Monday, December 26, 2016

John Glenn must surely have wondered, as all the astronauts weathered into geezers, how a great nation grew so impoverished in spirit.

Our heroes are old and stooped and wizened, but they are the only giants we have. Today, when we talk about Americans boldly going where no man has gone before, we mean the ladies’ bathroom. Progress.

Mark Steyn

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

My youngest son, Richard, is visiting with our grandson, and tomorrow I have an appointment at COSTCO to get my broken right ear hearing aid back; at the moment I’m using the left ear electronics with suitable modifications in the right (and much better) ear, thus confusing my pocket hearing aid remote control. I don’t hear much with my left ear even with the aid, but I miss it, and it looks strange to see that the control shows nothing in my right ear ad and the control in the left. Anyway Mr. Galloway will be here in the morning and we’ll put as much time into that as it takes.

With Richard here we naturally turned to discussions of space. Richard told me of a meeting with an old friend and I think one-time colleague (they were both Congressional staff members). His friend now works for Trump and is to be posted to an Assistant Secretary position where among other things he’ll write speeches for his Secretary. Richard joked about doing outrageous Twitter posts. His friend turned mildly serious. “Oh, no. I’m in Trumpland. In Trumpland only the boss is allowed to say outrageous things.” I thought about that. I’m still thinking about it.

I do not recall any senior member of Trump’s team saying anything outrageous, or even silly, either formally or off the cuff, while working for Trump. There must have been instances, but I don’t recall them. Trump’s people maintain Dignitas; that seems obvious now that I think of it; maybe it’s one of Trump’s less well known abilities.

As most of you know, Richard is a Vice President of Nanoracks, which has put up a majority of the commercial space satellites, and if you want your own satellite he’s the one to talk to. He had some thoughts on the Chinese and EmDrive, and we’ll get to that later.

A dialogue on EmDrive.

EM Drive almost certainly not true

Jerry,

I have to admit that I’m finding the posts on your site a bit, uh, let’s call it “optimistic”. The “EM Drive” or whatever it’s called this week is NOT “confirmed”. All that’s happened is that (my god, of all sources) The Daily Mail has made an unsubstantiated claim that has then been echoed by other equally dubious 3rd (or worse) hand sources.

What do we actually KNOW at this point? Not much.

1. Unconfirmed, sometimes anonymous sources.

2. The notions that “NASA” has tested this device and found something is also dubious and overblown. It’s really two guys in a small group at NASA, and of those two, I believe only one actually works for NASA. So trying to establish credibility by invoking “NASA” is not only a logical error, it’s also not even true.

3. The borderline hysteria that the Chinese are now about to stage a Sputnik event on us is really silly. We have no idea if that is even true. The confirmations are 3rd hand, anonymous or dubiously sourced. Note how different this is from the real Sputnik(!) which could be heard transmitting by ham radio operators as it passed overhead! (I know someone who did this!)

4. The NASA paper that was “peer reviewed” has NOT been duplicated. There is a huge difference between peer review, which amounts to reviewers saying “This is a very, very odd result, but I don’t see anything obviously wrong with this”, and independent duplication of results. I have to remark that I find it odd that you, and so many on your site who are extremely dubious of thousands of peer reviewed articles about climate change are so credulous about this reactionless drive, which has one peer reviewed paper.

5. This is the big one. This device would violate conservation of linear momentum. This is not just a principle in classical physics, but also quantum mechanics. It’s very, very, very hard to believe these low signal/noise ratio experiments. Like the recent buzz over faster than light neutrinos, this will almost certainly (and in my mind, at least, that means something like 6 9’s likelihood) turn out to be either fraud or experimental error.

6. But, we want to keep open minds. Well, cold fusion has always failed the “power my house” test, so the EM Drive can pass/fail a similar test. Put one in a satellite and see if the thing can change course.

In conclusion, while I’d love to be wrong about this, I think this thing is utter nonsense. The quest for reactionless drives has a long history, going back at least to the Dean Drive (and I know you know this), and it has been debunked every single time.

So, while this would be wonderful, there’s very little reason at this point to believe that the EM Drive really works.

Chuck Bouldin=

 

Come now. I doubt it works simply because we have too many confirmations of Newton’s discoveries; but it is not impossible. As it is claimed to exist EM probably is not even better than NERVA. But the Chinese Academy of Science says they thought enough of it to put a test object in orbit; possibly that is propaganda, possibly not, but I don’t think there is much doubt that they said it. If it does work, our science needs some revisions.

I do not accept your accusation of borderline hysteria, and I am puzzled by that language. I was not hysteric over Sputnik, nor was von Braun; motivated he was.

I think there is enough evidence to warrant an experimentum crucis, which can’t cost as much as a lot of the bureaucratic activities that eat up most of NASA’s budget, and is all I have advocated. Of course it violates the conservation principles. So did atom smashing violate the conservation of matter and energy we lived with until the 30’s or so. Fortunately an experimentum crucis on EM drive will cost a lot less that the first atom smashers did.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the Chinese are smart enough to realize that, and while I have no confirmation that they have actually put one on their space station, I find it hard to understand why they would say they have done so, since it is unlikely the US will take one to orbit with its more limited access to orbit. To induce us to waste money because they did not do better ground trusting? For sport?

