Tuesday, October 25, 2016

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

“Deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Immigration without assimilation is invasion.

More chaos, but some order is appearing at last.

I call your attention to http://chaosmanorreviews.com/detecting-vulnerable-internet-of-things/ Our long suffering webmaster Rick Hellewell has been struggling to keep up with Chaos Manor Reviews. I hope to revive it shortly, if things will just stop flowing so…

From time to time I call attention to some of the ramblings of my friend Fred Reed, who calls himself a curmudgeon. I got this comment from a friend:

Fred Reed is just another crank who can write well. Information comes only from the unpredictable, but Fred always says the same things. Further, there has always been someone predicting the imminent collapse of the republic since the creation of the republic, so the existence of such an opinion or article conveys no information. Consistently right-wing and left-wing websites are in the business of reinforcing priors and rallying their respective troops, not educating or changing opinions. No light, just heat.

All this reading I’ve done about what was going on in the early 1970s makes it quite clear that essentially everything is better today. Politicians were worse then, American society was more contentious, the external threats were vastly more serious, and most people were poor as dirt by today’s standards.

There’s no lack of structural risks in today’s America, but they are fewer, less severe, and easier to fix should we decide to fix them. Maybe the chaos and incompetence of a Trump administration or the foolishness and corruption of a Clinton administration will be a wake-up call for reform, but I’m confident that neither one will be the death of us.

While I do not agree that Fred is always a crank – some days Fred might even agree that he is – I know that he is a lot more than a crank, and often worth listening to not only in spite of, but because of, his style; but I tend to agree: America is more resilient than many think. We have endured much and yet survived. But the Establishment has assumed powers not dreamed of by Boss Tweed and Tammany and Prendergast, and technology which has empowered individuals has also unraveled a number of the safeguard institutions of the US. I think Fred is wrong: despair remains a sin.

Russell Kirk taught that “conservatism is enjoyment” but he was not naïve about threats. He held that we should approach the deficiencies of the Republic as we would the wounds of a father: and we must keep that in mind as we watch the growing power of the ruling class.

Meanwhile, the bureaucrats in Washington have managed to horrify even the most liberal establishment: they have tried to claw back the reenlistment bonuses paid to induce troops to go to Iraq and Afghanistan again even after it was made pretty clear to the Army that the politicians, beginning with Bush who listened to the “professional” Foreign Service and appointed Bremer to govern Iraq out of the bureaucracy instead of someone he could trust – just as his father sent April Glaspie to be Ambassador to Saddam Hussein, and instead of persuading him that taking Kuwait was a life threatening mistake, she delivered a note that Hussein misinterpreted – as would anyone else in his situation. And thus began the first Iraq war, which was followed inevitably by the second.

Still the bureaucracy prevailed again. Foreign Service Seniority rules tossed up Bremer, and Bremer was appointed to mess things up and get us involved in a land war in Asia when we thought we had won. We sacrificed our treasure and our heroes’ blood for the gratification of arrogant “professional” rules and liberal notions of building democracy where it never was before. We had many alternatives we might have tried, but none fit the narrative we are supposed to swallow whole without question.

And now we are about to betray the only friends we have left over there: certainly Hillary will. Her record as Secretary of State is one of misunderstanding and disaster. In Libya she sent back the bulletin :We came, we saw, he died to describe a man who desperately tried to Finlandize his nation. I doubt the people of the failed state of warring tribes thank her for that.

And now the bureaucrats move against the veterans. They need more money for bonuses they can pay themselves:

“They’ll get their money, but I want those years back.”

<http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-national-guard-bonus-20161020-snap-story.html>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

I remind you that the great issue in the last days of the Roman Republic involved veterans retirement benefits.

Almost half of Republicans fear election-rigging

Boston Herald

http://www.gopusa.com/?p=16307?omhide=true

Nearly half of Republicans will have doubts about the outcome of the election if their candidate doesn’t win, according to a new poll — another sign that Donald Trump’s cries of widespread voter fraud and rigged systems could seriously undermine a Hillary Clinton presidency.

Some 45 percent of Republicans said they will not accept the results of the election if Trump loses, compared to 16 percent of Democrats, according to an NBC/Survey Monkey poll released yesterday.

Trump vowed to keep the nation “in suspense” about whether he would accept the Nov. 8 election results during Wednesday’s debate, after weeks of railing against what he considers a corrupt media, a rigged election system and faulty polls.

Another poll, by Reuters/Ipsos, showed Trump gaining on Clinton. The former secretary of state still held a 44-40 percent lead this week, but that was down from the same survey the previous week that had her up by 7 points.

“Make no mistake, by doing that, he is threatening our democracy,” Clinton said at a rally in Cleveland yesterday. “We know in our country the difference between leadership and dictatorship, right?”[snip]

A general loses his clearance and is to be jailed for security breach: he confirmed to reporters what they already knew. Mrs. Clinton retains hers. But surely the law is impartial?

 

Then we have Dilbert’s view:

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/152293480726/the-bully-party

Missing voters

Dr. Pournelle,
A follow-up on the ‘missing voter’ issue, at least here in the Eastern People’s Republic. As I promised I went to Town Hall to check on my voter registration status (having as I previously mentioned been excised from the rolls after 34 years in town) and was pleased to find that I was still listed. However my mother, who votes absentee from the nursing home, was now gone. Her legal mailing address is still in town and I have previously had an absentee ballot mailed to her.

When I checked with her I found that someone (supposedly) from the Town Clerk (D) in the town the nursing home is in had come by to get all the seniors living there registered in that town and then a flock of ‘assistants’ swarmed in to assist the seniors with filling out their early voting ballots.

My mother used to be a ‘Poll Watcher’ and worked every town election, so she refused any ‘help’ in filling out her ballot and made sure that it was sealed before she let anyone touch it. As far as she could see, none of the other residents were that particular or resistant to allowing the ‘assistants’ handle their ballots during and afterward. Many of the residents who were to far gone had their ballots filled out for them.
By any estimate, Hillary picked up an easy hundred votes that day.

I can attest that family members were not notified in advance of this little game of ‘assisted voting’. I should have seen this coming. Now multiply this by a few thousand across the country.
John the River

But you are to announce in advance that you will accept the results of the next election.

And then we have

We’re in trouble…..

The election will be rigged. Here’s the proof. The voting machines are provided by

company owned by George Soros, a major Hillary supporter. The machines flipped

the Bernie vote to Hillary. (Ever notice Hillary and Obama don’t wear American Flag pins)

The Clinton Foundation did an internal survey with staunch Hillary and Trump that showed

that Trump voters will vote come hell or high water. The report detailed various plans

to salvage Hillary from staging radiological attack like 9/11, to bringing UN troops over

Canadian border to attack to, get this, a fake alien attack. They have the capability

to project 3d images of alien craft over 2/3 of the country…. Imagine the impact on

the religious people if they see massive alien craft in the sky. It would be devastating.

(They do have counselors though, ready to handle the impact….)

These people will stop at nothing. It’s unbelievable.

The IT nerd Michael Trimm details all of it. He could have edited it down because it’s

over 1 hour and 20 minutes. He’s busy going thru all the emails because he and other

small online guys are the only ones who can. The Mainstream can’t because they’ll lose

their jobs and be replaced like Nazi Germany.  It’s important to watch and share;

These people in control are professional liars;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjLyEmTfgwY

All or any of which may or may not be true, but we no longer find it fantastic. The senior bureaucrats are so enamored of their right to rule and pay themselves annual bonuses – often amounting to more than the reenlistment bonuses they now want to claw back from the veterans — that they are desperate now that they are threatened. I don’t usually pay attention to “vast conspiracy” notions, but this isn’t that. There is no conspiracy involved.

Newt Gingrich: Gore, Trump and liberal hypocrisy

By Newt Gingrich

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2016/10/21/newt-gingrich-gore-trump-and-liberal-hypocrisy.html?utm_source=Gingrich+Productions+List&utm_campaign=b1de9a000d-debate3_102116&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bd29bdc370-b1de9a000d-51726965

The media is beside itself that Wednesday night, in the final presidential debate, Donald Trump said he would wait until the election actually occurs to judge whether or not it was carried out fairly.

