Chaos Manor – Jerry Pournelle – Page 296 – the original blog of Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Manor

Jade, memory lapses, reading, and other mail

By Jerry Pournelle | Nov 21, 2011 - 12:20 am | Updated: November 21, 2011 - 12:20 am | Mail

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Mail 701 Sunday, November 20, 2011

Feeling jaded about the Taj Mahal

Dear Jerry

Saw your link to the Maya Taj Mahal photo– after four decades of tropical sun and rain it needs a new coat of dayglow lime and orange paint to restore it to Magical Realism’s top ten list.

One correction is in order – you give yourself too little credit, as the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard & the Museum of Fine Arts Boston had you on the books as Associate Field Director of their joint venture, The Mesoamerican Jade Project.

Here for those interested is Bill Broad’s New York Time’s story about the project’s successful, if somewhat delayed conclusion- having gone missing for roughly 25 centuries, the lost jade mines of the Olmecs took a quarter century to track down:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/22/world/in-guatemala-a-rhode-island-size-jade-lode.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm.html

Attached is a picture of the end of the operation- After chasing rumor and reality over hill and dale, including the Sierra de las Minas, where we encountered the standard _Incidents of Travel In Central America_ assortment of mules, jaguars, coral snakes , live angry people with guns and peaceable dead ones without them , we finally got together enough good intel to end up with yours truly resting comfortably atop the the Quebrada Seca Olmec mother lode, a ~100 M3/ 300 tonne blue jade monolith about half way up the side of the Jalapa escarpment, which I arrived at on horseback ( If only we had thought to ask for horses in 1977

!) and dutifully reported in the December 2001 issue of _Antiquity_ — time it would seem makes archaeologists of us all

A fellow name of Helferich is writing a book about jade in Guatemala, with the rather grandiose title "Stone of Kings" but I fear he is in kahoots with the Antigua tourist traps that, absent any jade a Chinese dealer would touch, used high pressure salesmanship to foist ugly high pressure rocks, mostly opaque omphacitites on unsuspecting tourists.

Despite paying pennies per pound for bad jade in the Motagua valley, they are still advertising the products of digs like Don Angel Merida’s backhoe operation as produce of the entirely fictive "Quarry of the Maya Kings"

Russell Seitz

Thanks. It was an interesting adventure, complete with sleeping on top of the Land Cruiser while somewhat poisonous toads hopped about feasting on the cloud of mosquitoes that rose from the lake at dusk.

Letter from England

The economy here seems to be gliding onto a sandbar. At least inflation has dropped to 5%. The expectation is for a double dip recession.

See if you can understand these articles. They’re on pensions in the UK:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/pensions/8899628/Will-the-Chancellor-demolish-pension-tax-breaks.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/pensions/8899230/Squeeze-on-pensions-is-for-greater-good-says-minister.html

—

"Good judgement comes from experience, experience comes from bad judgement." (SLClemens)

Harry Erwin, PhD

How many dips does it take before people begin referring to Depression? Ah well.

Occupy Movement Goes Nuts

<.>

The group plans on disrupting banks, Wall Street, homes of financial CEOs, and whoever else constitutes the top 1 percent of the wealth holders in America. Their message is one of civil disobedience, enabled by a home base surrounding L.A. City Hall that functions

<..>

"There is no debt crisis. There is a revenue crisis. It is in the coffers of the 1 percent," Brito interjected.

</>

http://www.whittierdailynews.com/news/ci_19372839

This is frightening. Clearly these people are putting out disinformation, misinformation, or they are speaking anything that sounds like it will fly. If you confiscate all wealth of the top one percent, you will not even get one year’s GDP. Then, after you confiscate that wealth how will you turn it into more wealth? How will the former elite — now that they have no wealth?

The statements from the article suggest that Occupy enthusiasts believe the top 1% in the list of successful Americans deserves negative sanction. Why not use the courts, ballot box, and legislative bodies? I think more thought, consideration, and communication is necessary. So far, I see angry people who don’t seem to have the bile or zest to figure out what they’ve been screwed out of and whom screwed them. The "movement" never dicusses these points.