Apparently I was not clear: all I said was confirmed was the Chinese announcement. I infer from that That they did enough ground testing to justify the expense of taking one to orbit. I have not heard they claim that it worked there, and I have not said so. I am very aware that it is impossible under the conservation laws we believe to be true, and that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.. evidence. I will add that I could easily find you a great deal of government supported research, peer reviewed and published, which is probably not true and almost certainly is not significant to anyone but that published author and possibly to academic committees considering promotion of that author.

If I have misread the press coverage and nothing independent of the Daily Mail announcement is true, then apologies; I will go back and check sources.

 

 

You’ve lived through more of these than I have, but I can list:

Polywater. Sub-electrons. Lifters. Rods. The Dean Drive (and many subsequent variants under other names). Cold fusion. Faster than light neutrinos. Gravity shields. Various perpetual motion devices, one of which my friends reviewed when I worked at NIST.

In my lifetime, after 35 years as a working Physicist, big discoveries that held up: High Tc superconductors. Gravity waves (although, remember the recent bogus result with the south pole IR telescope before LIGO II made the real discovery), Bose Einstein condensation. Others, depending on how exclusive you want to make the list.

The things in the first list have certain hallmarks, which BTW, are described very well in Bob Parks book “Voodoo Science: (1) an effect which is very marginal in terms of signal/noise, (2) no experimental changes seem able to make the effect any larger relative to the noise, (3) constantly changing “explanations” for how the effect is produced (cold fusion has this in spades!), (4) the effect is often only observable to a few select experimenters, (5) when the experiment flunks a null control test, as cold fusion did very early on when non-heavy water tests gave the same “results”, the theory is changed to explain the failure. BTW, in the NASA work, the EM Drive seems to have flunked a null control test.

Consider instead the second list. All grounded in Physics. All predicted, and all well understood, except for High Tc, where a complete understanding still escapes us. All published in peer reviewed journals, all quickly and often easily replicated (a team of 4 grad. students at the UW did a “shake and bake” YBCO replication in under 2 weeks!).

Now, which list does the EM Drive belong on? Yes, it MIGHT be true. But, that isn’t really the question. The question is how likely is it to be true? Not very likely. But it makes a good Daily Mail article, I guess.

As for hysteria, when you start talking about “conquering the galaxy” I think you need a bit more to go on than what we have on the EM Drive. Maybe that’s hyperbole, not hysteria, but however you want to label it, that’s taking things far beyond any reasonable extrapolation on the basis of what we know at this point.

Also the claim (and it is nothing BUT an unsubstantiated claim) that the “Chinese are testing this in space”, followed by worries about our access to space limiting our ability to make similar tests….well, that whole line of discussion suggests that there is something to worry about, when the very, very high probability is that there is no worry, because there is no effect, and it matters not at all where the tests are conducted.

All this said: I’d love this to be true, but it almost certainly is not. And there’s clearly no reason to give this thing much credence on the basis of the reports we have.

And second, I don’t disagree with you at all about the tragic loss of US access to space. It’s appalling, it’s embarrassing, and if you count everything (Atlas, Titan II, Saturn IB, Saturn V, Shuttle), the US has built and discarded 5 operational human rated launch systems. There are many reasons to be deeply concerned about our access to space, but testing the EM Drive in a manned space station is not one of them.

Chuck

 

So you are saying give it up, forget it, it can’t work, we know enough to abandon any tests, let the Chinese make fools of themselves if they want to, we’re investing nothing in further tests?

 

My last .gov job was as a Program Officer at NSF. The soul of the job is to decide “Fund this, or that?”. So, yes, I wouldn’t put a dime into this. It’s not even high risk/high payoff. This violates such basic laws of Physics, that it is essentially in perpetual motion machine territory.

Note carefully, the funding decision is not, “Fund this or not”, it’s “Fund this, or something else?”. I’d fund other things. There are plenty of advanced propulsion ideas that WILL work, but need more money. Do a good operational test of a solar sail. The ion drive that is taking the Dawn mission around the asteroid belt is amazing! I’d put a lot more money into that.

http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/ion_prop.asp

If credible evidence appears, I might change my mind, but on the basis of what we know now, that’s what I’d do.

Chuck

BTW, when I was still in grad school (UW!) one of the Professors had funding for “spin polarized hydrogen” propulsion, ie, monoatomic hydrogen as postulated by RAH in “The Rolling Stones”. The trouble is that if you produce it in any quantity it has a tendency to go kaboom even when kept very cold and in a strong magnetic field. The NASA project was to produce it “on demand” for very low thrust engines so that there was never any quantity on hand, so it was a way of coupling a power source into production of a very high specific impulse fuel. I don’t think it ever led to anything, but it still could.

Not a reactionless drive, but an advanced propulsion idea that could really work.

 

Which is probably a good ending to the discussion.

I asked Richard what his views were; he was dismissive. The Chinese would not orbit an EmDrive system unless they had done the crucial experiments I have described, and if they had done those (months to years ago since it would have had to be accomplished before planning the orbital mission) we would almost certainly know about it; it’s just too big a secret to keep, just as the news of the Salk vaccine leaked out well in advance of the formal announcement (and before Dave Garraway broke the newsban a few hours early).

Which leads one to wonder why they would make announcements about it – careful announcements, not indicating that it worked, but that they were doing serious testing including orbiting an EmDrive. And of course we can only speculate about that. Perhaps they are doing space experiments they don’t want us to be thinking about.

