Chaos Manor – Jerry Pournelle – Page 156 – the original blog of Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Manor

Does America hate bright kids? Kemal’s Brotherhood

By Jerry Pournelle | Jan 20, 2014 - 10:58 pm | Updated: January 20, 2014 - 10:58 pm | View

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View 807 Monday, January 20, 2014

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

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

I spent the day taking Roberta out to the doctors, and of course sort of recovering from this flu, which is debilitating. Apologies.

Capital accumulation is booming as witness the Dow; but unemployment is not shrinking, and in fact it appears to be a lot lower than it is, since those who just plain gave up on finding work are no longer counted as unemployed. We have no real way of measuring that number, but there are a lot, and of course that also includes “early retirement” people, middle managers whose jobs have mutated beyond their understanding, skilled workers replaced by robots and generally increased productivity.

There are a lot of reasons for this.

If you pay people not to work, you must pay them even more to get them to work; and given various welfare, disability, unemployment, food stamps, and other subsidies that can be expensive. It’s particularly for small capital enterprises whose owners have to eke out a living as they burn capital in startup ventures.

Small firms also have the regulation problem: compliance with all the various regulations is difficult for anyone, but larger firms can have compliance officers and other experts on the payroll. Little outfits can’t afford them. If you have only eleven employees, adding a compliance officer to tend to regulations ups your expenses in the order of ten percent.

And finally there’s this:

America hates…

Jerry,

http://www.newsweek.com/america-hates-its-gifted-kids-226327

Jim

It says little we haven’t been saying here for years, but the long term effect of ignoring the brightest 10% so that you can devote a larger portion of education to bringing up those just below normal up to normal is disastrous.

I have more on this, but it’s late and I’m tired. I will repeat: a quick way to stimulate small business and raise employment would be to raise the exemption levels: a single line of legislation that doubles the exemption levels. Regulations that apply firms larger than 10 no apply only to those larger that twenty. Similarly, regulations that don’t apply until you get to fifty employees now don’t apply until you have one hundred. This alone would create a very large number of jobs, and pretty well everyone knows it. The capital is out there. And probably no single measure would do more to add to the number of people employed, especially if you cut the amounts paid to people for not working.

Turkey has now fallen into the kind of corrupt state in which police power is used to protect corrupt politicians and protect criminals that Mustapha Kemal Ataturk envisioned when he charged the brotherhood of Army officers to protect the Constitution. They were strictly forbidden from BEING the government; they were instead to come out of barracks and restore honest government in cases of corruption. For a very long time they did that.

The current regime has dismissed the senior officers and interfered with the judicial system, and is now dismissing and jailing prosecutors who have found corruption at the highest levels. The senior officers have been cashiered or jailed; we will see whether the spirit of brotherhood that Kemal Ataturk imparted to his Young Turks survives in the junior officer corps.

winter that never ended — footfall? Dr. Pournelle,

The full article http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129520.700-ad-536-the-year-that-winter-never-ended.html is behind a paywall, but io9 has a summary with excerpts at http://io9.com/what-caused-a-10-year-winter-starting-in-536-1505213873?utm_source=recirculation&utm_medium=recirculation&utm_campaign=mondayPM. The years-long winter that began in 536 is possibly caused by cometary debris left over from the 530 passing of Halley’s comet.

-D

Yes. It has long been pretty clear that something happened to the Roman Empire (at that time divided into a Gothic Western Kingdom and Byzantium) in about that year. Crops failed, production fell, plague came. The Dark Ages descended. Perhaps that was more literal than many think.

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

Has the Sun Gone To Sleep? And thinking about the FDA

By Jerry Pournelle | Jan 19, 2014 - 5:20 pm | Updated: January 19, 2014 - 5:20 pm | View

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View 807 Sunday, January 19, 2014

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

The grandchildren are off to Disneyland and then back home to Washington. Roberta is still in bed, and I’m going to take her out to the doctor Monday. I’m not anywhere near up to normal energy.

Everyone I know – well nearly – has had flu shots yet many of them have come down with this long lingering flu-like affliction, which saps energy. Sudafed takes care of the stopped up nose, but not completely. It takes half the morning to clear the crud out from my sinuses and lungs, and it comes out a little at a time as fairly hardened grey crud. I’m sitting here trying to come up with enough energy to write on a number of interesting subjects I’ve found, but it’s hard slugging.

Has the Sun gone to sleep?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25771510 It is well worth your time to watch the video on Maunder Minimum that comes up when you visit this site. There are paintings of markets set up on the frozen Thames River during the Little Ice Age. It gets cold when the Sun dozes off, as many think it did back then.

