View 710 Monday, January 23, 2012

Still trying to catch up.

I have other mail like this:

You should probably write something about Newt’s win in South Carolina

The negatives from the older and wiser’s are starting to roll in. They seem to not realize what you told me earlier, that Newt never expected to run for office again and therefore did things that a prudent politician probably would not do. Frankly, I’m sick of the older and wiser’s. They may be old, but they aint that wise.

I suppose I should comment, but I want to repeat, I am not an apologist for Newt Gingrich, nor have I endorsed him for President. I will say again that I think every one of the Republican candidates would be a far better President than the one we’ve got. Of course I think William Clinton was a far better President than the one we’ve got. The Obama program really will fundamentally change the nature of the United States political system. His “recess” appointments show his ignorance – or reasoned contempt – for the concept of separation of powers. His use of political trickery to defraud the General Motors bondholders of their money in order to turn the company over to his political allies would have horrified every single member of the Convention of 1787 and every single signer of both the Constitution and the Declaration. And his rejection of the oil pipeline from Canada demonstrates that he places political advantage over the national economic welfare – for that matter, as did the entire GM deal.

I have no brief for the political cronyism that took place during the Bush administration and which continues under the Obama administration. The whole concept of limited government was damaged by the people who came after Gingrich’s term as Speaker. As to the “ethics” charges against Gingrich, the one I am most familiar with was the charge that the fiction book we were to collaborate on was a sham and a means for a publisher to bribe Gingrich with an advance to be paid to both of us. As I pointed out at the time, I am the author of several best selling books, and the advance we were offered was not particularly large compared to what I was then getting for novels. I decided not to do the book – a contemporary high-tech political thriller – when Newt became Speaker; I could handle the political implications of the plot when the co-author was Minority Whip, but the Speaker is third in line for the Presidency, and the need to be careful in the plot lest it have diplomatic effects seemed too great. The book was never written, but the “ethics” charge that it was anything other than a book to make money was simply fabricated; which told me all I needed to know about the kind of people who would bring such a charge. If they could say that was unethical they would say anything.

Newt was a fairly close friend from 1980 until he left public office. He remains a friend. And I repeat that every single one of the candidates would be a better President than Barrack Hussein Obama. As was William Jefferson Clinton.

It is a long campaign. The election is not until November, and the Republican National Convention is not until Summer. I do with the candidates would concentrate their fire on Obama and the Democrats rather than each other, but then I have said all that before.

I do not have much mail like this, but I suppose I ought to comment:

You have said that Newt Gingrich is the smartest man in any room he happens to be in, or words to that effect.

You must inhabit some amazingly stupid rooms.

PenGun

What I said is that Newt is likely to be the smartest man in whatever room he happens to be in. I didn’t say always, because often those rooms contained other people I admire, and when you get to that level of intelligence the matter of “smartest” doesn’t turn out to be all that meaningful.

I have been in rooms with Newt and some pretty smart people including Max Hunter, General Graham, General Meyer, Colonel Kane, Poul Anderson, Robert Heinlein, Dan Goldin, Alvin Tofler, and many other science savvy people, and other rooms with historians of merit. Jim Baen and I spent many hours with Newt in deep conversation in Washington during the 1980’s. Who was the smartest person in the room didn’t come up.

I do know that when I knew Newt Gingrich he like to be in rooms full of smart people, and like many intellectuals he liked to come up with new and different ideas; and like most new and different ideas some sounded pretty good when first brought up but didn’t withstand critical rational discussion. That seems to happen often enough in the intellectual circles I prefer. That may not be an optimum situation for politicians, whose words and thoughts and ideas seem to be taken down in writing to be brought up again decades later.

Of course, if you are convinced that I am amazingly stupid, there is no reason to pay attention to me.

In COMDEX days Sheldon Adelson, who owned COMDEX, and I used to present the Best of COMDEX awards together. I note that Shelly has given Newt a lot of money. That changes the Florida odds considerably. It’s going to be a long campaign.

