View 704 Friday, December 09, 2011

I have a dozen small chores to accomplish today and over the weekend. I need to complete my pass through Black Ship Island, a novella set in the world of Legacy of Heorot about early interstellar colonies set up by slower than light ships. This story is set between Legacy of Heorot and Beowulf’s Children and while it stands alone, it is a part of the development of that unusual society of Adults and Starborn. It introduces a new alien creature.

Then I need to complete a reminiscence on Poul Anderson to be part of a book to be published at BOSKONE this year, where I am one of the guests.

And I need to get on paper some of the scenes I have been developing for the Anvil book; Niven and I have scheduled a hike to discuss that next week. And there’s always Mamelukes, which sits teasingly at 140,000 words, about 10,000 words from completion. And everyone wants me to revive Chaos Manor Reviews which I have neglected for a quarter. Time was I kept up with that many projects and more, and it’s embarrassing to discover that I run out of energy before I can do what I used to consider a full day’s work.

And behind all those are the other projects like getting the public domain California 6^th Grade Reader posted as a Kindle Book for home schoolers and Charter Schools and for that matter just as good reading of what used to be a common part of our culture.

I really am dancing as fast as I can. At least I don’t have to go grubbing for quick money to pay the bills with free lance articles, thanks to those who subscribe to this place.

Roberta had an appointment so Sable and I took a long hike this morning. I’ve been getting a bit of static from some of my radios, and discovered that I no longer have any spray cans of tuner cleaner. I used to have several, including both “zero residue” and “lubricant”. There was a whole shelf of them at Fry’s. Alas, I wasn’t smart enough to buy a lifetime supply of them, and they seem to be scarce now, probably a gift from the friendly regulators at the EPA. I am not for polluting the atmosphere, but I doubt that tuner cleaners ever did much damage to anyone, except perhaps someone silly enough to sniff the stuff. But that’s another rant. Anyway, a quick trip on line showed these weren’t so easy to come by, but Radio Shack offers a lubricant tuner cleaner. There’s a Radio Shack about a mile away in Studio City, and I figured I needed the exercise. Sable and I took off at a brisk pace, taking the longer route down past where the Shell Station used to be when we first moved to Studio City. We met some neighbors, Sable met new and old admirers, and all was well. There were two clerks and only two customers in the Radio Shack. I found the lubricant tuner cleaner very quickly.

Then came the wait. Fifteen minutes. Both clerks were involved in doing something related to sales to the two customers. The elder, an Asian I would guess to have come from Bombay, was on the telephone. Endlessly on the telephone. It probably had something to do with a credit card. This went on and on and on. The other clerk, a younger American, was serving a little old lady who kept going off to find something else, then asking for one more thing like a new battery, and that went on and on. Eventually the little old lady got everything she wanted and that sale was completed after only fifteen minutes. My transaction was done in three minutes flat, although I note that Radio Shack’s system can’t tell whether a card is a credit or a debit card although Trader Joe’s can. I got my tuner cleaner and left. The elderly Indian clerk was still on the telephone. With the same customer. I can’t imagine how Radio Shack stays in business if they can make only about 3 sales each half hour. And mine was trivial.

The lubricant tuner cleaner did seem to work on my radio, eliminating the static when I turn the volume knob, but it leaves a residue I don’t like. I’ll have to see if I can find some zero residue cleaner, but I don’t think I’ll bother looking at Radio Shack. No wonder On Line is taking over retail sales.

And now it’s lunch time.

View 704 Thursday, December 08, 2011

The latest polls show Newt Gingrich leading in almost all the early Republican nomination events. Mitt Romney, who has campaigned for the Independent and Moderate vote while leaving the rest of the field to compete for the conservative Republicans, now has a decision to make.

Of course the establishment criticism of Newt is that he’s not a “real” conservative and never has been. Since many of those making that criticism have little idea of what conservative views are, that is not surprising.

Understand: I am not an apologist for Newt Gingrich, and I have said many times I would rather see him as Speaker than as President. I have also said many times than anyone in that field of Republican candidates would be a better President than Barrack Hussein Obama, who is busily showing that there are worse fates than to have Jimmy Carter as one’s chief executive.

In classic military science, officers are divided into Brilliant vs. Stupid, and Lazy vs. Active. Now understand, these are relative terms: we are assuming that this is not Lake Wobegon, and even the Stupid can be pretty smart compared to the general population; stupid is probably the wrong word although it is the one generally used in these discussions. You will see what I mean in a moment.

This produces four classes of officers. What do you do with them?