Back when I was science editor of Galaxy – well, it really means I wrote the science column, A Step Farther Out – there were a number of articles in both the science and general press on whether the Sun had “gone out”: that is, if there had been a fundamental change in the way the Sun fuses hydrogen into energy. The then current theory of how the Sun works required there to be about 300% more neutrinos than were being detected. Perhaps, perhaps, the Sun had gone out? That there had been a fundamental change in the processing of hydrogen, something that might be restored as the Sun continued to contract; in other words that there might be a cyclical process at work.

Then theorists decided that neutrinos had mass after all, and they could wiggle in certain ways, and when they acted that way we would not expect to see so many of them since some would decay on the way from the Sun to the detector. Everyone was overjoyed. The Sun hadn’t gone out, after all. Of course it took thirty years to come up with a theory that explained why we weren’t seeing as many neutrinos as we had, and there are still dissidents pointing out that the Sun seems to vary in brightness in a cyclical way, and perhaps that has something to do with the neutrino detection rate. Note that a neutrino is pretty close to being nothing at all travelling at light speed. It doesn’t like to interact with anything, and mostly just goes on past without leaving any trace of having been there, so you don’t detect many of them anyway. Billions and billions of them pass through every square inch of everything – including you – every second, but since they don’t interact with you they don’t have any effect. Or at least we sincerely hope so.

One experiment detected precisely nineteen – that’s 19, 1.9 x 10^1 – neutrinos out of some 10^10 coming our way from a supernova in the Greater Magellanic Cloud. Other detectors get larger numbers, but they remain quite small. Given that, the reliability of our estimate of just how many we should be able to see – or of the total flux based on what we do see – is subject to question.

The Maunder Minimum doesn’t refer to solar output, but to Sun Spots, but for all the time I was growing up it was assumed that solar output was lower during the centuries of the Little Ice Age (roughly 1350-1850 AD) and that the Maunder Minimum period (1645 – 1715) right in the middle of it was indicative of something related to that. It was a period of great cold, not just in the northern hemisphere. We know the Viking Warm period was warm in the northern hemisphere through all kinds of observations – longer growing seasons in Europe and China, grape vines in Vinland and Scotland, almanacs, monastery records, and the like. We don’t have much on Africa and the Southern Hemisphere although there are Inca records, sort of, that indicate it was warm there too in Viking times. But the Little Ice Age was global.

So. Has the Sun gone to sleep? If so, what does that mean, and how long will it go on?

For one speculation about life in a time of a renewed Maunder Minimum, I can recommend Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn, Fallen Angels http://www.amazon.com/Fallen-Angels-Larry-Niven-ebook/dp/B005BJTZ1U/ref=sr_1_5?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1390176803&sr=1-5&keywords=Fallen+Angels. The book is largely satire and comedy, but we do some serious speculation in it. It’s also a lot of fun.

For more serious discussion, the last time we worried about reduced solar output a great number of books such as The Genesis Strategy were spawned, and Big Science told us to take it all seriously; but that was before the Great Global Warming Consensus that came about when global temperatures began to rise – by fractions of a degree Centigrade – in the 80’s and 90’s (up to 1997 or so) when they stabilized and may have begun to fall again. We don’t know how long that will go on, either.

Indeed, the latest round of observations confirms what I’ve been trying to say for a long time: we don’t really know where the climate is going. We know we’re pumping a fairly large amount of CO2 into the atmosphere, and it will be around a long time unless we do something about it – plant huge forest areas, encourage plankton blooms in the ocean, stop burning fossil fuels and run civilization on something else – it may well be something to worry about. The one thing we are not going to do, though, is reduce the amount of CO2 mankind puts into the atmosphere until we have new and economical ways to generate energy. We thought we had those in nuclear power, but we seem to have gone into panic mode on that score. We sure don’t have them in wind – very few windmills ever generate enough useful power over their lifetimes to build their replacement. We have only partial source in solar power. It works great to run air conditioners in hot areas, but storage of ground based solar power for use during bad weather and at night is hideously expensive. Electric cars, for instance, will never “save” as much CO2 as was produced in their manufacture – they tend to be coal powered cars.

And of course as I pointed out in A Step Farther Out – the book made up of many of my Galaxy columns http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_8?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=a%20step%20farther%20out&sprefix=A+step+f%2Cdigital-text%2C207 – what used to be called the third world isn’t interested anyway. “Hey man, I get you, now that I got a piece of this industrial revolution action you tell me to shut down the game. Let me tell you what I think of that —“ India and China add far more CO2 every year than the US produces already. And that beat goes on.