Apparently, some people think that when a Republican says he will watch closely to make there’s no corruption of the vote, he is a “threat to democracy” and even a “domestic insurrectionist.” [snip]

There is a vast right wing conspiracy against the Clintons…

What is this?

This is madness:

<.>

U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials are warning that hackers with ties to Russia’s intelligence services could try to undermine the credibility of the presidential election by posting documents online purporting to show evidence of voter fraud.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said however, that the U.S. election system is so large, diffuse and antiquated that hackers would not be able to change the outcome of the Nov. 8 election.

But hackers could post documents, some of which might be falsified, that are designed to create public perceptions of widespread voter fraud, the officials said.

</>

http://af.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idAFKCN12L015?sp=true

Some of which might be falsified? Some of these documents might be authentic? That being the case would we not want to look at those?

Why would they issue a warning that someone might present evidence of a crime but some of the evidence might not be real? I’m confused by this.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Interesting development in optical rectenna

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/10/20/forget-solar-panels-optical-rectenna-converts-light-directly-to-electricity/

Eric

I encourage comments. Even if this technology is not useful for industry of even offices, home consumption takes up about – last time I looked – 20% of generated electric power.

Global Agenda

An interesting point:

<.>

The United Nations has rejected the media credentials of three journalists from a conservative news outlet in Canada to the upcoming UN climate summit in Morocco in November. Nick Nuttall, a UN official, admitted in an October 18 CBC interview that The Rebel news outlet is being banned from attending the UN summit because of its skeptical reporting of the UN’s climate claims.

</>

http://www.climatedepot.com/2016/10/21/caught-on-tape-un-bans-skeptical-journalists-from-climate-summit-for-holding-views-not-particulary-helpful/

The scientific consensus is political? Have we considered the possibility that as our scientists feed a the trough of government grants, science has become institutionalized as a tool of various governments in the same way Rome institutionalized Christianity as a tool of the state?

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Surely you understand that the ruling class needs carbon taxes and the issue is settled?

Response: Trump & War on ISIS, Trump & Bankruptcy

Sir, my apologies for not acknowledging your response to my email on your blog (dated Oct 10). I must have missed that update in my Inbox which, like most, is far too cluttered with far too many interesting newsletters that I never have time to read!
If I may belatedly respond with some thoughts: I agree that a war with ISIS is necessary, but I don’t think anyone can effectively fight a campaign against such a nebulous entity. ISIS has already evolved significantly since its origin. In the beginning it did, indeed, appear to be a cohesive and organized force with a front line, organized lines of supply, and a rear echelon composed of a command structure and a fascinating (and horribly effective) propaganda arm based almost entirely on social media. But since then it has blossomed and waned many times in response to disorganized and haphazard attempts to engage it by actors who were often busy elsewhere; actors like the Syrian Army, which had bigger fish to fry, or the US and other Western powers who, in the beginning, only grudgingly devoted any assets to the fight, and with the increasing involvement of Russia became increasingly afraid of an ‘unfortunate incident’ in the skies.
I strongly agree with your early assertions that a couple of battalions of troops, some ground attack aircraft and the surveillance assets to support them would have done the job, admirably. I further assert that the UK should have been capable of just such an approach with little more than those assets that were used in Libya (a dozen Army Air Corp Apaches with the addition of the Royal Marines, or the Gurkhas, as the ground component). But that was when ISIS was still in its infancy. Now it’s grown up to become an idea in the minds of our own youth; a social media account that is hard to track and moves like mercury under your thumb whenever you try to close it down. Both of these things keep feeding new recruits into the fight, and the fight has now moved to our own streets. How do we declare war on that?
Quote: “Clinton, like Obama, has no idea of what we should do. Mr. Trump might manage to get the Saudis to pay much of the cost,”
I struggle to see why the Saudis would agree to any such thing. They are more heavily engaged in Yemen right now than they have been engaged anywhere in decades, and they still find themselves unwilling to commit to anything more than a Western-style, casualties-averse air campaign. ISIS has already suffered a Western-style causalities-averse air campaign and prospered. The cost of successfully fighting ISIS is not so much in treasure as in blood, and the Saudis will not pay that! As far as they’re concerned, that’s what the US Army is for! After all, isn’t that why they let the US buy all their oil?
Clinton, like Obama, and everyone else in the world missed their chance to nip this in the bud years ago. I don’t see it as a particular failing on their part to come up with a way to do what ruling classes everywhere, whether they be democratic or despotic, have struggled to do for centuries: to kill an idea.
We may be beyond the point at which bullets will solve this problem. But I doubt that building walls will solve it, either. The 20th Century is replete with examples of how they did not.
Quote: “I am not advocating full isolationism; merely that we conduct our affairs with a view to our own interest, and recognize that we are not omnipotent, and with our debts we are no longer so rich.”
In this statement I hear echoes of the decline of Britain as a post-war, post-imperial power. Britain went through just such a phase. It resulted in foreign policy disasters like the Suez Crisis, in which the old powers attempted to reassert their authority, the failure of which led to another foreign policy disaster: the withdrawal from East of Suez which removed an important lever of influence and stabilizing factor from the entire region. A line of causality might be drawn to the present predicament because a pot of water placed over a fire will boil, whether it’s watched or not. And if not watched, it will boil over and extinguish the fire. (A torturous analogy for which I apologize. It’s the best I can do at 1am!)
Thank you again for taking the time to respond. I apologize again for not acknowledging it at the time. I realize this email is already long – I hope the paragraphing survives submission through the Contact Form, this time, as it seems my earlier missive came out in a Wall of Text.
Speaking of which, I only noticed that you had responded to my message when I read, in your update of Oct 20, a response from another subscriber pointing out an egregious error on my part. Specifically, I said Trump has been bankrupt 13 times. And it seems I did, indeed, report an inaccurate number of bankruptcies, according to all the references I can find online. In a state of alarm at this public humiliation, I consulted my email drafts folder, but there was nothing in it because I used the contact form on your website! So I went to my browser history and recalled the following two websites:
http://thelawdictionary.org/article/how-to-keep-your-tax-refund-in-a-chapter-13-bankruptcy/
Which, as you doubtless know, is the personal bankruptcy code, not to be confused with Chapter 11, the business code. Much is made of Trump’s specific refutation that he ever used Chapter 13 in the context of avoiding paying income tax in the 1990s, so it was worth a look.
The other website was this:
http://thelawdictionary.org/article/how-is-donald-trump-able-to-file-for-bankruptcy-so-many-times/
Which states that he filed for bankruptcy four (4) times. Having read a lot of conflicting information in the media, I chose to use this as my basis, and still do because I see that your correspondent, Joe, who diligently sought to set the record straight has done so with reference to that bastion of exactitude, Wikipedia! According to this great experiment in the democratisation of knowledge, and the reduction of peer-reviewed facts to the status of mere opinions, Mr. Trump filed for bankruptcy six (6) times.
Joe then described me as “… misleading because a brief and uncritical reading of [my email] gives the impression that Mr. Trump has, in fact, gone through numerous personal bankruptcies when in fact he hasn’t.”
Brief and uncritical, and ever changing from one minute to the next, like a Wikipedia article? Also, I did not specify which Chapter he had filed under. It seems many think it was Chapter 11, because this allowed him to then avoid paying income tax.
Joe then advised I do the following: “…take a few seconds to check his claims against the public record,”
What public record? Wikipedia? Or Mr. Trump’s published tax returns? Oh, but wait…
I have been bashed over the head with a Wikipedia link many times. I never take it seriously. But if I could I would thank Joe for noticing my stupid mistake. He has guaranteed that I will always proofread my messages more closely in future!

Mike Ranson

I find the topic of bankruptcy counts uninteresting.

