knowledge is carefully suppressed.  In any event it is becoming more and more clear that it is no longer just science fiction, but a possible hypothesis, and animal testing seems to confirm the view.  In other words, the possibility of eternal youth.

If there is anything to the hypothesis, we may look for a great deal of negative evidence suddenly to appear.  After all, the last thing governments want is to stimulate a demand for eternal youth if it can be achieved only at the cost of premature aging for younger people – you can avoid getting older by draining the life out of younger people.  If eternal youth is possible it will soon become an entitlement.  And if there is a class of people more aware of and demanding of their perquisites and entitlements than Senators and Members of Congress, I am not aware of it.  Then too there are the rich.

And some of the rich are already be buying young people as slaves.  True they mostly buy girls for sexual purposes (although one supposes some boys are sold for such purposes as well) but if you are willing to buy sex slaves you are probably willing to buy enslaved blood donors.  Economics will dictate whether it is better to keep a known healthy crop allowed to live in quarantine as they are repeatedly bled and allowed to recover, or simply bleed them to death and replace them with fresh young blood.  I suspect both approaches will be tried. I say the rich, but that is a conclusion: someone is buying sex slaves, and there is a great deal of money in the traffic which has been going on for a long time.

But the incentive to buy sex slaves is small compared to the incentive to greatly slow aging.  True, so long as it is not assured that this works the incentive is not so high, but I would think that the possibility of its working is now high enough to make it tempting to try; moreover, Moore’s Law is inexorable. Technology just now advances in a part of the S curve that is indistinguishable from an exponential curve.  If we don’t yet know how to arrest aging, we’re making so many advances in biology that it would be odd if we didn’t learn the causes and preventions of aging – and alas all the best theories seem to lead to a requirement for young parts.

Meanwhile, Clarke’s theory that reliable contraception and paternity identifications would lead to the disruption of moral codes and sexual mores, changing sex from a means for reproduction into just another cool thing to do, seem already to have taken place in much of the West and are slowly boring their way into less progressive cultures. I see not reason for that trend to slow down. This weakens families, and thus weakens protection for young people belonging to a libertine culture.  Perhaps I am just speculating.  It is hard  to think of people who would sell their own children into slavery. It is not so hard to think that there will not be organizations that exist to sell other people’s children into slavery.  It’s just business…

We can hope that technology will take another giant step and come up with some way – nanotechnology? – to synthesize not just blood, but young blood.  This may not prove so easy to do. We can clone Dolly, but we are still in the era of Schliemann and Schwann. It won’t be easy – and there is an easy way to collect young blood. There are already reasons for trafficking in young girls.  Now there is an even more compelling payoff for those who buy them.

The good news is that advances in technology bring increased productivity, more goods with less work, with fewer people required to get the work done.  Meanwhile the schools are kept in a condition indistinguishable from an act of war against the United States,  and increasing numbers of citizens graduate without learning how to do one single thing that other people will pay you money to do. Now comes the news that many of them aren’t useless at all – at least not if they are young and healthy.

A late night thought:

In another conference I stated that the trend was clear, and that at some point half the population would be useless.  This led to a challenge: it’s a serious charge, I was told.  I should not say anything like that. The implication was that I was immoral for saying it, and had an evil definition of useful, and I suppose the inference I was supposed to make was that I should change my views of humanity, and presumably be more Christian. People are never useless, and I should be ashamed of myself for saying it.

It’s not bad advice but it had missed the point of what I was saying.

I am not advocating I am pointing to what appears to be an inevitable trend.

In 1900 well over 80% of the population was required to work in agriculture to grow enough crops and tend to enough animals to feed the farmers and families and the rest of the nation. Over time farms became more productive.  Capital was invested in farm implements, farm labor became more productive, more farm products were available – and fewer and fewer farm worker were needed.  Now considerably fewer than 20% of the population are needed to produce enough food to feed everyone in the US far better than we were fed in 1900, we can burn corn as fuel and do other wasteful nonsense, and we still have food to export.  The productivity rise was just too much for the bureaucracy and the farm workers unions to stop, and the trend continues inexorably.  We do not need 50% of the population to feed the other half and feed them well.