Apple has announced the end of the textbook as we know it. That sparked a lively debate on their methods, and particularly the licensing agreement for using the free apps they released to make it easy to take textbook research and classroom lecture tools and turn them into textbooks. The agreement seems ill thought out. I am sure Apple has been appalled at some of the reaction to it. I suspect revisions are coming soon enough.

The textbook industry is huge, and is a large part of the profit structure of many print publishers as eBooks become more and more important. It will take a while to change it – there are many political reasons that will make changes very hard to do, and there are many economic interests involved here – but I suspect it’s all inevitable. More on this as more comes out, but I expect Apple’s long range forecast is correct: the textbook industry as we know it will collapse.

Whether the current laptops and tablet computers are Good Enough to become the new textbooks or not is debatable; they’re expensive, to begin with. But Moore’s Law is inexorable. CES was stuffed with MacBook Air wannabees running Windows and Chrome and Linux and such like, and those are the early consumer machines. There are new generations of them coming.

No one has really thought through the implications here. It used to be that textbooks were used for a long time. Now they can be revised by “revision” with changes in text and emphasis happening in hours. Think memory holes and 1984. We live in interesting times.

View 709 Friday, January 20, 2012

There is a difference between crime and rebellion, as there is a difference between sin and denouncing the concept of morality. Saying let he who is without sin caste the first stone is not the same as approving adultery.

It was painful to watch Santorum during the debates last night. It is not that I disagree with anything he said – well, let me amend that to anything I remember him saying – but that I don’t think that it’s an effective nomination strategy to draw attention to one’s virtues by pointing out the faults of others. Leave that to someone else. There will always be a someone else.

Santorum has the virtues we have always sought in a Chief Executive. He is fairly sound on the conservative issues. He has never had to govern a liberal state, so he has never been required to compromise. He sounded Presidential the night of the Iowa Caucuses. I understand that his followers believe that he performed well in the debates last night. I do not share that view.

I found his attacks on Romney and Gingrich painful to watch, and unenlightening. I would have appreciated more an explication of what he would do with the office. As to his accusations of grandiosity: I can remember when the notion of a Contract With America and a Republican majority in the House of Representatives after forty years in the wilderness was considered grandiose. I can remember when Strategic Defense was considered grandiose and called Star Wars in derision. I can recall when winning the Cold War was considered grandiose, and negotiating a CoDominium of the United States and the USSR, First World and Second World to dominate the Third World was thought to be inevitable. Does anyone else remember Kissinger as Metternich, and détente? I certainly do.

The Founding Fathers of the United States boldly proclaimed that A New Age Now Begins. That was a grand idea. The Philadelphia Convention of 1787 proclaimed

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

That was a grandiose idea. We were building the city on a hill, an example for the world to follow. A New Age Now Begins. Maybe it’s time we remembered such matters.

View 709 Thursday, January 19, 2012

Rick Perry withdraws, endorsing Newt. We are down to Romney vs. Gingrich, with Santorum as the non-Romney spare tire. It now appears that Santorum won the Iowa Caucus by a few votes, correcting the announcement that Romney had won it by 8 votes. Romney won the New Hampshire primary. If Gingrich wins South Carolina, as is now expected, it will remain a horse race.

Perry’s withdrawal was not unexpected. His concession the night of the Iowa caucuses sounded like the prelude to closing the campaign, but apparently he was persuaded to stay on in the hopes that Gingrich and Romney would cancel each other out with a stream of negative ads, leaving Perry and Santorum to fight it out.

Tonight we have another Republican debate scheduled. I’ll probably miss it. It may be critical for the future of the nation.

Then on Nightline tonight, after a day of teasers, ABC is going to run an interview with Marianne Gingrich in which the headline item is that Newt Gingrich wanted an “open marriage,” which she refused. Rush Limbaugh is saying that the effect of this in unpredictable but that it will depend in part on how well Marianne comes off in the interview when it is aired. I can tell you that. Marianne will come off very well. She always does and did. I always liked her when I was more closely associated with Newt Gingrich, and so did everyone else I knew.

