View 818 Tuesday, April 01, 2014

I do not do April Fool columns or articles.

“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

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

‘For starters, the company [Microsoft] has officially abandoned its “Windows First” policy.’

<http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2014/03/31/why-the-microsoft-surface-just-died-last-week/>

——-

Roland Dobbins

.

The story is about why the writer would not buy a Microsoft Surface now, although he would have two weeks ago. Whether that is a correct conclusion, he says much that needs thinking about.

: Kind of like bunny inspectors

http://downtrend.com/71superb/man-on-trial-for-single-shotgun-shell-gets-convicted-of-even-more-bizarre-count/?utm_source=Outbrain

Examples are not hard to find; but the Bunny Inspectors thrive and gain promotions, in this open administration that will take a laser like focus on needless government.

It is pointless to speculate about the missing Malaysian 777 at this point. It is almost as if someone is encouraging conspiracy theories by feeding odd and probably irrelevant data and misquotations into the information stream. There are no reliable sources. At this point the most probable explanation is fire, followed by a loss of cabin pressure. The unexplained climb to 43,000 feet is puzzling, but if the cabin was not pressurized the crew would have been unconscious in under a minute at that altitude even on pure breathing oxygen. The Autopilot would have returned the aircraft to cruising altitude, but given the lack of cabin pressure recovery of anyone in control would be very unlikely. Anyone surviving would be suffering from hypoxia and that means irrational behavior. Irrational means just that, and it is unpredictable. Almost anything might seem like a good idea given exposure to 43,000 feet for any time at all followed by above 20,000 feet without oxygen.

But that too is speculation. We have no real evidence. We can deduce that hiding an airplane is not all that difficult but keeping that secret is not so easy for every government. The passengers are almost certainly dead. So is the crew. It is unlikely that we will ever be certain what happened.

Despair is a sin.

By all normal political measurements the next election will return both Houses to the Republicans, but the Republicans have been known to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the past. There is still no agreed Presidential candidate acceptable to the Republican Establishment and tolerable to the Tea Party; at least none that I know of.

Foreign policy is in such a mess that old diplomatic hands can’t resist calling it a farce. An Israeli Deputy Minister of Defense has said that he hopes the world will give Secretary of State a Nobel Prize early on so that Israel won’t have to put up with him any longer. He has since apologized, but I have it on very good authority that most members of the Israeli officer corps found it amusing, and few among our allies have any respect for him. Perhaps this is not astonishing.

The employment situation is far worse than the official statistics indicate. Although we have in theory created many jobs, the total number of hours worked is not going up so rapidly. Moreover, the unemployment rate falls only because the number of people in the work force – those actively seeking work – is constantly being reduced, as the long term unemployed give up and seek public assistance or some other way of surviving. The economy stubbornly insists on growing very slowly. Talk of raising the minimum wage in an attempt to spread more money around and thus boost the economy is not absurd, but that move almost certainly dooms the unskilled workers entering the work force for the first time: they simply can’t do anything worth that much money to anyone hiring them, meaning that the incentive for hiring them must anticipate that they will at some point be productive enough to earn their pay; and fewer and fewer companies are finding highly paid training programs a good investment. That, after all, was the purpose of really small businesses, yard work, ‘burger flipping’ and other such jobs – many of which are now taken by off the books illegal aliens – oops, undocumented migrants – and government policy is to allow de facto amnesty for more than 90% of all undocumented migrants including many with criminal records.

The forecast for the election is hopeful, but realistically no election result will bring about much change. The labor union/public employment/ political contribution axis is strongly forged, while at the top of many states there is fairly rampant corruption. It is not grand corruption, but it is the kind of corruption that ensures that once elected a politician will serve as many terms as term limits allow, and will then very likely move into another term-limited public office. The notion of a legislature made up of citizens who serve and return to private life is nearly gone; the standard practice now is career politicians, which means a career in fund raising interrupted by legislative sessions. This has become true in many state legislatures, and of course such machines have been traditional in big cities for a long time; what has changed is that the practice is nearly universal, not just in New York and Chicago, but all over the country. Any place that has a full time city council becomes beholden to city employee unions whose goal is raises in pay, large pensions, and tax-payer paid benefits both medical and other perks.

In the old days this pattern was periodically interrupted by “Good Government” organization, called ‘googoo’s” by the politicians; they came and reformed and went away and the machines rebuilt after the novelty of good government faded. In the past decades, though, googoos have become rare and successful googoo movements rarer still.

