Monday, March 13, 2017

“The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed across the entire world.”

Donald Trump

Between 1965 and 2011, the official poverty rate was essentially flat, while the government spending per person on poverty programs rose by more than 900% after inflation.

Peter Cove

Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for the West as it commits suicide.

James Burnham

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

Every time I think I am recovering from the crud, I have a relapse. This time for sure, as Bullwinkle was fond of saying. I seem to have no more symptoms other than running out of energy; when I expel my tidal air I get wheezing, but some deep coughing clears that out. Maybe I had mild pneumonia, but I doubt it; friends tell me they had this cried for six weeks. But the weather is nice outside, and much of the domestic stress at chaos manor has been rectified, so things can improve rapidly. We have adjusted the staff taking care of Roberta, and the reconstruction of the house is in order.

I should get some time in the Monk’s cell, giving me a chance to run through Mamelukes; the interstellar colony book Steve Barnes, Larry Niven and I are working on; and the serious novel on artificial intelligence and robotics John De Chancie and I are doing. I can still work on non-fiction from down here in the chaos – after all, I wrote a lot of the columns in the press room at computer shows and AAAS meetings – but I can’t do fiction with constant distractions.

Speaking of which they are calling dinner. I’ll get this up fast to relieve curiosity; also I have finally recorded the subscriptions sent to the po box; I hadn’t been there in a month – actually in two months. Thank you all for renewing; there was a pretty big bundle.

I’ll have a substantive contribution and an amusing story later tonight.

I posted this much before dinner.

 

I returned after dinner to write the rest of this.

 

I thought I would have a substantive essay.  I have notes for several. unfortunately it is 2150, and I have had no time to work on it.  There are several things to contemplate. One is technical: the best keyboard I have found to work with is the keyboard of the ASUS ZenBook. The keys are large, larger than the keys of the Logitech Bluetooth keyboard I use on my main machine, but it’s a laptop; it doesn’t have the enormous disk capacity of my main machine, and maybe I just have a prejudice for big desktops; on the other hand, I can write faster on the ZenBook’s keyboard, and the ZenBook has at least as fast a CPU as does Eugene (this machine). On the gripping hand, Eugene has a lot of customizations; it has a big set of spam filtering rules, and a lot of junk mail addresses I have no idea of how to transfer to a laptop. It has a number of AutoCorrect rules that let me type faster with fewer corrections. It took a while to build that and I’d hate to lose it, but I have no notion of where that AutoCorrect table is stored. I suppose I can find it, and many of the other things on Eugene I want on a main machine, but since my stroke I am very nervous about starting big projects that I don’t really know how to do; that’s probably why I no longer do the monthly computing column. Intimidated; of course the most popular feature of the column was my log of attacking big problems and bulling through to a happy ending, but now I’m not so confident of the happy ending.

All of which argues that I should do that, and write up the experience in Chaos Manor Reviews, and I suppose I ought to do that. My experiments with keyboards since the stroke took away my touch typing capability have led me to the conclusion that the ZenBook keyboard is superior to any others I have tried – larger keys and better key separation, and all over better layout. It has output to a big screen, which is what I need to edit text – my eyes ain’t what they used to be – and since it has a docking station I can attach an enormous capacity disk to, I can simply copy Eugene’s D drive to that and it will be the ZenBook’s D drive. We’ll see about everything else.

It will take a while, though. For the moment, Eugene with the Logitech K360 will just have to do.

If you have not seen Peggy Noonan’s “A Surprising Show of Confidence” in the Saturday, March 4-5 issue of the Wall Street Journal, it’s worth your time. Ms. Noonan learned her way around the White House in Nixon days, and has remained a respectable – and my many respected – journalist since. She is nominally conservative but often realistic and objective. This is her reaction to President Trump’s speech to Congress, and shows that some journalists might be getting the news of the election in November. I meant to write about her piece a week ago, along with my analysis of the speech, but chaos intervened.

I contemplate three essays. One is probably part of a longer discussion of how to “repeal and replace” Obamacare, and just how much of the income of the healthy do the unfortunates rightfully claim? That is, if I’m healthy and you’re not, how much of your health care bill do I have an obligation to pay? And if I don’t have that obligation, who does? Our grandchildren? Immigrants? If they’re entitled to “insurance whose rates are nor raised by prior conditions” – clearly a losing proposition to any insurance company – someone must pay. Who should it be, and how did they get that obligation?

(And please don’t argue Christian duty. That may well be true, but nothing stops you from donating to Christian hospitals and clinics and for that matter missionary doctors; but that can’t affect non-Christians, nor legal obligations; see all kinds of Supreme Court rulings on that subject.)

One answer to health care problems is reduction in costs of health care. That is quite obvious, and certainly not being neglected by President Trump, but one reason for those high costs, particularly to the elderly, is the costs of drugs and pharmaceuticals in general. For more on that, see

A Doctor to Heal the FDA

Scott Gottlieb may be Trump’s most important nominee.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-doctor-to-heal-the-fda-1489357456

in today’s Wall Street Journal editorials.

[snip]One of Dr. Gottlieb’s priorities will be moving generic medicines to market, and competition is the best way to reduce the price of treatments like the now infamous EpiPen. About 10% of 1,300 branded drugs “have seen patents expire but still face zero generic competition,” Dr. Gottlieb wrote in the Journal last year. “New regulations have, in many cases, made it no longer economically viable for more than one generic firm to enter the market.” Now he can roll back such arbitrary directives.

The press is overcome with relief that President Trump didn’t pick Jim O’Neill, a Peter Thiel pal who supports making drugs available to patients after testing for safety, though not for efficacy. But that idea is far from crazy, especially for drugs that treat rare diseases when no approved options exist. Why should desperate patients have to take a sugar pill so the FDA can satisfy its demand for 100% certainty that a drug works? [snip]

And of course there is room to debate just what phrase in the Constitution gives the Federal Government power to forbid sale of something they think ineffective, when they know it’s not harmful, but there is no proof of ineffectiveness? Why can the Feds forbid snake oil? And of course the argument is that they know snake oil just wastes the badly needed resources of desperate people who have a powerful motive to buy anything that gives them the shadow of a hope.

While I was sick I did participate in some chatter in other conferences; one of them was the SFWA Forums, which are open to members only, and quoting anything said there without explicit permission from the author is explicitly forbidden; a policy I have no argument with, but of course I can give myself permission to quote myself, and I do.

I said:

Someone might develop the technology, but the FDA will require tests costing tens of millions of dollars before they will let anyone sell that technology to users, even if the users have full knowledge that this is a new technology not certified by the government to be effective. That will prevent upstarts from getting into the business, so the already established companies are safe from competition from newcomers. The use of government to prevent new competition to established business has been going on for a long time.  Adam Smith wrote about it.

Once a bureaucracy is established it inevitably cooperates with the established businesses to prevent new entries that would be competition.  The cost of tests for any new drug — not just tests that it does not harm, but that it is “effective” — keeps Big Pharma safe from new competition.  People who see some technique as their holy hope must beg the bureaucrats to let them try it, but they are not often successful.

Exactly why the Constitution gives the Federal Government the right to forbid me from buying a drug is not clear.  The Volstead Act forbidding us from alcohol was declared unconstitutional, there being no grant of power to the federal government to prevent it, and it required the 18th Amendment to make federal prohibition possible.  It sure turned out well.  It was repealed.

There is no Constitutional grant of power for the FDA, but apparently, it can forbid not only narcotics and hemp, but competition to aspirin and for that matter snake oil, although which clause of the constitution gives that power to the feds is not clear.  Perhaps it is a penumbra of some emanation?

This was answered by stating the good intentions of the Congress in giving that authority, and references to Henry VIII and his attempts to ban medical fakes and their drugs.

