View 737 Monday, August 13, 2012

We’re home and all’s well, if you can call a heat wave ‘well’. It’s about 100 outside the house, and the municipal power people are begging us to be sparing with the air conditioning because there’s a chance of power shortages. Given what we pay the various public service union people in Los Angeles you’d think they’d have seen this coming and come up with a way to do something about it, but I don’t know what that is. On the other hand I don’t get paid what the public service people get paid.

I note that we are moving toward feudalism. In feudal times people paid what they had to to the local knights, who undertook to defend them from the barbarians. In those times the barbarians came from outside the city gates, although I expect they had some inside also. In our case we are raising cultures of barbarians, some in the cities, some in California’s Central Valley. So we pay $150,000 to $300,000 a year with full pensions after 20 years to police officers, the new Blue Knights. Knighthood was never hereditary although the chance to become a knight was much higher for the children of knights than for the peasantry, and over time the social classes became something like a caste system. Could we be going that way in the US?

In any event, we are home, and the election proceeds. Those who think that the best chance for America lies in fooling or deceiving the electorate believe that the choice of Ryan was a drastic mistake, because it will make it clear that this will be a crucial election, responsibility vs. entitlement. My own view is that if the country chooses the road to serfdom we need to rethink the whole concept of Constitutional government – which, by the way, will be inevitable in any event. Think about the difficulty of getting Germans to work 40 hour weeks so that Greek civil servants can have 30 hour weeks with 13 week vacations, and apply that to the US, substituting whomever you choose for Greek civil servants and hard working Germans. The point is that eventually those who produce the wealth will demand a say in its distribution, and those who distribute will find themselves running short of something to distribute, and those who contribute nothing to the economy but their progeny will find that everyone has decided the services of the proletariat are overvalued. Or so things have always been. Perhaps it will be different in these United States.

Or, perhaps, we will turn back from the road to serfdom and quite deliberately choose liberty and responsibility. It will be interesting to see. But I do recall the elections of 2010.

Government is too big. Hope and Change were chosen over what was thought to be the path by which government got too big, and the result was a doubling of the debt while unemployment remained high. Hope and Change didn’t work, and all we are offered is more of what doubled the debt.

OMG!

We all know what CNN’s take was going to be no matter who Romney picked because it’s CNN’s daily job to sew fear and panic about Republican actions.

So isn’t it absolutely absurd for Frum to pretend Romney wasn’t going to be tied to House Republicans by the media — starting with CNN? The only real question is whether Ryan helps Romney more than any of the alternatives.

–Mike

http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/13/opinion/frum-romney-ryan/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

Opinion: By picking Paul Ryan as his running mate, Mitt Romney is tying himself to House Republicans, to the benefit of the Obama campaign, David Frum says.

I am no longer surprised by anything the egregious Frum says. Thanks.

Adding Ryan to the ticket does little for Romney among various cliques and factions, but that wasn’t the point. Justice Roberts has said that the Supreme Court can hold out against the will of the legislative and executive branches for only so long, and we are at the edge now. Romney’s choice of Ryan will make it clear what this election means. One way or another.

View 737 Sunday, August 12, 2012

I spent part of the afternoon watching the Ryan and Romney show, and I was impressed. They play off each other very well. Clearly each respects the other, and they are in essential agreement.

Regarding foreign policy: an old friend reminds me that most of Ryan’s votes on foreign policy have been in support of the Republican establishment, and hardly in line with my suggestions of speaking softly while carrying a large cudgel. That of course is both true and expected. Ryan is Chairman of the Budget Committee. A powerful committee, and one that has no formal connection to foreign policy although of course at bottom financial control is power over almost anything. But to get that kind of committee chairmanship requires that you get along with other committee chairmen, and that usually means supporting their policies. You can call that unfortunate, but it is the essence of liberal democracy and pretty well has been for a long time. And yes going along to get along can be a terrible thing, and once in a while someone has to upset that apple cart. As Newt did.