And leads me to this conclusion: no, I would not spend a lot of money on this; but a few hundred thousand to finish the tests? Of course I would. The result of any sign of reactionless drive, however improbable, would be of inestimable value. That was the argument I made to Boeing all those years ago regarding the Dean Drive; and management agreed, but stipulated that there must be real evidence of a positive result however small. I couldn’t get that, and I wasn’t able to purchase the Dean Drive for Boeing (nor was the 3M team able to buy it for Honeywell) but I certainly would have if I could have done the tests.

I do not see why a definitive test would be all that expensive. Hang it in a swing. Turn it on. Make sure there is no air movement. It either hangs off vertical by a measurable amount no matter how small, or it doesn’t. If it does, leave it on for weeks. If there any measurable reaction mass you should know simply by weighing the device. After a few weeks if you still have millinewtons of force, rejoice. If not, well that’s what we expected, and you can add another confirmation of Newton’s Third Law.

Russian hacking once again

Dear Mr. Pournelle,
It is fascinating to see Republicans coming to the defense of the Kremlin; and also that Julian Assange has suddenly gone from villain to unimpeachable source of truth, and therefore all discussion should be closed.
Several points seem to be missed in some of the discussion:
1. It’s not a question of “did Russian hacking make Hillary Clinton lose?” There were plenty of other reasons for that. The question is: DOES the Russian government attempt to discredit or destabilize Western societies? To that, the answer seems increasingly to be: yes.
2. It’s not all about Clinton’s e-mails, if any. There are plenty of other points of vulnerability, such as electronic voting machines with no paper trail, and we’d better raise our game on them.
3. It’s certainly not about “is there enough evidence to convict?” The FBI is quite right that there isn’t. The CIA, however, is trying to answer a rather different question: are there enough clues for us to deduce what our rivals are trying to do? Short of a signed note from Vladimir Putin, I doubt that question will ever yield courtroom evidence.
4. It’s not all about Democrats vs. Republicans. Be aware that, worldwide, plenty of other Western governments are finding troublesome evidence that Russia is using the internet against them.
Yours,
Allan E. Johnson

Of course we have never tried to interfere with Russian internal politics, not even when the Soviet Union governed Russia. Our Voice of America and other efforts were nothing of the sort.

 

 

cool things in the depths

http://gizmodo.com/this-deep-sea-jellyfish-looks-like-it-came-from-outer-s-1773794459

http://gizmodo.com/bizarre-new-deep-sea-creatures-found-in-unexplored-hydr-1790137365?utm_medium=sharefromsite&utm_source=Gizmodo_facebook

http://io9.gizmodo.com/a-bizarre-new-species-of-fish-has-been-discovered-at-a-1673109432

http://gizmodo.com/horrifying-video-of-swarming-crabs-looks-like-an-alien-1770334840

Stephanie Osborn

“The Interstellar Woman of Mystery”
http://www.Stephanie-Osborn.com

Orwellian

Obama Quietly Signs The “Countering Disinformation And Propaganda Act” Into Law | Zero Hedge http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-24/obama-signs-countering-disinformation-and-propaganda-act-law

T

This technology is somewhat frightening.

http://blog.simplejustice.us/2016/12/23/seeing-believing-technology/

Let me contemplate that. And the one above.

Strain Transition

1. Your mileage may vary. This plays into the liberal fears of Trump as a belligerent warmonger, but shows that Trump will not follow the path of appeasement (at best) that has worried conservatives for the last eight years. Note, as is buried in the WSJ article, and likely is not being repeated in some of the articles about the matter, that Trump’s comments FOLLOW Putin’s about expanding Russia’s nuclear capability.

2.  The link below will probably be stopped by the WSJ firewall. You can get the article through Google, however:

https://www.google.com/#q=let%20it%20be%20an%20arms%20race%20wall%20street%20journal

and click on the first link.

3.  And as I’ve previously noted to my libertarian friends, “Draw last, shoot first” is often a workable strategy when it comes to individual self defense – if you are mentally prepared at all times to defend yourself, but opens the door to catastrophe, for yourself and for thousands or millions you’ve sworn to defend, when dealing with weapons of mass destruction.

    Subj: Strain Transition

    As all of this comes to light, perhaps people will see what a disaster BHO
     has been for this country.
   http://www.wsj.com/articles/let-it-be-an-arms-race-trump-says-1482507844
   I am convinced that most of this country’s problems could be corrected if
   we stopped attempting to educate people beyond their intelligence.

It would be useful to educate them to some level; say that of the California Sixth Grade Reader of 1915? Clearly we were once able to do that.

Politicians and business leaders must make full economic calculations of the impact of the new Little Ice Age on everything — industry, agriculture, living conditions, development.”

<http://www.financialpost.com/m/wp/fp-comment/blog.html?b=business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/lawrence-solomon-proof-that-a-new-ice-age-has-already-started-is-stronger-than-ever-and-we-couldnt-be-less-prepared>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

Politicians generally make no such analysis, nor do journalists. There have not been contingency plans for a return of the Little Ice Age for decades.

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

Saturday, December 24, 2016

Christmas Eve

It came upon a midnight clear,
That glorious song of old,
From angels bending near the earth
To touch their harps of gold!
“Peace on the earth, good will to men,
From heaven’s all gracious King!
The world in solemn stillness lay
To hear the angels sing.