Yes; but how does the Federal Government get the power to forbid me from buying snake oil if I want to?  Or some new drug product that the FDA doesn’t “know” to be effective, even though there is no evidence that it is harmful? It took decades before the FDA finally approved aspirin as a possible blood thinner. A Glendale dentist had noticed that patients who routinely took aspirin had fewer strokes than those who didn’t. It was amazing how much effort was put into keeping him from saying that at medical conventions. Now, of course, it’s accepted wisdom. I doubt it would be if he hadn’t been a persistent nuisance insisting that it seemed to work.  Of course there’s no big money in preventative use of aspirin.

I have nothing against the FDA having the power to insist on labeling accuracy, and even to require that the seller label a drug “Not Approved by the FDA. Take at your own risk. This could be useless.” Well, I sort of do because I find no grant of power giving the Feds any control over that sort of thing, but we’ve let them do it for so long that it’s well established; but after they insist that the seller tell you that the Government doesn’t think this will do you any good, and maybe it will kill you, why do they employ armed agents to prevent you from selling it when it is properly labeled  “The FDA thinks you ought to avoid this stuff”? Or stronger labels. “The FDA believes this is a scam, and it may kill you.  Don’t buy it.”

I know some desperate people with terminal problems who’d be willing to try all kinds of stuff. Probably none of it will do them any good. They can afford snake oil. Why is this the people’s business? I can understand the government not wanting to make snake oil an entitlement and have to pay for it. I don’t understand why they won’t let me buy it.

You can argue that making them inform you that’s they think it’s worthless is a good idea, but it’s still your business if you want it anyway.

It was pointed out that this power is part of the power to regulate Interstate Commerce, and of course that is the Court decision. Rather wordily and not very brilliantly I said

My question is, where did the federal government get the power to substitute its judgment for mine when it comes to questions of my health or my children’s? 

The obvious solution is to take that away.  I can understand requiring proper labeling (although the source of that authority is subject to debate). I can understand requiring the label to say “The FDA has not approved this. Beware.  But to say it can’t be sold at all because some say it is not effective is another story.  if a doctor I trust says that snake oil is good for me, and the government disagrees, why should the government be involved at all?  Of course it really has to be snake oil, derived from snakes, or it has to explain that it isn’t, it’s really just swamp water; but isn’t even that the province of the states?

At which point came an eloquent assertion of people’s rights to be protected from fraudsters and snake oil salesmen who drain away the resources of people who desperately need them.

To which I said:

Because some citizens are incompetent all citizens must be deprived of the power to make what government thinks is a bad decision.  Understood.  Alas, I cannot agree.

Hardly the most brilliant argument I have ever made, but there it is. I did get one chap to say he agreed with me, this being Liberalism vs. Libertarianism; not precisely what I was arguing. There followed a long discussion of Liberalism vs. Libertarianism, and a protest that this was not assertion of control over people, but protecting them from obvious harm.

Since I am neither Liberal nor Libertarian, I wouldn’t know.  I thought I was pointing out that protecting people from things they don’t want to be protected from looks a lot like control. Children need to be protected from pederasts. One of those protections is jailing people who have child pornography on their hard disks; even cartoons of child pornography. How it got there is of no concern; claiming you didn’t know it was there is no defense.

In a case forty years ago, a chap was suspected of embezzling from a bank; also with mail fraud; both federal crimes. There wasn’t enough evidence to get a search warrant, but the feds were morally certain that he was guilty and a search of his house would prove it.  A federal postal inspector mailed him, registered mail, some kiddie porn (printed; this is before the Internet). The chap had to sign for it. Now they had absolute proof that he had kiddie porn in his house, obtained a warrant from a friendly judge, searched his house, ignored the porn but found plenty of evidence of embezzling, and charged him.  I expect it would be easier now to download a video file to someone, and in these days of terabyte hard drives it would not be noticed until discovered by a search team…

Good way to protect people?

Yes, often people do need protecting, and law officers need a victory over very clever criminals every now and then. Government is a positive good, not merely necessary. No one wants to live in a Hobbesian society where life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Hobbes solved that problem: absolute monarchy. He protects you, you submit to him.  In 1648 the English decided that had gone too far. Then they found they needed the King after all, and brought his son back. In 1688 the decided they needed a king, but not that one, and came up with a new balance between King and Parliament. That experiment was still going on in 1776. The Convention of 1787 had all that in mind when they drafted the Constitution (sorry to repeat what used to be taught in 5th grade). It’s always a balance between government doing too much, and places where anarchy reigns and it does too little. There are always people who think we have too much government and those who think we have too little. We will hardly settle that here.

I was trying to point out that people with perfectly good motives for protecting others do end up controlling them for their own good, and sometimes the protected people resent the hell out of it.

There followed a long discussion of child pornography laws irrelevant to this discussion, as well as discussion of various food supplements not approved by the FDA which some people found helpful and some did not. There was other chatter on that subject. You are very likely sick of the subject, but there’s a point to this long exposition (other than a desire to give you something I wrote while neglecting you; I do know it’s not my best).

Much of that discourse was in response to some well-made arguments I regret I cannot quote either the assertion or my answer without skating closer to the rules than I care to go. At one point, I said:

Here in southern California we have either a severe cold or bit-worse-than-moderate-flu going around. Laid me low for a week, and I find that many friends have lost four or five weeks to it;.  One couple eventually developed pneumonia. I have found Alka-Seltzer Plus, sudafed, and lots of down time the only things that work, and I’m slowly climbing out of it, but it’s quite real. I credit the myriad pills I take daily with keeping it from being as severe with me as it was for some of my younger friends.

We come now to the close of this, and the point. There was a long and impassioned defense of the good intentions of the authorities, and the good work they do. I replied:

Surely there is a way to let people mind their own business that doesn’t involve sending SWAT teams to raid a business for selling things that aren’t harmful? Particularly if they are clearly labeled?  I’m of the opinion that you should be able to sell snake oil so long as it is properly labeled; indeed, I have no objection to a label that says “The US Government believes the claims made for this stuff are ridiculous and absurd, and a waste of your money”  — and that it contains what it says it is, namely actual snake oil. 

Jailing doctors for prescribing off label — there aren’t enough billion dollar tests of the effectiveness of this for a particular disorder that it might work on, but you can prescribe it for something else — seems to me a bit of a stretch and a power I can’t find in the Constitution.  Whether a state can do that I can’t say.

The urge for well meaning people to mind someone else’s business for their own good is fairly strong.

The states may have inherited the crown powers of Henry VIII, but the federal government got only those granted in the Constitution, as witness the failure of the Volstead Act until the passage of the Prohibition Amendment, whereupon the feds could protect people from drinking alcohol. A well meant act with side effects severe enough that the Amendment was later repealed.

John Adams said that in America we believe that each man is the best judge of his own interests; of course he was speaking of the nation as a whole, not of the states with their inheritance of crown powers which used those powers in quite different ways one from another.

It is always good to protect small children from profit seeking capitalists, but how does that apply to protecting Jim Baen and me from SAMe, which we had to have brought to us from Italy where it was sold on the open market but prohibited in the US?  Now of course it is open market here in the US, but for years it was confiscated at the border if detected.  Possibly a folly, but one I indulge in.

Good intentions are not always justification for protecting people from their follies — or what others perceive as follies. Like aspirin as a heart attack preventative.

At which point there was a plea from an officer I respect to stop this discussion; no reasons given. I was ready to do so, but it continued anyway, and after other exchanges I said:

But surely there is room for disagreement on the effectiveness of various vitamins and other food supplements?  Linus Pauling was probably wrong about the universal effectiveness of saturation bombing with Vitamin C, but perhaps stupid is the wrong word to apply to a Nobel Prize winner?  And it may be that it is effective on some and not others, but we do not yet know how to distinguish one from another, so we use “psychosomatic effect” to “explain” the actual data that suggests that some do indeed have dramatic cures while others do not?  