US manufacturing output has always been large compared to the rest of the world.  During World War II we built an enormously productive war products manufacturing system and did it from scratch.  From producing a thousand rifles a year we went to millions.  When the Germans developed a Panther tank ten times better than our Sherman, we sent after each Panther twenty Shermans and several low cost Tank Destroyers to finish the job while the Panther was engaging ten Shermans.  We built better airplanes than the Zero and the Betty, and we built a LOT of them.  We turned out a Liberty ship a day from places that used to be mud flats.

After the war the economy boomed, and workers of all skills and abilities participated, so that a lot more than half the population possessed the goods of fortune in moderation – Aristotle’s definition of Middle Class, as Rule by the Middle Class was democracy.  It all worked, we built schools to turn out workers for the new economy, and it looked as if we had reached the end or that part of history in which a large part of the population was doomed to Lower Class status.

But Moore’s Law – I use this for shorthand to indicate the great advances in all fields of technology that are so typical now – inexorably produces higher productivity.  Labor costs never go down, but the capital cost of replacing a worker falls every year.  US factories produce as much as they ever did, but they don’t need half the population working in them to do it. Or even a quarter of it. Robots are cheaper and their cost falls all the time.  We can now print stuff that used to be forged, cast, injected…   The trend is clear.

The schools could slow it a bit by teaching skills to increase productivity without incurring capital investment (the school being a kind of capital investment) but of course they don’t.  Most of the schools teach their students nothing that anyone will pay them money to do.  What they do teach isn’t so clear. 

So it is easy to project the trend and come up with the possibility that half the population will not be able to do anything needed to grow the food and produce the goods needed by the entire population.  They will be economically useless, because they can’t do anything someone will pay them to do.  This is not a moral judgment it’s an economic statement.  And it would appear to me to be the fate of this nation; and I cannot think that a republic can survive in those conditions.

There is always an ecology. It may not be one we much care for.  Me, I sing for my supper.

If you have not yet subscribed, this is the right time to do it. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html

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

View 823 Tuesday, May 06, 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

This is pledge week at KUSC, which means it is subscription drive week at Chaos Manor. This place operates on the Public Radio model: it is free to all, but it can only exist if enough people subscribe to it. Rather than constant nagging of the readers for money, I get it over with during subscription week, and I leave it to the Los Angeles Good Music station KUSC to set the times for the pledge drives. If you have never subscribed to this place now would be an excellent time to do so. If you can’t remember when you last renewed your subscription, now is a good time to do that. Thanks to those who have already responded by renewing, and thanks and welcome to our new patrons and subscribers.

We continue the discussion of Thoughtcrime.

VDH: ‘If the NBA establishes the precedent that it can force the sale of an owner’s property because of one’s illiberal speech, however odious, what now is the new standard of behavior? A sort of descending French Revolutionary justice, predicated on the sound and fury of the mob?’

<http://victorhanson.com/wordpress/?p=7286>

——-

Roland Dobbins

That expresses my concerns very well. And Sterling did not make a speech or proclaim his views to the world; he told his mistress that he did not want her consorting in public with black basketball players and particularly not with Magic Johnson. He said that in private, to her and her alone, and it was later leaked – possibly sold – to the scandal publishers. For that he was fined some $3 million and forbidden for life from attending games of a team he owns; and was told he had to sell the team, although the legal status of that particular sanction is not clear.

Had he made a public speech would it have been a different matter? That’s worth discussing, but in fact he did not. He expressed his sentiments in private. Now there is a clamor for sanctions against him. When I was in high school we were shown as a class the old black and white 1935 Ronald Colman Tale of Two Cities. The scene of revolutionary justice is well done. Of course Sterling will not face the guillotine; what he gets is a billion dollars or so to compensate him for selling his team. It’s hard to feel sorry for him, and few will; but is this a precedent for future action against those guilty of Thoughtcrime?