Regarding the Caliphate: the necessary and sufficient condition for the Caliphate is that they enforce Sharia Law in territories they rule: this gives then the right and ability to recruit all over the world. Without territory they rule they have no attractiveness, at least no more then any other terrorist gang. So long as they have even one, they may claim to have the assent of Allah and recruit in his name. This is both their strength and their weakness.

Current battles go on for days. It requires overwhelming force to win; the defenders have to understand that they have no chances at all. That takes more American commitment.

parent interview about education

Dr. Pournelle,
You may find some of this author’s opinions on early childhood education interesting, although probably not new.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2XFfH5p2Zk
-d

The Debate

Dear Mr. Pournelle,
At a few days’ distance, what sticks in my craw about the latest debate is Donald Trump’s assertion that, as president, he would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton. Well, I say investigate: his later interruption “you’ll be in jail” sounds like “sentence first, verdict afterwards…”
Consider that, in the event Trump is in a position to follow through on this threat, Mrs. Clinton will be a defeated opponent and a private citizen, with no governmental authority. Special prosecutor? Would a Trump presidency, then, treat us to show trials?
Some of your readers may believe Hillary Clinton is legally culpable. Fine. We have a legal system for that. It does not include bills of attainder, or presidential vendettas against defeated opponents.
One might take refuge in the thought that, rather than seriously proposing an assault on constitutional government and the rule of law, Mr. Trump was merely shooting his mouth off. Irresponsibly; but, “It’s just words, folks.” There would actually be evidence to support this assumption: it’s not clear to me that Mr. Trump intends words to be instruments of meaning, rather than contentless tools for getting his way. So assume nothing he says should be taken seriously. Or perhaps it would be fairer to see him in terms of Kipling’s bandar-log:

Dreaming of deeds that we mean to do,
All complete, in a minute or two —
Something noble and grand and good,
Won by merely wishing we could.
Now we’re going to — never mind,
Brother, thy tail hangs down behind!

In either case, why vote for him? Is he just a blank screen on which people can project whatever fantasies they wish?
Yours,
Allan E. Johnson

Well, Fred says that Trump makes him nervous; Hillary makes him want to take poison. I do not like the notion of prosecuting former officials, although Mrs. Clinton’s blatancy is exceptional; but you may be sure that Mr. Obama will issue her a blanket pardon if she loses, so she is in danger of nothing beyond wealthy obloquy.

sc:bubbles]

Re: Education In America

While I agree with the main thrust of Mr. John B. Robb in his comments on American education, he takes a swipe at “unscientific rightist true believers in Creationism,” as “…indicative of the scientific and mathematical illiteracy of the vast majority of Americans.” But then he himself acknowledges that neither “…creationism [nor] evolutionism, whether in its classic Darwinian form, or in any of the other far more sophisticated versions that have emerged over the last 100+ years, can be considered scientific hypotheses in the first place, because none of them are subject to clear definition, let alone falsification.” I’m a little unsure then why it’s believers in Creationism who are such sterling examples of scientific illiteracy and not those who insist that Evolution must be taught as unquestioned fact.
He then refers to Mr. Dawkins and cites the Gallup poll questions on the origin of humans to demonstrate the “sheer scientific illiteracy” of those who answered that they believed “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.” Given the popularity of Mr. Dawkins writing, it’s not surprising to see this attack made frequently. However the attack is misguided.
Dan Kahan has analyzed the data for the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School here: http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2013/6/19/what-does-disbelief-in-evolution-mean-what-does-belief-in-it.html
He opens by saying “The idea that popular “disbelief in evolution” indicates a deficiency in ‘science literacy’ is one of the most oft-repeated but least defensible propositions in popular commentary on the status of science in U.S. society. It’s true only if one makes the analytically vacuous move of defining science literacy to mean ‘belief in evolution.'” And much later he says, “Moreover, if you do define it that way, you’ll be counting as ‘science literate’ many people who harbor genuinely ignorant, embarrassing understandings of how evolution works.”
In a second post (http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2013/6/21/how-religiosity-and-science-literacy-interact-evolution-scie.html) he summarizes the data presented in the first post, so I’ll repeat the two points most directly relevant to this discussion:
1. Neither the “Evolution” nor the “Big Bang” items in the NSF’s “Science Indicators” battery can plausibly be viewed as reliably measuring “scientific literacy” in subjects who are even modestly religious.
2. When subjects who are highly science literate but highly religious answer “False” to the NSF indicator’s Evolution item, their response furnishes no reason to infer that they lack knowledge of the basic elements of the best scientific understanding of evolution.
Basically belief or denial of modern evolutionary synthesis does not track with understanding of the theory or with science knowledge in general. It DOES track with religiosity, but that’s about it. It’s past time to drop this tired, old canard and accept that reasonable people can sometimes look at the same data and come away with very different interpretations of it.
Kenton Yoder

I really haven’t time for proper comment here. I will remind you that if you find a watch you do not assume that someone shook a bag of parts and out came a watch. You assume a watchmaker. If you see a ballet, you do not assume that a random collection of atoms will eventually dance Swan Lake. You assume a greatly unlikely and complex organization. Mr. Dawkins can explain why people less brilliant than himself assume some kind of designer, but he hasn’t explained it to my satisfaction.

Apologies for leaving the font glitches; there are too many to edit out and it’s dinner time.

And a closing message

http://www.famous-quote.net/be-wary-of-strong-drink.html

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

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Thursday, October 20, 2016

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

“Deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Immigration without assimilation is invasion.

Chaos continued all week. I will omit details, except one mystery. The sound stopped on my main machine. I don’t hear well, and it developed yesterday but I didn’t really notice; but this morning I discovered that the CAPS LOCK key no longer beeps when pushed

Thursday, October 20, 2016

I broke off there, and later got the problem fixed. The whole sound system was set wrong. It was a distraction which consumed more time than I Like. I am sort of working on regaining some typing skills; that consumes time. Then last night we had to go to the Emergency Room after we watched the debate – no connection between the events – and that was mostly time consuming, no real consequences, but I slept in a bit. Apologies. I did get some fiction done and I am working on using the home keys and multiple fingers – I find that my left hand knows where its keys are, but I have to stare at the keyboard and my right hand still does not know which fingers to use. But I am making progress. I now use my right thumb to do the spacebar instead of my left index finger, so I don’t hit alt-spacebar at all, and I am getting more and more proficient as I go along. Takes time, and I can type faster with two fingers, but I make fewer errors, and the overall effect seems to be an increase in speed. We’ll see.

Thursday, October 20, 2016

The Debate

Well, Trump won on points, but Hillary got the headlines as if she were the voice of reason when Trump refused to say in advance that he would accept the results of the election. He did not bother to say what he meant by accept the results, and Mrs. Clinton was clever enough not to ask, but she talked in generalities as if Mr. Trump was going to raise the standard of rebellion. Now I don’t know what Mr. trump means by not accepting, but if it means that he would not challenge the election results as many have, I wouldn’t agree to do it either. Remember hanging chards? In 1960 John Kennedy got more votes in Cook County, Illinois (Chicago) than there were registered voters, but General Eisenhower wouldn’t let Nixon challenge the results lest that lead to something worse; but President Eisenhower was old school, as was Nixon in those days.

If Hillary meant would Trump call for revolt – but she can’t believe that. Trump’s no general. I wonder, does a House resolution of impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanors – say ignoring a Congressional subpoena, or willful violation of the official secrets and Freedom of Information Laws – constitute a rejection of the election results? Or Congressional investigation of election law violations? For that matter didn’t John Kerry reject the election results?

So the headlines didn’t talk about the emails, or the unauthorized server in her basement which got hammered into oblivion to protect – just what we don’t know – but they do talk about Trump’s possible rejection of the election results.

But we did see the actual issues made clearer. Abortion including day-before-birth abortion (otherwise known as killing a live baby after induced birth, a crime if the birth is natural); more government or less government; immigration; pay to play in the State Department; those got aired a bit, Mrs. Clinton was reduced to reciting a memorized speech, or in one case rambling nonsense, certainly not rational replies. If you take the key issues one by one, most Americans would prefer Mr. Trump’s position. And he did well in asking where are we after eight years of hope and change. Do we like the change? The Regulatory State? If so, Mrs. Clinton offers more of it. At least that was clear. And she’ll finance more free stuff for the voters by soaking the rich. Hasn’t that been tried elsewhere?