Jim Baen found in his search of the literature (mostly from overseas literature) that SAMe has a dramatic beneficial effect, at least on some people.  At the time it was very expensive in the United States because it was illegal; perhaps it was much to the benefit of those manufacturing it to have the United States government involved in keeping the price high?  But it was so popular in some parts of Europe that there was competition in selling it, so the price there was low.  For years, the US spent money preventing the importation of SAMe, and people like Jim Baen and me spent money acquiring it. Eventually the US restriction was dropped, and you can buy it on line at reasonable prices now.  No one ever asserted that it was harmful; only that it was not “effective”; yet a great many people, here and abroad, thought it was effective in many ways.  Perhaps we were fooling ourselves, and the placebo effect was triggered, and there was nothing more to it.  Perhaps, but what little continued research there is suggests otherwise.

The point being, what power in the Constitution gives the Federal government the authority to keep the price high?  Perhaps the states have inherited that power from the Crown, but the Constitution explicitly rejects the notion that the Federal Government (as opposed to the States) inherited any powers at all, and has none not explicitly granted in the Constitution of 1789 as amended. I can well imagine that the Feds can and perhaps should refuse to pay for anything not proven effective by the FDA itself, but that brings up entitlement in general and that is certainly not a subject for this discussion; but not paying for someone’s use of a disputed substance is not the same as having Customs officials seize and presumably destroy a product not shown to be harmful  and in fact widely used elsewhere on the grounds that the FDA has not seen the results of a tens of millions of dollars double blind study of its effectiveness, and Federal officials’ judgment is superior to that of individual citizens.

We went through all this in the California battle over compulsory use of helmets for motorcycle riders.  For years cyclists protested that they have the right not to wear a helmet.  Now they do not, because head injuries use a lot of medical resources, some of those — probably nearly all, now — are provided by public money, and helmet protection is a reasonable requirement.  That has been accepted by most motorcycle associations, reluctantly by some. But surely that argument is far more reasonable than one substituting a public official’s judgment for that of a citizen when it comes to the use of SAMe — or snake oil, for that matter.

The discussion is not unimportant; perhaps it should be transferred to another topic,

That was too much. A SFWA moderator, backed by the officer who had requested that the discussion halt, locked the conference, and it sits in frozen silence. The reason given was that it was too personal, and I was privately informed that there were complaints about me. Since I named no one at any time, I mildly protested that I was unaware of what was personal about it that would be personally offensive to professional writers voluntarily reading a topic no one could possibly feel required to read.

The answer I got was that these discussions upset some members, and that a SFWA forum was no place for political discussions at all. And that’s the point: we have come to this, that a professional writers’ association finds that we can no longer have discussions that include politics because some members (who voluntarily read the topic) find it upsetting, and toxic, presumably because they disagree with the opinions expressed. For the life of me I cannot tell you what professional science fiction writer would find anything I said there personally offensive. Disagree, yes, of course; many disagree; that is to be expected, and it is those the FDA will rally to support the proposition that the FDA should insist that generic prescription of Name Brand drugs whose patents have expired be forbidden until double blind tests of the generic drug’s effectiveness have proved its effectiveness.

I think health care costs can be drastically lowered by letting doctors have more room to try different remedies; obviously only with informed consent of the patient, but medical associations I would suppose will work to assure that; but apparently the entire discussion can’t be discussed in a science fiction professional organization because some members are upset over encountering opinions contrary to their own – and if it can’t be discussed there, where the devil can it be discussed?

I suppose another discussion of immigration enforcement is in order, but nothing will change physics: transporting ten million people to the borders will take time and many resources just to do; and the inevitable legal tangles will take more. Surely it’s best to start with the least desirable? In which case, do we have to let those who aren’t among the worst know they’re safe, at least for years? Or will that just make them bolder in protest rather than calming their fears? Perhaps a random process: undocumented immigrants arrested in a protest face a 5% chance of being deported? But that makes this a farce, and is not what we need.

A new government? Or no government

Dr. Pournelle, hope that you are now on top of the cold or whatever it is… seems to be an epidemic around Northwest Florida as well.
This comes from Sign of the Times (https://www.sott.net/article/345144-A-week-in-the-life-of-the-American-kleptocracy) I submit this without any ability whatsoever to vet or verify. The salient quote seems to me to be this:
“This begs the question: if the government is overstepping its authority, abusing its power, and disregarding the rule of law but no one seems to notice—and no one seems to care—does it matter if the government has become a tyrant?
Here’s my short answer: when government wrongdoing ceases to matter, America will have ceased to be.”
In this article our current form of government is represented as a “Kleptopcracy” meaning a rule by thieves and enforced by “techotyrany” (ie: CIA, NSA).
The examples quoted range far and wide but all seem to tie into our current political malaise and mistrust of government in general.
John Thomas

 

I am no anarchist, nor am I Liberal or Libertarian; and having been read out of the Conservative movement I feel no need to defend them. I do think there are elements of a ship that exists only to serve its crew in what we have at present. And Bunny Inspectors?

WikiLeaks and Umbrage

Dear Mr. Pournelle,
I’ve been following a useful series of articles in the (London) Times regarding Russian cyberwarfare. An article this Sunday caught my attention (http://www.thetimes.co.uk/past-six-days/2017-03-12/focus/yo-bro-im-totally-watching-you-zcxtckcq9) Here are a few brief quotes.
‘But perhaps the most significant element of the cache was the claim by WikiLeaks that the CIA’s “umbrage” division” had been “fabricating” Russian hacks against the West. …
‘One British intelligence source told The Sunday Times that this was the key “revelation” in the WikiLeaks dump, and would be used to discredit western-backed allegations about Russian cyber-attacks on Britain and the U.S.
‘The source added: “Winston Churchill famously once said: ‘In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.’
“In the Russian manual of disinformation, lies are so precious they should always be attended by a bodyguard of truth. Assange’s Russian masters have inserted a conspicuous lie in these documents, which are otherwise largely accurate.
“Wikileaks claims that the Americans have stolen Russian cyber-weapons are are now using them. Doubtless this line of defense will be used in Washington in the coming months by parties with an interest in muddying the waters.”
‘The party with the greatest interest in Washington in “muddying the waters” is Russia …’
And further down:
‘Michael Hayden, former CIA director, said “I’m now pretty close to the position that WikiLeaks is acting as an arm, as an agent, of the Russian Federation.”‘
I would use WikiLeaks as a source of information extremely cautiously; if at all.
Yours,
Allan E. Johnson

I distrust most intelligence sources; one of my jobs was once to sort out credible technological threats. There is a strong incentive for spies to find what they’re looking for. And of course an astonishing number of agents on the other side are turned by ours, leading to the obvious speculation…

Health Insurance

Dear Dr Pournelle,

So far I have resisted the temptation to comment on the Trump Presidency. But the following comments on Obamacare vs Trumpcare might be of interest.

The Irish healthcare system is hardly ideal, in fact it’s a shambles. Public healthcare (funded from general taxation) is great for certain things but not so good when there’s a shortage of hospital beds or specialists. Private healthcare, which is funded by individuals who can afford to pay the premium, effectively allows you to jump the queue and get a better level of care. We have several providers in Ireland.

While private health insurance is frequently paid for or subsidised by employers, it’s not tied to the job. So if I quit work or change jobs, I can contact the insurer and agree to continue my payments and thus not break my cover. I can switch providers or change plan with no break in cover. If I am starting cover (for the first time or after a break in cover) or if I increase my level of cover, then pre-existing conditions are excluded for a minimum of 6 months. So buying cover right after I find a nasty lump won’t work.

This isn’t all ideal. While healthcare in Ireland is typically 5x cheaper than the US, some specialised treatments and drugs are not available. And even the private system can have capacity issues. Premium costs are going steadily up. Public healthcare staff here move to other countries where working conditions are better and salaries higher.

I do not envy the legislators trying to sort out the system in the US. In Ireland there have been moves politically to eliminate the existing two-tiered system but so far nothing has come of it.