Still through the cloven skies they come
With peaceful wings unfurled
And still their heavenly music floats
O’er all the weary world;
Above its sad and lowly plains
They bend on hovering wing.
And ever o’er its Babel sounds
The blessed angels sing.

Yet with the woes of sin and strife
The world hath suffered long;
Beneath the angel-strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love song which they bring:
O hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing.

For lo! the days are hastening on,
By prophet bards foretold,
When, with the ever-circling years,
Shall come the Age of Gold;
When peace shall over all the earth
Its ancient splendors fling,
And all the world give back the song
Which now the angels sing.

We can hope so, anyway. God bless you all.

And a special Merry Christmas to all on deployment, and to all who sit in ready alert rooms, or deep underground in silos, or under the sea in submarines, on watch in warships or in fire stations, on patrol or watch in cities and towns and in the country.  Thanks to you the rest of us can sleep tonight. God bless you, every one.

And we can all hope and pray that mankind – English, American, Chinese or Russian – now have the evidence that there is reactionless drive.  We can conquer the Galaxy without it, but it will be quicker and easier with it.

 

Again, Merry Christmas

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

Thursday 22 Dec 2016:  Claim confirmed. Chinese Academy of Science claims EmDrive working on Chinese Space Station.. See Below.

 

The question becomes, given the magnitude of this, why is it a surprise? We have 21 expensive intelligence agencies; not one of them knew the Chinese orbited an EM Drive? Of course it will be a while before we can do orbital tests. We have no rockets.  That’s preparedness. Perhaps Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos can help? This is a signal larger than Sputnik. If the Intelligence Community knows about Russian hacking, why doesn’t it know about Chinese testing of a reactionless drive? 

More tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

Wednesday, 12/21/2016

China claims to have a working version of NASA’s impossible engine orbiting the Earth – and will use it in satellites ‘imminently’

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4052580/China-claims-built-working-version-NASA-s-impossible-engine-says-s-orbiting-Earth.html

China claims to have a working version of NASA’s impossible engine orbiting the Earth – and will use it in satellites ‘imminently’

 

The scientists say they’ve created a working prototype and are testing in orbit

They’ve revealed plans to implement it in satellites ‘as quickly as possible’ 

They say it is ‘currently in the latter stages of the proof-of-principle phase’

EmDrive creates thrust by bouncing microwaves around a chamber

The system has caused a stir as it it ‘goes against’ the laws of physics

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4052580/China-claims-built-working-version-NASA-s-impossible-engine-says-s-orbiting-Earth.html#ixzz4TSTZ8v5F

 

 

Scientists in China claim they’ve created a working prototype of the ‘impossible’ reactionless engine – and they say they’re already testing it in orbit aboard the Tiangong-2 space laboratory. [snip]

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4052580/China-claims-built-working-version-NASA-s-impossible-engine-says-s-orbiting-Earth.html#ixzz4TSTqBv3S
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

 

 

I have no more information, but this is staggering.  Movable satellites requiring a power source but no reaction fuel. The implications are enormous. Think Thor for a start. The Em Drive wouldn’t reduce launch costs, but it makes satellites much more useful.  No station keeping reaction mass needed.

 

 

 

 

 

Hey Doc:

You said:

I have no more information, but this is staggering.  Movable satellites requiring a power source but no reaction fuel. The implications are enormous. Think Thor for a start. The Em Drive wouldn’t reduce launch costs, but it makes satellites much more useful.  No station keeping reaction mass needed.

It seems to me that not having to launch any reaction mass with the satellite would reduce launch costs somewhat. For the same functionality there’d be a smaller launch load or for the same load the package could include much more capability,

We need to view the Chinese doing this in the same light we viewed the Sputnik launch when I was a kid. This should be a call to action for our space program(s).

John

John Harlow

 

Right on both counts; and of course if it can get more than 1 milliNewton per KW it would be even more valuable.  But I still have no other information on the validity of this claim.  The “Intelligence Community” has yet to say anything, nor has the President, though one would think this an important matter.

 

I’m very skeptical of the supposed EM-Drive news from China.

And I hope I’m wrong – but the PRC has a history of making all kinds of outlandish claims about supposed scientific breakthroughs which turn out to be absolute nonsense.

Again, I hope I’m wrong.

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

Pretty well me sentiments. (I am looking for other sources.  I have heard nothing from mainstream media, although I have some people checking.  It has been a busy day.

Roberta went to the hairdressers and got her hair done.  She looks great.

 

China claims it’s already started testing an EM Drive in space

http://www.sciencealert.com/china-is-claiming-it-s-already-started-testing-an-em-drive-in-space 

Peer review or it didn’t happen.

FIONA MACDONALD

22 DEC 2016

  The whole world got excited last month when NASA published the first peer-reviewed paper on the ‘impossible’ electromagnetic, or EM, Drive, which appears to somehow defy physics by producing thrust without a propellant.

Their verdict was that it seems to work, although a lot of physicists still think the results are flawed. But now researchers in China have announced that they’ve already been testing the controversial drive in low-Earth orbit, and they’re looking into using the EM Drive to power their satellites as soon as possible.

Big disclaimer here – all we have to go on right now is a press conference announcement and an article from a government-sponsored Chinese newspaper (and the country doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to trustworthy research).

So until we see a peer-reviewed paper, we really can’t say for sure whether the researchers are even testing the drive in space, let alone what their results have shown.