Shortly after World War II we had a faltering economy and a huge national debt. We recovered, and then Kennedy cut taxes and we had a long period of economic growth. That sort of hope and change showed we can grow out of debts. Maybe we can do it again. Mrs. Clinton says no. We’ll raise taxes on the investment class and increase entitlements. “You’re Entitle” was a popular book once; it raised expectations for many. And we’ll soak the rich, who wouldn’t flee or pay to play to protect their fortunes.

Trump has surprised us many times in the last year. We’ll see if he surprises us again. Meanwhile read Victor Davis Hanson (below.)

Read this, those of you who haven’t been thrown out of National Review Conservatives (as I was by the egregious Frum)

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441126/donald-trump-conservatives-should-vote-president

It’s by Victor Davis Hanson, whom I have always admired and respected, and worth your time. It came out just before the debate.

A President Trump might shake up U.S. foreign policy in controversial and not always polite ways. In far calmer fashion, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton already has revolutionized America’s role overseas — from the Iraq pullout to the foundations of the Iran deal to lead-from-behind Libyan bombing to tiptoeing around “violent extremism” and “workplace violence” to empowering Chinese expansionism to increasing distance from allies and proximity to enemies. Obama reminded us that approval from abroad is usually synonymous with thanks for weakening America and making us more like them than them us. Should we be more terrified that the socialist and largely pacifist European Union is afraid of Trump, or that it welcomes even more of Barack Obama’s type of leadership? Is not the present course of projecting weakness while insulting Vladimir Putin — the Russian reset of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — the inverse of speaking softly while carrying a big stick? The ancient idea of tragic irony can sometimes be described as an outcome unfortunately contrary to what should have been expected. Many of us did not vote in the primaries for Trump, because we did not believe that he was sufficiently conservative or, given his polarizing demeanor, that he could win the presidency even if he were. The irony is now upon us that Trump may have been the most conservative Republican candidate who still could beat Hillary Clinton — and that if he were to win, he might usher in the most conservative Congress, presidency, and Supreme Court in nearly a century.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441126/donald-trump-conservatives-should-vote-president

Hope and change has brought us to this:

Army in Trouble

I’d say the US Army is on hard times when it claims a heart attack on active duty was not a result of duty! You might as well say that someone could have been shot while hunting in the woods, therefore the Army is not responsible to pay your medical bills if you get shot in a war!

<.>

“As we were doing the push-ups I got 15 in, and I noticed that it was a lot harder for me to do push-ups than it has ever been,” Shane said.

“So he hooked me up to the EKG and said ‘I’m 99.9 percent certain you’re having a heart attack.’”

One artery was completely blocked, but there was another problem, the Army determined the heart attack did not happen in the line of duty, so its been withholding medical payments.

“You have a heart attack during a forced, a mandated PT test and then you tell him it’s his fault that he could have had it at home, but he didn’t have it at home he had it, while he was doing push-ups,” Jaime said.

The Army cited an earlier blood test.

</>

http://boston.cbslocal.com/2016/10/19/army-heart-attack-medical-bills-shane-morgan/

This is more than the US Army skimping on its bills; this is about a lack of awareness, a lack of accountability, and a failure of leadership at several echelons in the chain of command. If the army was aware of the blood test before the PT test, why was this soldier put under conditions that could create a heart attack? If the army was not aware of this test until after the heart attack, why wasn’t the army making sure it’s soldiers are deployable? In short, one wonders why this soldier was not chaptered out of the United States Army before testing.

This is either an unacceptable state of readiness or an unacceptable way of leading soldiers.

Bottom line: a soldier who “could have had a heart attack at home” or anywhere else, could certainly have had it while deployed. This would reduce the combat effectiveness of this soldier’s unit. This would be a disservice to the soldier, his unit, and the United States Army. If this is pervasive army policy then we’re in more trouble than I realized.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

A Wikileaks Anvil Lands On John Podesta’s Toes

Dear Jerry:

This may be the most interesting White House Memo leaked to date- 

http://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2016/10/ad-john-podesta-ex-masters-of-disaster.html

In 2014, former White House  Chief of Staff and ThinkProgress founder John Podesta delegated  Obama’s Grand Strategy for the Climate Wars to The Master of Disaster himself, Chris Lehane.

—

Russell  Seitz

Fellow of the Department of Physics Harvard University     

       Senior Research Fellow,  The Climate Institute   

Unsurprising but fascinating.

The new Clinton administration will put paid to this:

FBI in Revolt

It’s interesting to see that others have concerns over at the FBI…

<.>

“I know that inside the FBI there is a revolt,” Joseph diGenova tells The American Spectator. “There is a revolt against the director. The people inside the bureau believe the director is a dirty cop. They believe that he threw the [Hillary Clinton email] case. They do not know what he was promised in return. But the people inside the bureau who were involved in the case and who knew about the case are talking to former FBI people expressing their disgust at the conduct of the director.”

The loss of faith in the bureau chief stems in part from a dishonest rendering of the decision not to indict Mrs. Clinton as unanimous rather than unilateral and in part from the bureau’s decision to destroy evidence in the case and grant blanket immunity to Clinton underlings for no possible prosecutorial purpose.

“There is a consensus among the employees that the director has lost all credibility and that he cannot lead the bureau,” diGenova explains. “They are comparing him to L. Patrick Gray, the disgraced former FBI director who threw Watergate papers into the Potomac River.

The resistance to the director has made the agency incapable of action. It has been described to me as a depression within the agency unlike anything that anyone has ever seen within the bureau. The director’s public explanation for the unorthodox investigation are viewed by people in the bureau as sophomoric and embarrassing.”

</>

http://spectator.org/former-u-s-attorney-agents-see-fbi-chief-comey-as-a-dirty-cop/

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Trump: “We’re going to have Common Core ended. We’re going to bring education local.”

<http://time.com/4530515/donald-trump-sexual-assault-accusations-transcript/>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

In the debate, Trump quietly said that reversing Roe v Wade would put it back to the States, where the entire abortion issue belongs anyway. No one noticed. Are the pro-choice people afraid that state legislatures would outlaw abortion? They certainly would regulate it. Congress would have the last word over the District of Columbia. He is on record many times for saying that matters not relegated to the Federal Government ought to remain with the states; a principle that I believe comes closer to meeting the consent of the governed from which all just powers derive…

Subject: Trump and bankruptcy

Jerry, you quote Mr. Mike Ranson writing that “Trump went bankrupt 13 times!” I realize that by the rest of his email Mr. Ranson is British, but even so, a quick look at Mr. Trump’s Wikipedia page reveals that six of the hotels and casinos that he’s owned have declared bankruptcy but that he has never filed for personal bankruptcy.

This makes Mr. Ranson’s statement both false and misleading. False because the number of bankruptcies he claims is double the correct number and misleading because a brief and uncritical reading of it gives the impression that Mr. Trump has, in fact, gone through numerous personal bankruptcies when in fact he hasn’t. This being so, I find no reason to give any credence to anything else in that email because I see no reason to think that the rest of his writing bears any more relation to the truth than the quoted sentence. He may, of course, be correct in his opinions, but unless he’s willing to take a few seconds to check his claims against the public record, what he writes is nothing more than political blather masquerading as fact.

Joe

Well there’s no scarcity of that.

A New Weapon in Russia’s Arsenal, and It’s Inflatable

By ANDREW E. KRAMER

The New York Times – The New York Times – ‎4‎:‎00‎ ‎AM

The Russian military is using life-size decoy tanks, jets and missile launchers for disguise and deception.

http://a.msn.com/r/2/BBxjWPQ?a=1&m=en-us

D

“A gigantic technological race is in progress between interception and penetration and each time capacity for interception makes progress it is answered by a new advance in capacity for penetration. Thus a new form of strategy is developing in peacetime, a strategy of which the phrase ‘arms race’ used prior to the old great conflicts is hardly more than a faint reflection.