But again I say Despair is a sin. The coming election offers at least some relief and the opportunity to go back down the solidification of government structure and regulation. It is important that those who still care about such matters take advantage of it. Be a googoo. The nation desperately needs it.

When Possony and I were working on The Strategy of Progress, which was to be Dr. Possony’s master career work, we came to the conclusion that the most important trend in history was the diversion of more and more of the output of society into structure. Coupled with the Iron Law of Bureaucracy http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html this explained much of both Western and Chinese history. The difference between Asian and European history was not so much inventions – technological inventions appeared in both cultures – but in the attitudes of the ruling regulators towards it: Europe was less hostile and more willing to give it a try. The result was some periods of productivity growth that leaped far ahead of the ability of the bureaucracy to regulate and control them. This happened briefly during the Viking Warm period, then again with the Discovery of the New World; then the various Industrial Revolutions, and finally, the Compute Revolution. In each case the increases in productivity were larger than before, but the time it took for the bureaucracy to react and regain control was shorter, until the Computer revolution begun in Silicon Valley, despite its enormous increases in human productivity , didn’t last more than a couple of generations before the regulators regained control.

In Strategy of Technology we showed that most progress goes in S-curves (although for much of it it will appear to be exponential). The Computer Revolution looked to make enormous progress in human productivity, as much as the agricultural revolution which transformed the US from an agricultural to a manufacturing nation and moved most of the population from farms to urban areas. The question was, what would happen as the Iron Law took over and the regulators began to fight back.

Alas, Possony’s stroke ended much of our work on this. I have tried to incorporate some of this view into stories and columns, but I have not managed to write a work like The Strategy of Technology based on this theory, and it remains unfinished. I am convinced that it contains much solid truth.

Air Force General Philip Breedlove, Nato’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, says that he’s worried that the Russians will march through the entire Ukraine in order to annex Transdniestria (a landlocked, rebellious Moldovan enclave that would be rather be part of Russia).

Population of Transdniestria is about half a million, about 30% Russian. A bit bigger than Rhode Island: you have trouble seeing it on the map without a magnifying glass.

So our brass thinks that Russia is going to conquer the Ukraine (including a whole lot of indigestible western Ukrainians) in order to seize this little piece of crap.

He also talks about the hyper-ready, massive Russian forces on the Ukrainian border. They are more formidable than he realizes: as revealed by a Reuters journalist who just drove along the entire length of the Ukrainian-Russian border (on the Russian side) , they’ve invisible, which would be a big tactical advantage.

Here’s how I picture it: some contractor for the DIA was tasked to analyze the Russian threat. The contractor is headed by people with some kind of pull, ex-generals or whatever, who naturally do no real work. The actual report is written by a couple of 24 year olds who weren’t smart enough to get a real job in insider trading, who don’t know jack about history or military affairs. Those youngsters did get the correct impression that they were supposed to talk about the Russian threat, so they applied their feeble imaginations to the task.

Apparently they also talked about the Russians cutting a path ( opening a corridor) through the Ukraine in order to prevent the Ukrainians from cutting off natural gas to the Crimea. One guess on  where all that natural gas originates in the first place : Yes, Russia.

So that would work for the Ukrainians, right?

As always with the fools at the top, you wonder whether they’re stupid or crazy.

Greg

I don’t think comment is needed.

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

View 817 Friday, March 28, 2014

http://reason.com/blog/2014/03/26/if-you-dont-want-a-swat-team-at-your-doo?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular

This might be worth putting up on your web site

B

Niven will be here shortly for a hike, but this was my first email of the day and I didn’t want to lose it. Have the police gone mad? There seem to be more and more stories like this every week in this land of the free.

And he’s here and I have to go.

We had a great hike, the full five miles and 750 foot climb, then lunch at the Oyster House which some say is the best seafood restaurant in Los Angeles. I wouldn’t go that far but it’s a good place.  Of course I came back exhausted. Since Sable got that bone cancer that finally killed her we hadn’t been able to go up the hill and I didn’t do it often without  her, so I get a bit out of shape.  We need to keep doing that, and we will.  I do find that my balance is worse all the time, so we have to stay on the fire roads, and not take trails any longer.  When the way is not level and not smooth, I have trouble with it.  Not much I can do about that. And alas, I am again deaf as a post in my left ear.  Right one works but not the left.

definition of a super power

Dr. Pournelle,

Falling back on Wikipedia, "A superpower is a state with a dominant position in international relations and is characterized by its unparalleled ability to exert influence or project power on a global scale." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpower)

Is the U.S. a super power, or is China the only real one left?

