View 812 Thursday, February 27, 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

I am preparing more exposition on Ron Unz’s “Conservative case for higher minimum wages” with some very perceptive correspondence including an exchange with a very successful software engineer inventor entrepreneur in the heart of Silicon Valley, and a good account of effects in a Canadian province. I’ll have that later. I need to take a walk now before it gets too late.  I also have some good material including a Possony story on Taiwan and China.

Meanwhile, I wrote the following for a closed conference, and thought it might be of more general interest. It tells a story I have told before, of how a very strange experience – given the astronomical probabilities involved one might be justified in calling it miraculous. The conference is writers and the theme was “Do you write full time?” For some reason probably having to do with the steroid treatment I am in the middle of for my Sudden Hearing Loss, I found myself waxing, if not eloquently, then at length:

====

I have had no income other than writing since 1971 after the earthquake.  The Sylmar earthquake. I had 5000 books in the house. None of the book cases were fastened to the walls.  In the Los Angeles library there were so many books on the floor that the library was asking for volunteers to come reshelve them, not in any order, just get them off the floor so that docents could come reshelve them in order.

In my case one book was on the floor.  It was No Wonder We Are Losing, by former Senate Counsel Robert Morris.  A Cold War document, not precisely a tract, but a defense of congressional activity in the Cold War.  I thought, well, there’s a lesson there somewhere, and put it back on the shelf.  That was a Tuesday. The next day the phone rang at 0800.  Roberta was already gone –she was teaching and had the only real income, I having left the post of Director of Research for the City of Los Angeles, having previously left a professorship at Pepperdine, having prior to that left a fairly successful career in aerospace as the Apollo Project wound down and I had to give up an ideal job as a senior scientist to join management which I knew I’d be terrible at. Possony and I had written Strategy of Technology and it was fairly successful, and I had two action adventure novels published under a pen name, and did a bit of highly paid consulting for the Trustees of the California State College system and all of that was done, I’d given up: I was not going to make a living writing.  Haldeman and Erlichman had scotched the idea that I’d be an assistant secretary of either Defense or the Air Force in the Nixon administration although Strategy of Technology was already a textbook in the academy and war college, and I had friends in the r&d departments of the Army and Air Force; so I pulsed the system and asked for a civil service appointment in aviation operations research, my final title in aerospace being acting Director of operations research.  And lo! the Army Aviation people wanted me, and went to the Civil Service Commission which had to approve a lateral entry at GS 13 since I had never had a civil service job before. It was to be in St. Louis, and the papers were on my desk to be signed when the earthquake shook things up.  That was a Tuesday.

Wednesday morning the telephone rang at 0800. Roberta was not there, being out earning the money to pay the rent.  The kids were off to school.  I answered the phone.

"John Pournelle?"

At 0800 that was good enough.  "Yes."

"This is Robert Morris. Do you know who I am?"

I managed to recover enough composure to say, "Yes, oddly enough I was holding your book yesterday morning about this time."

He said, "Interesting. You had an earthquake in your city."

I admitted there had been one.

"Well, I am the publisher of Twin Circle, a National Catholic Press paper edited in Los Angeles, and I want you to do a short piece on the earthquake.  One picture if you have a good one that is illustrative, but mostly I want something scientifically correct, descriptive, compelling, and reassuring. It needs to be 700 words, and I’ll pay $400 dollars. Need it to be in the office of the editor in Century City by Friday Noon.  Can you do it?"

My house payment at the time was $210 a month. I’d made $22,000 a year in city hall, which was damned good money in 1972. I thought for about twenty microseconds and said "Sure."

So I did, and took the article down to Vince Ryan, the editor, in the Twin Circle offices in Century City, and he liked it, and invited me to lunch, and at lunch he said "We need a science correspondent.  Cover some science conferences, and do a weekly column on something interesting in science. It has to be interesting to the people who buy it in the back of the church, and it has to stand up to the inspection of Notre Dame Jesuit Professors of Physics and Medicine and such.  I hear you can do that.  Want to try? I can’t pay $400 a column. I’ll pay $200 a column and expenses if you need to travel. The AAAS annual meeting is coming up in Mexico City pretty soon.  We’ll pay expenses. I can use four pieces from that. Maybe in addition to regular column, maybe not, we’ll see how good you are."