Best wishes,

Simon Woodworth.

I don’t envy them either. There must be ways to lower costs.

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

Wednesday, March 8, 2017

Between 1965 and 2011, the official poverty rate was essentially flat, while the government spending per person on poverty programs rose by more than 900% after inflation.

Peter Cove

We are a nation of assimilated immigrants.

Immigration without assimilation is invasion.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana

Partial posting, 1730 Wednesday; letters added at 2140; post complete.

This cold/flu hangs on longer than I thought, and there are construction workers making startling noises at random intervals as they work on my house now that the rains are over, so I’m not sure what we have here, or what order to present it in. I have a massive amount of interesting mail on subjects that need comment, and not a lot of energy to make comments with. I’ll do the best I can.

The present discussion is “replacing” Obamacare. Since that is impossible, it is difficult to discuss. Obamacare cannot easily be replaced, because of its most popular feature, which appears to be endorsed by Trump: forbidding insurance companies from denying you “insurance” or charging you a higher premium because you have pre-existing conditions. Of course a policy they have to sell you despite pre-existing conditions is not insurance at all; it’s a subsidy.

Imagine if they banned charging more for “pre-existing conditions” when selling home fire insurance, or auto collision insurance, or property liability insurance. You have bought no fire insurance. Your house catches fire and is severely damaged. You go to the local insurance office and ask to buy a fire insurance policy which will cover your present problems. They would laugh at you. So you get the local legislative body to insist they sell it to you. They do: the premium is the cost of your house repairs, plus some other fees. When you protest, the agent explains, politely, that the insurance company is in business to make money, and they cannot sell you a policy on which they know up front that they will lose money; thus the price.

Now you go back to the legislature and get them to forbid the insurance company from charging you more than your neighbors pay just because you have a “pre-existing condition,” namely that your house has already burned down.

The company thinks about this, then divides your costs by the number of policyholders that it has, and adds the resulting number to the cost of a policy. If this case involved only you, and the company was large, the additional price would not be very great, and perhaps few would notice; but if thousands of uninsured people whose houses had already burned came in insisting that the company sell them a policy at the rate anyone else could buy a policy for, insurance prices would skyrocket; as indeed they have under Obamacare. Requiring everyone to buy the policy under pain of a fine would help only if (1) the fine were large enough, and (2) there were enough people with enough money who could afford the policies.

If not, the plan fails again: either they pay the fine and buy a policy if and only if their house burns, or they plead poverty and can’t buy it at all, then ask for welfare to pay for their ruined dwelling. Meanwhile, that local insurance company, with many of its fellow companies, has got out of the fire insurance business, and does something else. My neighbor finds himself unable to afford fire insurance, and can only hope and pray that his house does not burn.

Of course, we have few politicians silly enough to do this with fire insurance, and insurance companies abandoning health care insurance still sell fire insurance.

I could go through the same arguments for auto insurance: you don’t get to buy collision insurance after the accident totaled your car, and if you got the law changed to require the insurance company to sell you a policy at the same rate that someone without a pre-existing wreck would pay, everyone’s collision auto insurance would skyrocket. The same with liability insurance: if you were involved in a wreck that destroyed you neighbor’s car, and you didn’t have enough liability insurance to cover it, do you think you could now buy some? And if you passed a law requiring the auto insurance company to sell it to you despite the pre-existing condition, what would happen to auto insurance rates?

Turn now to health insurance. The old story about pre-existing conditions generally concerned someone who had health insurance – generally provided by an employer – and lost it because he changed employers. He had, since his last insurance application examination, developed a condition: cancer, perhaps, which was discovered in the examination for the new policy. If he had not changed jobs, he would have remained insured, and when his dread disease manifested itself, his insurance company would have had to pay. Now he has no insurance since the new policy is denied due to pre-existing conditions. He is in big trouble, and through no fault of his own.

That sort of situation might be amenable to legislation; some combination of liability assignment, some to the individual, some to the previous insurance company, and some to the new one. It could get tricky, and I won’t attempt a plan here; there would have to be an interval between employments when premiums would continue to be paid (COBRA worked in our case) and perhaps the new company could be mandated to accept applicants with a similar policy with a different company: after all, he was insured, he didn’t have the pre-existing condition when he bought the first policy, and had it been discovered while he still had the old policy – etc.

But that is not what Obamacare did, and the mandate to accept, and with no additional premium cost, “pre-existing conditions” is very popular among Republicans, Democrats, and Mr. Trump. The problem is that this is not insurance at all. It is an entitlement, and an expensive one at that. I see no way to keep that provision and “replace” Obamacare. The Republicans will have to bite the bullet: admit that you can’t “insure” against something that has already happened. If you got a policy as a non-smoker and took up the habit of smoking, would you expect your rates to go up? What about obesity? You weren’t fat when you bought the first policy, but you are now; yet the second company cannot charge you more for this (now) pre-existing condition? That’s nonsense.

Insurance companies are in business to make money. One way they make money is shrewd investment of the large pools of money they collect, but they must be very careful on those investments, because at any time there may be enormous cash demands from an insured who has suffered a stroke, or heart attack, or automobile accident. The mathematics of insurance are complex, and different companies use different mathematics: they have in essence bet that you will pay them before your claim, in premiums, as much or more as they are now going to pay for the claim. They make their profits largely on careful investment of that money before the claim.

If an early claim is fairly certain – pre-existing conditions – there is a near certainty that they will lose money on the policy. There is no reason for them to sell you that policy, no matter how much you want to buy it. The inducement in Obamacare was that making everyone buy the policies would let them profit because everyone does not need insurance; it has a negative expected value for young healthy people. (Actually, it has a negative expected value for all purchasers, but that’s another discussion: there are still good reasons to take out insurance policies. This has been discussed for a very long time, a great deal of it during the Chancellorship of Bismarck.

We are not going to settle the issue here, but be aware that replacing Obamacare and keeping the requirement that they not charge more for pre-existing conditions is impossible, because what emerges is not insurance at all, but a complex scheme of subsidies not only to the “insured” but also to the insurance companies. Those subsidies have to be paid either with taxes or borrowed money; there is no other source. An enormous boom in the economy with a great increase in productivity may mask this while it lasts, but booms don’t last forever; and the productivity increases may be due to increased use of robots; that makes for more goods, but fewer jobs. But that, too, is a matter for a different discussion.

(I am presuming that we will never levy tribute on the neighbors, or send the armed forces out to loot and sack and bring home what they can’t hide which gives us revenue neither borrowed nor taxed.  Of course that has been done, by democracies as well as tyrannies, but it is not a practice usually employed by the United States.)

You can repeal Obamacare, complete with the restrictions insurance companies can place on applicants with pre-existing condition; but you cannot “replace” it with anything keeping that restriction except with massive subsidies which at present we cannot afford.

What is the EM Drive? And Does it Really Work? Scott Manley

Scottish astronomer Scott Manley in sixteen minutes covers the original peer reviewed paper on EmDrive, how the experiment detailed in the paper worked,the implications for physics if the reported observations in the paper are repeatable, and why he is still a skeptic, while admitting that he believes it would be, as surfers might put it, “way hanging low cool” if it works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGcvxg7jJTs

Petronius

 

That’s my view, but of course I have no data and don’t experiment. Extraordinary claims – and this is certainly extraordinary – require extraordinary evidence. I would very much like to see a series of crucial experiments to determine once and for all if we have thrust without mass ejection. It may be that something is ejected; but if it can keep it up for weeks without noticeable mass loss, something interesting is going on.

Cheap access to interplanetary space changes the economic situation something wonderful.

Irrationality in the election process

Dr Pournelle

Donald Trump’s primary run and election shocked me. By shocked, I mean more than surprised. So much so that I changed my views on politics. Where before I believed in making a choice of candidate based on reason, Trump showed me that I was mistaken. (In this sense Trump followed Hitler, and I do not mean that as an insult. Like Hitler, Trump treated the election as irrational and acted accordingly. The result validated his approach.)