But what the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST) team is saying also corresponds with information provided to IB Times from an anonymous source. According to their informant, China already has an EM Drive on board its version of the International Space Station, the space laboratory Tiangong-2.

We do know from previous papers that Chinese researchers have at least constructed an EM Drive and have been studying it for more than five years now. But there are no published results that we’ve been able to find that show how positive the results have been.

At the press conference, CAST claim they’d seen the EM Drive producing similar thrust to the NASA team’s version.[snip]

 

 

EmDrive: China claims success with this ‘reactionless’ engine for space travel

NASA also has high hopes for the theoretical engine

By Jeffrey Lin and P.W. Singer

http://www.popsci.com/emdrive-engine-space-travel-china-success

It’s a piece of space tech that sounds almost too good to be true. The “reactionless” Electromagnetic Drive, or EmDrive for short, is an engine propelled solely by electromagnetic radiation confined in a microwave cavity. Such an engine would violate the law of conservation of momentum by generating mechanical action without exchanging matter. But since 2010, both the United States and China have been pouring serious resources into these seemingly impossible engines. And now China claims its made a key breakthrough.

Dr. Chen Yue, Director of Commercial Satellite Technology for the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST) announced on December 10, 2016 that not only has China successfully tested EmDrives technology in its laboratories, but that a proof-of-concept is currently undergoing zero-g testing in orbit (according to the International Business Times, this test is taking place on the Tiangong 2 space station).[snip]

 

 

You’d think one or another of our expensive intelligence agencies would have warned us, or that the White House would have comments.

 

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/byron-york-intel-report-wont-end-russia-hacking-fight/article/2609959

Sunday, December 18, 2016

The Electoral College votes Monday. 19 December, 2016

According to the New York Times, “President Obama on Friday described the Electoral College — originally a compromise between those who wanted Congress to choose the president and those who favored a popular vote — as a ‘vestige’.” The clear indication is that the Electors ought to “vote their conscience”, but it is unlikely that they would do this in sufficient numbers to affect the outcome.

There is a small but concerted group inviting the Electors to vote for anyone but Trump. This would probably not result in a majority for Mrs. Clinton, but if enough Trump electors failed to vote for him but did not vote for Mrs. Clinton, the result would be to throw the election into the House, where each state delegation votes for one of the Nominees. Each State has one vote, and a majority of state votes is needed for election. The likelihood that the House would choose Mrs. Clinton is negligible.

We will not have a President Elect until January, when a joint meeting of the House and Senate will witness the votes of the Electoral College, but we should know by Monday night how they voted; we can hope that ends the drama.

There is a small but I suppose finite chance that we will be in a state of Constitutional crisis by Monday evening, even verging on civil war, but that is a story for novelists, not for rational discussion. I do not believe there are anywhere near that many faithless electors.

 

Monday, Dec 19, 1800 PST

The results are in, and there were few faithless electors despite all the furor.  We have a President Elect, and  Donald Trump will be sworn in on inauguration day. A few celebrities continue, whether to draw attention to their cause or to themselves being unclear, but the fear of a coup was, as I suspected, only a fear.

Observation: no one watching the developments in Syria imagines that there are any good guys in charge of anything over there. Russia and the Syrian regime have decided to end the revolt once and for all, in the only way they know how. Their side of the story can only be one of defending their actions lest the war go on endlessly; better simply to end it no matter the cost. This is not an argument that appeals to Americans, who believe there is some way to pull the rabbit out of the hat. I do not purport to make their case; I merely say it is the only one I can imagine them making. They see ISIS as an even greater horror.

 

This with Saturday’s post (below) should be enough about the hacks and the election; the Electors will vote now. [And have. For Trump.]

Russian hack

Why is everyone still talking about the “Russian hack”? Julian Assange, who, after all, released the emails through Wikileaks, and is therefore in the best position to know whence they came, has repeatedly assured us that it was not the Russians, it was someone inside the DNC. A leak, not a hack. Unless my skimming of the “news” on this subject has missed some important bits, this would seem to settle the matter.

But I guess this doesn’t fit the media narrative well, so they have no interest in it.

Richard White

Surely we have all heard the bizarre story of the meeting in a wooded area where a DNC staffer passed the leaks to an Assange associate?

Russians and the election

Addendum: Here is an additional comment by Craig Murray, Assange associate, who calls the CIA report hogslop, in that elegant British way.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2016/12/cias-absence-conviction/

“I have watched incredulous as the CIA’s blatant lie has grown and grown as a media story – blatant because the CIA has made no attempt whatsoever to substantiate it. There is no Russian involvement in the leaks of emails showing Clinton’s corruption. Yes this rubbish has been the lead today in the Washington Post in the US and the Guardian here, and was the lead item on the BBC main news. I suspect it is leading the American broadcasts also.

A little simple logic demolishes the CIA’s claims. The CIA claim they “know the individuals” involved. Yet under Obama the USA has been absolutely ruthless in its persecution of whistleblowers, and its pursuit of foreign hackers through extradition. We are supposed to believe that in the most vital instance imaginable, an attempt by a foreign power to destabilize a US election, even though the CIA knows who the individuals are, nobody is going to be arrested or extradited, or (if in Russia) made subject to yet more banking and other restrictions against Russian individuals? Plainly it stinks. The anonymous source claims of “We know who it was, it was the Russians”

are beneath contempt.