Bottom line was that I put off St. Louis and the GS 13 for a couple of weeks, found I fit in nicely with Twin Circle as Science Correspondent, and I could do the column in a day, two tops, if I didn’t have a conference to go to, leaving me the rest of the week to work on fiction.  And $800 a month was pretty darned good money for a guy whose house payment was $200.  And I sold to Analog, and did a science article for Analog that I figured wouldn’t work for the Twin Circle readership, and Analog bought just about everything I sent in their direction, and — and I told St Louis thanks a lot and deep apologies for putting you through getting that Civil Service Commission vote in my favor, but I think the kids are used to California.  (And the Science Columnist for National Catholic Press had no problem getting his kids into the best Catholic school in Los Angeles, which beat holy hell out their prospects in St. Louis.)

And I’ve never done anything but write for a living since.  After MOTE IN GOD’S EYE and LUCIFER’S HAMMER I was making more out of fiction than Twin Circle was paying, but then I got on as the GALAXY science columnist, which gave me an interesting set of credentials for science conferences, GALAXY SF and NATIONAL CATHOLIC PRESS.  It was even good enough to get Niven a press pass to AAAS meetings, and we used to go to them together. I made enough to afford a $12,000 home computer ($6,000 for the Diablo typewriter that produced mss. and looked like they had been typed and couldn’t be told from typed mss. if you didn’t look too close at the edges of the paper).  And that led to an article about Writing with Computers which led to the BYTE column.

So for the last forty years of my life I haven’t earned any significant income except from writing.  Of course if I’d taken the GS-13 I’d have retired as GS-15 and have a heck of a good pension, but I haven’t done too badly — and eBooks have revived the economic value of the back list which is why I rail so much about not selling perpetual eBook rights whether exclusive or non-exclusive unless you’re getting paid royalties for every damned sale.

So that’s my one religious experience.  I mean, think about it.  I later asked Morris how he ever came to ask me to write for him.

It turned out he lived in New Jersey. Stefan Possony lived in Mountain View near Stanford (he was a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute) .  From New Jersey Stanford and Los Angeles don’t seem that far apart.  When he heard there was an earthquake in Los Angeles he called Possony to get an article from him.  Steve laughed and told him it was five hundred miles away.  "But I have a young man in Los Angeles, we wrote Strategy of Technology together–"  "Oh, yes, I have heard of that."  "Well, he is very familiar with such things, and he writes fast and well, and perhaps you can induce him to write this article for you. He will do it well."

So that’s a simple enough explanation of why Robert Morris called me the morning after the earthquake. Nothing mysterious about it. And he had no way of knowing that I was on the verge of giving up on writing for a living and about to sign the papers accepting the civil service GS-13 appointment but I really didn’t want to do that but it didn’t look like I had much choice in the matter, and this looked like a way out of that…  Big coincidence, but still within the realm of possibility.

But precisely how he managed to have his book be the only book out of thousands on my shelves fall to the floor the day before at this life crisis of mine is not so easily explained.  And that the post he would offer me was as science correspondent to the National Catholic Press was certainly interesting and then some. It certainly changed my life.

= = = = = = = = =

When I told this story to my old friend Marvin Minsky – who in contrast to his wife is a product of Ethical Culture and a pretty thorough atheist – he said coincidences happen because there are a lot of people in the world and a lot of days nothing like that happened to them, but then we began to look at the probabilities, and the improbabilities added up like crazy. When the numbers began to approach the age of the universe we stopped talking about it.

Oddly enough, in 1983 there was an earthquake in the Hollister-Coalinga are of California which affected the Bay Area including Mountain View where Possony lived.  He was by then in a wheel chair having had a stroke earlier, and by pure coincidence Roberta and I were in his house when it happened, having driven up for a computer conference of some kind, probably an Applefest but possibly not because the BYTE staff were in a motel not too far away. Anyway he was in his armchair and I was in his wheel chair so I could sit near him, and I suddenly found myself rolling across his floor.  Many of his books came down from the shelves in his study, but otherwise no damage there.  That one I call pure coincidence and it wasn’t at all improbable that I would be visiting him, nor that I would be in that area when there was a computer conference.  But of course almost all his books fell down. In my case where the shelves swayed two feet out of line from the walls, only one book fell down, and that was Morris.  Different probabilities altogether.