But there are some signs of returning sanity to the scientific community. With so many tenure positions and grants dependent on being a Global Warming Believer it will take a while to return to actual science in which theory is made to conform to data rather than data massaged so that it will fit the computer models, but we can have faith that reason will prevail. Especially since the Sun keeps going to sleep…

MS leukemia drug http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303465004579322403405913292

I had hoped to comment on this in some detail, because it illustrates a real problem in attempts to regulate. People willing to be government regulators tend to a certain personality type, a sort of civil service mentality cubed, with doses of megalomania and paranoia thrown in. Now the paranoia is justified: when you make recommendations intended to protect public safety but costing large and powerful corporations billions of dollars, you are going to be attacked if you can be attacked. They really are out to get you, and one thing they will do is accuse you of megalomania. It doesn’t take a lot of that to generate the notion that one might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb, and better not to be hanged at all. Find rigid standards enforced by the courts, and stick to them.

The problem there is when the regulators also reach out as far as they can, no matter what their motive for doing so. It is one thing for the FDA to demand that a product do no unexpected harm; it is quite another for it to say that it must do good. That is: few would disagree that fraud ought to be prevented, and if someone wants to sell snake oil that will cure chilblains, pneumonia, gout, cancer, bad disposition, whooping cough, and measles, something should be done about it because the man is clearly a hoaxer. But what should be done? Put him out of business?

It would seem to be better if the FDA enforced truth: if Ol’ Doc Methuselah’s Genuine Snake Oil says it contains snake oil, then it better contain actual oil of actual snakes, or it is fraudulent. What it claims to be able to do is another matter. I’d be satisfied with a notice that “The FDA requires us to state that no one in their right mind should take this stuff. We have seen no evidence that this cures anything, and there is plenty of reason to believe it’s going to poison you. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. The Federal Drug Administration and the Bureau of Public Health have rated the value of this as JUNK. Have a nice day.”

Of course that won’t stop some people from selling the snake oil, but then I wouldn’t prohibit states and cities and counties and villages from having stronger ordinances about the stuff. I’m not in favor of snake oil cure-alls, but I do worry about too much power for the FDA.

This drug is a case in point: Europe and Canada have decided that it may well be valuable for treating MS, more so than the “standard treatments”. But the FDA is stuck with the ritual of the Double Blind Experiment. The problem is that this stuff has well known (and unpleasant) side effects, making “double blind” impossible : the treating physicians will know, absolutely and without doubt, which of their patients are getting the new experimental treatment and which are getting placebos and which are getting the old and not very effective standard treatment. Any patient with minimum curiosity and access to the Internet will also know whether she is getting the experimental treatment or not. If they know it’s a sugar pill they won’t be rigorous in taking them and may stop altogether; their hearts sure won’t be in it. There goes the last value of the double blind experiment.

Of course you might devise a placebo that makes people as sick as the treatment but which can’t possibly do them any good, and I expect there are regulators who might think that a good idea, but we don’t need to go there.

One can come up with ways to except this procedure from the usual rules and probably Congress will do so when enough Americans flee to England or Germany to get an MS treatment that has a chance of working, but it doesn’t solve the fundamental problem: we may all agree that FDA ought to have power to protect from harm, but assuring effectiveness is a different and larger power, and prevents informed patients from trying measures of a last resort. We dealt with such a bureaucrat in ESCAPE FROM HELL, and few think we mistreated him.

And it is late afternoon, and this small amount exhausts me, and yes, I know I’ve done better. I expect to be getting better. I sure wish there’d been a shot for the brand of flu I got instead of what they protected me from last October…

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

Distributist economics, Social Credit, NSA, health, climate, and other interesting mail

By Jerry Pournelle | Jan 15, 2014 - 11:30 pm | Updated: January 15, 2014 - 11:30 pm | Mail

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Mail 806 Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Alas, much of this will be short shrift, but the mail keeps collecting and I haven’t time to do the comments I had planned. But I did find enough energy to make some comments as you will see.

On negative income tax and such, you recently wrote "The trick here is to make the basic minimum large enough to allow one to live, but not in luxury or even in excess comfort".

When I looked into the area, it strongly appeared that a sustainable system needed it to be a little less than that, as it had to hit a sweet spot where top up wages could be low enough to let practically everybody live, but practically everybody would have to work to get them and practically everybody could price themselves into low enough top up wages to get work. If you do hit the sweet spot, G.D.P.

actually goes up and there are no continuing aggregate costs, but if you miss it by much you just can’t afford it for long. Even when you do hit it, big problems come from churning funds (moving aggregate gains around while goring as few people’s oxen as possible, also allowing for transaction costs) and getting through a transition without people falling through the cracks before everything comes right, which is why I prefer a negative payroll tax approach.

