Chaos Manor View, Saturday, June 11, 2016

Additional  2300 Sunday, June 12, 2016

Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western Civilization as it commits suicide.

Under Capitalism, the rich become powerful. Under Socialism, the powerful become rich.

Under Socialism, government employees become powerful.

This has been an interesting weekend. More unexpected adventures in computing, coupled with more unwanted adventures in computing, coupled with a call to Mike Diamond Plumbing to unstop a drain. The main drain. So that the toilets are backing up.

But wait. There’s more. It’s Saturday Morning, and the Internet has amazing slowdowns.

It all started Friday afternoon when, in a moment of foolishness, I invoked Steam to buy a copy of Total Annihilation, a rather old game that I don’t really need. That turned out to be a bit more complicated than I thought, because Steam kept wanting to add the silly game to my “Wishlist” rather than just sell it to me. Eventually I figured it out, and thought to test the installation. Whereupon I got several unexpected updates to video drivers; I can’t think why. I should have rejected them, but I didn’t and the adventures began.

The game ran fine, but when I exited, all of my open displays were concentrated up in the upper left corner of the screen, all piled up so that, at least for me, it was very difficult to get hold of a corner arrow to drag for expanding them. It was also difficult to see which one I was trying to work on, since they were all piled together in an area about the size of a playing card.

I could see some red x’s, so I figured I’d just close them. Then I could adjust the screensize one at a time. Worked fine with Word, and not so well with Firefox which has the worst session manager I know of, usually managing to only return part of the last session, while unerringly including a video that immediately begins talking; I closed it long ago but here it is, and I have to pick out which has the audio going from a bunch of windows. But I managed just fine if a bit tediously restoring my previously open windows until—

I opened Outlook. The blue starting window came up. It said Starting. Little things moved across the screen. Endlessly. After five minutes nothing had changed. I closed it. Reset the machine. Everything worked. Opened Outlook. The blue starting window came up. And stayed there endlessly.

All right, find scanpst. First you need to remember that while it’s chkdsk, it’s scanpst. Then you need to remember that just typing scanpst in the lower left corner will not find it for you. Cortana will refer you to the Internet, which won’t tell you how to find it either.

Microsoft once had a file manager program and a search function that worked, but modern Windows 10 will have none of that. But if you open a file explorer, and go to ThisPC, and search in the upper right corner for scanpst, it will show you a dozen documents where it is mentioned but eventually it will show you SCANPST.EXE with its own clever little icon, and you can open it from there. For the record, it’s in Windows / program files (x86) / Microsoft Office / root / Office16, not the most intuitive place in the world. Meanwhile, Cortana will refer you to the world wide web. She never heard of no stinking scanpst. Incidentally, you can find it in file explorer searching the C: disk, but Cortana still never heard of it.

So I ran scanpst on outlook.pst and a couple of other pst files; this takes time, but it works (of course you have to know where to find the relevant pst files). Then I opened Outlook. The blue starting screen came up, the dots started moving – and this went on endlessly. Then, on Eric’s advice, I went to Control Panel > Programs and Features > Office and selected Change. The system offered to repair Office. I let it do that. It didn’t take long, and told me it was all repaired. Opened Outlook. The blue starting screen came up. The dots moved. And this went on until I closed it. No joy.

By now panic was creeping in. I used the Surface Pro (where Outlook was working fine) to communicate with my advisors. There was some stress in that, because again I could not tell if my messages were getting to anyone. I was getting mail, just none from me. Went to Swan, a large modern machine in the back room. The messages weren’t getting to him either. The panic level crept up. Then I got an answer from one of my advisors: at least one message got through. I was replying to that with some joy when a whole pile of messages from me suddenly appeared. Apparently something had been delaying my sent mail. It appeared to be fixed now.

Went back to my main machine. Tried to update Office. No Updates. Went to Control Panel to see if there was a more drastic Repair under Programs and Features. There is, an on-line repair that might take some time. Fine by me. Chose that (while I was writing this in Word), and was told that I should save my work, the repair program had to close Word.

Saved, returned to the repair program, and told it to have at it. Took a while, but finally up popped a screen saying all was well, and did I want to register this copy of Office as one of the ones I am paying for. Yes, said I.

Noted that neither Word nor Outlook was on my taskbar now. Found Word in the Start list, opened it, and here we are. Pinned it to taskbar while I was at it.

Found Outlook in the All Programs list, opened it, and – well, the blue starting screen appeared, and it trundled until I closed it.