-d

I am not sure I understand that advantages of being a superpower. We still have two oceans, a Navy, and an Air force, and being a superpower encouraged us to intervene in territorial disputes in the Near East and the Balkans when we would have got a much greater return on investment from developing energy resources – including space solar power for that matter. The problem with being able to project power into foreign places is that it seldom gets projected in the national interest. We have served as the armed forces for half the world, and for a long time; the advantages of that since the end of the Cold War are not all that obvious. The Cold War held a potential existential threat to the United States, but it is not at all clear to me that the Kuwait intervention helped anyone we much care about, and it certainly removed a strong counter to Iran.  It eventually led to the second intervention in Iraq, which has created a Kurdish state that we can pretend is a liberal democracy; we can hardly make that pretense for the rest of Iraq, or for Afghanistan.  Defeat of the Taliban for harboring our enemies was very much in the national interest but our pretense as a superpower caused us to stay long after the Taliban had been removed.  We we not have been better off leaving Afghanistan to its own devises? It would have settled into a confederacy of warlords, none of whom would have dared harbor America’s enemies or allowed them to form plots there for fear that we would be back with fire and sword.

As I said when it was estimated that the cost of the Iraq invasion would be $300 billion dollars, with an investment of that magnitude we could become energy independent and tell the Arabs to drink their oil. The effect would have been to make Near East oil cheaper for Europe, which would end much of Europe’s dependence on Russian Gazprom.  The ability to project power is not purely military, and if one has no will to use the military then it is not terribly useful We could have had a great deal more economic power had we not chosen sides in the Balkans and become very much inv9olved in the territorial disputes of Europe.  But I have said all this before.

The original had the figure of $900 million which was wrong in both numbers and magnitude.  The original published estimate of the cost of the Second Gulf War – the one in which we took Baghdad – was $300 billion.  It went monotonically higher every month thereafter.

As to what I thought we ought to do about the Invasion of Iraq  see http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2view/view234.html

And in digging about in old stuff, here is Dr. Phil Chapman, former astronaut, on Global Warming and the Medieval Optimum Climate: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2mail/mail235.html#global

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

View 817 Wednesday, March 26, 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

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

When I was growing up, there was war in Europe before I understood much about international affairs. Somewhere in first grade I heard of George Washington, and since there was national debate over US involvement in putting an end to German aggression, opponents of US involvement in that affair warned us against entangling alliances and involvement in the territorial disputes of Europe. But then came Pearl Harbor and all such debates ended. The goal after that was converting the US industrial economy into Freedom’s Forge (http://www.amazon.com/dp/1400069645/?tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=28529615666&hvpos=1t1&hvexid=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=5804142049809068182&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=b&hvdev=c&ref=pd_sl_1o21gjnv8k_b) , one of the most mazing stories of the last century. During the Depression the US built the Empire State Building and Hoover Dam; from 1940 to 1943 America converted to war production and produced more war goods than all the allies plus all the Axis put together. One hundred and thirty merchant ships a month; tens of thousands of aircraft, tanks, machine guns, artillery pieces and ammunition, trucks, Jeeps, mess kits, uniforms, boots, transportation system to get them to the war area; they flowed endlessly from Detroit, Willow Run, Richmond California, hundreds of other places, most of which are now mired in unemployment.

Yet through all of that remained the memory that Washington had warned us against being involved in the territorial disputes of Europe, and against entangling alliances that would involve us in those disputes. Europe was Europe, and we did not need to be involved.

Pearl Harbor convinced us otherwise, and after World War II ended and we had begun to convert back to a peacetime economy, the Berlin Blockade and then the invasion of South Korea convinced us that we had better pay attention to international politics, since international politics was certainly paying attention to us.