Yours sincerely,

P.M.Lawrence

Actually there’s no proof that it will work at all. Distribution of confiscated property and income to go equally to all does break up concentration of wealth and power, and tends to increase the middle class, which is vital to any kind of mass republican form of government. The question is, will enough people work when work is no longer required to make a living? Some, we know, will not. Some will work but not at anything others would pay them much to do: will that help build an economy? Tocqueville saw that voluntary work through what he called ‘the associations’ could prevent the enormous growth of government power and bureaucracy that was even then consuming Europe. Claudius invented a sort of civil service using freedmen rather than citizens, and that made the Empire stable for a long time; of course it replaced the self-government of the Republic but that had long been lost anyway.

Dr. J,

You say:

"Fine tuning can contain refinements like a poll tax: you are paid enough in the basic entitlement to afford a poll tax, say on the order of $250 a year. If you do not choose to pay it, you do not vote, nor can anyone pay it for you: it is paid through the same system that pays you the entitlement."

Wasn’t this sort of ‘abrogation’ of rights settled long ago as unconstitutional?

I get facetious and say some sort of thing like, "Yes that is all well and good, but I’d rather have that $250 and the ability to vote myself a larger payout from the treasury…"

-p

Oh there are constitutional amendments that prevent poll taxes now, but a distributist republic that gave everyone a bare living income would be a pretty big change to everything anyway, likely requiring amendments, so we can be permitted one that allows poll taxes.

Winston Churchill once said that the best way to learn to hate democracy was to spend a lot of time with the average voter. Trying to require some qualifications for citizenship and voting has long been a pastime for political philosophers….

Jerry,

A contributor of yours, Bob Holmes, wrote a bit about a stipend… I find that a book I had earlier mentioned to you ‘Beyond this Horizon’ by Robert Heinlein seemed to describe such a thing as this… I’d like to recommend that he read it… Of course it is fiction, but the ‘grand-master’ balanced the same idea with the idea that dueling wouldn’t be dead… interesting if we are talking about future societies in any case…

I do not hate to reference the ‘grand-master’ of science fiction, other than to repeat something he said (about another gov’t system he ‘proposed’). I must paraphrase, but I think it can be found somewhere in ‘Starship Troopers’

We don’t hold on to this system of government because it is the ‘best’ we hold on to it because it works, it works better than anything that humanity has yet known, to make grand strides in the name of ‘progress’ is foolish if we take them as ten-league-boots strides.

I finish my paraphrasing, and perhaps the last bit is a ten-league-boot stride on RAH’s view…

I wonder; if you raise the bar from zero to ‘something above zero,’ if in fact that the new benchmark does not indeed become the ‘new’ zero… I guess you might run into the poor chap who indeed has less than nothing in such a scenario…

-pate

Mr. Heinlein was experimenting with the Social Credit notions of Major Davis: that production exceeded demand and the surplus needed to be distributed in a way that did not concentrate power. This principle is acknowledged by Keynes, but SoCred has so far as I know never ruled a sovereign state, although it did control government in at least one Canadian province. Without control of the whole structure of government SoCred can’t be implemented, so it has never actually been tried. In Beyond This Horizon Robert assumed that it had been.

This is ground control to Major Tom

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=KaOC9danxNo

Recorded aboard ISS by Chris Hadfield. Lyrics somewhat adapted.

Jerry,

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/12/gadget-border-searches-2/

Court Upholds Willy-Nilly Gadget Searches Along U.S. Border

Note: The article makes the point "The judge said it ‘would be foolish, if not irresponsible’ to store sensitive information on electronic devices while traveling internationally." I agree. But that’s because of theft risk and capture of the electronics by the country you’re visiting. It should not justify random searches of electronics by the US on return. This business of collective exceptions to the Fourth and Fifth Amendment is Unconstitutional, no matter what the Courts say. All of that said, I would encourage everyone traveling internationally to either buy a "sacrificial" laptop for the trip and only put the minimal information necessary on it (a practice at least one company of my experience recommends), or backup any personal or business sensitive information onto a disk that you leave at home and delete it from the computer using NSA protocols. (Speaking of which … at this point it’s probably safe to assume NSA has the data anyway…)

Jim

Its good to have time again to read your site and reply to it again. The article forwarded to you about Type 2 Diabetes and using cinnamon to help regulate blood sugar was eye opening for a type One Diabetic. This brings up an interesting point: Do major children’s cereal makers KNOW this and add it to so many as favoring without revealing their true intent? Scary.