IMO Trump’s primary run demonstrated that the electoral process is not rational. If he ever showed consistency in his approach to different candidates, I failed to see it. Instead, it seemed to me that he shifted with the winds and worked to project an image that would garner the most votes at the moment. Opportunistic populism, if you will.

Trump’s approach in the general election changed again. Trump’s attacked Hillary Clinton by echoing the perceptions of the people of Middle America. She never answered his attacks, possibly because she thought a response to be beneath her dignity, possibly because she had no answer; but in either case, Trump damaged her. Clinton played well in California. Trump played well in the swing states that decided the election.

Anyway, that is my view of the election. I shall be grateful to hear yours.

Live long and prosper

h lynn keith

That may be the first use of Hitler in rational discourse I have seen in some time. I am not sure I have a complete understanding of the Trump strategy; like nearly everyone else not already in the Trump camp, I thought he had no path to the White House.

CIA Data Dump

I’m still waiting for the real story with this; I see nothing that I didn’t know or expect. But, I saw one thing that interested me. The spying software for the Samsung smart TV was developed by CIA and MI5

— as opposed to MI6. I suspect you know the difference and it was not surprising to see a foreign US intelligence service cooperating with a domestic UK intelligence service to learn new ways to spy on folks. I always say the UK is on the cutting edge of tyranny and it’s not meant as an insult but an observation.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

I am not at all sure what we ought to be doing, who ought to be pardoned, and who ought to be prosecuted.

Comment unnecessary.

https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/index.html

Richard White

Del Valle, Texas

See also https://www.infowars.com/cia-turned-samsung-smart-tvs-into-listening-devices-wikileaks-dump-reveals/

 

More on the “Russian” hack

From Wikileaks’ release of CIA documents. Could this be the source of the “Russian” hacks?

“The CIA’s Remote Devices Branch’s UMBRAGE group collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques ‘stolen’ from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation.

With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the ‘fingerprints’ of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from.”

Richard White Del Valle, Texas

Trump Wiretaps Timeline 

Jerry,

There’s a ten-step timeline of the apparent Obama Administration wiretapping of the Trump campaign, based on what’s public so far, at

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/03/03/mark-levin-obama-used-police-state-tactics-undermine-trump/

Step 4, “October: FISA request” is particularly interesting.

“The Obama administration submits a new, narrow request to the FISA court, now focused on a computer server in Trump Tower suspected of links to Russian banks. No evidence is found — but the wiretaps continue, ostensibly for national security reasons, Andrew McCarthy at National Review later notes. The Obama administration is now monitoring an opposing presidential campaign using the high-tech surveillance powers of the federal intelligence services.”

No evidence found, but wiretaps continue? “..for national security reasons”? Of a Trump Tower computer server? So, they were apparently reading the campaign’s email? Starting when?

Also, “wiretaps” plural? Were they just looking at that one server the FISA court had authorized (after shooting down a broader surveillance request)? Or might they have been casting a wider net? Listening also, say, to phone calls?

I have to wonder where the information came from that Senator Sessions had in fact had a meeting (plus an apparent casual public encounter) with the Russian ambassador.

The obvious source would be, covert surveillance of that ambassador.

If so, that would presumably be classified information. How did it come to the Post?

And if not, then was the information from covert surveillance of Senator Sessions? If so, done by who, and on what authority?

I’m beginning to think some people might have taken the assumption they had no chance of losing this election and run just a little too far with it.

Then instead of just covering up after November, doubling down.

This is rapidly getting very interesting indeed.

Porkypine

 

Trump Wiretaps Timeline

Jerry,

And here’s a detailed look at the legal implications if the Obama Administration indeed sought and used FISA court warrants to wiretap the Trump campaign, then disseminated (rather than instantly deleted) information on US citizens from these taps that was NOT “information necessary to protect the United States against actual or potential grave hostile attack, war-like sabotage or international terror.”

http://lawnewz.com/high-profile/yes-obama-could-be-prosecuted-if-involved-with-illegal-surveillance/

Short version: This lawyer says both obtaining the second, narrowly-targeted FISA warrant without mention of “Trump” and any dissemination of information gathered from it are both serious crimes.

One more addition to the timeline also – before the first, named-Trump attempt to get a FISA warrant failed (only the 13th such refusal out of over 35,000 such requests) the previous Administration is supposed to have tried for a wiretap warrant through the ordinary courts. That initial request is said to have also been turned down for complete lack of evidence.

interesting times

Porkypine

Of course there is denial that any warrants were requested, and definite denial that if any were President Obama was unaware of them. I am not aware that we have heard from Sally Yates, who presumably would have been involved. As you say, interesting times.

2110 Wednesday: it now appears there was a FISA warrant in October, according to a usually reliable but not official government source. The last message we had from General Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, was that there were no FISA warrants obtained regarding the Trump organization; now we are told that there was one, and also a “regular court” warrant as well.  No evidence was found of any collusion between the Trump Organization and Russia.  During the Cold War the search for American academics and government employees influenced by or under the discipline of Communism or the Communist International was very controversial.

 

random thoughts on health care 

I may have thought of a possible solution to the conundrum of uninsured pre-existing conditions (and unpaid emergency room visits, etc.)

The government will advance money to cover the condition, at prevailing rates of Medicaid/Medicare reimbursement, assuming the risk of non-payment, but will manage collections as if the present value of the advance is a tax to be recovered (complete with penalties and interest) from the patient or their estate.

Otherwise manage the health insurance industry so as to minimize costs of services provided, with high copays (or total cost out of pocket) for “lifestyle”-induced charges such as smoking, obesity, drug abuse, and the consequences of risky sexual practices.

J

I doubt that would work. but I am not sure why; perhaps when I am better recovered.

 

I was sent this link in mail and promptly lost the message.  I did open the link.  It is an interesting account.  Note, though:

 

 

Why Did Greenland’s Vikings Vanish?

Newly discovered evidence is upending our understanding of how early settlers made a life on the island — and why they suddenly disappeared

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-greenland-vikings-vanished-180962119/#zdXOHFpS3vTJov4R.99

[snip]Accordingly, the Vikings were not just dumb, they also had dumb luck: They discovered Greenland during a time known as the Medieval Warm Period, which lasted from about 900 to 1300. Sea ice decreased during those centuries, so sailing from Scandinavia to Greenland became less hazardous. Longer growing seasons made it feasible to graze cattle, sheep and goats in the meadows along sheltered fjords on Greenland’s southwest coast. In short, the Vikings simply transplanted their medieval European lifestyle to an uninhabited new land, theirs for the taking.[snip]

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-greenland-vikings-vanished-180962119/#zdXOHFpS3vTJov4R.99
 

The entire story makes it clear that it was warmer in Viking times than now, which is the important point.  No hockey stick.

Stephen’s proposed cure is worse than the disease

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/stephen-hawking-world-government-stop-technology-destroy-humankind-th-a7618021.html

Also, Stanley Schmidt said it (or a version of it) over 20 years ago.

Bottom line, the only way to ensure that individuals never achieve the power to destroy the world is a world tyranny that stops all research and scientific training. Which in and of itself would inevitably end in the United Nation’s “Agenda 21” extreme depopulation agenda. Even without Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

The species-level solution is to get off planet as rapidly and widely as possible, and having enough people as broadly trained as possible in ways to recognize and defeat the symptoms of individual – and/or – state-sponsored WMD megalomania, with (at most) enough government to coordinate their efforts without curtailing the liberty or learning experiences of the world’s benign citizens.

j

My CoDominium stories have that theme: the CoDominium tries to suppress scientific research.  It is never very successful and eventually flat fails.

 

Tapping Trump

Hello Jerry,

I think the Obamunists are being a bit ‘cute’ when they deny ‘tapping Trump’s phones’.

That may in fact be accurate.