I will continue the minimum wage discussion in a MAIL I will post tonight.

Blood sugar last night before bed was 318, so in compliance with my internist’s instructions I took and extra metformin before going to bed. This morning before breakfast it was 125. It is now 1615, and I am about to take it having had lunch at 1300 along with a metformin and six steroid tablets. Ah, It is now 168. I had no breakfast – got up too late – and a salmon and lettuce sandwich for lunch. No exercise yet but I hope to get out for a half hour in a few minutes. Logging this now. No hearing improvement whatever, if anything a deterioration in the right ear which is terrifying.

Went to LASFS meeting after dinner. Dinner was soup. Was enticed by a slice of pizza at LASFS.  Home at 2050 (long program by Aldo Spidoni on an art history of the manned space program after Shuttle, excellent) and it is now 240.  Took a metformin at 1840 with dinner, will take another with my night time pills when I go to bed.  We’ll see what it is in the morning.

The batteries ran out on my hearing aids while at LASFS in the middle of the program.  The right one gave the warning tones just as I got there at 1920, and about 2130 expired.  I took the battery out of the useless left aid – ear still stone deaf – and put it in the right one, and it donged the low battery signal but lasted through the meeting and indeed until I got to my doorstep before it died.  I have replaced both batteries and the right ear hears fine. Left nothing not even when I scratch the sound input spot or send it gong signals.  The steroid treatment lasts three weeks.

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

View 812 Wednesday, February 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

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

Barrack Obama, famously.

In the morning before breakfast my sugar was 174, which is high but not the 301 of last night. This afternoon after lunch it was 191. My primary physician tells me to take an extra metformin (normally I take two a day) if it’s over 200. A few minutes ago after dinner it was 224, so I’ll have a glucophage with my night pills (having just had one with my after dinner pills). The steroids definitely raise blood sugar levels because I have been very good about eating, a half sandwich for lunch and a Greek salad for dinner, no desserts or sweets. And a pretty good walk. Alas no hearing improvements. In anything when I scrape the left side sound intake spot I hear that less well now than I did this morning. I took the six steroids with lunch. It’s all discouraging. It was great being able to hear for a few weeks, and I keep hoping something will get better. Better to hear with one ear than neither, of course. Count your blessings.

This in today’s Los Angeles Times

Patt Morrison Asks

Ron Unz, a mo’ money man on the minimum wage

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-0226-morrison-unz-20140226,0,6284572.column#ixzz2uVAeSSGl

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-0226-morrison-unz-20140226,0,6284572.column#axzz2uVAbF8g2

Ron Unz knows his way around the California ballot. He ran for governor against Pete Wilson in the GOP primary 20 years ago. He lost big, but four years later he won with his Proposition 227, which altered California schools by effectively ending bilingual education and mainstreaming Spanish-speaking students. The sometimes conservative, sometimes libertarian Republican entrepreneur-turned-activist is going back to the ballot, collecting signatures for an initiative to raise the state’s minimum wage to $12. It may seem counterintuitive but Unz contends it’s an idea that’s as conservative as they come.

Raising the minimum wage has been anathema to conservatives and Republicans. What changed your mind?

For years I’d assumed increasing the minimum wage was not a good policy, but once I did focus on it, I was surprised how strong the evidence was. My article [on the conservative Daily Caller website] strongly backing a higher minimum wage was probably what got the attention of Bill O’Reilly [and] prominent conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly. I think a lot of people may look at the issue in a new way.

There’s a lot more. Ron is brilliant. That doesn’t mean he is right, because if he is correct then some smart people like Milt Friedman have been wrong for a very long time, and, to be blunt, so have I. I have always assumed that minimum wages are a bad idea.

But of course there was a hidden assumption in that premise about minimum wages: it was that the difference between the minimum wage and “a living wage” would not be made up by a public payment of tax money, and that this payment could not be denied to anyone including minimum wage earners.

And Ron is certainly correct in pointing out that the great financial gains made since the crash and the Great Recession have not gone to the working class or the middle class. They have gone to stock holders and no one else, and they don’t contribute all that much to middle class tax relief.

