View 694 Wednesday, September 28, 2011

We keep hearing about the White House “czars”, and some of those telling us about them can get fairly shrill. It might be well to temper that with the White House Blog (a political site) defense. Clearly it isn’t an impartial presentation – it doesn’t pretend to be one – but it does give some facts. One of those facts is well known but often forgotten (as Burke said, men seldom need educating but they often need reminding): There is no legal definition of czar, and officially the position does not exist; most of those designated “czar” are so named by journalists, political enemies, or both.

Second, of the 32 czars complained of by Glenn Beck, nine have been confirmed by the Senate. Others have no actual executive authority.

The position of “czar” is not new.

But while Obama’s cadre of newly crowned czars has earned condemnation from the right, when it comes to recruiting presidential advisers he’s in good company. During World War I, Woodrow Wilson appointed financier Bernard Baruch to head the War Industries Board — a position dubbed industry czar (this just one year after the final Russian czar, Nicholas II, was overthrown in the Russian Revolution). Franklin Roosevelt had his own bevy of czars during World War II, overseeing such aspects of the war effort as shipping and synthetic-rubber production. The term was then essentially retired until the presidency of Richard Nixon, who appointed the first drug czar and a well-regarded energy czar, William E. Simon, who helped the country navigate the 1970s oil crisis. The modern drug czarship — perhaps the best-known of the bunch — was created by George H.W. Bush and first filled by William Bennett, now a conservative radio host. By some counts, George W. Bush had the same number czars as Obama — or even more — though not so early in his presidency.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1925564,00.html#ixzz1ZHoUkTwh

The main complaint is that it is a position unknown to the Constitution.

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.

He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.

The result of this is that commissioned officers of the United States from ensigns and second lieutenants to five star generals are all confirmed by the Senate. Congress by law has vested the appointment of Warrant Officers in the Service Secretaries. The complaint often heard is that of the 32 “czars”, many of them have executive authority but have never been confirmed by the Senate.

Mostly this is a political matter. The remedy, if one is needed, would be for the House of Representatives to seek an injunction barring the Treasurer of the United States from paying those “czars” whose names were not submitted to the Senate or the beneficiaries of interim appointments.

That isn’t going to happen.

However, as long as we are discussing ways for the House to assert its constitutional authority, it certainly could put into every appropriation bill a clause specifically denying that this bill authorizes payment to – and name those enforcing Obama Care, Bunny Inspectors, various czars, etc. That would produce some interesting political debates. I’d love to hear the President’s defense of bunny inspectors.

For those interested in Petr Beckmann’s book Einstein Plus Two, it is supposedly available free in pdf format here:

http://www.stephankinsella.com/wp-content/uploads/texts/beckmann_einstein-dissident-physics-material.pdf This link is published in the Wikipedia Beckmann entry. The parent web site www.stephenkinsella.com contains among other things referenences to essays and a book “Against Intellectual Property” so it is possible that this is not authorized by Beckmann’s estate. My copy of the original Einstein Plus Two is copyright 1987 and published by Beckmann’s house imprint Golem Press. The Golem Press website under “buy this book” lists Amazon and other secondary sites with used copies at over $100, and no other sources.

Actually, the pdf contains essays about Beckmann’s book, some of them very interesting, but not the book itself. Several of the essays may be worth your while; and about halfway through the pdf you will find the last issue of ACCESS TO ENERGY written by Beckmann. In it he triumphantly announces that Einstein’s Relativity is refuted by the observational data on the aberration of certain binary stars. Clearly the world did not agree, but the “proof” is relatively clear.

Moreover, the reference does contain Beckmann’s Preface to Einstein Plus Two, and I do urge those interested in what Beckmann was trying to do to read it. The preface is quite short and very clear.

In his introduction (which is not in that pdf), Beckmann says:

“Note that I am not complaining about the amount of supportive evidence for the Einstein theory; only a crank (and there seem to be plenty) would go to war against Einstein on that account. What I am complaining about is the narrow field from which this plentiful evidence is gleaned.

“No length contraction has ever been shown on a well-defined, charged or uncharged body with well-defined dimensions and a velocity measured by several independent methods, if not directly; no time dilation experiment has ever provided proof that the changed rate of the clock is only perceived by the moving observer and has not taken place in the clock itself.

“The Einstein theory has never proved its two tacit postulates: that the Maxwell-Lorentz electrodynamics, remain valid at high observer-referred velocities; and that the motion of matter though a force field does not inherently – independently of any observer – change its own force field.”