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Movements never discuss such matters. And of course the Occupy enthusiasts no sooner draw attention before they are diluted and swamped by hangers on as well as organized groups. It’s a very old political tactic used by both Communists and Fascists between the wars among other times: let someone else draw a crowd, then go exploit the attention.

Deutschland, Deutschland, ueber Alles.

<http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/284656/Germans-try-to-kill-off-pound>

—

Roland Dobbins

The art of economic warfare is not lost…

One Nanosecond

You will of course have realized, perhaps belatedly, that either your recollection or Adm. Hopper is wrong.

One nanosecond is 299.8 mm, 5 mm. less than a foot. It is perhaps too bad that we went to the metric system before getting a good handle on the speed of light. One foot = one nanosecond at c would have been a nice, unambiguous standard.

By a curious coincidence, Thos. Jefferson’s suggested definition of a foot — one-fifth of the length of a uniform bar that beats one second when suspended as a pendulum — is a good bit closer to a nanosecond at c than it is to the current value of a foot.

Regards,

Ric

Ric Locke

I plead temporary insanity. Of course you’re right. I still have my nanosecond, but I haven’t looked at it for twenty years. I should have gone to the trophy case and dug it out. Thanks. And Grace Hopper was never wrong. And alas, that wasn’t the only lapse this week:

Evolution and light speed

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

I read Chaos Manor today with interest, and this one snippet you posted caught my eye:

"I have yet to see a report of actual information travelling faster than light in these experiments, but that would be the obvious next experiment. If information is sent faster than light, the theory of evolution is in need of drastic revision, and theories like Petr Beckmann’s entangled gravitational fields as a form of aether bear examination."

Having read this, I have a simple question.

Why, exactly, does the theory of evolution need revision if information can be sent faster than light? Normally I understand what you’re talking about, but I’m afraid I need some education this time.

Many thanks if you can assist.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

The answer is nothing, of course. I meant Relativity. I should take more time proof reading. In my defense at least I managed to name an important theory. Just the wrong important theory. Evolution is hardly in danger from CERN.

Georgetown University suggests reading comes from memorization

http://explore.georgetown.edu/news/?ID=60788&PageTemplateID=295

"WASHINGTON, D.C. — Skilled readers can recognize words at lightning fast speed when they read because the word has been placed in a visual dictionary of sorts, say Georgetown University Medical Center <http://gumc.georgetown.edu/> (GUMC) neuroscientists. The visual dictionary idea rebuts the theory that our brain “sounds out” words each time we see them…"

And of course this is a repeat of the study done generations ago that caused the educationists to denounce teaching phonics. Of course experienced readers do not “sound out” words. Over time they learn words about the same way that Chinese learn to read classical Chinese script, or Egyptians read hieroglyphs, of for that matter, readers of languages with a phonetic alphabet such as the Phoenicians have been reading their languages for over two thousand years. The phonetic revolution made it possible for everyone to learn to read, and to read words that they had never seen before: with a phonetic language you can say words you have never seen written before, so that your “reading language” and your “speaking language” are the same. Over time those who read learn the words, and don’t have to “sound them out”, but every now and then they may see a word they haven’t seen in a long time, and they may have to attack it with phonic skills. But the geniuses in the departments of education decided that since mature readers don’t sound out words, there was no point in teaching kids how to do that, thus neatly converting phonetic English into an ideographic language like Chinese or Egyptian hieroglyphics, and setting reading education back by two thousand years. California managed to go from the highest literacy rate to way down below average by forbidding the teaching of phonics in public schools. A generation of teachers grew up unable to teach phonics because they had never learned them.

The creature who imposed this idiocy on the State has since apologized, and I suppose he was sincere, but I don’t accept his arrogant apology. He was told better at the time.

You can find out more on this at http://www.readingtlc.com/ which is the web site for my wife’s reading program. It is a systematic phonics program that works, and if you know anyone from age 5 to adult who needs to learn to read English, this program will do the job. It has taught thousands, and in California after they had 20 years in which teaching reading was in effect outlawed by arrogant professors of utter ignorance, it has been damned well needed.

So I see the drum rolls are starting again?