First, the commanders, from company to regiment to division to army to army group: which class do you want as commanders? The answer is that you want them Brilliant and Lazy. Then for their Chief of Staff you want the Brilliant and Active. The reasoning is simple enough. The Active tend never to leave well enough alone. They drive the troops mad with new schemes for improvement. Your units go to hell.

However, you need the Brilliant and Active in the picture, just not as commanders. Someone has to recognize problems and look for solutions and agitate for improvements. You want the man at the top to understand this, and select among the various recommendations those which are needed – and which are affordable. But you want the agitation for improvement, else things atrophy.

So far so good. Now what do you do with the Stupid and Lazy? Why, that’s the bulk of your officer corps. They follow orders, and if they come up with awful ideas they aren’t so active as to try to implement them. As to the Stupid and Active, you encourage them to get out and go away. You have no place for them.

I summarize here discussions which have quite literally gone on for a thousand years, and which have to fold in with the unassessable, such as leadership ability and charisma. Can this officer get the troops to follow him? Even when the mission is clearly badly planned and unlikely to succeed? And so forth. And the old adage, that if you don’t trust an officer with troops, you put him in Intelligence; reasons for not trusting judgment with troops vary and are not identical with the Brilliant/Stupid division, and binary categorizations like that aren’t always useful models anyway. There is always a continuum.

I bring this up because candidates who are brilliant but active can be a problem when the office sought is President of the United States.

I also remind you that I have had this discussion with Newt, not once but several times. I also remind you that Russell Kirk once said “What is Conservatism? Conservatism is enjoyment!” He was the classic brilliant but lazy intellectual; he also understood that the United States is in trouble, and it is time to “prune and fertilize” the nation. And Annette Kirk, his wife, was the author of the summary phrase of the National Commission on Education: “If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.” (A Nation at Risk, sometimes known as the Seaborg Commission from Nobel Laureate Glenn T. Seaborg.)

That is still the case. We have a national education system that is indistinguishable from an act of war on the people of the United States. We do not seem to have many candidates who are aware of that. The nation is still at risk.

And let me repeat, anyone on that stage is preferable, and by a lot, to what we have.

But the Presidency is not the only office, and this notion that it is has been one of the problems. Ideally we would have a Congress that understood that some problems are truly national, and require the attention of the federal government; but many more, probably most, are not the business of Washington, and the government ought to get out of the game. As to the role of the federal government in education, the proper role is for the Congress to set up, in the District of Columbia, the best system of education it can devise, and let that be a beacon to the world. And if it cannot do that, it ought to abandon the pretense that it knows how to run schools In Kansas City, Missouri, or Mineral Well, Mississippi, or anywhere else.

The Congress and President alike ought to find it absurd that the United States borrows money from China in order to pay Federal officers to inspect magician stage acts to be certain that the magicians have a federal license to use rabbits in their act. I suspect we can all make other lists of things the federal government pays for that are absurd on their face, and then another list of things that may or may not be worth doing, but which we simply cannot afford. We need to examine what is called “regulatory science” and understand that regulatory science is to science as duck hunters are to ducks. We need a Congress that understands that the purpose of the Constitution is to insure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. It is not the purpose of the Federal government to deliver hot lunches to school children. That may be the business of the states, but it is the business of the federal government to protect the rights of some states to opt out of that, not force them to serve the free lunches.

But we all know that, and I ramble.

I have not discussed these matters with all the Republican candidates. I have discussed them, in depth, with one of them, and he remains my friend.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free. And the continued expansion of the federal government has the effect of favoring equality over freedom.

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_copybook.htm

The story is coming out: when it was realized that the Iranians had managed to take control of the Rq-170 Sentinel drone, President Obama was offered several alternative actions to recapture or destroy it. He chose none of them, and now the drone with its electronics intact is on display in Persia, and doubtless will be sold to China. It’s an odd way to conduct a war. Of course the assumption that such equipment could be deployed without using advanced encryption for its controls was at best questionable. Some sources say that it was sheer arrogance: the US is so far in advance that we didn’t need that. This assumes that the People’s Liberation Army would not be cooperating with Iran, or else assumes that China is also well behind the US; both those assumptions are questionable at best.

There is more to this story than is coming out. Apparently we had contingency plans for what to do in this situation, but for some reason the preventive action, hardware encryption of the control signals, was not taken in the first place. We’ll keep watch.

View 704 Wednesday, December 07, 2011

Pearl Harbor Day

I remember hearing President Roosevelt on the radio that morning. I was eight years old.

President Obama has made it clear that this will be a pivotal election.

