Mail 683 2011 Monday July 11, 2011 – 2

 

Vegetables On The Lawn

People are looking at this as an example of a government official gone mad (or, maybe, just stupid) and inappropriately using his power.

See, I don’t know about that. From the looks of things this is a man executing the duties of his office in a manner that seems entirely reasonable to him. His community has charged him with maintaining its chosen standards, and that’s exactly what he’s doing.

Maybe what needs to happen here is that instead of asking why this guy can’t find someone else to bother, we should instead ask why there’s an official Department Of Bothering People at all. Don’t cry about how this is a special exception, because *everyone* has a reason why they’re a special exception. Complain that the law exists at all. This isn’t even the voluntary-contract situation of the dread Homeowner’s Association; this is an employee of the elected municipal government. If you don’t like what’s going on, then change it! Find the people in charge; get THEM to handle it. We do not claim that a thief’s hands should be in jail but the rest of him go free.

—

Mike T. Powers

I tend to agree. It’s a local matter, and I firmly believe in local government. I probably should have made that clear but I was wondering if anyone else would notice. I have to say my proclivity is to let local governments do a great many things, including censorship of books and movies. I’d let Boston ban obscenity in Boston; I just wouldn’t let Boston ban Lady Chatterly in Cambridge. Of course Boston isn’t likely to ban anything nowadays, nor are very many other communities. The days are long over when the Binford Commission could forbid me to see Jane Russell in the Outlaw in the city of Memphis and we had to go over the Harahan Bridge to West Memphis in Arkansas. And I completely agree that this is a local affair to be handled by locals.

Now when it comes to Federal employees at a time when we are broke I take an entirely different view…  Thanks.

 

Closing the Iranian border

Dear Dr Pournelle,

your commenter ‘Ed’ asks, referring to the Iranian border, "So they can afford it and we can’t?", and you respond "It’s a matter of will." May I suggest that you take another look at the quoted text? It does not say that Iran has closed its border, it says that the Iranian government has "*announced* that 90 percent of [its] border has been sealed". Well, anyone can announce anything they like, but if, tomorrow morning, Obama announced that he had closed the Mexican border, would you believe him? And if not, why believe the Iranians? And this is all the more true because the quote goes on to point out that the Iranians have lost several thousand soldiers in their effort to keep that border closed (which seems to indicate something on the level of ongoing guerrilla warfare), and that heroin and opium are *still* getting through.

I suggest, then, that even if closing the Mexican border is indeed a matter of will, the Iranian case does not demonstrate any such thing.

Regards,

Rolf Andreassen.

 

Actually, haven’t various politicians told us that the US border is under control? Or will be Real Soon Now. The Iranians would do it if they could; the question is whether the current politicians want to at all. I don’t really care about Iranian control of their borders so long as I don’t have to pay for it. I do care about our. Alas I have paid for a fence that was never built, and a bunch of other stuff.

Mail 683 Monday July 11, 2011

· Letter from Mariposa

· The View from Tycho

· No Longer a Space Faring Nation

· Farewell to the Archduke

·

[Note: I am still experimenting. There will be lines and other stuff in here. I hope it’s not too distracting.]

And BYTE is back http://www.informationweek.com/byte/

Many prominent UK politicians have an Oxford PPE http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy,_Politics_and_Economics . This is considered to be a dilettante’s degree, consisting in American terms of three minors–a year of philosophy, a year of political science, and a year of economics, none studied in depth. In particular, no training in law or history or anything quantitative. They begin to be involved in politics during their three years at university, and move to the big leagues at graduation, where there is a real tendency for them to get in over their heads.

Phone hacking story: http://tinyurl.com/44rm8mq

Blair commenting on where Labour went wrong: http://tinyurl.com/3q8w3y8 "Parties of the left have a genetic tendency to cling to an analysis that they lose because the leadership is insufficiently committed to being left, defined in a very traditional sense. There’s always a slightly curious problem with this analysis since usually they have lost to a rightwing party. But somehow that inconvenient truth is put to the side."

UK inflation up: http://tinyurl.com/425jv4g

Boat thief caught in action: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-14076170

Imported tech spiked with vulnerabilities: http://tinyurl.com/642q6hk

Jim Dunnigan’s comments on tech war: http://tinyurl.com/3p2s4tm . I tried to get a program going to teach security engineering in the UK, but it didn’t recruit enough students to sustain it. Not the easiest subject to learn, and most UK students take difficulty into account when they choose their MSc program. Those who we did recruit did very well, but students that good are rare. Students who take my final year module in that area seem to regard it highly and find it often leads to a job.

The second person to subscribe to my new wordpress blog http://crowan-scat.sunderland.ac.uk/~harryerw/ViewFromEngland/ is a known blog spammer…

I don’t know what to say about the vote to kill the James Webb Space Telescope: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/science/07webb.html

—

"We do not understand how a country,… can produce people who seem to be acting without thinking, let alone making serious efforts to investigate the consequences of their actions." (Mary Evans in the Times Higher Education)

Harry Erwin

It is only recently that politicians’ education has been important in getting elected. College degrees were not much of a qualification: what was important was life experience, particularly for executive off and especially as President. The one time Harry Truman ran for President he could list as qualification that he was President of the United States. I doubt anyone reading this knows what, if any, Truman’s college experience was. Eisenhower was a West Point graduate. Nixon didn’t depend on his college qualifications. Kennedy liked to pretend to a better education than he had – he was an indifferent student – and relied on academia to supply him with advisors. Over time there has been a tendency to plead credentials, but it has never been a strong American tradition.

I would be curious to know why the phone hacking scandal resulted in actually folding the News of the World. That seems a bit drastic.