So precisely how do science students read polymorphicnitrotoluene and other such words that they have never seen before? Only a damned fool thinks that people sound out all the words they read. But there is no shortage of idiots in education schools. I expected better from Georgetown.

gun protection from TSA

Note that, per the TSA website, having a gun in hard-sided locked luggage doesn’t mean they can’t open it. It just means you have to go watch them do it and give then the key. This will still keep your items from being stolen–the airline never gets the key–but it’s not a magic way to keep the screeners from going through your luggage. (indeed, it’s probably more of a way to *ensure* that they go through it.)=

M

Water Does not prevent dehydration

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/11/20/business-leaders-will-reportedly-face-jail-time-for-claiming-water-prevents/?test=latestnews

J

Not all the dolts are in departments of education.

occasional success stories

there are occasional success stories. For example, the Dallas News reports on the stunningly good math and reading test scores achieved by third-grade pupils at Field Elementary school. There was a minor downside, though. They achieved those high math and reading test scores by devoting essentially all of their effort to teaching these kids math and reading, which of course meant they had to skip science and other subjects almost entirely. Not to worry, though. The kids still got grades in those other subjects. Of course, those grades were faked, sometimes assigned by teachers who’d never even taught the subjects in question. If I had school-age children, I’d do whatever it took to either homeschool them or get them into private schools. I don’t believe public schools–any public schools–can any longer be trusted to educate kids.

http://www.ttgnet.com/journal/

Some aren’t dolts.

Newborn Pentagon DNA database exposed in Supreme Court

Another tip of the iceberg that may interest the curious:

<.>In a long running case, a Supreme Court has ruled to limit the use of blood samples collected from newborns by the government.The case has exposed the fact that there is an ongoing semi-covert movement by state and federal governments to claim ownership of every newborn baby’s DNA for the purpose of genetic research without the consent of individual citizens. The Minnesota Court ruled Wednesday that the Minnesota Department of Health is violating the law in storing, using and disseminating newborn screening test results and newborn DNA. Overruling a lower court’s decision, the state Supreme Court found that the samples are “Genetic Information” under the State Genetic Privacy Act, and held that “unless otherwise provided, the Department must have written informed consent to collect, use, store, or disseminate [the blood samples].”</>http://www.infowars.com/supreme-court-blocks-government-plan-to-claim-ownership-of-dna/

This is one of those "conspiracy theory" issues; look at that it wasn’t a theory after all it’s what happened. —–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Unexpected bio details,

Jerry

Biographical bits have the oddest way of turning up. Not long ago I re-read a lovely book called Queens Die Proudly, a 1943 book written by W L White, the man who wrote They Were Expendable. Like that book, Queens Die Proudly became a movie, the forgettable “Air Force.” Unlike the movie, Queens Die Proudly is fascinating, a look at B-17’s in the Philippines at the beginning of the war, and the American involvement in trying to stop the Japanese in what is now Indonesia. But toward the end is a bit about LBJ, of all people (the excerpt is from page 263 and pp. 266-267):

“A man doesn’t know what distance means until he flies that end of the world,” said Red, the crew chief. “Remember the time we had to make a forced landing right in the middle of the place?”

“I’ll never forget,” said Charlie, the bombardier. “It was about the time of that Buna business.”

“We had left Darwin,” said Red, “and were flying across the Australian desert headed for Cloncurry. We had umpty-ump rank aboard, about Sixteen in all—General Royce, General Perrin, General Marquat, and some Australians—Air Marshals they probably were—and also Lyndon Johnson, a big lanky guy from Texas, a real Congressman, only now he was out inspecting this area as a Navy Lieutenant Commander.

“Well, we’re flying along over this wilderness which looks like the rumpled parts of New Mexico or Arizona, heading, we think, for this Cloncurry, only our arrival time goes by, and no Cloncurry. <snip> (p 263)

“. . . and in about a minute there was quite a bump, but still it was a perfect three-point landing. In four seconds the Major had her rolling smooth. The ground was soft. Twenty-five tons is a lot of bomber, and her wheels began to sink in about six inches. But the Major could sense this, so he gave gas to all four engines to keep her rolling, and taxied her up to high ground hard enough to hold her up.