The only open question I know of here is how new any of this is. Everything in that interview has been known since the last millennium, so the interview is more a reminder than an education. Newt Gingrich has not been running as an exemplar of marital integrity. I would guess that at least half of the Presidents of the United States had mistresses at one time or another before becoming President, and a substantial number during and after their Presidential terms. Some seem to have used the White House for assignations. Newt’s transgressions have long been admitted, and indeed he resigned from the House when this one became public. That was in the last Millennium. One wonders just how many actual voters find this new and disturbing, as opposed to those who feign shock and astonishment for other political purposes.

I suspect that this ‘news’ was sprung in a desperate attempt to bolster up Romney, whose star has been falling lately. We’ll see. These firestorms will probably push Santorum up to a position of prominence, and it will then be his turn for destruction. Meanwhile neither Gingrich nor Santorum has any money. And the Wall Street Journal has done a piece called Bain Capital Saved America which is worth paying attention to. Those were exciting times that changed the world.

My position remains the same. I would prefer anyone on that stage to Barrack Obama. We do live in interesting times.

View 709 Wednesday, January 18, 2012

My head is buzzing with thoughts about our novel. Imagine if you were given the task as a military mission: fix the schools so that no geek is left behind. We need boffins. Find and teach them.

That’s a direct oversimplification, but it’s important, and it requires a lot of thought. One of the things I found while looking into it was a commentary onf the upcoming Apple education technology announcement: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/01/apple-education-jobs/ . It includes a 1996 interview with Steve Jobs on education and technology.

I used to think that technology could help education. I’ve probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I’ve had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.

It’s a political problem. The problems are sociopolitical. The problems are unions. You plot the growth of the NEA [National Education Association] and the dropping of SAT scores, and they’re inversely proportional. The problems are unions in the schools. The problem is bureaucracy.

He’s dead right, of course. Technology alone cannot fix the problem. But it can help: technology does make possible some solutions that are otherwise politically impossible. In our novel we are changing the political rules, but in fact technology does that also.

We won’t know what the technological innovations are until Thursday.

On Thursday, Apple is hosting an “Education Event” in New York City. Thanks to reporting by sister publication Ars Technica, we expect Apple to announce a new digital publishing tool — a “GarageBand for e-books” — to create interactive, HTML5-based texts that can be read on Apple’s iOS devices.

I’m looking forward to it.

Wikipedia has gone black for the day, and I for one have found that less irritating than I thought it would be. There’s plenty of information that hasn’t been summarized and wikied. I’ve also been using Bing to find it. I agree that the copyright laws need reform, but that reform needs to be made with authors and artists in mind, not just publishers. One reason pirates were so successful in the music industry was that the publishers had all the stakes, and artists often encouraged their fans to pirate their works, since the artists weren’t getting paid anything from ‘legitimate’ sales. Authors of books don’t have quite that antagonistic a relationship with their publishers, but their interests aren’t identical either.

That’s for another time, but so far the lack of Wikipedia hasn’t inconvenienced me, and I’ve been finding Bing about as useful as Google. One thing the blackouts have done is break a few habits.

And this just in:

Wikipedia blackout dodge

Turns out that if you disable Active Scripting then Wikipedia works just fine. Lots of other sites don’t–which leaves me wondering what exactly they do that relies so heavily on scripting.

—

Mike T. Powers

Here is a warning:

Does Gumby have an alibi?

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/fake-ipad-2s-made-clay-sold-canadian-stores-220733489.html

The tablet computers, like most Apple products, are known for their sleek and simple designs. But there’s no mistaking the iPad for one of the world’s oldest "tablet devices." Still, most electronic products cannot be returned to stores. For the the stores and customers to be fooled by the clay replacements, the thieves must have successfully weighed out the clay portions and resealed the original Apple packaging.

Future Shop spokesman Elliott Chun told CTV that individuals bought the iPads with cash, replaced them with the model clay, then returned the packages to the stores. The returned fakes were restocked on the shelves and sold to new, unwitting customers.

M

Beware