In other words, I am back where I started. I have Outlook 16 on the Surface and on Swan, and in theory on this machine, although it won’t open here. Don’t know what to do next. I like this machine, but without Outlook it can’t be a main machine. I like the ASUS 15” ZenBook keyboard enough that I am seriously contemplating buying another to control all my other machines with; I can type much faster and more accurately with it than any other machine I have tried since the stroke.

I was beginning to like Windows 10, but now I wonder. I don’t want any more adventures in computing. I just want stability. Outlook isn’t as important as Word, but I do need a mail program on my main machine; if nothing else I need a way to select interesting mail and collect it so that it is easily found and accessed, but I would also like to work with the ZenBook keyboard because I had to correct every single word in the last sentence I just wrote (I am using the Logitech K360 wireless), the Surface Pro keyboard is marginally better but it is too small and simultaneously hitting alt-spacebar happens too often on it, and I don’t see the Surface screen all that well. The ZenBook made life a little easier, and I could control this machine remotely with it, meaning that I could do very well that way; too well. I enjoyed it too much, so I suppose this mess became inevitable. Why Not?

And when I start thinking that way I am on a slippery slope indeed, and at my age I can’t afford to slide down it. I might never get back.

So here we are. I was going out to Fry’s to see if there were any keyboards like the ASUS ZenBook’s but not attached to a ZenBook; obviously that isn’t going to happen today.

I have a bunch of selected mail, but I can’t open Outlook on this machine, and this is the machine I used to use to select out and restore in the To Be Posted folder the most interesting; I’ll have to go through a lot of mail to get that back. Or perhaps I can import the To Be Posted folder onto Swan. Or I can get someone to bring down the ZenBook from upstairs, put Office on it, and import the pst files from this machine, while I order another ZenBook to work as a control keyboard for here after I take my original Zen back upstairs. If that’s confusing, I need two free hands to navigate stairs. I can’t carry a big laptop up and down.

I’d appreciate comments, but do understand, I have thought about this. Computers are expensive, but compared to life extension not so much so.

Meanwhile, I did get this written, even if I am correcting 60% of the words, and that feels pretty good: one of the secrets of recovering from both brain cancer and a stroke is not to give up, and one cure for depression is to get something done. And the plumber is here, so one less thing to worry about.

I’d now go over to Outlook and look at what interesting mail I have collected, but Outlook doesn’t work; so I’ll post this, go to another machine where Outlook does work, and start sorting through mail; that’ll take a while.

One comment on the election: whatever you think of Trump, do understand that the New Mexican judge he claims ought to recuse himself from the case is a Board Member of La Raza. Whether La Raza is a racial or a Mexican nationalist organization, it is not unreasonable to assume a suspicion that he may be prejudiced against Trump, just as a member of the Communist Party of the United States might engender suspicions of partiality, or a Kleagle of the KKK might be thought to have some prejudices.

I saw today but did not read beyond the headline that Trump ought to be embarrassed because he once praised President Clinton. Perhaps so, but then many of us deserve criticism. I have often said that Clinton gave us the last balanced budget in the history of the nation. True, he had Newt Gingrich as Speaker at the time, but he was President, and we got a balanced budget. When Bush became President he didn’t have Newt as Speaker, and we got huge deficits. Then came Obama…

The United States budget strategy is to kick the can down the road and let the Millennials pay for all the free stuff. We can pay for it by giving them all free college. Of course when everyone goes to college, not many get a college education because the standards have to be lowered, so that national productivity is not likely to rise because of increased capabilities of the graduates, but perhaps the robots will bail out the children of the Millennials. The United States with its regulatory agencies increasing the expense for starting new companies has already succeeded in transferring a great deal of wealth from the young to the elderly. Unemployment has been defined down, but a smaller percentage of the population has jobs now than earlier; I’d say that was a Depression.

Trump is a pragmatist. So was Clinton. Neither is an ideologue, of Left or Right. Hillary is neither a pragmatist nor an ideologue: her performances in Libya and Iran show that. Lately she seems to letting Sanders write her ideology, then trying to run to the left of that. I can praise some of Clinton’s performance. Not so sure about Obama, whose record Hillary now defends.

The happy ending.