[snip] But, Osawatomie, this is not just another political debate. This is the defining issue of our time.  This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class, and for all those who are fighting to get into the middle class.  Because what’s at stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, secure their retirement. 

[snip] Now, just as there was in Teddy Roosevelt’s time, there is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let’s respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune.  “The market will take care of everything,” they tell us.  If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes — especially for the wealthy — our economy will grow stronger.  Sure, they say, there will be winners and losers.  But if the winners do really well, then jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everybody else.  And, they argue, even if prosperity doesn’t trickle down, well, that’s the price of liberty.

Now, it’s a simple theory.  And we have to admit, it’s one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government.  That’s in America’s DNA.  And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker.  (Laughter.)  But here’s the problem:  It doesn’t work.  It has never worked.  (Applause.)  It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression.  It’s not what led to the incredible postwar booms of the ‘50s and ‘60s.  And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade.  (Applause.)  I mean, understand, it’s not as if we haven’t tried this theory.  
Remember in those years, in 2001 and 2003, Congress passed two of the most expensive tax cuts for the wealthy in history.  And what did it get us?  The slowest job growth in half a century.  Massive deficits that have made it much harder to pay for the investments that built this country and provided the basic security that helped millions of Americans reach and stay in the middle class — things like education and infrastructure, science and technology, Medicare and Social Security.  
Remember that in those same years, thanks to some of the same folks who are now running Congress, we had weak regulation, we had little oversight, and what did it get us?  Insurance companies that jacked up people’s premiums with impunity and denied care to patients who were sick, mortgage lenders that tricked families into buying homes they couldn’t afford, a financial sector where irresponsibility and lack of basic oversight nearly destroyed our entire economy. 

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-text-obama-speech-kansas-20111206,0,4426647.story?track=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+latimes%2Fnews%2Fpolitics+%28L.A.+Times+-+Politics%29

What we need, according to President Obama, is more regulation and more government to “level the playing field,” which translates into wealth redistribution. He doesn’t address the problem of what happens when you run out of wealth to redistribute.

Meanwhile, government spending rises exponentially. A Supercommittee charged with reducing the deficit by $1.4 Trillion over ten years. The projected deficit for those ten years adds up to more than $4 Trillion. Had the Supercommittee done its job, the deficit would have continued to rise, but not quite so fast.

We still continue to borrow money to disperse to the poor. If the deficits continue to rise – and this is inevitable since there is no proposal simply to stop borrowing money and spend only what we take in – the amount we pay in debt service will rise. That money will go to someone. If we have raised taxes and confiscated domestic wealth, we will have no one to borrow from in the United States. That means more and more of what we produce will leave the country. We can hope it will return as investment, but if so, the profits will go to – well, to whom?

What we have projected is increased spending to cover more and more of the expenses of the population. Houses, medical care, retirement, food — but I don’t need to go into all that. Tocqueville did it quite well a long time ago.

It would seem that if despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them. I do not question that, in an age of instruction and equality like our own, sovereigns might more easily succeed in collecting all political power into their own hands and might interfere more habitually and decidedly with the circle of private interests than any sovereign of antiquity could ever do. But this same principle of equality which facilitates despotism tempers its rigor. We have seen how the customs of society become more humane and gentle in proportion as men become more equal and alike. When no member of the community has much power or much wealth, tyranny is, as it were, without opportunities and a field of action. As all fortunes are scanty, the passions of men are naturally circumscribed, their imagination limited, their pleasures simple. This universal moderation moderates the sovereign himself and checks within certain limits the inordinate stretch of his desires.

I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/ch4_06.htm

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

And President Obama is correct. “…this is not just another political debate. This is the defining issue of our time. “

Tuesday was devoured by locusts, but I am slowly catching up. I have also been working on fiction, and Eric and my friends are getting a number of older works to go up as Kindle editions. I am putting together a lot of notes on Anvil, which is more and more looking like a story of how to save a nation. We’ll see. Thanks for your renewals and subscriptions.

On that score, the biggest holdup in getting some of the old stuff up as eBooks is covers. I am not artistic and I don’t do cover designs. I did pick a couple of on-line pictures and bought them for some of what’s up, and Reck Hellewell and some of my other advisors came up with some of what’s there, and my agent took care of the ones that she has put up, but I don’t really have a solution to the cover problem. Incidentally, if you find glitches in any of my Kindle books, tell me so we can get them fixed. Amazon allows all those who have bought a book to download updates if the author has copies fixed. I’ve done that with a couple of them.

The Habitable Exoplanets Catalog, a new online database of habitable worlds