I continue to be concerned about the effects on startup small businesses. I am also concerned about the Constitution: I know that the Courts have so interpreted “Interstate Commerce” to include transactions in which a local famer sells his garden produce in a local Farmer’s Market, and window washers in an Ann Arbor office building are engaged in interstate commerce because one of the offices whose windows they don’t even wash – contracts are with individual office renters – in that building is sort of engaged in financing commerce in another state. So after two different Child Labor Amendments to the Constitution failed of ratification, the Supreme Court reversed itself and said that the Federal Government had regulatory power after all. In my judgment, minimum wages are state matters. Alas, that point is moot: the courts have said that the Feds have a joint power with the states.

My concern with small businesses is not satisfied. I think that if we are to raise the minimum wages significantly that ought to apply only to businesses of 20 or more employees; the point being that we do not want to discourage small startups. We need them. And a high minimum wage raises the capital cost of starting that business, which is already burdened with plenty of Federal regulations to begin with. I think imposing minimum wages on small startups would send us further down the drain.

David McCord Wright predicted the end of the Soviet Union. One of his lines of reasoning was that Marx’s prediction of the total concentration of power into a very tiny group was not coming true: the American practice of trust busting – the Sherman Anti-trust Act – had seen to that. But lately we are seeing that come to an end. Already we have Five Big Banks Too Big To Fail instead of, say, Fifty Large Banks Any One of Whom Could Go Bust And We’d Still Survive. And it’s increasingly true of other organizations. We’re down to it on airplane companies: when I got into the aerospace business there were a lot of companies, Boeing, McDonnell, Douglas, Hughes, North American, Lockheed, and more; not so many now. And somehow there aren’t so many innovations, and each new airplane costs double and more what the last one cost, and==

We are concentrating on big business. We let companies “grow” by buying up their competitors. Does anyone here think any of us will benefit from Comcast acquisition of Time-Warner, just to pick a current example? Concentrating everything into a few companies ends competition and the consolidation of management saves money on the bottom line, but the savings tend to go to the stockholders, not the workers.

All those economic analyses warning of the perils of raising the minimum wage — are they wrong?

In 1996 when [California] raised the minimum wage, people said it would destroy the state economy. Instead, for the next four years, unemployment dropped by a third. Obviously there are broader economic issues, but when you see huge declines in unemployment after a minimum-wage hike, it undercuts the case that it would devastate the economy.

I was surprised at how insignificant price increases would have to be to cover the cost. People said Wal-Mart would have to double their prices. The actual figure is less than 1% — about $12.50 a year [per customer].

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-0226-morrison-unz-20140226,0,6284572.column#ixzz2uVIZPwPj

What I don’t see here is an analysis of the effect on small startups. Wal-Mart is not your local hardware store, or the little ap designer shop operating out of mother’s basement. Or even Philippe Kahn starting Borland Software.

Understand, Ron Unz is no fool. He tends to be sure he is right, and prefers debate to discussion, but he’s good at it.

How would it affect illegal immigration?

It would remove the incentive businesses have to hire illegal immigrants. Right now the wages for certain businesses are so low that the only people who will take those jobs have just arrived from other countries, desperate for work. You see a lot of industries that used to have reasonable wages now have wages that are much lower. [That] drives down wages for everybody, including the immigrants themselves. The best way to protect against that is to have a high minimum wage; people can earn a reasonable living.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-0226-morrison-unz-20140226,0,6284572.column#ixzz2uVJiKYUV

Which is an interesting point.

In fact it is all interesting. Read the article and send me your comments. I am convinced that a universal minimum wage would be devastating – indeed I think that some of the devastation Victor Hansen sees in the California Central Valley comes from that big minimum wage hikes California periodically undertakes, but I can’t prove it. It seems to me that if you force me to pay someone more than the work he does will make for me, in general I won’t hire him; particularly I won’t hire a beginner in the hopes that he’ll one day be worth it, if in fact at first he ain’t worth nothing to me. But Ron is pretty smart and he’s written a lot about it.