I thought Beckmann’s theory interesting when it was published, and as a science fiction writer who needs faster than light travel for his space operas I was more than willing to add it to my armory. At the time I wondered just how many serious physicists took it seriously, and was surprised to find that the answer was “not many” rather than zero. Other than that I hadn’t thought much about Beckmann’s theory until the CERN announcement of a possibly faster than light neutrino – enough faster than light that it might be able to convey at least a bit or two of ftl information. That would indeed turn physics on its head and require all serious physicists to look for, if not alternatives to Einstein, then at least adjustments. Beckmann, to the best I can tell, had an alternate theory that covers all the experimental evidence available at its time of publication, and does allow information to travel faster than light. It also generates a prediction of the Titius series (better known as Bode’s Law).

This could be fun.

NASA has a design for an expendable heavy lift vehicle, but no mission for it. Since it employs segmented solid rocket boosters you may be sure that politics has a great deal to do with its design. I can think of one major space mission worth public financing, that it’s military, and we don’t need NASA to build or operate it. Let the Air Force or the Navy do that.

It is probably time to phase NASA out in its present form. There is still talent at NASA, and it is still important to have space science and space research: the question is whether NASA ought to do that or contract for it. One possible use for NASA is to let it become a part of NSF, or indeed remain a separate agency but which performs the NSF mission for space science.

This is worth further discussion.

View 694 Monday, Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Sunday, October 2, at 3:15 PM at the West Hollywood Book Fair I’ll be discussing “Myth and Reality” in the world of writing. For reasons not known to me we’re in the “That’s Entertainment” pavilion, as opposed to fiction or mystery or something else. We’re following cast members from “The Waltons” and if there’s anything else about writing in that track I don’t know of it. We’re followed by werewolves.

If you’re in the LA area, they say the parking is free and it’s a good book fair. I have been to the big LA Times fair at UCLA, but never to this one, which is “small” in the sense that it’s perhaps 40,000 rather than the near 100,000 of the UCLA campus event. It may be fun. We’re up against Hector Tobar of the LA Times in the main pavilion, a panel on writing for the LGBT readership on another, and several panels with actresses in other pavilions, so I have no idea how large a crowd we’ll draw. They want us to talk about myth and reality in the publishing business and particularly whether you can make a living writing science fiction. I’ve done that panel about a hundred times at science fiction conventions, but never to a mainstream audience. It should be fun.

The campaign scene is pretty dull. President Obama has been in Los Angeles raising political money, and I suppose he was successful, but there hasn’t been a lot of stir from it. His speeches continue on the theme of “fairness”, but they don’t seem to be getting all that much traction.

I continue with the opinion that I have mixed feelings on “fairness” of taxes and taxing the rich, and particularly raising taxes on income from risk investment: it seems an odd way to encourage people to make risky investments and create jobs.

I also note that while Warren Buffet paid only a million or two in personal taxes, his investment company paid $5 billion last year, and he owns 30% of the company; which sort of raises the total tax burden he has assumed. As to Ms. Warren’s viral speech about how others paid for the roads and the schools and the police force, I would have thought those are mostly paid by local property taxes, and if the factory owner has got away with not paying those he’s pretty clever. I would have thought that factory owners paid a lot of property taxes. How much of that is fair is, I would presume, a matter for local communities. Raise them too much and the factory moves elsewhere, as Massachusetts has long ago discovered. Of course the remedy for that, according to liberals, is to eliminate competition – make the taxes national so they can’t be escaped. Oddly enough that was all debated as part of the Convention of 1787, but you’d never guess that from listening to this Harvard Professor, who doesn’t seem to have read The Federalist Papers or Tocqueville. But then that’s not too surprising.

In any event, what I don’t want is to continue to finance the 7% exponential rise in government spending, and any new income to the feds will have that result. I have more faith that Mr. Buffet will spend his money more wisely than the Department of Education can do so, or the Department of Agriculture for that matter (which has both Bunny Inspectors and a SWAT team).

That’s the campaign just now.

View 694 Monday, September 26, 2011

The possibility that CERN has discovered a faster than light neutrino has reached the mainstream press. “Has a Speeding Neutrino Really Overturned Einstein” but I note that even the mainstream physicists don’t seem to understand the situation. The Wall Street Journal found CCNY Professor Micio Kaku to say

The CERN announcement was electrifying. Some physicists burst out with glee, because it meant that the door was opening to new physics (and more Nobel Prizes). New, daring theories would need to be proposed to explain this result. Others broke out in a cold sweat, realizing that the entire foundation of modern physics might have to be revised. Every textbook would have to be rewritten, every experiment recalibrated.