There are no battles in this strategy; each side is merely trying to outdo in performance the equipment of the other. It has been termed ‘logistic strategy’. Its tactics are industrial, technical, and financial. It is a form of indirect attrition; instead of destroying enemy resources, its object is to make them obsolete, thereby forcing on him an enormous expenditure….

A silent and apparently peaceful war is therefore in progress, but it could well be a war which of itself could be decisive.”
–General d’Armee Andre Beaufre

THE STRATEGY OF TECHNOLOGY: Winning the Technological War

by
Stefan T. Possony, Ph.D.; Jerry E. Pournelle, Ph.D. and
Francis X. Kane, Ph.D. (Col., USAF Ret.)

We have pretty well abandoned the Strategy of Technology in the past eight years; we cannot assume local supremacy against technological powers like Russia, nor can we have great confidence that we lead China.

Hi, Dr. Pournelle, I was wondering where the Yemenis get their missiles. I found this site which seems to be a pretty detailed analysis of the missile situation in Yemen. Iran is the likely source. No surprise there.

http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2016/08/analysis-irgc-implicated-in-arming-yemeni-houthis-with-missiles.php

—

Cheers, Joe

Science fiction is at it again – becoming real

http://www.moneyandmarkets.com/smart-cars-cyber-afterlife-82311?

“As a memorial to Roman Mazurenko, and as a way to keep his spirit alive, Eugenia Kudya came up with the idea to combine all the text messages she had received from him with all the text messages that their circle of friends could muster, and ran them through a neural net. Then she developed a way to interact with the output of the neural net.

“The chatbot-type interface gives her and her friends a way to interact with their lost comrade after death in a way that feels very real. The neural net learned the quirky way the friend would respond to texts, so it does more than repeat his actual words back. The net responds in an unpredictable-but-authentic way, making it seem as if the dead friend was responding from beyond the grave.”

“Think about all the people that you primarily deal with digitally — i.e. all the people you only contact via email, text or social media, often for years without seeing them face-to-face. Is it not possible that an artificially intelligent representation of your humanity could stand in for you – and stand up to scrutiny? We are such creatures of habit, and respond to stimuli so predictably, that the artificial human is probably not a whole lot different than the actual human at a distance.”

“The idea of cars connected by and communicating with a giant network might seem like science fiction.  A few years ago it was.  Now it’s coming.  It will bring convenience and safer cars.  It will also bring a huge new business opportunity most investors still can’t fathom.”

Charles Brumbelow

The government will take care of it all.

FYI: Russia Moves Million Ton Iceberg

http://maritime-executive.com/article/russia-moves-million-ton-iceberg

Your comments on the Caliphate neglected this:

<.>

“While this military/para-military operation is moving forward, we need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region,” Clinton wrote.

</>

http://dailycaller.com/2016/10/10/hillary-in-leaked-email-saudi-arabia-and-qatar-are-funding-isis/

How does this change things? If this communication is authentic, this goes beyond data and inference. This has to be taken seriously if so.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

sc:bubbles]

Opinion on HSV-2 Swift.

Sir,

Through Phillip Pournelle or your other friends  I suspect you of having interesting thoughts on the damage to the former USN ship HSV-2. Do you have the liberty or inclination to share them?

Yours,

David Bullis

This is another example of resting on our laurels.  The Navy will (and ought to) contend that with a US Navy crew and our ship defense technology they’d never have hit her with the missiles fired, but then we didn’t expect missiles to be fired by rebels in 2016.  Technology spreads fast.  Winning the technology war is the most vital thing we can do, but we are not making the proper effort under the Obama administration, and there is no reason to believe Clinton II will be much different. 

“Exposure to the space environment has permanent effects we simply do not fully understand.”

<http://abcnews.go.com/US/space-travel-permanent-effects-astronaut-scott-kelly/story?id=39884104>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

I have always argued that we need a moon base to study survival in the space environment. I still do.

 

 

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

Monday, October 10, 2016

Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for the West as it commits suicide.

James Burnham

 

Rudolph Giuliani: Trump is right about ‘stop and frisk.’ Lester Holt should apologize

 

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

 

“Deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Immigration without assimilation is invasion.

The news media concentrates on locker room remarks made by Donald Trump a decade ago. Speaker Ryan decides it’s the most significant issue of the day.

Paul Ryan won’t defend or campaign for Trump ahead of election

A decision Monday by House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) to not campaign with or defend Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump through the November election sparked a public feud with his party’s standard bearer within a matter of hours, suggesting that a widening split within the GOP could reverberate long after the presidential race is decided.

Ryan’s move — and a blunt assessment of the race that he and other congressional leaders delivered during a conference call with House GOP lawmakers Monday morning — underscored the perilous choice Republican officials now face in the wake of Friday’s release of a 2005 videotape in which Trump made lewd comments about women. [clip]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/10/10/paul-ryan-wont-defend-or-campaign-for-trump-ahead-of-election/

I think there are more important issues in this election than whether Donald Trump unsuccessfully tried to seduce married woman ten years ago. He wouldn’t be the only President to have had raunchy relations with women before entering politics. 

Hillary Clinton calls for no-fly zone in Syria

10/01/15 09:24 PM—Updated 10/01/15 09:37 PM

By Alex Seitz-Wald

In an apparent break with the Obama White House, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton called for the creation of a no-fly zone inside Syria Thursday, the day after Russian warplanes started bombing rebels fighting the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

“I personally would be advocating now for a no-fly zone and humanitarian corridors to try to stop the carnage on the ground and from the air, to try to provide some way to take stock of what’s happening, to try to stem the flow of refugees,” Clinton said in an interview with NBC affiliate WHDH in Boston after a campaign event nearby.

U.S. officials confirmed Wednesday that Russian planes had started bombing anti-Assad forces in Syria, but that they did not appear to be targeting Islamic State forces as promised. “I think Putin is playing a very dangerous and cynical game. He’s clearly doing everything he can to prop up Assad and to establish sort of a Russian presence in Syria and the broader Middle East,” Clinton added.[Snip]

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/hillary-clinton-calls-no-fly-zones-syria

This is brinkmanship, and risks war. America is superior to Russian and Iranian forces in numbers of aircraft and certainly so in production capacity, but in airpower local to the eastern Mediterranean, the Russians have the technological advantage. They have mobile Surface to Air systems superior to all but our very best and already deployed in the region.

 

 

 

 

The S-300V/S-300VM/VMK/Antey-2500 is the world’s only truly mobile Anti Ballistic Missile system, and later variants are claimed to be capable of intercepting 4.5 km/sec reentry speed targets. The large size of the Grill Pan phased array and TELAR command link and illuminator antennas is evident. The system provides the capability to engage very low RCS aircraft at ranges in excess of 100 nautical miles. Below: 9M82 Giant round The highly mobile Antey S-300V and S-300VM remain one of the most lethal area defence SAM systems ever developed, firing hypersonic missiles designed to engage aircraft, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles.
Designed from the outset for high mobility and effectiveness against targets at all altitudes, the S-300V would have been a key player in any late Cold War conflict. This weapon was developed to provide not only long range area defence, but also to engage and destroy ISR assets like the E-3 AWACS, E-8 JSTARS and U-2, and tactical jammers like the EF-111A Raven and EA-6B Prowler.

http://www.ausairpower.net/APA-Giant-Gladiator.html

Note the capability against AWACS and JSTARS. Declaring a no-fly zone is a matter of words; imposing one is a matter of forces within 100 nautical miles.

We can’t afford more wars in the Middle East. We already owe — every man, woman, and child each owes – some $60,000. We can’t pay for another war.