The Conservative Case for a Higher Minimum Wage

February 3, 2014

Over the last couple of months the minimum wage has moved into the political headlines, but most of the arguments for raising it have come from liberals.  That’s fine, but since I’m not a liberal, I’d rather focus on the conservative reasons for supporting a much higher minimum wage, which are just as compelling.

Cutting Social Welfare Spending and Reducing Hidden Government Subsidies

Each year the American government spends over $250 billion on social welfare programs for the working-poor, individuals who have jobs but can’t survive on their wages.  This funding represents a hidden government subsidy to low-wage businesses, allowing them to shift the burden of their low-wage employees over to the taxpayer.

A much higher minimum wage would force these businesses to stand on their own two feet and cover the costs of their own workers.  Once those workers were no longer so poor, they would automatically lose eligibility for many anti-poverty programs, saving the government huge amounts of money.  For example, establishing a $12 per hour minimum wage in California would save American taxpayers billions of dollars each year.

http://www.ronunz.org/2014/02/03/the-conservative-case-for-a-higher-minimum-wage/

And I continue to wonder. The transfer payments from taxpayers to Citizens (and illegals) continue. The poor get richer, the middle class sort of holds its own or gets poorer, skilled workers lose jobs and get a lot poorer, and the rich certainly get richer. And more and more pay no taxes but get richer off those who do. If something can’t go on forever it will stop.

‘You want a higher minimum wage? Turn off the spigot of low-wage workers pouring in to the U.S. and it will rise on its own through the iron law of supply and demand.’

<http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2014-02-26.html>

——–

Roland Dobbins

That certainly sounds like the first thing to do.  Improving the schools would be the second.

"This is essentially a case of a physicist, who may be very good in his sub-discipline, talking about a subject about which he is abysmally ignorant."

<http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2014/02/25/giant-walls-tornado-alley/5808887/>

—

Roland Dobbins

And then some!

And more food for thought:

‘By trading with China and helping it grow into an economic powerhouse, Taiwan has helped create a burgeoning Goliath with revisionist goals that include ending Taiwan’s independence and making it an integral part of China.’

<http://server1.nationalinterest.org/article/say-goodbye-taiwan-9931?page=show>

———–

Roland Dobbins

We were urged by George Washington not to become involved in the territorial disputes of Europe. We were warned by MacArthur and others not to engage in a land war in Asia. We are said to be the last hope of freedom and the world’s policeman but not to be interventionists or isolationists, and —

Walter Lippmann long ago wrote that Foreign Policy is like checks written against power, which ultimately comes from trade and the military as the assets the checks are written against. We have written large checks to Taiwan and Japan. Most are against Navy power, of course.  We also wrote large checks on Iraqi and Afghan democracy; those are definitely going to bounce, and many, including me, say they should not have been written in the first place.  Staying in Iraq after reducing its ruling mechanism to a shambles left us trying to plant democracy among people who don’t want it – since they are not a nation, and the Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish factions do not think of themselves as a nation.  A vote is like the barnyard animals deciding who will be eaten. Christians and Jews, of course, but after that who’s next.  And in Afghanistan the writ of the Mayor of Kabul has never run very far; the one thing that unites Afghanistan is the sight of armed foreigners in Afghanistan.  We defeated the Taliban; we could have left Afghanistan to the Afghanis.  Instead we decided to implant Democracy in a nation that never had it, rule of law in a nation that never had it, and – but that is another story.  We don’t have a large enough bank account to honor that particular check.

The Cold War was close; Containment was the cheapest strategy, and yet it was very expensive. Reagan threw in enough chips to bleed the Soviet Union faster than we were bleeding. Viet Nam was costly to the Russians, costly in industrial goods shipped at great expense to Hanoi only to be destroyed. And the Afghanistan war bled Russia in the way that Viet Nam had bled the United States.  I suspect they see our struggles there as the cream of the jest.

Russia is not the USSR. The Cold War is over.  There is a new realism in the world.

And it’s now 2330 and my blood sugar is 318, so I will definitely take another Glucophage with my night pills.  Still no improvement in hearing. Incidentally, I have been taking LipoFlavenoid for months now, four tablets a day, and it has definitely ended tinnitus; but it didn’t do much for hearing.  That was done by the COSTCO hearing aids ($2,000 and worth it); but then came the Sudden Hearing Loss in my left ear.  See earlier logs this week on that.  The steroids are supposed to help. We’re hoping. Prayer may help too.