WSJ links

When I want to send a WSJ link to someone I search Google with the full title then click on news on the left side. The WSJ article comes up. This link is a referral link and must come from Google. I then copy the URL for the search and attach it to as a link in my email. Example:

The Road to Serfdom and the Arab Revolt http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=The+Road+to+Serfdom+and+the+Arab+Revolt#q=The+Road+to+Serfdom+and+the+Arab+Revolt&hl=en&prmd=ivnsu&source=lnms&tbm=nws&ei=o9oXTsq-K5OosAORtLHVDQ&sa=X&oi=mode_link&ct=mode&cd=4&ved=0CBYQ_AUoAw&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=f7da403014ea4f31&biw=1392&bih=815

WSJ wants to be at the top of the Google search returns, but to do that they have to allow someone to follow the link. The compromise seems to be that if you find it by Google with the right kind of search, you can see the whole story by going to the WSJ-on-line link.

iPhone update –

Hi Jerry,

There’s widespread expectation that an update will be released in around September – probably more of an evolutionary change, but one of the big ones is a dual-mode CDMA/GSM phone. That would allow you to migrate to whatever carrier you want (once the contract is up of course).

I always check the MacRumors buying guide at http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/ before making a major Apple purchase. They have the timing pretty well recorded, and have kept me from buyers remorse more than once.

Cheers,

Doug

I understood that, which is why I didn’t just buy an iPhone 4 on the spot, but I will probably get one. My wife simply can’t use and iPhone and we are looking at something with a physical keyboard that has a camera and other smartphone features. Pocket size isn’t so important for her. Being able to use the keyboard is. I admit that I have some problems pecking away on the iPhone keyboard; the best of the pocket phone devices I ever tried as an old RIM way way back when. I could actually write quite quickly with two thumbs with that. I have never been able to write anything worth keeping and not much worth sending as a note with the iPhone, but hope springs eternal…

In my experience there is no reliable way to find out what’s going on at Apple. We all used to have our sources out on the infinite loop, but it’s now easier to find out what’s going on in Plans than get reliable info on Apple’s intentions – at least that’s my experience, and Leo Laporte seems to have the same experience.

Subject: News as satire Down Under: Saving the world from farting camels

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/4480/australian-kill-a-camel-scheme-attacked

Steve Chu

Tycho’s central peak from the LRO

Jerry,

The LRO provides some astonishing pictures

Regards, Charles Adams, Bellevue, NE

Tycho itself

<http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/news/uploads/wac_tycho_highphase.png>

Tycho’s central peak from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter with an "egg" on top <http://lpod.wikispaces.com/July+1%2C+2011>

The "egg" brought down to Earth to see how it compares to something we know.

<http://lpod.wikispaces.com/July+8%2C+2011>

Tycho brought down to Earth and compared to Tokyo (so does Kaguya/Selene as well!) <http://lpod.wikispaces.com/September+12%2C+2008>

The start of the LRO featured pictures

<http://wms.lroc.asu.edu/lroc_browse?page=1>

RE: No Longer a Space Faring Nation

Jerry,

Upon landing of Atlantis, I will be keeping track of how long we are no longer a space faring nation. From Freedom 7 to today we have had a little over 50 years as such a nation.

I did not expect to see Heinlein’s hiatus. I take some solace in that you have said that we will be back on the moon, but with the important caveat that it may not be with US citizens. This is not much solace. I need to remember that despair is a sin.

I hope to know who the real D.D. Harriman is before I die. We need a "Person to Sell the Moon."

Regards, Charles Adams

==

As I think I established in A Step Farther Out, most of the resources available to mankind are out there, not on Earth. We are already mining miles and miles down. Mining the Moon would be easier, except for the big energy penalties for getting to the Moon. Yet much of the cost of space travel is due to design and ignoring operations costs: we established a preference for performance over operations in design priorities way back in Apollo because we were in a race; Shuttle was designed to employ 22,000 development scientists and technicians, and it met its objective nicely. Reusable ships designed to be reused, not rebuilt, and designed to have efficient operations, not employ lots of people (hundreds of launch consoles for Shuttle!) can make space travel an affordable cost for rewards. I went all over that in A Step Farther Out and there’s no point in making the argument again. America may wake up and discover that path; if not, the Chinese, Japanese, Indonesia – someone will find it. Mankind will go to space.

The Archduke and Prince Imperial is dead

Franz Joseph Otto Robert Maria Anton Karl Max Heinrich Sixtus Xavier Felix

Renatus Ludwig Gaetan Pius Ignatius von Habsburg-Lothringen has died at

his home on the Starnbergzee

—

Russell Seitz

==

He was a very distant relative, and a patron of two of the orders of which I am honored to hold membership in. I never met him, but I knew some of his friends, and corresponded occasionally with Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn who knew him fairly well. Possony had met him. Knowing he was a distant relative I took care to read some of his works when I was an undergraduate. It may or may not be significant that I remember little of them. From all accounts, though, he would have made a good Emperor. It has always been my belief that Wilson’s utter opposition to the monarchy and his imposition of his system in Europe was the biggest disaster of World War I; Europe would have been a lot better off had the Austrian empire survived, But that is another story and another argument. My favorite story is when the Archduke was asked his view of the Austria-Hungary World Cup soccer match. His response was “Against whom is the team playing?”

= = =

End of EU? for real this time

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/danish-committee-approves-governments-controversial-border-control-plans/2011/07/01/AG5eEKtH_story.html

——–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Articles: The Purposeful Flooding of America’s Heartland –

Of course, we have some of the usual collection of Watermelon Greens screaming that the Midwest floods were caused by CAGW (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming). Rational analysis of the situation may lead one in another direction.

The Purposeful Flooding of America’s Heartland

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/06/the_purposeful_flooding_of_americas_heartland.html

Regards,

Jim Riticher