As Julian Assange has made crystal clear, the leaks did not come from the Russians. As I have explained countless times, they are not hacks, they are insider leaks – there is a major difference between the two.

And it should be said again and again, that if Hillary Clinton had not connived with the DNC to fix the primary schedule to disadvantage Bernie, if she had not received advance notice of live debate questions to use against Bernie, if she had not accepted massive donations to the Clinton foundation and family members in return for foreign policy influence, if she had not failed to distance herself from some very weird and troubling people, then none of this would have happened.”

Respectfully,

Brian P.

And of course if the leaks had not contained anything to be ashamed of, they would not have had to be leaked; the Times and other papers would have carried the stories. This is sufficiently obvious that I have not bothered with it, but perhaps that was a mistake.

Deep Throat 2

· Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and associate of Julian Assange, told the Dailymail.com  he flew to Washington, D.C. for emails

· He claims he had a clandestine hand-off in a wooded area near American University with one of the email sources

· The leakers’ motivation was ‘disgust at the corruption of the Clinton Foundation and the  ’tilting of the primary election playing field against Bernie Sanders’

· Murray says: ‘The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks’

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4034038/Ex-British-ambassador-WikiLeaks-operative-claims-Russia-did-NOT-provide-Clinton-emails-handed-D-C-park-intermediary-disgusted-Democratic-insiders.html

Those pro-Trump “Russian hackers” had to be good!  They gave Hildabeast the popular vote, but Trump the Electoral vote.  NOW that’s “good”!
Or maybe, it was the voters that defeated the Clinton Crime Family.

Russian Hacks

Plenty of other good commentary on the “Russian hack”, but a couple of points occur to me:

1) Russia could not have been trying to elect Donald Trump. I assume they believed, like the rest of us, that he would lose. If it was them, seems much more likely to me that they were just trying to weaken the expected winner.

2) Your commenters so far have not mentioned the clear statements by Assange of Wikileaks and Craig Murray that the leaks were an inside job. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4039310/Wikileaks-founder-Julian-Assange-goes-offensive-claims-Russia-Clinton-emails-saying-Kremlin-NOT-source.html​ Take it for what it’s worth.

3) I really have no idea how much Wikileaks mattered, nor does anyone. It seemed to hurt the DNC more than Clinton particularly, and there was so _much_ going on in the campaign. FBI investigations on emails, Clinton Cash, Bernie Sanders, her collapsing and stuff that made people think she was sick, a really lackluster campaign that focused on all the wrong states, a lot of enthusiasm from voters that everyone but Donald Trump wrote off. That’s just in the anti-Clinton column and I expect I’ve forgotten a few. Wikileaks probably helped Trump cement the Crooked Hillary Crooked Democratic Party Same-old-same-old attitude, but there were plenty of other things too. Hard to know how many voters were just on the margins.

It’s easy to think with Mr. Trump’s remarkable negatives that any other Republican candidate would have won handily, but I really do not know if any other candidate could have emphasized Ms. Clinton’s vulnerabilities so well. They might have played nice, and he sure didn’t. Interesting times.

As for what happens now, I don’t have a good picture of what a President plus Congress minus an ability to overcome filibusters can accomplish. They can defund anything they want, I guess: how precise is that scalpel? Can they get rid of regulations, or large numbers of superfluous entrenched fiercely Democratic civil servants? It’s really interesting that Trump has put so many of their enemies in charge of particular Departments.

The DofEnergy, for instance, has already refused to answer some of Mr. Trump’s people’s questions. The obvious response to that is that any sections of DoE that will not cooperate _fully_ with the new administration will immediately be completely unfunded, gone. I imagine that’s what Mr. Trump would do with a part of his company that decided not to cooperate. Doesn’t sound hard; sounds rather that some bureaucrats just fell into an obvious trap. Guess we’ll see.

Best wishes on your wife’s continued recovery,

mkr

Jerry

Has anyone heard of dissipative structures? I was reading a piece in a CME “newspaper” on Asian vs. Western medicine. In the overview part of his article, the author mentioned quantum field theory, chaos theory, complexity and dissipative structures in the same sentence. I’ll admit I had not heard of dissipative structures before, so I looked it up on the Web. A Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissipative_system) entry says, “A dissipative system is a thermodynamically open system which is operating out of, and often far from, thermodynamic equilibrium in an environment with which it exchanges energy and matter.” I also found links here and here.

Has this concept been helpful to anyone? Or is this another case of false equivalence, where this theory may not be as fundamental as the other concepts cited?

Ed

The real reason for the CIA focus on Trump?

Jerry, I was exploring the website of John Robb, the guy who posted on dissipative structures and in another post quote John Boyd as he considered thermodynamics. His latest post was this:

“Thursday, 15 December 2016

The US is Officially a Banana Republic: the CIA is trying to topple the Government

There’s an electoral coup underway.

The number of potentially faithless Republican electors is now up to 50, more than enough to deny Trump the votes he needs for an EC win and/or give Hillary Clinton the votes she needs to win.

The stealth effort, led by liberals who believe Trump is a danger to the US, has been underway since the election.

That effort only gained traction with Republican electors when the CIA leaked that Russia had intervened in the US election to help Trump win.

Of course, the timing of the CIA’s leak wasn’t random.

It was something much more sinister.  It was an opening salvo by the CIA to actively influence the Electoral College and stop Donald Trump from becoming President.