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

View 812 Tuesday, February 25, 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

In January I got new digital hearing aids from COSTCO, and shortly after my hearing was as near to normal as it has been in many decades. That continued until last Sunday. On Sunday I noticed that over the period from Noon to Dinner the hearing in my left ear became progressively worse, and by Sunday night I was as deaf as a post in my left ear. I thought at first this was some kind of hearing aid failure, but I found that if I put the left aid in my right ear I could hear in my right ear, and if I put the right aid in my left ear I could hear nothing. I did several other tests and the conclusion was obvious: I was deaf as a post in my left ear.

When I would sort of scratch on the sound input area of my right hearing aid I could clearly hear that. Sunday afternoon if I did that with the left aid, I’d sort of hear it, but not well, and over time that faded, until by Sunday night I could hear nothing at all from doing that. Similarly my hearing aids give signals, a ringing gong sound, in various patterns to convey messages: over Sunday afternoon they became fainter and fainter in my left ear, and again by Sunday night they were gone from the left but unchanged in the right.

Monday after our trip to the vet we went to Kaiser to my primary care physician, who looked at my ears, did things with a tuning fork, shone lights into my head, and other such physician activities, then excused himself and left the examining room for about ten minutes. He returned to say he had scheduled me with the audiology department for Tuesday morning – the next day, at 1030. So out I went, where I first got a fairly normal hearing exam, but not from a technician but an MD.  She didn’t show me the results of the test, but I already knew that my right ear was about the way it was before I got the hearing aids and the left was just about stony deaf. After the exam I went out to wait for a call to be examined by yet another MD.

He showed me the results. It was what I have feared. Damned near total loss in left ear. He also informed me that the diagnosis was Sudden Hearing Loss, and I pointed out that this wasn’t informative, a bit like “lumbago” for lower back pains. He agreed enthusiastically. It turns out SHL isn’t that uncommon for someone my age, but they don’t really have a good theory of causation although it’s likely that several different causes may produce the result, but they do have a treatment. It doesn’t always work, but it works better than anything else they have.

It’s steroids. A lot of steroids. Beginning with an initial application given by a needle through the eardrum; which sound extremely unpleasant, and in fact it was although less so than I had feared. I also take six steroid pills a day – the pharmacist says I can take them all at once, but with a meal – to be followed after a week or two by taking five a day, then four, then three, tapering down weekly; and also there will be three of these treatments by needle, one a week for three weeks, the first one to be in about five minutes. Or I could wait for more tests and such; he did want me to go down to the lab, which I was scheduled to do anyway. I told him to add his requirements to the already scheduled lab blood draw, and let’s get on with this. He agreed that was what he’d recommend.

It wasn’t all that hard a decision. My weeks of normal hearing with the COSTCO hearing aids were life changing. I didn’t say “Huh?” to my wife more than once, I think. I could hear just about everything going on around me. Birds. Kids laughing. The choir, and I could even understand most of the sermon although the acoustics in our church are awful (very modern with maybe 8 speakers on each side of this very great acoustically lousy hall, not really properly synchronized). Acoustics or not I could actually understand most of what was said. And at LASFS I could hear the other members of the club, and — Anyway, it turns out that it doesn’t take long to get used to being able to hear what’s going on around you, and I would put up with a lot more than an ear shot full of steroids to get it back again.

So I got the shots, and tonight at dinner I took the little pills – they’re very bitter – and watched TV for an hour, and LO! while I could not really hear in my left ear, by gollies when I scratch the input screen on the left hearing aid I can hear that, nowhere near as well as I hear when I do it to the right one, but better than late Sunday afternoon and as good as Sunday about noon. (And an hour after I wrote that I think it may be even better!) It’s nowhere good enough, but the fact that there’s a positive change is heartening. I have a faint hope that things will be restored to the point that the COSTCO technicians can retune the left aid to the point where that ear will be at least partly useful. Of course what I really hope for is that it can be made as good as it was.

Sudden Hearing Loss seems to be correlated with diabetic matters, and I’ve been somewhat diabetic for years. I haven’t always been as careful about sugar and dieting as I should be. That ends now. Today I have been quite careful about what and how much I have eaten.