We have chosen the anti-Slavic side in the European conflicts. We have allowed the invasion of Kosovo by Albanian refugees, then used the presence of those refugees to force the Serbians out of Kosovo. We then bombed Serbia and dropped the bridges over the lower Danube, destroying the economy of nations dependent on Danube transportation. We bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade; something the Chinese are unlikely to forget just as we have not forgotten attacks against our various embassies. Neither the Russians nor the Chinese love us, and our service to China in the Open Door era is long forgotten, as is our industrial contribution to Russia in the Second World War.

Imposing no-fly zones on Russia will be expensive if even possible.

There are other issues. The economy is “recovering” from the “Great Recession”, but after 8 years of enormous budgets and doubling the national debt, it seems like a depression to a great number of Americans who don’t have jobs but officially are not unemployed.

The schools are an act of war against the people of the United State; actually an act of war of the federal government against the children in both the states and the District of Columbia. If we knew how to build great schools by spending lots of money, the DC school system should be a model for all the world; I submit that it is not.

The present administration acquired more debt than all the previous presidents from the founding of the republic, and there are no signs of slowing down deficit spending.

We have the most regulated society in our history, making it impossible for new businesses to start up with burning capital for compliance officers.

We have the question of open borders including refugees.

I could go on, but I submit these are more important issues than a locker room seduction story told ten years ago. Sure it was raw, and embarrassing. We would rather have a President who was more dignified. But after all, he was a Democrat when he told that story. Now he knows better.

Missing voters

It’s not just sloth or disinterest at the root of the ‘unregistered’ white voters. Not in my case.
I’ve lived in the same town for thirty-four years, voted in over 90% of the elections and in this heavily Democrat town sometimes my ballot was a very thin gruel. But I never thought about the need to register because I was registered. I thought.
After my wife’s passing, the thought occurred to me that I should ensure that her name was removed from the voter registration rolls. As the old joke goes; My grandmother lived in Chicago for twenty-five years and always voted for the GOP, then for the last five years she started voting for the Democrats, What changed? She died. So I did that and a few years later I went back to check that she was still not listed. She wasn’t, but then neither was I.
The bland and thin explanation was that periodically they purge the rolls of ‘inactive voters’. I’m sure that they are careful to purge the ‘inactive’ Democrats as well as the Republicans and in my case Independents. Not only had I voted in the last town election, but I was a poll worker and waved a sign outside the polls. I was the one guy with a red sign against the half dozen with blue signs. Of course, the half dozen were all union members, who were happy to comment that ‘They’ were all getting paid for their time.
Perhaps it’s why we haven’t been able to fit our problems in this country at the ballot box, it’s the old struggle of individual piece work against the ‘Machine’.
For what it’s worth, I’ll be back at Town Hall the week before the election with my water bill in hand, and while I’m there I’ll check to see if I’m still ‘Inactive’. Again.

Good on yer.

 

Trump = more wars in the Middle East

“We can’t afford more wars in the Middle East. We already owe — every man, woman, and child each owes – some $60,000. We can’t pay for another war.”
Donald Trump committed himself to another war in the Middle East, this time against ISIS. He said so in the debate the other night. He was very clear on the subject.
I only point this out because you’ve spent months, now, convincing yourself to vote for this man using all the intellectual rationalisations at your disposal. It’s been fascinating to watch.
Please, however, do not consider me intentionally impolite or disrespectful. I grew up reading your books and regard you very highly. I’m just a little bemused over the whole Trump thing.
But perhaps it’s none of my business. I live in the UK. I voted to Remain because I don’t want trade tariffs, I think free movement of people and goods are both good and beneficial things, I want to work and play across the continent without encountering unnecessary bureaucratic barriers, I like my European Health Insurance Card because I think the idea is very civilised, I like the protections granted to the populace by a supra-national regulatory body that reigns in the vicissitudes of each new government, and provides welcome oversight of our leaders because, frankly, I don’t trust any of them and prefer that they exist as small fish in a big pond, not big dictatorial fish in a small pond. And, finally, as a student of history I appreciate the fact that Europe has been quite peaceful all these years, and that closer union between the member states helped that a lot.
However, I’d take a so-called ‘Hard Brexit’ over Trump, any day. Hillary is a text-book politician of the kind we’ve had in the UK and Europe since the year dot. She lies, she manoeuvres, she games the system and so what? It’s called politics. We in the Old World don’t have the luxury of voting for people who are pure in word and deed. We don’t even subscribe to such fallacies. We deal with the situation as it is and make the best choice we can, with our eyes open and no illusions to cloud our judgement about the messy, dirty business called governance. We do not demand that our politicians be pure, we demand that they be competent. Trump went bankrupt 13 times! Does that make him competent? Trump didn’t pay his taxes, but is now asking to be elected to a position in which his job will be to spend other peoples taxes! Doesn’t that make him a hypocrite?
As I said, I mean no disrespect. I hope you won’t interpret my remarks as polemical for its own sake. I simply struggle to understand the appeal of Trump. Is he just not Hillary? In which case, the Republican party has really gone to the dogs if the biggest selling point of their candidate is that he’s not someone else.
Regards,
Mike Ranson

 

You are of course correct: I should have been more clear.

I maintain that we are now in a war with ISIS, so we cannot avoid it; and if we do have to have war, I prefer it to be on other people’s territory.  We stuck our fingers into the hornets’ nest once too often.  Fortunately, this is an already declared war (they declared it; we haven’t reciprocated, but we’re in it all the same). What we do with that must be decided, but it won’t be cheap, and it will not go away. I have said this so often that I weary of repeating it, but of course I should have done so,  Clinton, like Obama, has no idea of what we should do.  Mr. Trump might manage to get the Saudis to pay much of the cost, and give some of the benefits of victory to Jordon, thus working to restore the balance lost when we eliminated Iraq from the balance of power. Trump  wisely does not discuss specific tactics, but we must restore some balance of power to the Middle East, and it is clear that Mr. Obama does not know how to do this.

If you want it all done by the UK, I encourage you to do it; it affects you more than us.  On the other hand, we are natural allies, and the UK enjoys a privileged position in American hopes and dreams; and Middle East stability is desirable for us; not that it matters because we are already in a declared (by the Caliphate) war anyway. At this point we get deeper into grand strategy than I care to go at this time.

 

You don’t like Trump, but you aren’t asked to. He pays all legal obligations of taxes; you may be certain of that. So do the Clintons.  I should have made it clear in the above that I am not advocating full isolationism; merely that we conduct our affairs with a view to our own interest, and recognize that we are not omnipotent, and with our debts we are no longer so rich.

 

Thank you for your views, and for reminding me of the ambiguity; we are already in a war with ISIS even if we do not act as if we are. Do understand, we have no choice but to finish the war we are in; I wish we didn’t have to.  What I want is to avoid new ones, particularly in Europe. The world is a far more dangerous place now than when Mr. Obama took office. I do not think Mrs. Clinton has much notion of how to get out of this situation. She certainly did not exhibit an understanding of world affairs when she was Secretary of State.

 

 

Trump = more wars in the Middle East

We can not afford any wars today (we are dead broke). But we have them. Obama is busy having us supply (covertly) the weapons to overthrow Assad. (and since we are not defending ourselves that is a war crime — but who pays attention to the sovereign treaties that we sign.

Back in my day I was baby sitting 48 hydrogen bombs north of the Soviet Union. Meanwhile we were fighting a war that LBJ started as a result of an erroneous report of an attack on destroyers that were involved in covert operations.  Even though a correcting message was sent LBJ pushed Congress into a war declaration.

Today we have Obama supplying weapons to overthrow Assad (with the help from the UK and France) because he will not allow a pipeline through the country. We bomb the enemy after telling him we are going to attack, but somehow miss our targets and hit the government forces. We airdrop weapons but miss our target and give them to Al Qaida (which in the CIA dictionary means “base” but colloquially means toilet – what self respecting army would call itself the toilet?) . This is a war of deception, but the people being deceived are the American public. So Trump wants to end the war (that we are already “fighting”)– decisively. The way the Romans ended the Punic wars – no Carthage.