“We get out. Pretty soon Australian ranchers begin crawling out of holes in the ground—I don’t know where else they came from—and right away Lieutenant Commander Johnson gets busy. He begins to get acquainted. They tell him where we are and some of them go off to get a truck to take us into town where we can telephone, and more keep coming, and Johnson is shaking hands all around, and he comes back and tells us these are real folks—the best damn folks in the world, except maybe the folks in his own Texas. Pretty soon he knows all their first names, and they’re telling him why there ought to be a high tariff on wool, and there’s no question he swung that county for Johnson before we left. He was in his element. I know he sure swung the Swoose crew. He can carry that precinct any day.”

“Listening to him made us all homesick,” said Frank, <snip> (pp. 266-267)

I wonder, did any of LBJ’s biographer’s get this bit?

Ed

I have never heard that before.

World of Warcraft Wealth Survey.

<http://xsinthis.net/2011/11/report-world-of-warcraft-wealth-survey/>

Roland Dobbins

And yet another beauty from APOD

The Butterfly Nebula from Hubble

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap111113.html

This site ( Astronomy Picture of the Day –

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html )

is well worth bookmarking, and is a hell of a lot better way to start the day than any of the media sites.

FYI – 🙂

—

Paul Gordon ( http://paulinhouston.blogspot.com/ )

"When faced with a problem you do not understand,

do any part of it you do understand; then look at it again."

(Robert A. Heinlein – "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress")

Official and unofficial versions

By Jerry Pournelle | Nov 20, 2011 - 6:26 pm | Updated: November 20, 2011 - 6:35 pm | View

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View 701 Sunday, November 20, 2011

The big flap today is that at UC Davis a bunch of protestors were pepper sprayed. The various on line photos show the campus police simply walking up to the kids and spraying them down; one commentator say the police were nonchalant and acted as if they were spraying insects.

Actually the story isn’t quite that simple. The students were blocking access to the area the officers had been sent to finish cleaning out camping stuff. One of the officers read the riot act – well, the section of the California code that they students were defying – and told them to disperse or move to another area where they were not blocking public access. When that got no response he produced a large can of pepper spray and read the code section again, said that if they did not disperse he would use the pepper spray, and when they responded with silence he methodically sprayed each one (presumably inspired by a desire to be seen to give equal treatment to each?).

Which raises an interesting topic for discussion. The students were not making threats of violence. They were not told they could not assemble, but they were ordered to do it somewhere else. One presumes that the police could have simply started arresting them. Is that what they should have done? Or would it have been acceptable had they used their batons to prod the students? Or –

At what point do the police have the right to remove people from blocking others’ access, and what means are acceptable for accomplishing that result? The law seems pretty clear, and the police complied with the requirement that the demonstrators be made aware that what they were doing was breaking the law, and which law they were violating. At that point what should they have done?

The chancellor of the campus says

"During the early afternoon hours and because of the request to take down the tents, many students decided to dismantle their tents, a decision for which we are very thankful. However, a group of students and noncampus affiliates decided to stay. The university police then came to dismantle the encampment. The events of this intervention have been videotaped and widely distributed. As indicated in various videos, the police used pepper spray against the students who were blocking the way. The use of pepper spray as shown on the video is chilling to us all and raises many questions about how best to handle situations like this." http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/11/uc-davis-police-defend-use-of-pepper-spray-on-protesters.html

It’s not what I would have done had I been in charge because I have not enough information on the effects of pepper spray and possible allergies. The students certainly weren’t doing anything that required instant action or deadly force. On the other hand, the liklihood of someone being injured during a physical arrest is not zero either. The urgency of the police action can be questioned, but surely the Constitution does not give any random group of people the right to sit with locked arms in any public path they choose to occupy.

Would it have been better had the police simply dejnied access to the students by anyone else, and waited until the calls of nature did their work? Perhaps distribution of bottled water to hasten the process?

I am reading SEAL Target Geronimo by Chuck Pfarrer, a retired Navy SEAL described as “assault element commander” of SEAL Team 6. I put it that way because oddly enough I have been unable to find his Navy retirement rank. A Special Ops spokesman, Colonel Tim Nye, says the book is completely untrue. Pfarrer claims his version of the raid is based on interviews with the people who were in on it. Colonel Nye says that the government version is true and Nye is making things up, and probably never talked to any of the team members. We can believe the official version.