Thoughtcrimes and their opposite

Perhaps advances in technology will enable the detecting of overall quality of consciousness. High quality consciousness presumably would be judged by parameters such as aspirations, conscience, etc. Individuals who do well on this test could receive better treatment from society than individuals who do poorly at it.

Dan Gollub

And we can have a Ministry of Truth and Good Feelings to administer this. God save the Republic.

A new reminder that in historical times Earth’s climate has been both warmer and colder than at present.

1066, Hastings was fought on an isthmus!

Hi Dr. Pournelle,

Some years ago I wrote you regarding a discussion of the impact of the Medieval Warm Period on AGW theories. I said (after apologizing for citing a TV show as a source) that I’d seen a documentary about the battle of Hastings that claimed the battlefield was in a different location than previously supposed because the sea was much higher in the medieval period than now, which led to mistaken readings of the primary sources. At the time, I couldn’t find the name of the show or lay hands on other documentation.

Well, I recently found a similar presentation on YouTube (which, by the way, has turned into a gold mine of historical documentaries). It’s the “Time Team Special #57 (2013), 1066 – The Lost Battlefield” from the BBC.

The punch line is that area around Hastings was “…effectively islands in a sea of marshland” due to the much higher sea level. Hastings was at the end of a peninsula jutting out into the marshes, and the only way to the mainland was the modern-day Hastings Road, which crossed an isthmus just at the southern outskirts of the modern-day town of Battle. Harold established a roadblock at the neck, and the rest is history. In addition to the trivia aspect, it’s very interesting to see just how much of the English coastline was inundated at the time.

The relevant point in the program starts at 31:30 minutes. The link below should take you right to it:

http://youtu.be/Il2FEVABs4g?t=31m30s <http://youtu.be/Il2FEVABs4g?t=31m30s>

Neil

Come now. The Scientists have proven that there was no Medieval Warm period, it was just a small phase, nothing to worry about. But if the sea was in fact much higher as recently as 1066, just how much northern ice would have had to melt to cause that? The seas are rising now, but not to that extent. The eleventh Century is not well recorded, but we do have monastery crop records and planting date, and there is evidence that China had fortunate harvests in that period. And doesn’t Domesday Book have something to say about vineyards in York?

I don’t think there is much evidence to challenge that the Earth was warmer in Viking times (including 1066) than it is now, which makes the Hockey Stick an indefensible proposition, and also makes it plain that it can’t have been CO2 that caused the Viking Warming however much it contributes to the present warming trend. Which asks whether the Earth will cool and the seas fall if we don’t have the CO2…

On your recommendation

Dr Pournelle

On your recommendation, I got Fehrenbach, This Kind of War. I do not recommend the Kindle version. It is full of typos, glaring text omissions, and transposed paragraphs. Enough comes through that it makes sense, but the translation from paper to e-ink appears to have been done by a cross-eyed, drunk baboon.

Thank you.

Live long and prosper

h lynn keith

I consider Fehrenbach’s book the best available history not just of the Korean War, but of American military policy and doctrine after World War II, and I am sorry to hear that the Kindle edition is flawed. Perhaps a complaint to Amazon would help? Ted Fehrenbach died last December or I’d write him about it. He was an outstanding commentator on military history and policy, and This Kind of War ranks with the best works on why men fight.

My Kindle edition of _This Kind of War_ is just fine.

Your correspondent should delete his copy and re-download it. If the errors persist, he should complain to Amazon – I’ve been successful in getting errors in Kindle editions of novels corrected that way.

——–

Roland Dobbins

Thank you.

Mexican Army in the US

Jerry,

I suppose this is how Pakistan feels about the US conducting ops within Pakistan.

http://www.kvoa.com/news/n4t-investigators-rogue-mexican-army-troops-crossing-the-line/

Civilians getting shot, US border patrol agents getting caught up in border crossing events, and the lack of official US govt response points to a tacit under the table agreement permitting these cross-border operations. Sounds awful familiar, except this time we’re on the receiving end.