But I have some reason to believe that both Romney and Ryan are closer to my views of American foreign policy – we are friends of liberty everywhere but guardians only of our own, and if you would have peace be prepared for war – than to the neoconservative imperialisms. And whatever their foreign policy views they are likely to be superior to what we are doing now. There isn’t a good simple description of our current foreign policy, which seems to be based on finger wagging, stating that something is unacceptable while clearly accepting it, telling everyone what they ought to be doing without paying much attention to what they are doing, and in generally promoting democracy by wishing for it without quite realizing what it would mean if implemented. Perhaps I am overly harsh, but I don’t think so.

There is a crisis in Turkey, another in Egypt, and others throughout the Middle East. Assad has clearly been told that he is unacceptable, meaning that nothing he can do will assure that he or any of his family will survive. He may as well fight on. Qadaffi found that out: he acceded to nearly every demand the US placed on him, but he found there is no forgiveness. Mubarak made the same discovery. Being a friend of the United States does not assure you of life even in exile. Sun Tzu tells us we must build golden bridges for our enemies, but Clinton, Bush II, and Obama blew up even the most rickety bridges that our friends and suitors might try to retreat over. Whatever will happen in Egypt now is beyond our control. We can only trust in Hope and Change, and hope that the change will — but then we run out of words because we don’t know what to hope for. As the Israelis must know by now. I am sure Netanyahu learned well when on his last visit he was dismissed from the White House by way of a tour of the trash piles.

In Iraq our only friends are the Kurds, who have built a Kurdish state on the Turkish border. Since about the only thing that Iran and Turkey agree on is that there must not be a Kurdish sanctuary for Kurdish rebels on their borders, this brings about interesting possibilities for realignments. Turkey at one time was very nearly an ally of Israel. Now all that has changed, as the successors of Mustapha Kemal are purged from the Turkish government – and the successors of Mubarak are dismissed from control of the Egyptian Mamelukes.

I have no certainties about US Middle East policies except this one: almost any consistent policy is probably better than what we have been doing. We invaded Iraq without any clear goals, sent in the most incompetent proconsul since Roman times, then staggered to a conclusion that leaves us nearly broke without obvious benefits from a pair of costly wars that could have been handled by punitive expeditions. Indeed, the Afghan War was settled by a few special forces. The Taliban was taught in no uncertain terms not to harbor enemies of the United States. What more did we need? But we had to build democracy in a land that doesn’t want it. But enough rambling. I have good reason to believe that a Romney/Ryan administration will not put us through military adventures. They can’t afford to, and Ryan knows that.

The election won’t be fought on foreign policy issues anyway. Both Romney and Ryan have said it flat out: this is a referendum on which way America will go, further down the road to entitlement until ruin, or back toward liberty and responsibility. There will be talk about jobs and prosperity, and most of us who believe in freedom will argue that liberty is a better path to prosperity than regulation and central planning – but even if it were not, is not liberty important in its own right?

We are down at the beach house for the weekend. For the story of how we acquired a beach house, and last year’s communications problems, see http://www.chaosmanorreviews.com/oa/2011/20110711_col.php.

When you are on the road nowadays you are seldom far from some kind of Wifi connection. Hotels, airport waiting rooms and particularly airline lounge clubs, coffee shops – there are Wifi networks everywhere, but as luck would have it, there isn’t one anywhere near our beach condo. I used to have cable modem, but for good and sufficient reasons that’s not an option right now. Last year I solved the problem using the AT&T USB Connect 900, which I bought in the local AT&T store. The device looks like a large thumb drive, and it connects to a USB port, where it functions sort of like a cell phone. In fact, it really is a 3G cellphone, and actually has a cell phone number.

When you get the Connect 900 you choose a data plan. You can choose to pay a monthly rate, but since you aren’t likely to use this when you have another option, that probably doesn’t make sense for most people. One option is a $50 prepayment. That’s good for one month or 5 GB of data, whichever gets used up first. After that, the Connect 900 will still connect to AT&T, and it will offer you the opportunity to buy more time or more gigabytes. I know that works because I have done it.