In other words, the CIA is trying to topple Trump.

Why?  Self-preservation.

The real reason is that Trump was working with Peter Thiel to corporatize the intelligence gathering of the United States around companies, like Palantir, that can adopt and employ technology much faster and with more efficacy.  In other words, Trump is planning to turn the CIA and the NSA into peripheral collection systems.

That was unacceptable to the CIA, an agency with a strong sense of self-importance.

They acted again today when the head of the CIA refused to brief the House Intelligence Committee on the their claims because the chairman of the committee, Devin Nunes, was part of Trump’s transition team.  

Instead, the CIA leaked more information this afternoon to influence electors:

“new intelligence shows that Putin personally directed how hacked material.. was leaked”

However, due to tight legal restrictions on the use of the information the CIA gathers and who it gather it on (i.e. US citizens), I anticipated that any new leak would be from allied sources not covered by these restrictions.

That proved to be correct:

“The intelligence came from diplomatic sources and spies working for U.S. allies.”

What’s next?

We can expect to see more leaks this weekend, before the EC votes on Monday.

What kind of info?  A shred of evidence (a taped conversation would be best), gathered by US allies and not the CIA, that shows that Trump knew about the hack or came to an agreement with Putin.

At that point, the EC will definitely flip and Trump will be denied an electoral college win on Monday.

After that we head to the courts and start down the road to street level violence.

To avoid the chaos of merely unseating Trump, the electors may award Hillary Clinton the win since she is best able to gather the establishment around her to fight off Trump’s bid.

Regardless, we have moved another step towards what looks more and more like another US civil war.

It’s not a long trip, now that we are a Banana Republic.”

I would hope he is wrong about the EC. I think that in the US we don’t care much about the EC. But I like the “banana republic” analogy.

Ed

I would say we have been spared from becoming a banana republic; the US is still capable of being the City on a Hill. A shining example to the world. Most of our traditional leadership rejects that notion, and the Establishment has forgotten they ever knew of it, but a sufficient number of citizens have changed that. We’re not finished yet, and we do not have to be. But I may underestimate the desperation of the establishment. We may know tonight.

Meanwhile, I think it ominous that Obama is allowing his CIA, and now his Press Secretary also, to weigh in on the Brief-The-Electors hysteria. It sounds way too much like building rationale for some sort of preemptive action.

Federal “briefers” descend on all electors simultaneously, with the removals to secure briefing sites a mere courtesy detail?

These things are always inconceivable, until they happen. I would hope for squads of state troopers to be there first – Electors are after all very much a vital matter for the states involved.

Obama, fortunately, remains the ditherer-in-chief. I take his maintaining deniability still – no official CIA testimony, yet, nor anything definitive from Obama himself, yet – as an indication he’s not ready to kick over the table, yet – or one hopes, ever.

Interesting times, when the best case is that the lame duck is merely covertly supporting an organized effort to undermine and delegitimize his successor. May all involved be both massively disappointed, and remembered poorly by history.

Scary, but I do not think that’s in the cards. The Marines would resent it…

The Marines, and a whole lot of other people with guns and training too.

Unless, of course, someone first blows enough smoke to confuse the issues sufficiently to produce inaction, or at least division.

I do doubt such a coup would succeed in the long run.

But I fear that the people currently blowing exactly that smoke (many openly talking about such a coup as a good thing) could conceivably self-delude to the point where they make the attempt. (When all else fails, take people at their word.)

Far more likely, of course, is open bureaucratic insurrection. That’s already underway. How much of that will it take before draconian Civil Service reform passes?

I expect more than one novelist and scriptwriter is madly at work on this story, but I cannot take it seriously. Perhaps I am just too old. But I do have this (obviously from another reader):

Regarding the recent buzz about suggestions for an electoral college revolt: perhaps this is just the liberal analog to the conservative meme that Obama wasn’t really a legit president, being a Kenyan born secret muslim, and all that. It serves to weaken the incumbent President politically, and fires up the opposition base. Plus, the Democrats may have learned a lesson from Trump’s successful campaign tactic of making controversial or apparently outrageous statements that simultaneously rile the opposition media, and fire up the base. Since it was a winning tactic, I suppose it may become the new normal in politics.
Regarding the substance of the hacking reports: Putin clearly would like to disrupt and weaken the NATO alliance. Given Mr. Trump’s statements about NATO, his professed respect for Putin’s leadership, and his willingness to make deals, it isn’t hard to guess who Putin’s preference was for the US election. That he might have directed his assets to release dirt on Clinton is hardly surprising. Whether that additional information made much difference in an election already awash in domestic fake news, innuendo, and spin, is debatable.
But I do wonder if Mr. Putin might have some additional tricks up his sleeve should the incoming President be less accommodating than Putin expects. Perhaps a wikileak dump of damaging RNC emails during an international crisis? Or a release of falsely planted information that shows collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian hackers? Or what if the Russians did manage to compromise a few voting machines in the US. A release of that information at an opportune moment could create a Constitutional crisis in the US at a time when Putin wanted maximum distraction on the part of his enemy. The possibilities are endless, and we seem particularly vulnerable now to this kind of manipulation.

So we will just have to wait and see.