There is apparently no question that Mr. Pfarrer is a former SEAL team commander, making him a former member of one of the most formidable outfits in the history of the world. He is honorably retired. He has directly contradicted the President’s version of the raid:

In SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama bin Laden, Pfarrer, a former SEAL, offers an alternative version of the raid arguing the SEAL team shot bin Laden within 90 seconds of arriving at the Pakistan compound where the al-Qaida mastermind was holed up.

Pfarrer claims the White House issued a fictional and damaging account of the raid that made the SEALs look inept. He says President Barack Obama’s speedy acknowledgement of the raid was a political move that rendered much of the intelligence gathered on the raid useless.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/navy-seals-controversial-book-not-true-261817

It makes for an interesting study. Of course nothing ever goes according to plan, but the official story does seem to make the SEALs look less competent than most of us think they are. More when I know more.

I have just heard that a recent survey says

One in three college grads said that access to social media sites like Facebook and the ability to choose their own devices was more important to them than salary when considering a job offer. This according to a study of 2,800 college students and young professionals worldwide conducted by Cisco. More than 40% went so far as to say that they would accept less money for a job that was down with social media at work on a device of their choosing if it also included telework.

http://hothardware.com/News/College-Grads-Say-Salary-Is-Less-Important-than-FacebookFriendly-Work-Policies/

Words fail me.

Don’t claim that water cures dehydration. You may go to jail.

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/11/20/business-leaders-will-reportedly-face-jail-time-for-claiming-water-prevents/?test=latestnews

Fortunately that’s just in Britain now, but the FDA is watching…

Working on fiction. Relativity in trouble?

By Jerry Pournelle | Nov 19, 2011 - 11:56 pm | Updated: November 20, 2011 - 12:03 am | View

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View 701 Saturday, November 19, 2011

I’m still doing hard research on a new character and some background for our novel, and I‘m grinding a bit on recording the subscriptions and renewals. I’m way behind on that, and my apologies to everyone for taking so long in doing it. I really appreciate the subscriptions and renewals, and actually I read and try to answer any comments that come with them, but data entry isn’t my favorite activity. I probably ought to work out a more automated way to do this, but nust now I certainly haven’t time for that. Ah well. And I do thank you all for your support of this place.

Regarding Chaos Manor Reveiws and my old BYTE columns, I do intend to get that going again. It hasn’t been my most energetic summer, and this is in some ways the hardest novel we’ve ever done.

A good part of this new novel will address a lot of contemporary political problems. I hope to keep it realistic, but it’s not a manual on political action.

For those who asked, no, I am not endorsing Newt Gingrich as the Republican candidate. I have my preferences on candidates, but like Newt, I am convinced that anyone on that stage is far better qualified to be President than the current occupant of the White House. Newt is an old friend and remains so. I’m on record as saying that he’s likely to be the smartest man in any room he’s in. I have no explanation for some of the odd things he seems to have done, but none of them approach the level of disqualifying him from holding the office of President. I hope that whoever does become President will listen to his advice.

News keeps coming in about the FTL neutrinos. Apparently we have several confirmations of some of the neutrinos definitely arriving 50 or more nanoseconds faster than the lightspeed travel time. Admiral Grace Hopper used to hand out nanoseconds at her lectures: a piece of wire a bit more than 18 inches long, which is how far light travels in a nanosecond. Sixty nanoseconds is a fair distance. I have yet to see a report of actual information travelling faster than light in these experiments, but that would be the obvious next experiment. If information is sent faster than light, the theory of evolution is in need of drastic revision, and theories like Petr Beckmann’s entangled gravitational fields as a form of aether bear examination. I suppose that relativity is still the way to bet, but the amounts you should be willing to bet are getting smaller and smaller. It’s exciting. I’m rooting for the neutrinos…

For those looking for something to do:

I saw this and recalled that you have been collecting similar links about online educational lectures.

"Sixty Symbols

SIΧTΨ SγMBΦLS is a collection of (currently) 143 videos on a number of physics topics, from cosmology to quantum mechanics, from the University of Nottingham. Each video is typically five to ten minutes long, and features one to a half-dozen professors discussing the topic …"

http://sagaciousiconoclast.blogspot.com/2011/11/60symbols.html

P

Even more interesting:

Afghanistan strategic projections Dear Dr. Pournelle,

I call this paper to your attention. I believe you will find it interesting.

https://csis.org/files/publication/111115_Afghanistan_at_End_2011.pdf

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Sorry to be both brief and late.