This time it didn’t work. I plugged in the Connect 900, it called home and connected to AT&T, then opened my browser, and a friendly message told me hello, please log in and buy some more time. AT&T even told me my log in name. It only wanted my password. That should have been all right. I had that written down in my log book, and for that matter the ThinkPad remembered the password because I had told it to, possibly foolish thing to do, and I won’t be doing it any more. The only problem is that while I remembered my password, and my computer remembered my password, AT&T didn’t. It kept telling me to log in. I cursed a bit, and got by with a dialup connection for a day or so, but it wasn’t much fun. When I first started doing Internet stuff including blogging – I can make a reasonable argument to having been the first blogger, although I didn’t call it that because I thing the word blog is ugly – we were almost all on dialup unless we were on an academic or government campus that had backbone connections, and we were all careful to keep our web sites simple and easy to use because there weren’t any high speed connections when we were on the road. Those were the days of hacking into a hotel’s telephone system just to get dialup. But nowadays almost everyone has high bandwidth, and web sites often make a dozen link calls, and bring in fancy graphics, and some web sites are nearly impossible for people on dialup, and I decided to go get my Connect 900 activated. The AT&T store is only a couple of miles away from my Mission Beach condo.

Traffic was horrible. Mission Beach is a busy place and this was one of its busiest weekends, miles of tourists in cars, bicycles, tourist busses, golf carts, roller blades, and nearly every conceivable means of locomotion. It took half an hour to get the two miles to the AT&T store, where I was pleasantly surprised to find that there were five uniformed employees and no customers.

I hauled out the ThinkPad and explained my problem to one of the clerks. I showed him that the Connect 900 was working fine, and was in fact able to connect to AT&T, but AT&T didn’t believe my password, and could he do something about that. Alas, he said, he didn’t think so. He’d never encountered that problem before. However, he’d try. First thing was to get my ThinkPad on the store’s wireless net. That turned out to be harder than it ought to be, because Windows 7 has a wireless management system, and the ThinkPad has a Lenovo wireless management system, and they hate each other, so you have to be familiar with both so you can keep one from interfering with the other, and my AT&T clerk cursed Windows because he was an Apple man. But eventually we go connected to the local Wifi net, and after a while we discovered what the problem was: AT&T remembered that I had an account, but I hadn’t used it in 180 days (or perhaps longer) – so AT&T cancelled the account. Alas, though, my Connect 900 couldn’t start a new account because it was still associated with the old one.

The clerk ingeniously solved the problem by removing the sim card from the Connect 900 and putting in a new one. I told you it was really a cellphone. With a new sim card AT&T saw it as a new phone, and asked me to tell it my name, address, phone number, email number, secret words, the name of my neighbor’s cat, and so forth, created a new account, let me log in to it, and now was ready to charge my American Express card for prepayment of a block of time and gigabytes. There wasn’t any charge for the new sim card.

After which everything worked just fine. The AT&T 3G system works quite well. It’s not as fast as modern Wifi, but the slowness is lagging response time rather than throughput. And of course Wifi can get overloaded easily. All in all, having a working 3G connection system can be a useful backup for any road warrior. The only caution is that you will have to buy a day’s time twice a year else AT&T will close you out and you’ll have to go to an AT&T store to get a new sim card so you can fool AT&T into thinking you have bought a new Connect 900. It works with Apple and Linux systems as well as Windows. Recommended for road warriors who want to be sure of having a connection wherever you have 3G bars.

My beach house writing establishment: ThinkPad connected to an ancient but very good ViewSonic monitor, Microsoft wireless keyboard and mouse, and other stuff. I do a lot of work down here, and Niven and I have done two novels here. When we started the monitor was older and the first computer I brought down here was a desktop with a 19” bottle monitor.