(serving officer)

You have my view of how we should react to the jailing of the Marine who inadvertently crossed the border with his firearms in the trunk of his car and was jailed rather than be allowed to return. I imagine the Pakistanis feel somewhat the same way. The relationship with Pakistan has been long and bumpy. Steve Possony always believed that Gary Francis Powers was not shot down in his U2, but downed by a bomb placed in the craft in Pakistan. Possony had good reasons including technical analysis of USSR SAM capabilities of the time. England and Russia and their Great Game make for great reading, but it is not a game that interests the United States; yet if containment was to work as a grand strategy the requirement was to commit the resources to contain the USSR…

Methuselah’s Children?

http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nm.3569.html

>>[E]xposure of an aged animal to young blood can counteract and reverse pre-existing effects of brain aging at the molecular, structural, functional and cognitive level.<<

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

Young Blood May Hold Key to Reversing Aging

From Heinlein’s Methuselah’s Children

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/05/science/young-blood-may-hold-key-to-reversing-aging.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/10807478/Vampire-therapy-could-reverse-ageing-scientists-find.html

1958:

"I still want to find out about the new rejuvenation process," insisted Master Hardy some time later.

"I think we all do," agreed King. He reached out and refilled their guest’s wine glass. "Will you tell us about it, sir?"

"I’ll try," Miles Rodney answered, "though I must ask Master Hardy to bear with me. It’s not one process, but several—one basic process and several dozen others, some of them purely cosmetic, especially for women. Nor is the basic process truly a rejuvenation process. You can arrest the progress of old age, but you can’t reverse it to any significant degree—you can’t turn a senile old man into a boy."

"Yes, yes," agreed Hardy. "Naturally—but what is the basic process?"

"It consists largely in replacing the entire blood tissue in an old person with new, young blood. Old age, so they tell me, is primarily a matter of the progressive accumulation of the waste poisons of metabolism. The blood is supposed to carry them away, but presently the blood gets so clogged with the poisons that the scavenging process doesn’t take place properly. Is that right, Doctor Hardy?"

 

Of course Methuselah’s Children had a technique for creating the young blood rather than harvesting it; it took a lot, and there would never be enough donors to supply everyone or even a large pro0portion of the population.  Which leads to the greatest inequality of all:  harvesting enough young blood to live for a very long time, at the cost of faster aging for the donors. We may be certain that Congress will have really good reasons why they should have this resource, which makes re-election all that more necessary, and changes the nature of elections considerably.  And there will be a black market, as there is in slave girls now.  Indeed it may be the same market and same customers.

If it is true that you can stay young – or younger – by replacing your blood with that of a younger person of your blood type, the social implications will be enormous. And of course the army will learn…

When you go by the Via Flaminia, by the legions’ road to Gaul,
Remember the luck of the soldier, who rose to be master of all.
He carried the sword and the buckler, he mounted his turn on The Wall,
And the Legions elected him Caesar, and he rose to be master of all!

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/trips/rome1.html leads to my decade old report on a walk through modern Rome, with pictures.  Click on a picture to expand it.  The text has nothing to do with Methuselah’s Children, but Rome should remind you that not long ago it elevated Il Duce; you still see many monuments and public works marked with tributes to Umberto, Rex; Benito Mussolini, Duce.  Had we known that young blood can preserve youth in those days–

All this is new and has not had time to ferment through the culture.

If anyone knows enough about nanotechnology to say with authority whether nanotechnology is getting close to the capability of produce – synthesizing – young blood in quantities, please tell me.  I am particularly interested in (1) is it possible, and (2) how long will that take? If all this is true we may be in a race between finding the technology to synthesize young blood, and an ugly social situation.  And there is already a slave market in young people.  You can buy two hundred or so young school girls in Nigeria this afternoon…  http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/05/world/africa/nigeria-abducted-girls/ 

Do not forget that it remains Pledge Week at Chaos Manor.  This place operates like public radio. It is free to all, but if not enough subscribe it will not stay open.  If you have not subscribed, this would be a great time to do that.  If you subscribed but don’t remember when you renewed your subscription, then surely it is time.  And to our patrons and platinum subscribers I can only say Thank You.  I also thank all those who have recently renewed.  http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html

Gary Francis Powers himself became convinced that it was a bomb that brought down his U-2.