Cosmology, the very way we think of space, would be forever altered. The distance to the stars and galaxies and the age of the universe (13.7 billion years) would be thrown in doubt. Even the expanding universe theory, the Big Bang theory, and black holes would have to be re-examined.

Moreover, everything we think we understand about nuclear physics would need to be reassessed. Every school kid knows Einstein’s famous equation E=MC2, where a small amount of mass M can create a vast amount of energy E, because the speed of light C squared is such a huge number. But if C is off, it means that all nuclear physics has to be recalibrated. Nuclear weapons, nuclear medicine and radioactive dating would be affected because all nuclear reactions are based on Einstein’s relation between matter and energy.

Which is part truth and part nonsense. Nuclear weapons will continue to work without regard to the truth of relativity, and in fact neither Einstein nor relativity had anything to do with the development of nuclear weapons. Szilard and Wigner thought an atom bomb was possible and that it would be vital for the US to get it before Hitler and Mussolini did. They wrote a letter to President Roosevelt saying so, but they couldn’t get Fermi to sign it, so they approached Einstein. Eventually Teller drove Szilard out to Einstein’s summer cabin, Einstein rewrite the letter and dictated it in German, it got translated into English, Einstein signed it, and it went to Roosevelt. Just how much influence that had over the President is controversial, but one certainty is that the Manhattan Project didn’t use the theory of relativity in the design of the bomb.

[I will note that Lise Meitner and her nephew Fritsch used the equivalence equation and published experimental data to conclude that nuclear fission, including a chain reaction, might be possible. This was just after her dramatic escape from Germany where she had been a Professor of Physics until all the Jews were dismissed. In 1938 she escaped to Holland and then Sweden, and in a famous walk in the snow they concluded that a fission reaction was possible.) So far as I know Dr. Meitner never questioned relativity. She also refused to work on a bomb.]

As to how much of physics is affected by the possible overthrow of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, that remains to be seen: as I have noted elsewhere (see Mail https://jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=2241 including the material added after first posting) there are non-Einsteinian theories that claim to explain all the experimental observations that drove Einstein to come up with his Special and General theories of Relativity. They mostly do so by correcting Newton’s assumption that gravity propagates at an infinite velocity (and that the speed of light is indistinguishable from infinite).

And that is probably that until there are new observations confirming or falsifying the FTL neutrinos. The 60 nanosecond discrepancy (sixty feet at the speed of light) is large enough to measure with some accuracy, and as I understand it the neutrino beam can be turned on and off faster than that, meaning that at least simple bits of information can be transmitted using these speedy neutrinos. If we ever get information at faster than light, Einstein Relativity is indeed gone, and we will need to look for a new theory to explain our observations.

Exciting, isn’t it?

At the moment the key issue in the 2012 election seems to be “fairness”. The problem is that it’s easier to agree that the tax rates are unfair than it is to agree to raise taxes so that the government can continue its 7% exponential rate of growth.

I understand the reality of No New Taxes, and Taxed Enough Already. I would be willing to agree to an increase in taxes in exchange for two spending adjustments: first, all budgets, everywhere, across the board, are cut by 1%, and by but I do not mean that they merely receive 6% increase as the present budgeting system counts a 1% cut. I mean a 1% cut in that 99% or less money is paid out next year than was spent this year, and that applies to everything. I understand that a 1% drop income would be very hard on some on fixed incomes and retirements, and that might need adjustment, but the adjustments would have to be compensated by other cuts (such as bunny inspectors?). Understand that under present rules this would be seen as a crippling 8% cut in all kinds of programs like food stamps and Medicare and everything else.

Second, the absolute size of the Federal budget gets cut another 5% over the next ten years, and never grows larger than it is now. This will be seen as a terrible cut in the budget and intolerable.

Given those provisions I might agree to an increase in taxes based on “fairness”; but the whole exercise would have to be done carefully, with the full understanding that without risky investments there won’t be economic growth, and taxing successful investors is one heck of a bad incentive for making risky investments.

Be prepared though: every non-Obama candidate is going to be pummeled on the “fairness” issue.

I note that the Senate has passed a continuing resolution to keep the government open another couple of months. That is, as I understand it, the equivalent of a freeze, which is at least a step in the right direction. It contains no “stimulus”.

The local iconoclast talk show notes that President Obama is in Los Angeles and doing a fund raiswer at the House of Blues. Some are now calling that the House of Bribes.