They don’t have to ‘tap’ his phones, specifically.  They tap EVERYONE’s phones—and all their other electronic communications—and archive the data.

See this:  https://theintercept.com/2016/11/16/the-nsas-spy-hub-in-new-york-hidden-in-plain-sight/

Then, considering that you can walk down to Best Buy and purchase 4 terabytes of storage that soak up less than 5 watts, all for $123 (today’s price), look at the capabilities (and power requirements) of this facility while keeping in mind that the el cheapo 4TB drive can archive 16 years of a single phone line.  24/7/365:

https://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/

Remember, this is only the latest, and most highly publicized,  of MANY such facilities operated by NSA.  

What they do, that is illegal, is to to task their insiders in the SIGINT system to search the electronic archives for ANY communications from, to, or about their political enemies that could be used to embarrass or blackmail them and use it for maximum political advantage.  And we see the results.

So, technically, they didn’t ‘tap’ Trump’s phone.  They just searched the archives for every electronic communication from, to, or about him and leaked the most promising results to the press.  

As a reminder, remember the time that Newt was in a parking lot somewhere and there just happened to be an intercept hobbyist near him who had an intercept system in his car, with recorder, who just happened to be scanning along, stumbled across Newt’s conversation, recognized who was talking, understood the importance of what was being said, and started his recorders in time to record the entire conversation?  And of course, being a rabid Democrat, he felt obligated to turn the tape over to the DNC (or some senior Democratic official; I didn’t look the recipient up).  And how, despite the blatant illegality of intercepting and recording private conversations, nothing happened to the fortuitous hobbyist?  We know what happened to Newt, though.

You can believe that story if you want to; I prefer to believe that the bulk NSA intercepts were combed for Newt’s traffic, that particular conversation appeared to be a deadly weapon against him, and the partisan ‘hobbyist’—really? he accidentally ran across Newt’s conversation on his scanner, in his car, recognized his voice, and started his recorders in time to record both sides of the conversation, which occur on different frequencies—simply provided the cover which the MSM (the propaganda arm of the DNC) would run with and defend against all attacks.

Bob Ludwick

 

It does appear (Wikileaks) that the NSA and others have collected a powerful lot of data; how much has been processed is not known.  I am uncertain whether processing already collected data requires a FISA warrant; one thing Congress should discover and publicize.

The New Moon Race? Orion vs Dragon

Dear Doctor Pournelle,

Report that SpaceX has two clients with the money and courage to pay for a flight in a Dragon capsule to the moon and back, on a free return trajectory, late next year.

NASA is also planning to fly its’ first ORION mission in 2019, and to send it into lunar orbit for a week. This would also be the first launch of the new SLS heavy lifter, able to place 70 tons into LEO.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_LLNuLhEXc

Things may finally be moving towards a manned lunar base of some sort, and even better, one where English is not a second language…

Petronius

 

The last Moon Race went well; perhaps this one will?  Of course if EM Drive works—

 

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

Monday, March 6, 2017

We are a nation of assimilated immigrants.

Immigration without assimilation is invasion.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana

The cold I thought I was well on the way to recovery from has continued. No drastic symptoms, but a dread of getting up and not much incentive to work. I managed Friday with story conferences and lunch with Larry and St eve – the hard science novel about interstellar colonization under slower that light conditions continues nicely, beautifully in fact – and Saturday we got to the barber shop for me and hair dresser for Roberta. Exhausting, and Sunday more so, with getting to church and then lunch out afterwards; but again rather exhausting. But we managed it, again with not enough energy left to do any real work. But I am coming up for air, and I’m in that stage where I know I’m recovering and surprised at how long it takes.

I learned from friends at church that this isn’t rare, and I’m doing better than they did. The average recovery time for people younger than me has been five weeks; I’m in the third week, and I’ll be over it soon if not soon enough. It does linger. On the plus side, it rained yesterday – we can use the water – and it’s a beautiful day today. And I did have enough energy yesterday to get most of the bills paid, and do other chores.

I have been reluctant to get to work because the “telephone tapping” imbroglio is so thoroughly complex; worse, there’s damned little solid data. Most of what we know comes from leaks whose source is pretty carefully – often legally – hidden, and the only confirmation has to be inferences.

Let me start with an assumption: Mr. Trump may be crazy, but he’s crazy like a fox. He seldom does stupid things, and very little without reason. I didn’t always assume this, but the campaign convinced me: yes, he had luck, but he was always a step ahead of most of the analysts including his own advisors. My assumption is supported because I know for a fact that it is shared by a number of people I know quite well and have for a long time; even when they don’t know what Mr. Trump is doing, they assume he actually has a purpose, and they are usually correct, and have been many times. To assume that President Trump is an emotionally driven maniac unable to control himself has been the unmaking of more than one of his opponents, and is often precisely what he wants them to believe at various stages of an operation; and if one pays close attention it is demonstrably untrue. His address to the Congress with all its emotional appeals and side shows was masterful; it is likely that it will be studied for years by students of political science.

A second assumption is that Mr. Trump employs his own means of testing leaked information. He has said as much, and there is no reason not to believe it.

That said, let us look at the telephoning tapping story.

It all really rests on this claim: that in June, 2016 and possibly earlier, a FISA court received and denied a request to tap Trump Tower phone, in particular that of Donald Trump himself. This was said to be in regard to an investigation of Russian interference in American affairs. The denial was unusual: it was one of about a dozen requests denied out of tens of thousands of such requests granted in its 33 years of existence.

[FISA Court Has Rejected .03 Percent Of All Government Surveillance …

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/06/fisa-court-nsa-spying-opinion-reject-request

Jun 10, 2013 – FISA Court Has Rejected .03 Percent Of All Government … But the FISC has declined just 11 of the more than 33,900 surveillance requests made by the … about just how much judicial oversight is actually being provided.]

There is no way to confirm or deny much of this, because FISA is, by law, not only very secret, but has to be very careful in allowing intelligence agencies access to American citizen affairs. For one open source on this incident, see the BBC reportage: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38589427 . It’s long, very complicated, and doesn’t tell the full story; and has no confirming sources. It can’t, really, and whatever evidence the warrant request gave would itself be both classified and also protected from publication by law.

Then came the Convention and Mr. Trump became the nominee.

In October, another warrant request was brought to FISA; it is not at all clear who made the application; there are reports that Sally Yates, the Obama holdover who became Acting Attorney General until she was fired for non-cooperation by President Trump, was involved. This warrant application did not name Mr. – then Nominated Candidate – Trump, but it did name some of his immediate associates; this warrant was granted. Once again there is little public evidence to confirm this, and by law there can’t be.

These two warrant applications were leaked, and reported in some news media, but generally were ignored.

On 12 January, 2017, President Obama ordered the NSA to share mush electronically gathered data among the 17 (or more) intelligence agencies; this to include data hitherto denied circulation because it released personal data of American citizens who may have been involved in communications with foreign nationals; such information; by law, is supposed to be destroyed upon. realization that it is not relevant to the purposes stated in the warrant. [The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. 4^th Amendment; for more, look up Writs of Assistance]

This will inevitably increase the probability of leaks, and particularly applies to telephone taps. It was not at the time much noticed, but we may assume it is well known in the White House now.

Then came the Flynn affair, in which Sally Yates warned then President Obama that General Flynn might be blackmailed because he had said that the sanctions on Russia had not been discussed with the Russian Ambassador in their December telephone conversation, and gave the President evidence from a phone tap showing that the sanctions had been discussed. Of course it would be astonishing if the Russian Ambassador had not brought up the sanctions when talking to the National Security Advisor designate. The full transcript was not released – I do not know whether President Trump has seen it to this day – but the subject was, he was told, talked about. This was considered serious; by some, very serious: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-flynn-affair-could-bring-down-trumps-presidency_us_58a33429e4b0cd37efcfed84

Details of Flynn’s conversation with the Russian Ambassador were later leaked to the Washington Post. It is not clear what agency leaked them, but it is a rock solid fact that they were leaked, and that a private citizen’s conversation was recorded by an American agency and those details were leaked to the press.    It was thus very clear that phones were tapped. President Trump then presumably ordered his staff to find out who tapped whom, and who ordered it done; but this is presumption, since I have no evidence, nor do I know what, if anything, they found out.