I grew up a Cold Warrior. My contributions to the Cold War were small with two exceptions: Strategy of Technology, which remains instructive to this day even if the examples are Cold War, not realist politics; and the “kitchen cabinet” reports on missile defense. Gene Roddenberry, no Cold Warrior himself, accused us of trying to “break the Soviet Union” with the Strategic Defense Initiative, and of course had done the right analysis: the idea was to confront the USSR with a number of equally unpleasant alternatives, all of them leading to its downfall without the detonation of any nuked anywhere. A lot of strategists considered this impossible, and those born after about 1980 will not remember the cold fear of nuclear war, the very rational Survivalist movement which feared that the efforts of the Cold Warriors would fail, and the days when there were 26,000 deliverable nuclear warheads aimed at the United State; of the time when young men and women sat twenty-four hours a day in a warcrete hardened command post, waiting for the Klaxon. EWO. EWO. Emergency War Orders, Emergency War Orders. I have a message in five parts. Message Begins. TANGO. XRAY …

But in 1990 the world changed, and the USSR, which had world domination as its goal, was replaced by – well, no one quite knew what it was replaced by. Herman Kahn had predicted before his death in 1983 that if we could avoid a nuclear war in the death throes of the USSR, Russia would revert to what it had always been, a regional power with pan-Slavic interests, and a natural ally of the United States as our relationship with Europe changed from military savior to economic competitor.

Today the President of the United States told Russia that “You are a regional power. The United States is the only super power.” He did not add that the US spends more on its defenses than the rest of the world put together; nor did he mention that our attempts to project that power into the territorial disputes of the Middle East – Kuwait, to begin with – have not always turned out well; we have withdrawn from Iraq leaving an illegal Kurdish Republic which under Obama’s logic Baghdad has every right to repossess, and when we withdraw from Afghanistan it is not settled just how far from Kabul the writ of the President we have installed there will run. Our Navy is now under 300 warships and sinking. In World War Two we launched, crewed, and deployed that many ships in a single month. But that was in another time.

And so we initiate a new Cold War, but one of words. We insult the President of Russia and do him small injuries when it is not clear what we demand to make our wasp stings stop. He will not relinquish the Crimea. The last time the West tried to pry the Crimea out of the fingers of the masters of the Kremlin, it took an army.

Half a league half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred:
‘Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns’ he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

If you have not read it lately, it will do you good to do so: http://www.nationalcenter.org/ChargeoftheLightBrigade.html

But we no longer have the means to send a light brigade to the Crimea. Indeed we don’t have a light brigade at all.

No more light infantry.

The US no longer has ‘light infantry’ regardless of the title of any unit…

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htinf/articles/20140321.aspx#startofcomments

http://thedonovan.com/archives/CombatLoadPresentation.pdf

http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/CSI/docs/Gorman/06_Retired/03_Retired_2000_11/22_09_SoldierFuture_Jun.pdf

And we continue to relearn lessons already learned:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Soldiers-Load-Mobility-Nation/dp/0686310012

David Couvillon

Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog Excellance; Avoider of Yard Work

Of course I know the Light Brigade was cavalry, not infantry. And when you finish reading Tennyson, try Kipling on what happened to those heroes. http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_brigade.htm  Democracies are not kind to their heroes.

The President threatens to do harm to President Putin and his friends, and to Russia. President Clinton made the same error in the Balkans, and in fact actually sent US forces into a region where the blood feuds stem from five hundred years, to confront Pan-Slavic Russia in the very place where Russian Slavophiles caused Russia to mobilize in defense of the Slavs, Germany to mobilize lest a mobilized Russia sweep into Prussia, and the Guns of August began. But of course nothing like that happens now. We participated in the latest Balkan War from 15,000 feet. In this next encounter we will fight with banknotes and property seizures. But Russians remember insults for a hundred years and more.

God Save Us.

We have forgotten much of what we knew about a strategy of technology; yet in these times of Moore’s Law, it is much more difficult to remain the only superpower. Is there anyone who believes the Russians are not capable of programming computers and designing chips? That they have not the mathematicians?

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/mar/25/obama-kill-navys-tomahawk-hellfire-missile-program/

I’m having to read between the lines a little bit, but it appears the Navy’s procurement of Hellfire and Tomahawks are being zeroed out over the next two years in favor of research and development of a new system.

While these systems ARE a bit long in the tooth, they are more than adequate in their current roles, I believe. Given the immense amount of trouble the F-35 program is having, I’m reluctant to zero out any production in favor of untested systems.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

A proper Strategy of Technology takes account of the need for doctrines and training as well as for testing of the technology. Schriever built that into the old Systems Command, but that is long gone. Meanwhile the President taunts the Russian who believes himself regent for the tsar.