I am adding this link http://www.sticksite.com/ to you for a human interest perspective. No doubt you’ve seen these walking sticks made of this wood around and possibly wondered about them. This guy harvests the wood. If you scroll down, you will find a link to his blog and photographs about how he is dealing with a diagnosis of terminal cancer. Worthwhile reading, to say the least.

John

PS I found this email in my deleted so not sure if it went to you. The man in question has since passed.

The stuff on second hand is of some concern. Most of the people who argue against it being dangerous don’t seem to follow reasoning in their arguments properly.

It is without question by now that smoking IS toxic to those who do it, regardless if they inhale or not. using a bit of logic, it would seem that inhaling it secondhand would carry similar risks, its just that these are harder to quantify. How would one go about studying this? Who would be the test population and who would be the control?

All *I* know about this subject is this, and my experience is this: I had two parents who smoked, my father only smoked pipes and some cigars and died at age 58 from a stroke followed by a heart attack a week or so later; my mother has smoked from age 13 to present day at age 79. She currently has fairly significant COPD requiring inhalers to deal with it.

Of 4 children, I had severe asthma from age 6 until age 23, with a brief respite from 18 to 21. My symptoms used to require me to carry a Ventoline inhalor and later on, aerasol steroids for better control. In these years, I had some 4 trips to the hospital to deal with severe attacks, several bouts of pneumonia and many other lesser bouts. I became virtually cured after doing two things:

1. No living with other smokers.

2. Not going to bars, clubs etc. that allowed smoking.

I know, absolutely anecdotal and based upon one sample.

John H Neufeld

I would not undertake to prove that living with smokers has no effect on the non-smoker. My guess would be that there has to be an effect. How much is another story. I quit smoking just before redesigning and rebuilding my house. I designed my new office suite with high cathedral ceiling with exhaust fans, so that Niven could work here. By the time we built it Niven noted I was healthier looking and attributed some of that to my non-smoking, so he quit. My office has a outside balcony/patio, and I require people who smoke to do so outside; but it was after all designed to allow smokers, so a few, such as Bob Bloch and Ginny Heinlein have been invited to smoke if they like – I put out an ashtray for them. But all those who smoked and were among those I invited to smoke here have since died, so my design turned out not to be needed… As I grow older I find being in the presence of smokers more and more annoying, and it makes me reflect on how I must have appeared to my non-smoking comrades in the days when I smoked constantly.

add-on to Couv’s last comment

Jerry,

An add on to Col Couv’s last posted comment on the 27th… During the

transition back to "peacetime" ops, don’t forget the practice of proving

that your efforts have a larger impact on the organization as a whole by

giving people outside of your immediate workplace more things to do.

Nothing gets a Capt or Maj more kudos than doing something with effects

outside their wing/base, and the easiest way to show an impact is to create

a time consuming program that everyone else has to do, and getting it

codified in command or force-wide regulations so it CAN’T be ignored.

Sometimes it seems like that’s how folks get promoted nowadays, making more

work for everyone else or coming up with ways to interfere with other people

doing their jobs.

As an example, I offer up an old USAF services regulation that dictated when

particular types of alcohol may be served/consumed on base. This regulation

was based on "normal" desk-clerk working hours, with no regard to ops or

maintainers who may be on wildly varying shifts. Per this regulation, even

if a pilot worked all night and went off duty at 10am, he could not share a

beer with his fellow pilots in the squadron heritage room (pronounced "bar")

prior to going home until after 11am, and he could not drink anything harder

than beer or wine until 4pm. But that pilot would be reaching his 12 hour

"bottle to throttle" rules before it was legal to drink anything on base, so

the valuable team-building BS sessions that *should* take place after work

in a fighter squadron wouldn’t happen, per regulation. At least they

wouldn’t happen, if pilots paid any attention to stupid rules written by

shoe clerks that somehow don’t affect anyone but pilots. Shoe clerks get

promoted by making more work for everyone else to do, and operators get

practice solving tactical scenarios by figuring out how to avoid/ignore

stupid shoe clerk regulations. The relationship between the wolf and the

sheep is vital to both populations, but if given a choice the sheep would

vote the wolf out of a job.

E-books vs. paper

Jerry,

I received a Barnes & Noble gift card for Christmas. I’ve been browsing their web site and noticed something that is interesting to me.

I’ve noticed that a number of paper books are cheaper than the electronic version. I have not looked at any Hot off the Press books, just slightly older books. As an example Torchwood: Bay of the Dead shows Nook (e-book) for $9.99 (marked down from $10.99) and an unused hard cover paper copy for $7.42.