Finally, Director of Intelligence Clapper has testified that he should be aware of all FISA warrants – he did not say of rejected applications, but of warrants issued – and he is not aware of any concerning Trump Tower, where, according to Newt Gingrich, General Flynn made the intercepted (tapped) telephone calls to the Russian Ambassador.  It is possible but, given the efficiency of the Russian security services, it may be unlikely that the tap was on the Russian Embassy telephone; but that, of course, is possible.  The assumption seems to be that the tap was on a Trump Tower telephone.

Another summary:

One is a report in the BBC from January, which the White House cited as a source. The BBC reported:

Lawyers from the National Security Division in the Department of Justice then drew up an application. They took it to the secret US court that deals with intelligence, the FISA court, named after the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. They wanted permission to intercept the electronic records from two Russian banks.

Their first application, in June, was rejected outright by the judge. They returned with a more narrowly drawn order in July and were rejected again. Finally, before a new judge, the order was granted, on 15 October, three weeks before election day.

Neither Mr. Trump nor his associates are named in the FISA order, which would only cover foreign citizens or foreign entities — in this case the Russian banks. But ultimately, the investigation is looking for transfers of money from Russia to the United States, each one, if proved, a felony offense.

A lawyer — outside the Department of Justice but familiar with the case — told me that three of Mr. Trump’s associates were the subject of the inquiry. “But it’s clear this is about Trump,” he said.

Finally, there was a report in the Guardian, which reported on the supposed June FISA request but could not confirm the October one. (The White House did not cite the Guardian.)

The Guardian has learned that the FBI applied for a warrant from the foreign intelligence surveillance (FISA) court over the summer in order to monitor four members of the Trump team suspected of irregular contacts with Russian officials. The FISA court turned down the application asking FBI counter-intelligence investigators to narrow its focus. According to one report, the FBI was finally granted a warrant in October, but that has not been confirmed, and it is not clear whether any warrant led to a full investigation.

The Breitbart summary, which president Trump almost certainly read, said:

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/03/03/mark-levin-obama-used-police-state-tactics-undermine-trump/

[snip] 1. June 2016: FISA request. The Obama administration files a request with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to monitor communications involving Donald Trump and several advisers. The request, uncharacteristically, is denied.

2. July: Russia joke. Wikileaks releases emails from the Democratic National Committee that show an effort to prevent Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) from winning the presidential nomination. In a press conference, Donald Trump refers to Hillary Clinton’s own missing emails, joking: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing.” That remark becomes the basis for accusations by Clinton and the media that Trump invited further hacking.

3. October: Podesta emails. In October, Wikileaks releases the emails of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, rolling out batches every day until the election, creating new mini-scandals. The Clinton campaign blames Trump and the Russians.

4. October: FISA request. The Obama administration submits a new, narrow request to the FISA court, now focused on a computer server in Trump Tower suspected of links to Russian banks. No evidence is found — but the wiretaps continue, ostensibly for national security reasons, Andrew McCarthy at National Review later notes. The Obama administration is now monitoring an opposing presidential campaign using the high-tech surveillance powers of the federal intelligence services.

5. January 2017: Buzzfeed/CNN dossier. Buzzfeed releases, and CNN reports, a supposed intelligence “dossier” compiled by a foreign former spy. It purports to show continuous contact between Russia and the Trump campaign, and says that the Russians have compromising information about Trump. None of the allegations can be verified and some are proven false. Several media outlets claim that they had been aware of the dossier for months and that it had been circulating in Washington.

6. January: Obama expands NSA sharing. As Michael Walsh later notes, and as the New York Times reports, the outgoing Obama administration “expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the government’s 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections.” The new powers, and reduced protections, could make it easier for intelligence on private citizens to be circulated improperly or leaked.

7. January: Times report. The New York Times reports, on the eve of Inauguration Day, that several agencies — the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Treasury Department are monitoring several associates of the Trump campaign suspected of Russian ties. Other news outlets also report the existence of “a multiagency working group to coordinate investigations across the government,” though it is unclear how they found out, since the investigations would have been secret and involved classified information.

8. February: Mike Flynn scandal. Reports emerge that the FBI intercepted a conversation in 2016 between future National Security Adviser Michael Flynn — then a private citizen — and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The intercept supposedly was part of routine spying on the ambassador, not monitoring of the Trump campaign. The FBI transcripts reportedly show the two discussing Obama’s newly-imposed sanctions on Russia, though Flynn earlier denied discussing them. Sally Yates, whom Trump would later fire as acting Attorney General for insubordination, is involved in the investigation. In the end, Flynn resigns over having misled Vice President Mike Pence (perhaps inadvertently) about the content of the conversation.

9. February: Times claims extensive Russian contacts. The New York Times cites “four current and former American officials” in reporting that the Trump campaign had “repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials. The Trump campaign denies the claims — and the Times admits that there is “no evidence” of coordination between the campaign and the Russians. The White House and some congressional Republicans begin to raise questions about illegal intelligence leaks.

10. March: the Washington Post targets Jeff Sessions. The Washington Post reports that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had contact twice with the Russian ambassador during the campaign — once at a Heritage Foundation event and once at a meeting in Sessions’s Senate office. The Post suggests that the two meetings contradict Sessions’s testimony at his confirmation hearings that he had no contacts with the Russians, though in context (not presented by the Post) it was clear he meant in his capacity as a campaign surrogate, and that he was responding to claims in the “dossier” of ongoing contacts. The New York Times, in covering the story, adds that the Obama White House “rushed to preserve” intelligence related to alleged Russian links with the Trump campaign. By “preserve” it really means “disseminate”: officials spread evidence throughout other government agencies “to leave a clear trail of intelligence for government investigators” and perhaps the media as well.

In summary: the Obama administration sought, and eventually obtained, authorization to eavesdrop on the Trump campaign; continued monitoring the Trump team even when no evidence of wrongdoing was found; then relaxed the NSA rules to allow evidence to be shared widely within the government, virtually ensuring that the information, including the conversations of private citizens, would be leaked to the media. [snip]

Most of the new media and “fact checking” sites conclude that one or more agencies tapped some phones, but “there is no evidence” that President Obama ordered it done. Perhaps so: given the secrecy we will probably never know. But it is hard to believe that President Obama did not know of a an application to FISA for a warrant to tap Trump Tower phones, even in June when it was not certain that Mr. Trump would be candidate Trump, and it is even more certain that the White House would be informed of FISA applications concerning a major party candidate.

Whether President Trump had more evidence not available to us when he made his ungracious tweets I can’t say. It does appear possible to likely that the Obama Administration might have been using intelligence agencies and leaks as a campaign tool. The community organizer recruited demonstrations have been infuriating and frustrating, but if that is the worst stress President Trump experiences in his Presidency he –  and we – should all thank God Almighty.

And see

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/03/05/trump-ends-innuendo-game-dealing/

cognitive dissonance, persuasion,

Dr. Pournelle,
According to the NR, the Trump+Russians=illegitimate election argument has collapsed: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445522/russian-election-hacking-fbi-not-investigating-trump-campaign, but I believe the author may have missed the point: The “fact” that a foreign power has intruded into U.S. politics and influenced the system is firmly established in the minds of Democrat party voters. It will come up again in public discussion and in the press, even if the allegations are withdrawn. Scott Adams references the use of what used to be called yellow journalism’s “addiction” to rage in
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/157904840851/dopamine-puppets , which will continue to fuel the fire long after the question has died.
Strange how the comparisons to nazism on the part of either political party fail to notice any apparent reference to Goebbels? IMO, both sides (as well as the Trump side, which is apparently not the official Republican position) have learned quite a lot from the propaganda ministry, as well as Stalin’s Pravda.
With hope for you and Roberta’s continuing recovery,
-d

It wasn’t much of an argument to begin with.