It is time to do a mail bag, but we have a dinner appointment tonight, and this fits here reasonably well:

Bunny inspectors and bear busters 

Dear Dr. Pournelle

http://www.thetribunepapers.com/2014/01/20/attention-sportsmen-in-wnc-and-north-georgia/

If I’m reading this story correctly, the USFS set up a sting operation to nab poachers. Only they couldn’t find any poachers, so they resorted to entrapment. Of those who went to trial, anyone who actually took it to a jury seems to have been acquitted. Meanwhile, the USFS employees in question have been decorated for their role in the action.

There was a time when being a police officer was something to be proud of. I hope we can make that the case again, and part of that is to ratchet down the overweening power of various federal agencies.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Whatever it takes to ensure the loyalty of the troops.

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

View 817 Monday, March 24, 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

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

I have held off speculating on the fate of the Malaysian 777 for lack of reliable information. I have heard speculation after speculation. The most reasonable was that some kind of fire or explosion initiated pilot response: the fact that the autopilot was reprogrammed to 23,000 feet, the Boeing recommended altitude for fire suppression, and that the first course change was in the direction of the nearest 13,000 foot runway, made it so. But there were plenty of unanswered questions, and there still are.

Of course there was plenty of speculation: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/03/finally-plausible-scenario-happened-flight-370.html

I always thought this one more plausible: http://www.businessinsider.com/malaysia-plane-fire-2014-3

And apparently that is now the official view: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jy-II2Po8MYBIrCeW0St8gys69zw?docId=ac372cb0-2413-4e2e-a62d-bdc20ca47a6c We will probably never know.

The melodrama of Crimea continues. Obama seizes and freezes assets of Putin’s friends and advisors. This is an international sanction I was unaware of: I studied diplomatic history as part of my graduate studies in political science, but I don’t recall running across the practice of seizing assets belonging to individuals who happen to hold public office in foreign countries we want to “punish”, nor have I any idea of what law allows the President to do so. Perhaps he needed some funds to pay for the First Lady’s vacation in China? But I thought the American taxpayers were picking up that tab? I seem to be out of touch.

But the Russian annexation of the Crimea is pretty well accomplished, with the last Ukrainian holdouts being a small Coast Guard post where the officers are said to be arming themselves with clubs – a rolling pin, to be exact – in order to have the means for resistance if the Russians come into the base. Since any resistance would be symbolic, this seems as good a way as any to avoid bloodshed, presuming that the incoming Russians are aware of the gesture. Perhaps they will bring dough and ask the Ukrainian colonel for assistance in making cookies? It would be a good way to end a standoff that has no importance in the story.

And of course President Obama will reward China and Russia with increased control over the Internet by letting ICANN go to the UN – which means fall under the control of Russia and China. ICANN ain’t broke but President Obama will fix it. See http://www.npr.org/2014/03/19/291475122/u-s-pulls-out-of-icann-what-does-that-spell-for-internet-users

I have been in the middle of my taxes, which are complex, and last week wasn’t all that great in other ways. The remnants of winter aliment stalk Chaos Manor, and in a couple of hours I have to take Roberta out to get an eye exam that includes dilation so she can’t drive herself. My apologies for neglecting this site, but I am getting back to work. Friday Niven and I went up the hill – well, sort of. I wasn’t really up to going up the trail we normally use; the combination of steep and just rough and uneven was enough to overcome my balance. We took an alternate a road, and some blonde woman in a Mercedes told us this was a private road and we had to go away. Niven thought it would be fun to just keep going, but I wasn’t up to it. As to how private the road is, the No Parking signs are city signs: no warning that this is a private road and you will be towed etc. which is required actually. These are city no parking signs and that requires city law enforcement but the city police don’t enforce private no parking restrictions – or didn’t when I was in the Mayor’s office. There being no warning signs about this road being private property it might have been fun to just keep going, but I didn’t feel up to it, so we took some alternate routes so that we got the equivalent exercise that going up the hill would have given.

Wednesday night was soup and cinema night; we saw Quartet, which has the theme that getting old is not for sissies; all true. This British movie of a London stage play has Maggie Smith among others is about a very elegant retirement home for musicians and singers which is supported largely by an annual concert fund raiser. It’s full of geezer jokes. Amusing.