Clinton on the other hand wants to start a new war – with Iran. Now we have been having a covert war with Iran for years – billions spent funding the terrorist groups in Iran, sabotage on the industrial facilities along with Israel. Murdering their researchers. – but no overt warfare. But Russia has now started to defend the Iranian state because it sees that it is also in our target list and would prefer to have a war outside its territory. The trouble is that war will not stay contained. It will go nuclear just like the Cuba missile crisis nearly went nuclear. Kennedy had IRBMs based in Turkey but felt it was impossible to let the Soviets have similar missiles on our doorstep. So he threated a blockade and invasion. Not knowing that the Soviet general had nuclear weapons on site and permission to use them if attacked. So officially the crisis was averted by the Soviets pulling back. No one mentioned that we also pulled our missiles from Turkey.

As Pogo says “ We have met the enemy, and he is us”.

Earl

We got out of the Cold War without any nukes going off. I count that a success, even if we later abandoned an ally in an invasion from the North. Korea was fortunate: their North State had a close and believable protector; North Viet Nam had to depend on luck and their Soviet allies. Fortunately, for them, domestic US politics prevented US intervention in their last massive invasion. Most American schools now pretend that Viet Nam fell to locals in black pajamas, rather than to massive invasion from the North.

Second Debate

I haven’t often made comments here of a political nature, but, well, things being what they are . . .
Every professional career politician — and those who serve their interests — knows that image means everything and substance means nothing. That’s an important thing to keep in mind as we see all the campaign messages. The most important task for the politician is to win the current election and prepare to win the next one. That means creating the most favorable image for him/herself and the most negative, destructive image of the opponent.
Nothing new here.
What we are seeing in the most recent “revelation” about Donald Trump is simply an illusion created by the Clinton campaign and their media cohorts. It is the illusion that the man in the 11-year-old video is the same person as the man who is running for President.
And it has worked, at least to an extent. Witness Jason Chaffetz, John McCain, and Paul Ryan’s self-righteous rescinding of their “support” of Trump. In reality, these people — and others of their ilk — have been living with deep-seated angst ever since Trump walked away with their party’s nomination. Horrors! Now they can pretend to have principles, which, conveniently, allow them to bail on Trump while creating the image (illusion) of still being loyal to their party.
Where were their principles when they passed Obama’s budget request without making any significant changes, giving the minority party everything they wanted. Every. Single. Thing. And much else besides. Is this what they think they were elected to do — act just like the Democrats they replaced? Did the Democrats take Republican’s wishes into account when they were in the majority? This whole matter, taking everything into account, crisply illustrates the farce that is the GOP’s OB club — the GOPe, or Republican establishment. Some have openly declared that they will vote for Hillary.
I, for one, am far more troubled by what Hillary has actually done than by what Trump has only said.
It is to be hoped that the millions who voted for Trump in the primaries will join their local Republican clubs and take control of the party away from these imposters.

Richard

 

Establishments die hard.

 

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

Sunday, October 9, 2016

Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for the West as it commits suicide.

James Burnham

Rudolph Giuliani: Trump is right about ‘stop and frisk.’ Lester Holt should apologize

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

“Deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Immigration without assimilation is invasion.

We continue to struggle up to normal here, and we’re making progress. Goy a fair amount of work on fiction done. And thanks for the subscriptions, support, and renewals.

The debate went as expected. Whoever won and who lost is not relevant; those watching saw that a very famous politician has not been able to do anything for 30 years, and those who think we are worse off both at home and abroad now than we were 8 years ago were invited to think about that. The Obama Presidency spent more money than any other President, doubled the national debt, and few people are actually working than they were before. Unemployment may be down, but that’s because of the narrow definition of unemployed. The work force is down. There may be an underground economy keeping us afloat, the way the off the books economy kept the Soviet Union going, but that’s a dangerous game that the Obama government will put a stop to – after they raise the minimum wage, forcing ever more people into the underground economy.

One reason Obamacare is in a financial crisis is that employers don’t have the money to pay for the compulsory health care, forcing more and more workers either to pay rising premiums or search for government subsidies – which are paid for with borrowed money. Obamacare is an entitlement and entitlements must be paid for.

Education in America

With respect to Mr. Jordan’s recent report of the PIACC assessment of adult skills, the situation is, if anything, even worse for the vaunted tech-savvy American millennials ages 16-24, including those with college degrees, as this article by the American Educational Testing Service summarizing earlier PIACC data indicates:
http://www.ets.org/s/research/30079/millennials.html
Given the regression to twitter and texting in their communications, it’s no surprise that half of these millennials scored below Level 3 on literacy and numeracy, which is considered the minimum international standard for functional literacy and numeracy. The millennials were also well below the average of OECD countries on problem solving with digital technology, and the younger cohorts among these ranked dead last.
This is the culmination of a trend of deterioration in our schools that began in 1964 with the Johnson Administrations “Great Society” programs and has progressed ever since. The SATs that have been used since the early 1950s as perhaps the principal basis for admission to the selective colleges have had to be dumbed down twice since that time, not just to accommodate the expanded population taking the test as the conventional wisdom has it, but also because the percentages of 17 year old Americans scoring at the elite levels on the SAT Verbal declined by over 60% by 1994 (the time of the first SAT dumbing down). SAT Math scores didn’t decline as much over that period, and because the STEM subjects were taken more seriously, the progressive high school STEM curriculum was largely jettisoned and standards tightened up, with the result that SAT Math score bounced back to somewhat above the original 1963 baseline – though it appears from the various educational assessments that they have resumed their decline since.
The other international comparison study for schools is the PISA assessment. Even though the taxpayers in this country are soaked to pay more than 30% more per pupil than the average of the OECD developed countries, our schools rank dead last, 23 out of 23 in educational results in the most recent international PISA assessments:
http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2012/pisa2012highlights_5.asp
For example, the unscientific leftist true believers in the thoroughly discredited AGW hypothesis (now renamed “climate change” as an equivocation), are a perfect match for the unscientific rightist true believers in Creationism, and both are indicative of the scientific and mathematical illiteracy of the vast majority of Americans (American 15 year olds ranked 28th in the world in the 2012 PISA assessment of scientific literacy). I don’t mean to imply with these examples that any of the sweeping versions of these theories (the AGW hypothesis, creationism, evolutionism, whether in its classic Darwinian form, or in any of the other far more sophisticated versions that have emerged over the last 100+ years, can be considered scientific hypotheses in the first place, because none of them are subject to clear definition, let alone falsification. Rather, it’s the fact that few Americans, and only a minority of those with science degrees, are even equipped by their education to understand what a scientific hypothesis is, and why it is different from any other assertion of truth.
Then there is the sheer ignorance of most Americans of the basics of the various sciences. Richard Dawkins, in an appendix to his anti-creationism book, The Greatest Show on Earth (2009), reported the results of a poll question presented to various populations annual by the Gallup organization (the %s marking each choice are shown in parentheses):
Which of the following questions comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings?
(1) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process. (36%)
(2) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process. (14%)
(3) God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years. (44%)
The sheer scientific illiteracy indicated by the plurality choice tracks with the results of the PISA assessment.
Then there is the US National NAEP assessment. According to the most recent (2015) NAEP statistics only 37% of high school seniors were proficient in reading at that level, and only 25% were proficient in math.
The intellectual development of most people, and the corresponding plasticity of their brains, comes to an end by age 25, though a tiny minority of people have during their developmental period learned how to learn, and managed to preserve their intellectual curiosity into adulthood. For virtually all societies, though, the only way new more effective modes of thought can possibly emerge is through generational changeover. Thus, thanks to two generations of dumbed down education (starting from a not very impressive level to begin with) cum brainwashing in the government madrassahs, the US is stuck with the population it has, and it would take 10-20 years to begin to make any improvements to the intellectual capabilities of our young people, even if we could immediately jettison the present system and return to the school standards that you and I grew up with.
Glenn Seaborg was right in his 1983 comment that what had been done to our educational system by then was tantamount to an act of war, and now we are a defeated and failing people. You say don’t sell the American people short, but the American people you are referring to are now in their 60s and beyond, and I don’t see them manning the battlements, rejuvenating American industry, or radically revamping American government in their declining years.
John B. Robb
P.S. There are any number of other indexes of the failure of American society over the last many decades. For example, I remember in one of the last National Review theme issues a year or two after Reagan stepped down as president (about the end of the Buckley era when I ended my subscription of some 30 years) undertook to refute the proposition that the 1980s had been a “decade of greed” – a charge that seems quaint in light of subsequent developments. Studies had shown that there was significant socioeconomic mobility among the five quintiles of American society, with rags to riches to rags being a non uncommon pattern. A recent international study of socioeconomic mobility commissioned by the Pew Charitable Trust (and featured in this month’s Hillsdale College Imprimis piece, Restoring America’s Economic Mobility, by Frank Buckley) found that as of today, the US is nearly as stratified a society as the UK. According to an index of economic mobility in which high numbers represent extremes of stratification, while low numbers denote high mobility, the UK was scored at .50, the US at .47, compared with France at .41, Germany .32, Australia .26, Canada .19, and Denmark .15.
When the US ranks below all the European semi-socialist welfare states, and far below our neighbor to the north, in the very social characteristic that was once the most definitive characteristic of America, and the idea of America, you know that something is seriously wrong. Canada today also ranks much higher than the US in measures of economic and personal freedom, and of course has an immigration policy that works, since it’s the same one that we had before the 1965 Ted Kennedy “reform” bill that replaced selectivity for skills with family reunification as the main immigration criterion: Canada allows in only immigrants with work skills and deports illegals.===