Faster Than Light Neutrinos, the Permian Event, and our new novel

By Jerry Pournelle | Nov 18, 2011 - 1:08 pm | Updated: November 18, 2011 - 5:52 pm | View

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View 701 Friday, November 18, 2011

The Insurance Dilemma

I have been working furiously on Lucifer’s Anvil, having had a major breakthrough in my understanding of how to tell this story. I worked a lot of it out in my head during my walk this morning, and I have an outline of a new character who will make things a lot easier in the story telling.

Then I came home and went through my mail, and found this.

Now here is exciting news:

Neutrino experiment affirms faster-than-light claim

Hope remains!

“Physicists have replicated the finding that the subatomic particles called neutrinos seem to travel faster than light. It is a remarkable confirmation of a stunning result, yet most in the field remain sceptical that the ultimate cosmic speed limit has truly been broken.”

http://www.nature.com/news/neutrino-experiment-replicates-faster-than-light-finding-1.9393

Chuck Ruthroff

It all looks good. Now we need to think about the implications. As Descartes said (and Carl Sagan often repeated) extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. FTL anything pretty well makes hash out of a lot of relativity theory, so it’s an extraordinary claim; now the evidence is slowly accumulating. As Mr. Ruthroff says, Hope Remain!

Then as I dug through my mail I found this:

Subject: Volcanoes don’t affect the atmosphere?

Jerry, as you know, the AGW fanatics claim that volcanoes don’t put enough greenhouse gases into the air to affect the climate. Well, paleontologists in Southern China seem to have evidence to contradict them:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/18/traces_of_mass_extinction_found_in_soil/

It looks like the Permian Extinction, 252 million years ago, was caused by a series of massive volcanic eruptions in what’s now Siberia that poisoned the air and killed off 2/3 of all life.

Joe Zeff

Roberta had noticed this one in the daily paper this morning, and passed it to me. The great Permian die off has worried geophysicists for a generation, but it doesn’t get much press now, probably because there is no conceivable way that the Permian event could have been caused by man-made global warming, and nothing else excites the Great Consensus Science Grant Grabbers Association.

As it happens, one theory of the Permian was that in addition to volcanism there was a large impact event. All grist for the mill in our new novel. Now I need to go have lunch and think about all this. The fact is that we live in a dangerous universe.

One thing seems clear on climate: in historical times the Earth has been both warmer and colder than it is now.

I’ll be back with more later this afternoon. Lunch time now. We live in interesting times…

1400: I discover I have a medical appointment this afternoon so I won’t catch up after all.

1700: Back, exhausted, with instructions to give up my daily walk for a few days to let my knee ligament recover from being stretched. Which is going to make it hard to get my exercises but I’ll manage. I’m considered in miraculous shape for a former brain cancer patient. Looks like you’ll have Pournelle to kick around for a while, so it’s safe to subscribe…

The good news is that the problem under my bathroom is not mold. The bad news is that we’ve got some termites. The good news is that they aren’t threatening anything structural. And USAA is handling the situation nicely. If USAA is an option for you, it’s one you want seriously to consider. For anything they offer.

Then there’s this:

On to Syria

It looks like the AQ connected Anglo-American intelligence operation popularly called "The Arab Spring" is off to Syria:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/britain-in-secret-talks-with-syrian-rebels-6264592.html

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

I note that an Islamist coalition holds a majority in Tunisia after the election. What’s going on in Egypt is not clear, but it’s certainly not as friendly to the west as Mubarak was.

George Washington told us to avoid entangling alliances and not to get involved in the territorial disputes of Europe. Jefferson and Monroe sent the Navy to the shores of Tripoli, but not to build democracy or even to stay. The Marines did deliver the message: millions for defense and not one cent for tribute. The best Near East policy for the US would be US energy independence. Invest in developing US energy resources, rebuild the Navy, and let the Arabs sort out their own governments. We are the friends of liberty everywhere, but the guardians only of our own; but we can be a very generous people to those who are our friends. Peoples can have friends. Nations have interests.