He was originally skeptical because the security at Peshawar was very tight, but seems to have come around to the conclusion that it was an insider job – e.g., a bad actor who’d wormed his way inside, or who was paid, placed a bomb in the aircraft.

Powers discussed this on a radio talk-show not long before he had his fatal helicopter accident. The conspiracy theorists have made great hay of this, of course, claiming that Powers’ helicopter was sabotaged. I doubt that, personally – there are far surer ways of getting rid of someone and still making it look like an accident.

———–

Roland Dobbins

Interesting.  About a year before he was killed in what I am sure was an accident, I explained Possony’s views to him.  He’d heard it before and wasn’t at all convinced. We were not close and I didn’t see him in the months before his crash, and I was unaware that he had come around to Steve’s views.  I am quite convinced Possony was right.  The Soviet surface to air systems just weren’t good enough to have done that job, particularly where it happened.  I worked out some of the math for Possony, and it all added up to a high probability of a bomb, including the reported damage to the ship and the fact that Powers got out of it alive.

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

View 823 Monday, May 05, 2014

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

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

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

Last week had more locusts to devour my time. They seem to come in flocks lately. To make it worse, this week is Pledge Week for KUSC, meaning that it’s subscriber appeal time at Chaos Manor, and this at a time when things have been a bit less active than usual. Nothing I can do about that. This place takes a certain amount of time and costs and energy to keep going, and unless I get enough subscriptions I can’t keep it open. As most of you know, we operate on the Public Radio model – hence the coupling of subscription drives to the schedule of KUSC the Los Angele Good Music Station – and it’s always free to all but it won’t stay open without subscribers. We’ve run this way for years, good years and not so good, and we’re still here.

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html

Well, the LA Clippers last night made another $100 million dollars for Mr. Sterling, their owner, who is guilty of having told his mistress, presumably in private, that he wished she would not appear in public at Clipper basketball games accompanied by black players, and particularly not with Magic Johnson. Somehow a recording of him saying that to her has gone public. One suspicion is that this was a boggled blackmail attempt, but she denies that. The NBA Commissioner immediately fines the billionaire Sterling several million dollars and forbids him to have anything to do with the management of the team he owns (how that is to be accomplished without letting him appoint a manager is not clear), or even to enter the building they are in at practice or to attend Clipper games. How this is to be enforced isn’t so clear. One presumes his mistress can continue to attend Clippers games, with or without accompaniment of her choosing.

The National Basketball Association also said that Sterling would be forced to sell the Clippers, but he hasn’t the authority to do that; he can only ask that 2/3 of the owners of the other teams vote to require him to sell. Sterling says the team is not for sale, and the other owners haven’t voted yet. Sterling paid some $12 ½ Million for the team many years ago. As of the opening of this year’s basketball season the team was worth more than $100 Million, but then came the team’s best season ever, bringing the value of the team up to about $800 million. Then Saturday night the Clippers beat the Warriors in a last minute rally, probably raising the value of the team another $100 million. If they win this series with Oklahoma that starts tonight the team will easily be worth $1 Billion, no small sum.

Magic Johnson is rumored to be one of those interested in owning the Clippers. He hasn’t the money, but he could front for those who do.

It is not clear who will get the money from the fines. It is not clear whether the mistress will be able to keep her multi-million dollar condo – Sterling’s wife is suing her to recover gifts that the wife contends ought to have gone to her – but I doubt we will see her sleeping under a Freeway overpass any time soon. And so it goes.

My concern is that Sterling is guilty only of Thoughtcrime. I covered that previously.

Lese de Marque

Dear Dr. Pournelle:

What Donald Sterling is guilty of is not thought-crime, exactly: it’s brand-injury. "Lese de marque." He’s a showman, an impresario, a dealer in images; and these images must be maintained for the financial health of the company. Many of his workers and customers are black men; it just wouldn’t do for the team’s owner to insult them; therefore Sterling had to go.

So the Market has ruled. You object that this has a whiff of tyranny about it. Very well then; the Market can be tyrannical. The Customer is King, not Prime Minister.