There is a lot of good mail, and I had intended a big mailbag for tonight, but it’s late, I am tired, and we will probably go home tomorrow, so it will have to wait. I’ll get there. I’ve got some of my energy back.

and we’re home

View 736 Saturday, August 11, 2012

My son Commander Phillip Pournelle is on his way home with his wife and my granddaughter, leaving us at the Beach House for a couple of days while friends take care of the house and look after Sable. That gave me time to get some work done, and I discovered that I can’t really work when connected with dialup. Mail contains links, my memory keeps slipping and I find I have to look something up that I ought to know, and generally I find I am more dependent on the cloud that I really want to be. That is going to take some thinking about. Meanwhile, there is a solution to the problem when you find you are somewhere without high speed connection and no Wifi. Of course that’s fairly rare. Hotels and airports and even coffee shops have Wifi. I have an old low cost t-mobile account (one I can renew but could never get again, alas) because at one time most airports had t-mobile. But sometimes it happens, and my beach house is one of the places that simply doesn’t have Internet or Wifi connectivity. Fortunately there’s a solution to that, called AT&T 3G, and it works. Of course that means you have to deal with AT&T, and, alas, it’s still The Phone Company, so a story goes with this. I’ll tell it later. Meanwhile I am on at medium speed by means of 3G.

It’s Paul Ryan. Roberta woke me up this morning to tell me. He was her favorite for VP. He has strong credentials – trained under Jack Kemp, conservative wing of the Republican Party, elected 7 times from a not Republican district, gets along well enough with the Republican Establishment that he has become Chairman of the Budget Committee, but not at all closely associated with the Country Club Republicans.

And as Roberta observes, he’s not pretentious. He’s articulate (clean and articulate) and he’s not afraid to stand up for what he believes in, witness that he was polite but not obsequious to the President in their much publicized meetings despite the President’s obvious disdain. And, Roberta says, besides, all his heroes are your heroes. All true, and Newt says the same thing. Newt Gingrich was quick to cheer the selection.

Ryan clearly scares some Democrats, who have rushed out to say Ryan is who they wanted because he will make this an ideological election, and they want to run on ideology. Odd, because Ryan will say he is running against liberals and liberalism, and what will the Democrats do: ere the cock crows twice they will deny liberalism thrice? I would have thought that an ideological campaign is precisely what they do not want, since they have to defend the liberal agenda, and that is not all that popular in the polls.

Of course they will use scare tactics. Pushing grandma over the cliff in her wheel chair. They will surely accuse Ryan of wanting to end Medicare, when it is Obamacare that is ending it: when Mr. Obama said that if you like your health care plan now you will get to keep it under Obamacare, and that is simply not true. Part of the financing for Obmamacare has been cut out of Medicare. And the Democrats haven’t been able to pass a budget in over a year, even in the Senate. I do not think that Romney and Ryan have much to fear in debating health care either as ideology or as plans, particularly since it’s not at all clear that Mr. Obama understands the details either intellectually or technically. Ryan does.

Another criticism I have heard of the new ticket is that it has little experience in foreign policy. Leaving out that anyone including Elmer Fudd has more experience in foreign affairs than the current President had on taking office, it’s easy enough to describe Ryan’s foreign policy: we are the friends of liberty everywhere but we are guardians only of our own; and if you would have peace, be prepared for war, which is to say you can trim details and needless spending but the US needs a strong military, and particularly a Navy, but we should not be using it to mind other people’s business. I think I could write a good foreign policy paper for Romney/Ryan, and I could put together a pretty good group to draft and critique it. Not that I’m volunteering. I did that in 1980 for the incoming Reagan administration, but that was thirty years ago. It’s someone else’s turn. But “inexperience in foreign policy” is dangerous ground for Mr. Obama and his people to wander into.

I will have more to say about using 3G later this evening. Here’s what happened last time…

http://www.chaosmanorreviews.com/oa/2011/20110711_col.php

The 3G story will have to wait until tomorrow or Monday. AT&T has some interesting policies. It’s still The Phone Company.

Note that I put this up as G3, demonstrating a distinct absence of mind. Peter Glaskowsky reminds me that it’s 3G as in Third Generation. I fixed it, and discovered that Windows Live Writer has a “find” but no find and replace. I thought I had downloaded and installed a “plug in” but it hasn’t done anything for me. Apparently you need to use Office to do any real editing, and Live Writer is a poor relation that Microsoft isn’t terribly interested in fixing. I thought there was a search and replace function in Live Writer, but I find there is not.