I was also told that this steroid treatment can and probably will play hell with my blood sugar, and if I notice a sudden rise I should inform my primary physician who may prescribe an increase in the glocophages I take twice a day.

So, tonight, at 2200, four hours after a dinner of one half chicken sandwich, not a lot of chicken, quite a lot of lettuce, on pita bread, I took my blood sugar. I had half a sandwich for dinner because after my steroid shot in the ear but before I went to the lab I bought that sandwich at the Kaiser cafeteria, and ate half of it for lunch. I haven’t had anything else to eat all day. And I walked about a mile at Kaiser and took stairs rather than elevators for most of it.

My blood sugar reading at 2200 was 301, which is about as high a reading as I have ever had even after Niven’s New Year party. It’s usually between 130 and 145, which I think is high, but the EENT chap thought wasn’t bad. Anyway, I’ve sent email to my primary because this sounds like an increase as predicted, and since it follows the ear shot and the six steroid pills at dinner, I think it ranks as a sudden increase. Alas I haven’t taken a reading for a couple of days so I don’t know any more than that. But I’ll sure be more careful about what I eat, and now that we no longer have to worry about Sable I can take longer and more vigorous walks; which is what my cardiologist friend has been urging me to do for weeks.

And once again I can say: the problem wasn’t the COSTCO hearing aids, and indeed I have hopes that I will recover enough that they can be reprogrammed to overcome this setback; and having had nearly a month of relatively normal hearing, including going to Dvorak’s Risalka and hearing it properly and not saying “Huh?” to my long suffering wife a dozen times a day and never knowing really what was going on – even a month of that was pretty well worth the cost, and I still have hopes.

I kept reasonably good notes during the radiation treatment of my brain cancer five years ago – six years come March – and I will try to log going from a deaf old guy to nearly normal hearing to this remission and, we can hope, to restoration of at least some of my left ear. And maybe that will help someone find a better diagnosis than “Sudden Hearing Loss” which is a bit like telling a sleepless person that he has insomnia.

[Morning, 0900 before breakfast, 175, still high but not so frighteningly so. No change in left ear hearing: I still detect scratching the sound intake area, but I in my left ear cannot hear the gongs when the device signals me although they are fine on the right side. More steroids at noon. And I have heard from my primary physician not to worry about the 301 reading.]

Retire ‘Em

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-the-army-should-fire-some-generals-and-promote-some-captains/2014/02/21/7921a234-9802-11e3-afce-3e7c922ef31e_allComments.html?ctab=all_&

This really doesn’t go far enough. Many of the flag officer billets should be downgraded and staffed with Colonels/Captains and Lt. Colonels/Commanders. The inflation of stars – mostly for political and appearance purposes – has not benefited as a whole.

s/f

Couv

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

They are shrinking the Army and probably the Marine Corps, so there will certainly be less need for general officers; although the Navy and Marine Corps remain the usual instrument of American power projection when we are not at war. I am sure most readers are aware that I think the arrangement of a Department of the Navy and a Department of War made a lot of sense for a Republic. But that’s another discussion for another time. I should probably try to write a short piece on the Strategy of Technology in the modern age. Thanks.

The Iron Law affects military organizations, but having actually to fight wars weeds some of that out. And I rather like the notion of a service led by officers who have been in front of a bunch of armed Americans in combat.

On Global Temperatures

Thought this was a very carefully explained post.

http://judithcurry.com/2014/02/25/berkeley-earth-global/

mkr

I found this explanatory but it may be at the edge of my understanding. When I was in human factors testing astronauts and others tolerance of temperatures and ability to perform at various temperatures, I learned a lot about the state of the art of temperature measurement — admittedly for 1957 or so – and the difficulties of coming up with a reason for averaging numbers obtained in many different ways.

I know we have experts on this subject among the readers, and I invite comments on this.

Heinlein Society (@HeinleinSociety) tweeted at 5:58 PM on Mon, Feb 24, 2014:

Biggest Lunar Explosion Ever Seen: http://t.co/4UBaEsul5T

(https://twitter.com/HeinleinSociety/status/438100535430766592)

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