Sweden

Do you remember the outrage over Trump’s comments about Islamic Radicalism causing problems “just like in Sweden?” Remember how the Swedish government screamed foul? Their “Integration Minister” claimed there were no problems.

She comes clean: Sweden’s Integration Minister admits lying when she claimed rape rate was “going down”

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2017/03/swedens-integration-minister-admits-lying-when-she-claimed-rape-rate-was-going-down

Sweden is in deep deep denial while it is in the middle of an existential crisis.

This is why we MUST judicially throttle all immigration, particularly illegal immigration.

{^_^}

The cyber war against NK missiles

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/04/world/asia/north-korea-missile-program-sabotage.html?_r=0

 

The Russian ambassador is *not* the rezident.

Anyone who knows anything about espionage – obviously the lügenpresse don’t fall into that category – knows that the idea that the Russian ambassador is the rezident is utter nonsense.

Something else that has gone unmentioned is the obvious contradiction between the proposition that Trump is somehow in thrall to Putin, while at the same time Trump is pushing for a massive remediation and expansion of our military capabilities and hardware, including new nuclear weapons – which have the property of increasing the Russian strategic threat evaluation of the United States.

Indeed, were Trump in thrall to Putin, he would more likely be aping the rhetoric of the Union of Confused Scientists and the (Soviet-inspired, -funded, and -controlled) Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and World Council of Churches.

One may safely assume that retired Podpolkovnik Putin, Pervoye Glavnoye Upravleniye of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti is familiar with the activities of those front organizations, and how his former employer directed same.

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

 

Giraldi: Did Sessions Do Anything Wrong?

<http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/did-sessions-do-anything-wrong/>

—–

As I believe the entire narrative seeking to portray the Trump victory as some kind of Manchurian-candidate scheme concocted by the Kremlin is complete nonsense, I tend to believe Sessions was answering honestly, after interpreting the question in a certain fashion. His spokesman has described the exchange as: “He was asked during the hearing about communications between Russia and the Trump campaign—not about meetings he took as a senator and a member of the Armed Services Committee.”

. . .

What is particularly disturbing about the attack on Sessions is the hypocrisy evidenced by congressmen like Charles Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, who are demanding that the attorney general resign because they claim he committed perjury. Answering questions in such a way as to avoid saying too much is a fine art in Washington — a skill that both Schumer and Pelosi have themselves also developed — but it does not amount to perjury. Sessions’s answer to Franken is not completely clear, but it is not an out-and-out lie. In that respect the attack on Sessions is like the attack on Flynn, basically a way of getting at and weakening President Donald Trump by opportunistically discrediting his high-level appointments.

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

I fear the media doesn’t know the territory.

California Releases Cellphone Radiation Exposure Fact Sheet Draft < CBS San Francisco

Jerry

Thought you might find this interesting:

http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/03/02/cellphone-radiation-exposure-fact-sheet-draft-released-by-california-health-officials/

Ed

And your conclusion, Doctor, is?

I can’t stop laughing

I went through my Twitter feed this morning and I saw a tweet that still makes me laugh. I didn’t click on the article yet because I want to savor it. The headline says, “Vietnam Veteran Given Cease and Desist Letter by Senators Office and Ordered not to Contact”!

HAHAHHAHAHAHA

Only a motivated veteran and his mouth could strike such fear into the heart of a coward! Never in my life have I see a US citizen issued a cease and desist letter, ordering him to stand down from exercising his — if I’m not mistaken — Constitutionally protected right to petition his government for redress of grievances through the system of representative democracy by contacting his elected representatives in the bicameral legislature we call “Congress”, which so far as I can tell is meant to be an antonym of “progress”. And with the way our “Congress” operates, perhaps we can be grateful the Forefathers did not bless us with a “Progress”.

In any case,I just can’t bring myself to click this article yet because I want to spend the rest of the day imagining the horrible and vicious things this man must have said to get a cease and desist letter from a Senator’s office. I just can’t stop laughing.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

I haven’t looked either. Let me know.

NEW in Q-MAG.org: huge spike in earth magnetic field recorded in 8th cent. B.C.

http://www.q-mag.org/

More than 2,500 years ago in the ancient Near East, the Earth’s geomagnetic field was going gangbusters. During the late eighth century B.C., a new study finds, the magnetic field that surrounds the planet was temporarily 2.5 times stronger than it is today…

http://www.q-mag.org/

Albert de Grazia

I’d appreciate comment on this; I’m low on time.

The Rise of the Machines

Jerry,

Harvesting coconuts is a dangerous and labor intensive process.  Now there is a robot to do this job:

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/students-have-built-a-coconutharvesting-robot

Best,

Rodger

But think of all the jobs lost!

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

Friday, March 3, 2017

“The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed across the entire world.”

Donald Trump

Between 1965 and 2011, the official poverty rate was essentially flat, while the government spending per person on poverty programs rose by more than 900% after inflation.

Peter Cove

Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for the West as it commits suicide.

James Burnham

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

We are a nation of assimilated immigrants.

Immigration without assimilation is invasion.

Wednesday: My cold continues, but I feel I am improving. Still not up to much work buy I am at least paying attention to what goes on around me. President Trump spoke to a Joint Session of Congress tonight, and I have to agree with Newt Gingrich’s assessment: “The best speech of his life. For the most part the Democrats sat on their hands, or even scoffed, when he asked for cooperation in getting the country moving again; and he asked for more spending, on infrastructure and the military; which clearly upset

Friday, March 3, 2017 Morning:

At which point Wednesday evening I felt so rotten I went to bed, where I have mostly been all week. One of those colds that leaves you unable to do anything but play solitaire. I did keep up with my mail, but the answers were all short shrift, for which I apologize.

In two hours Larry and Steve will be here for a story conference, and I haven’t had breakfast; this is just to allieve any worries some may have had, I’m all right, if feeling a bit filleted. I’m recovered pretty we’ll, and I’ll go to lunch with my collaborators, and over the weekend I’ll catch up here. Thanks for all the kind good wishes.

Odd: Word has never heard of the word allieve, Looking in my dictionary I see that I spelled it correctly.

One thought:

When President Obama expelled 30 Russian diplomats and their families after he lost the election, is there anyone on the planet who is astonished that the winning candidate would not want to alleviate the situation ? I would be astonished to find that General Flynn, the National Security Advisor designate, had not been instructed to talk with the Russian ambassador with instructions to cool things down. As to whether they would discuss sanctions – like the expulsion – how could they not? How could the Russian ambassador not bring up the subject? I can even imagine his asking if he was going to be next to be sent packing.

For some reason I can only imagine, General Flynn did not report this to the Vice President elect, although Flynn had to know the call was monitored and a transcript would be delivered to Mr. Trump if not immediately, then following inauguration.

And came the inevitable leaks, facilitated by President Obama’s changing of the rules for circulation of phone tap information to all 16 known and a couple of unknown intelligence agencies; a sure formula for leaks.

And sure enough, Sally Yates, Acting Attorney General and Obama loyalist but not on the list of those supposed to receive the wiretap information, comes forward to warn President Trump that General Flynn lied, lied I tell you, to the Vice President about the content of the phone call, not reporting to him the one conversation every sane person knows thy must have had, namely the Obama sanctions against Russia.

You might contemplate this. Perhaps General Flynn had other reasons for not wanting the National Security Advisor job? Sand he was chosen to lead a leak detection operation before resigning? Or was he so stupid as to lie about something that was ridiculous, namely that there was no discussion of the one subject everyone on the planet must have known would be discussed at that time between the Russian Ambassador and the National Security Advisor designate?You may contemplate that while I recuperate.

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