The only explanations I have is either they are trying to clear their inventory of paper books or e-Books have become so popular that they can raise the prices to increase profits.

Mike

I don’t think publishers understand the eBook phenomenon very well. I know I would rather read on an eReader on an airplane than carry a book. It will all shake down I think.

Dr. Pournelle,

Any update on the availability of the reader you’re working on? My son

started reading "for real" before age 2, and he’s always looking for

something new to read. He’s about to turn 6 and is in first grade, so I’ve

been keeping an eye out for when the reader is ready for release. I like

sitting down with him while reading books and short stories so we can

discuss life lessons in the stories, and it sounds like the reader will be

perfect for that.

Keep plugging away! I always enjoy reading your work.

Sean

I am down to one last introductory essay, and I would have finished that by now had it not been this flu. I will get that done and up. The Reader is the 1914 California Sixth Grade Reader, which contains classic prose and poetry, with some comments. It is a good supplement to the pap that schools assign now in high school.

Windows 8 impact on platform decisions –

Dear Jerry,

A while back you were about to switch to the Mac as your platform of choice.

Then came Windows 7, and you decided to stick with PCs on a Windows platform.

Now that we have Windows 8, have you changed your strategy?

In my opinion Windows 8 is Microsoft’s coup in its efforts to make Windows the operating system for all machines. I is a step backward. We are forced to settle for the limitations of smaller devices, largely abandoning the capabilities and power of our larger machines in order to force the world into their one-size-fits-all view of Microsoft dominance.

It seems to me that Windows 8 fixes nothing, but breaks much.

Never since IBM has a company been so hated, and not since the IBM giant behemoth’s reign has such a widely utilized company so despised their customers.

I covet your thoughts, sir.

Marty Stephens

I don’t hate Windows 8, but I would not replace Windows 7 with it. I am told that Windows 9 will be an improvement. The fact is that the same operating system is not optimum for desktops and tablets.

fast & furious

Jerry,

Regarding Operation Fast and Furious

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/12/27/atf-agent-sends-shockwaves-across-internet-with-explosive-allegations-about-fast-and-furious-and-brian-terrys-death/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=story&utm_campaign=ShareButtons

http://www.erikrush.com/agent-feds-allowed-brian-terry-killing-to-gain-cartel-operatives-trust/

J

I do not endorse these views, but I do think it worth while to be aware of them.

A question on your website,

Jerry,

I am considering starting up a daybook for me on the web. I note that you use the SIteLock service option.

Do you use it for the ecommerce portion of your site for subscriptions, tipjar, and Roberta’s reading program? Or is there an additional or other reason you are using it?

I also see you have "whois privacy." I am considering it but it is "pricey."

Regards,

Charles

I have to say that I don’t make those decisions, or don’t remember making them. I have a team of experts who handled the transition from Front Page, which I did myself, to the new engine. For a long time my web service was provided by a business web service operated by old friends and fans, and when they decided to get out of that business we went to the new one, again under the direction of advisors, not me. I don’t keep up quite as well as I used to, but fortunately I can manage because I’ve still got advisors who do and who care. It’s nice being me.

hearing aids

Jerry,

I was interested to see what you wrote about the hearing aids you bought recently.

I have moderate hearing loss (being 80 now) and bought two MDhearingaid PRO models a couple of years ago. I was VERY impressed how good they were and suspect they are as good as analogue devices get, judging from the reviews.

I see there is now a MDhearingaid AIR that is a digital model, that sounds like it has all the features of the Costco Kirkland models that you have, but for much lower cost.

Although I don’t have to wear a hearing aid unless doing something like going to a meeting where it is difficult to hear, I’m at the point where I will probably start wearing them all the time. Right now I use ear phones for TV in order not to have the sound up too far for my family and think I get better quality of sound that way.

I think you do your readers a good service bringing up the subject. I would be particularly interested if you would get around to comparing the MDhearingaid line as they are so much cheaper. Possibly they would send you one to do the comparison as they seem a particularly friendly company. I don’t understand why most hearing aids are so expensive and suspect it is driven by what the market can bear and the thought that if it costs more it must be better.

Anyway, see https://www.mdhearingaid.com/shop/hearing-aid-comparisons/

Have a look at both the PRO and AIR models and see the reviews too.

Best regards,

Adrian Ashfield

"And my head is full of cotton wool"…

Genetic engineering has come far if they can plant sheep or extract plant products from animals.

I’ve never heard of cotton wool before. Is it both cool and warm, what are its properties, and where can I obtain some?