Our education system is failing. We clearly do not have a working policy at the federal level. No one has one, We once had a splendid educational system; we left it to the states, they competed, and we had real education without Federal Aid to Education. None. I realize that many of you do not know, but before Sputnik we had no US Department of Education and no Federal aid to education. At a Federal level we funded the District of Columbia and some schools on ,military bases for military dependents. They were pretty good schools, but they competed for military dependents with the local state schools in some areas. The debate over Federal Aid was long and involved and not all that long ago. We tried it, and got union controlled schools, credentialism, workshops, and other embellishments, and went from the best schools in the world to the present mess.

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

breaking out the long johns for another cold war

Dr. Pournelle,
This epic failure belongs completely at the feet of the current administration and both current and former Secretaries of State: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-usa-missiles-confirm-idUSKCN1280IV
If you’ll remember, president elect Obama traveled to Russia to talk disarmament with Putin, Secretary Clinton repeatedly discussed nukes with Russia, and Secretary Kerry, at the off (as the British might say) threatened Putin with the irresponsible, uncreditable, and impossible forward deployment of fighter-borne nukes to Eastern Europe if Russia didn’t get out of East Ukraine.
As stated previously, the U.S. is not in a position to play games with nukes. We couldn’t reconstitute our cold war strategic force if we had to, and without a better strategy than MAD, we shouldn’t. If this little legacy of Obama’s doesn’t represent “high crimes” as a cause for impeachment, then sheer incompetence should.
-d

We do not have nuclear superiority and the splendid high morale force that was SAC has been disbanded. We cannot impose no-fly zones in Syria if the Soviets don’t want them; we do not have air supremacy, and we don’t have an Army over there. The days when the US could order the Soviet Union to abandon Tehran ended years ago.

Walter Lippmann observed that diplomatic demands were like a check; they had to be drawn on a reserve of military ability. We can’t write larger checks against the Russians in the Middle East. But we do have Obamacare and other entitlements.

Thought this might have a place on your blog somewhere.

There Is No Room For Hyphenated Americanism Theodore Roosevelt Address to the Knights of Columbus New York City- October 12th, 1915 “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all.”

“This is just as true of the man who puts “native” before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance.”

“But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as any one else.”

“The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English- Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian- Americans, or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality than with the other citizens of the American Republic.”

“The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good American.”

B

Immigration without assimilation is invasion.

America’s ‘quiet catastrophe’: Millions of idle men – The Washington Post

After 88 consecutive months of the economic expansion that began in June 2009, a smaller percentage of American males in the prime working years (ages 25 to 54) are working than were working near the end of the Great Depression in 1940, when the unemployment rate was above 14 percent. If the labor-force participation rate were as high today as it was as recently as 2000, nearly 10 million more Americans would have jobs.

The work rate for adult men has plunged 13 percentage points in a half-century. This “work deficit” of “Great Depression-scale underutilization” of male potential workers is the subject of Nicholas Eberstadt’s new monograph “Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis,” which explores the economic and moral causes and consequences of this: 

Since 1948, the proportion of men 20 and older without paid work has more than doubled, to almost 32 percent. This “eerie and radical transformation” — men creating an “alternative lifestyle to the age-old male quest for a paying job” — is largely voluntary. Men who have chosen to not seek work are two-and-a-half times more numerous than men who government statistics count as unemployed because they are seeking jobs.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/americas-quiet-catastrophe-millions-of-idle-men/2016/10/05/cd01b750-8a57-11e6-bff0-d53f592f176e_story.html?utm_campaign=pockethits&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pocket&utm_term=.801154eb0e3b

John Harlow

The sea ice is gone – NOT

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/10/07/experts-said-arctic-sea-ice-would-melt-entirely-by-september-201/

J

As I repeatedly say, we just don’t know the climate future; we do know it has been doth warmer and colder in historical times. Probably in Viking times the Arctic was nearly ice free and there was a Northwest Passage. We don’t know about in Roman Warm times.

Subject: r.e. Petronius’ Election Data Point

Dear Jerry,

I’ve encountered the same lack of local organization here in Florida.  Nevertheless my wife and I have been encouraging people to register (this ends October 11 here in Florida) and turn out.   Our interest in The Donald lies solely in the fact that he was the only candidate this year willing to address both trade and immigration.

The Donald’s lack of ground game is reasonably well known now.   This leads into the real reason he’ll lose, if he does lose which seems very possible.   This link has the most significant article of this election in my opinion.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/missing-white-voters-could-elect-trump-but-first-they-need-to-register/

“Here’s a scary stat for Democrats: In 2012, President Obama won re-election by almost 5 million votes, but about 47 million eligible white voters without a college degree — including 24 million men — didn’t bother to vote. In 2016, these nonvoters are part of the demographic that is most strongly in favor of Donald Trump.”

“If Trump rouses even a fraction of these notoriously disaffected Americans — like this grease-smudged, 61-year-old first-time voter in western Pennsylvania — he could surge to victory. There’s just one catch: If we’re on the cusp of a blue-collar Great Awakening, it’s not yet showing up in the registration data.”

These disaffected white people are why John McCain and Mitt Romney lost.  But I don’t see any rationale reason they should have turned out at all for these individuals or anyone else in the GOPe.  All the GOPe ‘ers ever do – at the behest of their Donor Class masters – is work to send their higher paying industrial jobs overseas and also displace them with immigrants in the minimum wage service jobs left over. 

Why the GOPe doesn’t want to mobilize these people is evident, at least to me.  After mobilizing to elect Donald Trump they would certainly primary Paul Ryan and the entire Koch Bros network out of existence in 2018.  As for the Bush and Romney families, they might as well move to Mexico and try reviving their political fortunes there.  Once mobilized these people would prove to be a dynamic, dangerous and uncontrollable political force.  At least not controllable by the Donor Class, their bought GOPe poltroons and their contentless CON ideology.

Think about the Missing 47 Million the next time the New York Times, the Bush Family and the rest of the GOPe come around with their Unlimited Immigration/Unlimited Trade manure and the need for Latino Outreach and cave-in on immigration, etc.

Now why Trump also refused to attempt to mobilize these 47 Million can fuel some interesting speculations.  He certainly had abundant time and opportunity since June 2015 to build a massively entrenched local organization.  But he clearly chose not to do so.

Best Wishes,

Mark

I would not say that Mr. Trump refused to mobilize those voters, but I am not privy to his strategic decisions.

 

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