I’m working on the 3G 900 story. As I noted in http://www.chaosmanorreviews.com/oa/2011/20110711_col.php the AT&T USB 900 actually works pretty well, but you still have to deal with AT&T and in many ways they are still The Phone Company. It took me over an hour at the AT&T Store over on Rosecrans in San Diego to get mine running again, even though I have used it for a year. The problem is that I hadn’t used it in 180 days, and AT&T doesn’t like that. Eventually I got it straightened out. I’ll try to write that tonight.

And I heard good speeches from Ryan and Romney today. They are firing up the campaign. I’ll have some words on that shortly. Those who believe that making this a campaign on the real central issues is a gift to the Democrats – I have a bunch of mail from people who believe that – may be right, but in that case, government by rational discussion is doomed as is the whole notion of the United States as proposed in the Convention of 1787. We’ll need a brand new Constitution if we can’t discuss issues for fear of losing the election. Perhaps that is true, in which case we have sown the wind indeed, indeed. But I don’t think that’s the case. I do not think we have become that degenerate.

More later. I’m watching 60 Minutes on it now.

View 736 Thursday, August 09, 2012

Still on the road on dialup. Son Phil with wife and grandchild are in town, and will be tomorrow. We’ll go home after that.

Not much change in the political scene. The Obama strategy is to get people disgusted with the process so they will stay home. Romney’s strategy is to avoid making waves and make the Democrats work at finding things to attack Romney on. There’s an attempt at generating suspense in who will be Romney’s choice for VP, but it probably won’t really matter who is chosen.

Sorry to be so brief. It has been a good day but a bit tiring.

The late Dr. Stefan Possony did many studies of terrorism including compendia of terrorist incidents and worked on classification systems. When he had his final stroke in the mid 80’s that stopped his work, and although for a while the Hoover attempted to put together a final report from his notes, that never happened. That may be unfortunate. Possony had a way of finding insights and theories in what looks at first like a mass of unrelated data. One conclusion you could draw is that statistically the sheer numbers of acts of terrorism peaked well before the turn of the 21st Century, This would surprise most people who think acts of terrorism grow exponentially and monotonically,

Another change has been toward directed acts of terrorism as part of a strategy. In the Middle East there are many potential terrorists associated with particular causes, and sometimes they need only encouragement to develop into operatives, either suicidal or clandestine, for one or another purpose. That is, there are many causes, and each cause has from a few to a lot of believers of various states of strength of belief; and many of them have significant numbers of believers who would seriously consider committing an act of terror for the cause.  There are also leaders capable of forming individual acts into a pattern so that the acts advance a particular cause, or a particular faction with the cause. This goes on continuously, but it is generally not studied continuously.The results can be very good for upholders of peace and order,  but just as likely to be given up just as a breakthrough is about to be achieved.

The objectives of terrorism have changed. For a long time there were acts of terror intended to strengthen the will of the Jewish settlers in Israel and strengthen Zionism. The most spectacular was the assassination of Bernadotte. Then came Israeli retaliations against acts of existence to the Jewish occupation of lands not designated for incorporation into Israel proper. At the same time, the Palestinians and their friends were learning the art of terrorism, and even began experiments to see what acts were more effective.

Decades ago I did a major study for the USAF Air Council on Strategic Stability. It served as a policy basis for some years. It was done during the Cold War but attempted to generalize principles applicable to other international configurations. It might be well to read again Richardson’s Statistics of Deadly Quarrels, and certainly time to read it if they never have,

Jerry,

Regarding the July heat, Dr. Roy Spencer has several posts:

http://www.drroyspencer.com/

The last shall be first: both the global average temperature and the northern hemisphere overall average dropped about 0.1 degree from June.

He proceeds that with a series of posts on the North American temperature anomaly in that period, questioning Hansen’s claim that July was the warmest month ever for the United States.

Jim

We can all be certain that whatever the truth about climate change – something both inevitable and not likely to be rapid – we don’t understand what is going on. We can’t even predict short term rises and falls in temperature.

The rising trends we have seen do not lead to rapid doom. The falling trends in the last century were a bit scarier but didn’t last. And there we are.