Alas it’s not mysterious. Cotton wool is the term we used to use for raw cotton as in the cotton you find in a bottle of aspirin. The term seems to have fallen out of use, but I learned it early…

Ice Follies

You say “I make no doubt there are plenty of explanations as to why the models didn’t show why three icebreakers couldn’t get through in mid summer. They just haven’t come out yet.”

Akademik Shokalskiy was rated as “ice capable”; it wasn’t an icebreaker, shouldn’t have been there, and Professor Tunney who chartered the ship ought to have known that. Stupidity on stilts, that one. Since his wife and children were aboard, we can be grateful that he’s not a Darwin Award candidate.

The Chinese Xue Long wasn’t really an ice breaker, either, although it was more capable. Aurora Australis IS an ice breaker, but apparently only rated for light to medium ice, and the ice they encountered was of sterner stuff, and it had been diverted from more important tasking. We can look forward to the arrival of the USCGS Polar Star, which is enroute from Sidney after its refit; this ship IS a heavy icebreaker, and ought to be able to free the Shokalskiy and the Xue Long. And if it cannot, then we’ll know something important about the coming ice age.

I understand that Tunney had pledged to plant 800 trees in New Zealand to “offset” the carbon generated in his expedition; an NZ newspaper now calculates that it would take 5,000 trees to “offset” the rescue missions.

I can sympathize about the health issues; I’m “recovering” from pneumonia myself. I hope we’re both feeling better soon!

Ken Mitchell

Thanks. I haven’t heard much about the ship in the past week, but then I’ve been hors de combat. I still find it ironic that climate experts couldn’t predict that there would be ice in mid summer precisely where they were going. Having seen “South” I don’t have much desire to go…

Archaeology vs. Physics: Conflicting roles for old lead

http://www.gizmag.com/relics-physics-archaeology-roman-lead/30032/

"The study of archaeology has long been carried out using tools from the physics lab. Among these are carbon-14 dating, thermoluminescence dating, x-ray photography, x-ray fluorescence elemental analysis, CAT and MRI scanning, ground-penetrating sonar and radar, and many others. What is less well known is that archaeology has also made substantial contributions to physics. This is the story of old lead; why it is important to physics, and what ethical problems it presents to both sciences."

I knew about the uses of the high quality steel removed from the sunken ships of the High Seas Fleet, I wasn’t aware there were similar uses for ancient lead shipments.

Graves

Asteroid spotted on collision course with Earth

http://boingboing.net/2014/01/02/asteroid-spotted-on-collision.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

"In fact, the International Astronomical Union says that the asteroid — 2014 AA — has most likely already hit us and burned up in the atmosphere. But here’s the cool part: This is just the second time in history that we’ve spotted an asteroid before it hit us."

Not how I’d characterize it. More like the horrifyingly tragic part is that this is only the second time we’ve spotted one before it hit us. I’d go on to discuss the horrifyingly inept way we don’t seem to have any method of dealing with one when we spot it. Good thing we have such brilliant people in charge to manage this sort of thing for us.

Graves

Kaiser and Obamacare

I have Kaiser group coverage for my company’s three full time employees. Today I got our renewal package. I can keep our current plan and if I do, the rates go down. 7% for the two male employees and 10% for the female employee. I can also convert to an Obamacare plan and possibly get a tax credit, but I didn’t have the time or energy to try to figure out how to compare them to Kaiser.

Good to hear. I continue to collect reasons for having a high regard for Kaiser Permanente. I do think trying to expand it radically would destroy it. Much of the success is in the attitude of the employees there.

‘The models account for none of this. Climate oscillates; the models do not.’

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

Roland Dobbins

I certainly would not advise investing large sums betting that the models are giving correct predictions.

Unregulated markets

Unregulated markets are black markets. Black markets meet the demand for illegal sex, drugs, guns, and sometimes even babies. If you are worried about human meat, I would be concerned about the internet. The internet has already allowed a few weirdos who fantasize about being killed and eaten to meet up with those who fantasize about eating people.

Cynthia Allingham

That is one way to describe it. Thank you.

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

In haste as the grandchildren approach

By Jerry Pournelle | Jan 15, 2014 - 2:31 pm | Updated: January 15, 2014 - 6:18 pm | View

Comments Off

View 806 Wednesday, January 15, 2014

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

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

Roberta thought she had to go to the emergency room at 6 AM this morning. Having been through what she suffers from – she caught it from me – I could understand that, and I didn’t argue. We went out at a good time, shift change, almost no one in the waiting room, so we got lots of attention and didn’t take up resources needed more urgently. Of course even at Kaiser that’s expensive, but it did assure us that she is fundamentally all right, no pneumonia, nothing wrong other than she feels more miserable than she has in a year. It was that way on the third or fourth day with me, and this stuff is tracking through her just like it did with me.