He was a showman, and the two of them put on a show. Rich old jerk vs. scheming gold-digger is a fine comedy; it always draws a crowd. Hand me some popcorn.

Count your blessings, it could be worse. Sterling was obnoxious but not frightening. Remember that audio playlet, that went viral on the Web in the summer of 2010, starring Mel Gibson as the Psycho Boyfriend and Oksana Grigorieva as the Desperate Mistress? That too was solid entertainment; but it was a much darker script than this.

Sincerely,

paradoctor

We are not in disagreement: this is the way the market ought to work, and Sterling, despite all his previous efforts, has no moral or legal right to the good opinions of mankind. If you want to own a basketball team, it would be better if you had no prejudices against blacks; if you do have any it is absolutely essential that you keep them to yourself and let not hint of that get out to the public, because you will need highly competent players. And indeed Sterling took strenuous steps to give a different impression of his sympathies, winning two Lifetime Achievement Awards from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He was careful to say nothing in public that would tarnish his image as a philanthropist who supported the NAACP among many other causes. Now that the story has come out there are many coming forward to say it was all a sham; indeed the President of the local chapter of the NAACP, who was about to give Sterling another award, has just resigned because he wasn’t telepathic and didn’t discern the true thoughts of Don Sterling.

And yet, isn’t that a bit disturbing? The tradition in Western law has been toward requiring an act – or at least a public speech – to establish that a crime has been committed; that is, over time, we moved from punishing beliefs to punishing acts. Thoughts and beliefs, heresies, remained outside the realm of the state. Even conspiracy – an intent — requires an overt act in aid of the planned crime before wanting to commit a crime becomes punishable. The Constitution of the United States requires an overt act witnessed by two before treason can be charged. Heresy is a Thoughtcrime – unacceptable belief – and the Inquisition used various means to extract confessions of that. Modern ideological warfare seems to be reviving the practice. You must not only act right but think right. A hundred years of freedom of thought is reversed.  This year racism is a Thoughtcrime.  How many years until sexist beliefs become Thoughtcrimes?  Can Jimmy Carter be prosecuted after all these years for lusting in his heart?

Die Gedanken sind frei, but not for Mr. Sterling, and indeed it seems to depend on the thought. Some crimes like racism are so terrible that no good act can compensate for such evil thoughts. And so it goes. Sterling is not going to be harmed. He’ll get his $Billion out of this. There will be a Kabuki act in which he will insist the team is not for sale, the Association will insist it is, an auction will be arranged, and just before the bidding starts someone will offer him a billion, and lo! the sale is concluded. And Sterling will have to compensate himself with something other than ownership of a basketball team – which, if he really is contemptuous of blacks, couldn’t possibly give him much pleasure of ownership anyway since it is pretty well impossible to put together a winning NBA team with only non-black players, even if it were legally or socially possible to do that in the first place.

So he gets his billion (he already has one, apparently, but everyone can use another billion), the NBA can have a five minute hate for Sterling before every game until he sells, and who knows, perhaps some good will come of all this. And nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

My friend Steve Sailer has an interesting but unprovable theory on all this. I don’t share it but it is amusing. http://isteve.blogspot.com/2014/04/magic-johnson-ultimate-cleanser-sports.html

Climate Change arguments with a new twist: Caleb Rossiter’s Sacrificing Africa for Climate Change, raises an argument I made back in the days of “The Limits To Growth” and “Small is Beautiful”: the third world will say “We understand this movement. Now that we get a piece of the action the game is over.” Now that Africa can get rich without living off charity, they will have to do it without coal and oil and other fossil fuels, and since they haven’t the capital to do that, they will remain in economic bondage to the West. Well, and to China: China has ignored all this “go green” and “Stop global Warming NOW” stuff, and cheerfully builds coal and oil fired electric plants as well as big dams and a lot of nuclear power plants, and can now profit by keeping Africa in an exploitable state.

Sacrificing Africa for Climate Change

Western policies seem more interested in carbon-dioxide levels than in life expectancy.