Russian National Identity and Foreign Policy

Report:

https://www.csis.org/analysis/russian-national-identity-and-foreign-policy

Launch event video and audio:

https://www.csis.org/events/russian-national-identity-and-foreign-policy

[quote]

In 2016, [Russian Foreign Minister Sergey] Lavrov put his signature under the most unusual article ever attributed to a Russian foreign minister titled “Russia’s Foreign Policy: Historical Background.”31 It provides an excellent glimpse into the framework of current Russian foreign policy, its philosophical foundations, and general worldview of the Russian elite. It does not matter if individual members of the Russian officialdom sincerely believe in concrete postulates of this philosophy. What matters is that they feel obliged to develop and implement their policies in a way that would not contradict the main narrative.

Relying on intellectual legacy of the most conservative Russian thinkers of the nineteenth century, including the Slavophiles, Konstantin Leontiev and Nikolay Danilevsky, and adding questionable terminology, Lavrov argues that Russia is fundamentally different from the West.

According to Lavrov, “Russian people possessed a cultural matrix of their own and an original type of spirituality and never merged with the

West.”32 Developing Putin’s argument about an existential threat of losing Russian national identity, Lavrov points to the source of this threat, the European West that has attempted “to put Russian lands under full control and to deprive Russians of their identity.” 33 Lavrov praises Russia’s centuries-old resistance to these attempts invoking, once again, an extremely controversial concept: “I am confident that this wise and forward-looking policy is in our genes.”

[end quote]

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

Fascinating.

Subj: Boston – Coldest December 16 in 133 years

Read the comments, too.
https://www.iceagenow.info/boston-coldest-december-16-133-years/

Snowstorm In Chicago Delays Hundreds Of Morning Murders

 

 

The city of Chicago is steadily recovering from an overnight snowstorm that delayed hundreds of murders on Saturday and Sunday morning and will likely continue to push numerous homicides across the city drastically behind schedule, public authorities announced. “As we speak, maintenance crews are working diligently to restore public transportation, de-ice roads, and clear back alleyways so that Chicagoans can quickly resume murdering again,” Department of Streets and Sanitation spokesman Dave Michelson said of the heavy blizzard, which caused numerous homicide cancellations this morning at peak murder times. “Unfortunately, we’re backed up by about 35 deadly shootings at the moment, but we hope to restore regular death tolls as soon as possible. We apologize to anyone forced to postpone shootings or other killings today and assure concerned murderers that they will be able to resume slayings by the early afternoon.” At press time, authorities reported that murders were up and running in many parts of the city, with four teenagers already gunned down on Chicago’s South Side.

But I thought 2016 was the warmest year in hundreds of years?

Making America Strong Again

Interesting comment in View today in the Kasparov article:
“But first we must rebuild the West, and to do that we need to make America strong again. Without American strength, little is possible.”
Well if there’s one thing that we’ve learned in the last 8 years, it’s this. We’ve done the experiment in withdrawing America from the world stage (starting with the Apology Tour), and we know where it leads, and it’s Aleppo.
This is rather like a fair bit of military SF, which tends to be set in the borderlands of great empires. (I’m thinking especially of Drake’s work: “Hammers Slammers” and the rest of that universe, but there’s a lot of SF in this vein). Set in the areas at the edges of power, where everything is up for grabs and the worst instincts of Man come to the fore, usually in a violent way.
Well we see this today in Aleppo. That’s the way forward if we continue to weaken and withdraw from the world. We know the Europeans will not replace us at any reasonable speed, we’ve done the experiment and they failed. The European Union is not a superpower, or even a regional power and it will take decades to centuries for it to become one if it ever does. And this says nothing of Asia, where the borderlands are now the South China Sea.
In the meantime, how many more Aleppos out in the borderlands? Because that truly is the price of American disengagement. If a liberal is thinking, they should get this. Aleppo didn’t happen because we elected a President-elect who is Putin puppet (they say), it happened because we withdrew. Or as Kasparov says, because we didn’t care.
We know how this works out, SF authors have written those books. Time to make another choice, if we care…

We used up our strength in causes we couldn’t win. We could have taught the lesson: don’t be beastly. We did not. Now like Yosemite Sam we draw line after line as we retreat, each time daring someone to step over it. Diplomatic policy is a check drawn against the power we have; and we are getting dangerously low.

One cuts one’s coat to the measure of one’s cloth.

Tankman – China Tiananmen square – behind the shot

Deception and One Last Roll of Film: The Story Behind the Tank Man Photo http://petapixel.com/2016/12/16/deception-one-last-roll-film-story-behind-tank-man-photo/

This is Jeff Widener’s story of how he got that one iconic shot of a lone man with two shopping bags holding up a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square.

{^_^}

On Mike Flynn’s Piece

Mike Flynn wrote an excellent piece. While one could add some material from general semantics to further demonstrate the nuances and complexity of what Mr. Flynn described, one point seems absent. Thomas Campbell once pointed out that a theory requires a set of assumptions.

He said he prefers a theory with one assumption or perhaps two assumptions. He said that once you start making three, four, or five assumptions then you’re theory is weak. These assumptions — even one

— constitute the reason why a single fact can invalidate an established theory, as Mr. Flynn said.

So, while I agree with Mr. Flynn’s point that we might best view theory as a narrative, we would also do well to remember that narrative contains assumptions that are not refuted by the facts — but this may change as new facts arrive so we must be ready to discard these models. And there is no shame in this; we created these models and we do not need to keep them around as graven images.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

 

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