Drudge reported that he was including his estimated 2014 ACA tax in his coming estimated quarterly taxes due April 15. He calls it his Liberty Tax. This sparked a neat round of condemnations and snark about Drudge, with many commentators calling him a liar. Actually it’s a bit more complicated than that. The general law is that self employed must send in payments on estimates of their taxes due the following year, starting with a separate ES tax check enclosed with your current tax bill; and if you severely underestimated your taxes and sent too little for last year, there is a penalty that can be pretty stiff. This makes a writer’s taxes rather complicated since it’s not easy estimating how much money we’ll get: a few years ago I got a rather large payment for movie rights on a book I wrote thirty years ago. It was unexpected. What I was supposed to do was recalculate and make the last estimated tax payment much larger to reflect the new and unexpected income. I realized that just in time to avoid penalties but it wasn’t easy. Anyway Drudge included the IRS collected penalty on not having health care insurance because he doesn’t have any and doesn’t intend to have any, and he calls that a Liberty tax.

The whole incident is covered here: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/-drudge-report–author-caught-in-debate-over-obamacare-penalty-claims-230459058.html The point, it seems to me, isn’t whether Drudge is or is not subject to a penalty for not having health insurance, and thus subject to pre-payment of that penalty on his estimated taxes, but that the law is so complex that it is legitimate to discuss this as not yet settled. In this land of the free we don’t know how much we owe to the government nor when we must pay it. It comes with Hope and Change, I guess.

Anyway, I keep digging. I’ll get out of this yet.

http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-dmca-takedown-of-feynman-lectures.html illustrates some of the problems of modern copyright law. The Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) has a committee which will send a spokesman to the Congressional hearings, and I have a couple of contacts in the Congress, but my problem is that I no longer understand just what changes we need in the copyright law. The DMCA is obviously flawed. The scribd case showed that quite well:

Scribd is a venture capital funded for profit corporation which purports to be a safe place for the unlimited free expression of ideas. To that end it allowed anyone to upload anything, and some uploaded the entire works of many writers including Isaac Asimov and many others, including me. They also included all the works of the late Poul Anderson and Jack Chalker, leaving their widows with considerable concern about their future income. Scribd was always cooperative: all you had to do was send them a DMCA takedown notice. One notice for each instance of each work. They wouldn’t respond to “The estate of Poul Anderson has not given ANYONE permission to electronically PUBLISH any work on ANY open site, so take down all of his stories.” And in fact when SFWA sent what amounted to a flawed (and therefore legally invalid) scribd hired EFF to send SFWA a threatening letter, which caused SFWA to respond by abolishing its copyright committee and abandoning member to their own devices. Scribd has since moderated their policies and does some self policing, but their business model still includes using other people’s work to draw a crowd so that they can display advertising to those who log on. And they are among the better behaved sites using that business model.

The whole story is told in a Chaos Manor Review article I did long ago http://www.chaosmanorreviews.com/open_archives/jep_column-326-a.php and for that matters some of it is here http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2view/view482.html

There is no end of stuff condemning me for being some kind of weasel for defending the rights of authors and their widows and orphans to control the use of their works, particularly in cases where profits are being made by making those works available for free. This is typical: http://www.teleread.com/copy-right/sci-fi-writer-jerry-pournelle-scribdcom-deserved-a-dmca-takedown/

Ah well. But the deeper I dig into copyright law as it exists – including some really complicated decisions by courts – the less I understand what can be done by Congress to fix it. What is needed is a thorough revision of the whole thing, and that is not going to happen with this Congress. What is needed is for writers to get their ducks in a row, and we don’t yet even know where our ducks are. I’d love to see some improvements, but I don’t hope for many.

It’s getting on for time to have lunch and get Roberta to the eye doctor. I haven’t time to comment on these but you might find them interesting.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/09/how-journals-nature-science-cell-damage-science?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487

http://www.strategypage.com/qnd/topten/articles/20131220.aspx

http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/01/a_few_easy_tests_to_debunk_global_warming_hysteria.html

How to Thwart Gunmen at 29,000 Feet.

Few remember how the various governmental bureaux of Western countries tried to criminalize and prosecute those who resisted hijackers prior to 9/11:

<http://www.timesofisrael.com/how-to-defeat-airplane-terrorists-from-the-only-pilot-who-ever-foiled-a-skyjacking/>

—–

Roland Dobbins

Have they changed much?

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