By

Caleb S. Rossiter

Every year environmental groups celebrate a night when institutions in developed countries (including my own university) turn off their lights as a protest against fossil fuels. They say their goal is to get America and Europe to look from space like Africa: dark, because of minimal energy use.

But that is the opposite of what’s desired by Africans I know. They want Africa at night to look like the developed world, with lights in every little village and with healthy people, living longer lives, sitting by those lights. Real years added to real lives should trump the minimal impact that African carbon emissions could have on a theoretical catastrophe.

* * *

The left wants to stop industrialization—even if the hypothesis of catastrophic, man-made global warming is false. John Feffer, my colleague at the Institute for Policy Studies, wrote in the Dec. 8, 2009, Huffington Post that "even if the mercury weren’t rising" we should bring "the developing world into the postindustrial age in a sustainable manner." He sees the "climate crisis [as] precisely the giant lever with which we can, following Archimedes, move the world in a greener, more equitable direction."

I started to suspect that the climate-change data were dubious a decade ago while teaching statistics. Computer models used by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to determine the cause of the six-tenths of one degree Fahrenheit rise in global temperature from 1980 to 2000 could not statistically separate fossil-fueled and natural trends.

Then, as now, the computer models simply built in the assumption that fossil fuels are the culprit when temperatures rise, even though a similar warming took place from 1900 to 1940, before fossil fuels could have caused it. The IPCC also claims that the warming, whatever its cause, has slightly increased the length of droughts, the frequency of floods, the intensity of storms, and the rising of sea levels, projecting that these impacts will accelerate disastrously. Yet even the IPCC acknowledges that the average global temperature today remains unchanged since 2000, and did not rise one degree as the models predicted.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303380004579521791400395288?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702303380004579521791400395288.html

There is considerably more. The evidence for the man made global warming theory gets shakier and the costs of pretending that it is true are rising. Of course there is money to be made from pretending its truth.

Caleb Rossiter is the son of Clinton Rossiter, whose books on the late Roman Republic and constitutional crisis I discovered as an undergraduate, and his 1787 remains one of the best accounts of the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 you will ever find. I prefer Wilmore Kendall’s Introduction to the Federalist Papers to Rossiter’s, but not by much, and one cannot be harmed by reading both. Of course The Federalist is no longer standard fare in liberal arts history courses now. Pity.

The Mexicans have arrested a US Marine who was moving and had all his possessions in his car, wandered over the border, and while trying to get back to the US was arrested by the Mexican authorities for having a rifle, and shotgun, and a handgun in his car. He found himself past the last freeway exit before the border, and went into Mexico and turned around, and whammo. He is said to have been wounded by other prisoners in a Mexican jail. The Mexicans seem glad to have a US prisoner. This is a nation that has armed cartels running riot but wants to jail a US Marine who had firearms in his trunk, and he wants to go home. He’s been there a month and has been injured.

I fear my solution to this were I president would be to tell the Commandant at Camp Pendleton to send a battalion of this Marine’s comrades down to escort him home, and THEN telephone the Governor of North Baja that they are coming; he will come home, and with all his possessions. It would be better if neither he nor his escorts meet any interference, but he WILL come home. The Marines have their instructions on how to respond if their weapons are demanded. Hint: We learned that from Leonidas a long time ago. You do not want to hear them say it. Have a nice day.

And this just in:

World Class Lie

At the press conference the NBA commissioner may have told a world-class lie:

Q. What kind of authority do they have to force a sale?

ADAM SILVER: The owners have the authority subject to three quarters vote of the ownership group, of the partners, to remove him as an owner.

If this reading of the bylaws is correct, what he said is patently false:

http://msn.foxsports.com/college-football/outkick-the-coverage/nba-lacks-the-authority-to-force-donald-sterling-to-sell-the-clippers-050114

Which should make things even more interesting.  Incidentally, the Clippers won against Oklahoma tonight so they come back to LA for two at-home games having won one of the four they need to get past this stage.  They played very well.  Doc Rivers is getting a lot out of his players, and coordinates them well.

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