So that used up the day until noon. Now Richard and Herrin and two grandchildren are due here in an hour, and that’s going to be tricky, which means that yes, once again, I am begging off, but I thought I owed you an explanation.

I hope to take this up again when I have more time.

Stephen Tonsor, RIP.

<http://obits.mlive.com/obituaries/annarbor/obituary.aspx?n=stephen-tonsor&pid=169062682>

–

Roland Dobbins

Stephen Tonsor was of the generation of Russell Kirk, one of the philosophers of conservative thinking, whose writings influenced a generation. Of course that was all the more reason for the egregious Frum to “turn his back on him” in his infamous neo-conservative denunciation of the true conservatives. His list included many, including me; we deserved his ire, he said, because we were not zealots for the Iraq Wars. I am not sure who appointed the egregious Frum as the Lord Censor of the Rolls of who may call themselves conservative.

A number of us opposed the invasion of Iraq as retaliation for 9/11. Most of us said at the time that once we have committed the troops to the fray we have no choice but to give them all the support they need: we have not sent them overseas to bleed out in the desert sands. They deserve support, and they deserve a clear mission that they can accomplish so that we may shed this entangling alliance and this involvement in the territorial disputes of the Middle East. Frum would have none of that. If you are not a war hawk you are not fit to be in the honorable company of men like the Egregious Frum.

Dr. Tonsor and I exchanged a brief correspondence after that. He has not written much lately, but he was a good influence on scholars and students at a critical time, and deserves respect from us all. Requiescat In Pace. Et lux perpetua luceat eis.

NASA Image of God’s Hand

Jerry:

First God’s eye, now God’s hand. Once NASA images a few more body parts, we’ll have a pretty good idea of what God looks like.

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2014/01/09/hand-god-spotted-by-nasa-space-telescope/

Doug Ely

It is certainly remarkable.

Greetings and wishes for a fine New Year.

For your pleasure, former Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, off the grid.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/01/roscoe-bartlett-congressman-off-the-grid-101720_Page2.html

Best Regards,

Paul Taggart

I have much to say about the end of net neutrality. You will recall that I was opposed to federal interference in the Internet market place. Some regulation may be needed, but not the ham handed actions of the current bureaucracy. More another time.

Jerry,

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/12/gadget-border-searches-2/

Court Upholds Willy-Nilly Gadget Searches Along U.S. Border

Note: The article makes the point "The judge said it ‘would be foolish, if not irresponsible’ to store sensitive information on electronic devices while traveling internationally." I agree. But that’s because of theft risk and capture of the electronics by the country you’re visiting. It should not justify random searches of electronics by the US on return. This business of collective exceptions to the Fourth and Fifth Amendment is Unconstitutional, no matter what the Courts say. All of that said, I would encourage everyone traveling internationally to either buy a "sacrificial" laptop for the trip and only put the minimal information necessary on it (a practice at least one company of my experience recommends), or backup any personal or business sensitive information onto a disk that you leave at home and delete it from the computer using NSA protocols. (Speaking of which … at this point it’s probably safe to assume NSA has the data anyway…)

Jim

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. I seem to have heard that said before…

And I have to run.

We couldn’t arrange dinner. The kids have been travelling all day, and Richard and Herrin are done in anyway. I find my grandchildren exhausting. Their dog at home is a desert pit bull, so devoted to them that they can ride him although he doesn’t put up with it for long. His solution to being abused is to go away. He is fanatically devoted to them. Sable, with her bad leg, is also devoted to human children, but she can’t run off so easily, so fur pulling is going to get snarls from a wolf. That doesn’t happen often, but it’s worth preventing: which takes a good deal of watchfulness. Anyway, with Roberta still bedridden, and all the kids tired, it works out better that they all go to a hotel for the night. We’ll see them in the morning. Disappointing, but given just how bad off Roberta was this morning, about the best we could hope for. As I said to her a few minutes ago if you can’t be cheered up by grandchildren nothing is going to work. But of course she was. We had a great time. They’ll be back tomorrow for the day.

For reasons I won’t go into I was thumbing through some old View posts, and came across the one I did after the Osama bin Laden assault. There were a lot of unanswered questions a couple of days after that was over. They are still unanswered so far as I know. If anyone knows any of the answers, I’d appreciate mail on that. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2011/Q2/view674.html#Monday