But we’ve said all this before.

The Insurance Dilemma

No one seems to listen to anyone when it comes to health care policy. Mitt Romney was in favor of something that looked like Obamacare in his state. Down with him. Newt once said something in favor of requiring everyone either to buy health care insurance or post a bond to be forfeited if you get medical expenses you can’t pay. Down with him.

But the real world is a bit more complicated. Romney never said his program would work outside Mass. It doesn’t work all that well within Massachusetts either, but that’s another story. As Romney tries to say, but is never allowed to finish his discourse, the state was already paying for what amounted to universal health care; his plan was to try to get some money out of those who were taking advantage of the state’s generosity and its well equipped public and academic hospitals and clinics which were being bankrupted by having to treat all comers, rich or poor, insured or not. The actual situation in Mass. was a bit more complex than that, but it’s not all that bad a summary of the situation Romney faced as governor.

Newt’s statements on the subject come from similar analysis. If the hospitals can’t turn anyone away, then they can’t stay open without some kind of public subsidy. If the public laws impose the requirement that all hospitals with working emergency rooms must accept all incoming patients regardless of their financial or health conditions, then the hospitals must either raise more money or go out of business. Some have solved the dilemma by closing their trauma centers: they remain as hospitals, but they don’t have emergency rooms any longer. In Los Angeles County some eleven have closed in the last decade.

If you pass a law requiring insurance companies to provide insurance to all applicants without regard to pre existing conditions, you have doomed the insurance company. Who in his right mind would buy an insurance policy while healthy? The rates will be very high if set realistically, so the incentive to pay that rate is very low. And why bother? Wait until you get the cancer. Then rush out and buy the most generous insurance policy you can find. Wait until you get sick, then buy insurance; don’t pay those rapacious capitalist corporations while you’re healthy. You’re entitled to insurance at the same rates whether you have pre-existing conditions of not. Take advantage of that, and if you’re not smart enough to figure that out, there will be plenty of people hanging around to explain it to you, often with a scheme of their own.

Newt’s proposal to require all those who don’t buy insurance to post a bond to be forfeited if you need public financed medical care is of course an alternative to what he has advocated for twenty years that I know of: A Medical Savings Account. The Bond would sit there and gather interest, it would not be taxed, and it grew you might from time to time take something out of it. How it differs from a medical savings account isn’t all that clear. I don’t think it’s a very good idea largely because it isn’t clear what happens to the bond – can you leave it as a bequest? Or must it be spent in your last year of life? But it’s not ridiculous on the face of it. It doesn’t address the problem of what happens to those who can’t possibly pay the bond, just as Medical Savings Accounts don’t fully address that problem, but those are details. The idea is to give the patient a stake in the medical payment game. It should cost the patient something – an increase in his Bond, or a reduction in his Medical Savings Account – whenever he gets a medical treatment or a medical device or a medical consultation.

Free medical care is not free, of course. In some countries it’s simply paid for by the government and financed by taxes; this is the exact equivalent of requiring everyone to buy insurance whether they want to or not, although of course that can be manipulated by progressive taxes – which is one of the problems with “free” health care. There is no limit to the demand for a free good, and the costs multiply without limit. There’s no incentive for the patients to limit the costs, and usually not much more incentive for the medical staff from doctors on down to limit them: they’re going to get paid the same amount no matter what. Medical savings accounts (or adjustable bonds which you must pay if you don’t have insurance) are intended to address this. It doesn’t always work.

In my case I have co-payments. Interestingly, I had co-payments to Kaiser until they determined that my problem was brain cancer and a treatment was decided on. After that there were no co payments, and indeed even the parking was free during treatments, until the cancer was pronounced cured. Now I make a co-payment when I go see my physician, and I pay my own parking. That all works for me: the co-payment keeps me from wasting the physicians’ time, but it’s not so high that I hesitate to go see them if I have any doubts.

We aren’t going to solve the medical payment problem – who is obliged to pay for whose medical treatments, and is there any limit to your obligation to pay for my treatments? — in this afternoon’s essay. But we certainly are not going to solve the problem by setting up a series of shibboleths.