Outlook is restored, actually by what I probably should have tried first. I should have opened Outlook in safe mode.  Actually I tried: at one time, control+click on the Outlook icon would do that.  No longer. Opening a command window and typing outlook /safe got me the information that  Outlook is not a recognized command.  That seems weird typed  and I may have had an unseen typo in the command. Eventually I remembered window-key r, which opens a run dialog window, typed outlook /safe and everything worked.  I hadn’t used safe mode in a long time and the view was not what I expected, but I sent a message and received it back.  I closed Outlook, opened it again, and it worked, looked right, and works still. My long adventure was done.

Lessons.  Microsoft generally works, but the help is a bit weird.  When I asked Cortana anything she usually referred me to online articles that told me exactly how to do it – but it didn’t work.  it used to work, but that was in previous versions. It is evident that Cortana does not know what version of Windows, or Office, you are running.  Obviously she does know because you can ask her, but like most AI programs she doesn’t know she knows until you tell her, and doesn’t realize that you don’t want to know the solution that would work with Windows 7 and Office 10 when  you are running Windows 10 and Office 365. Microsoft ought to let Cortana know what machine is hosting her, and assume that before she looks for useful help files.

For all that, I got it working again, and it works well.  I have the experience of finding and using scanpst, which I expect to need; I have in the past. I now know how to reinstall, even if that didn’t fix my problem. It’s good to know that works.  And I won’t forget windows-key+r as a way to run programs; I can see why Windows 10 pays so little attention to the command window.  No one uses it anymore.

 

 

[

outlook woes
Hi Jerry:
Are you running OneDrive on that machine ? If so, you might try disabling OneDrive completely, then starting Outlook. I’ve seen interactions with OneDrive that resulted in Outlook never managing to start.
Andy

That wasn’t the problem, and indeed I have OneDrive running nicely.  Thanks.

Eric sent this, but I didn’t see it until I had already done it,  The information may be useful:

Outlook

https://www.google.com/search?q=Outlook+2016+stays+on+splash+screen+forever&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

https://www.roelvanlisdonk.nl/?p=4697

I don’t think you tried this yet: Starting Outlook in Safe Mode. See the second link for description. Other hits in the search mention it too. It usually works but some report needing to do it on a regular basis due to something happening on their system. Bad shutdowns seem to be one cause and if a bad piece of software is present it may cause the damage over and over again.

 

 

One of the nicest commercials I’ve ever seen.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/uoABty_zE00?rel=0

Nick

Why GOP Failed

This article outlines why Trump should not apologize and why the GOP is a failure from Pat Buchanan’s point of view and I think it’s worth

reading:

<.>

But Ryan’s remark raises fewer questions about Trump’s beliefs than it does about the depth of Ryan’s mind. We have seen a former president of Mexico curse Trump. We have heard Mexican-American journalists and politicians savage him. We have watched Hispanic rioters burn the American flag and flaunt the Mexican flag outside Trump rallies.

We are told Trump “provoked” these folks, to such a degree they are not entirely to blame for their actions. Yet the simple suggestion that a Mexican-American judge might also be affected is “the textbook definition of a racist comment”?

The most depressing aspect of this episode is to witness the Republican Party in full panic, trashing Trump to mollify the media who detest them.

</>

https://www.newsmax.com/PatrickBuchanan/judge-muslims-republican/2016/06/10/id/733257/

The rest is interesting, especially when you consider the judge is an active member of La Raza (an ethnocentric group, La Raza means “the race”). And, you can see La Raza folks marching around, advocating violence. And Cesar Chavez thought La Raza was a racist group, despite all the crying by leftist that it isn’t:

https://zeekly.com/video/18412/cesar-chavez-la-raza-is-racist-

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

It was certainly impolitic for Trump to denounce the La Raza Lawyer’s Association judge – he’s actually a Board member == but I do wonder what Trump’s critics would do if they were being sued and discovered the judge in their case was a member of the White Race Lawyer’s Association?

 

Middle East problems and IQ 

An interesting perspective on the current and future problems of the Middle East. The author opines it will get rather worse in future and details the underlying forces. Alas he identifies the problem, but fails to suggest a solution.

http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=7672

“The general rule is you need a mean IQ of 95 to have a modern economy.”

“Some old data suggest the mean (IQ in Saudi Arabia) is somewhere just north of 80, which is what you see in sub-Saharan Africa and American prisons.”

Indeed, how would a government raise the average IQ of its population?

Or even merely prevent its decline? The more I think of it the less there seems to any national discussion of this rather critical aspect of societies and nations.

Of course these days any attempt at a rational discussion of IQ, national or individual, gets you denounced as a racist. But then what doesn’t? A short story takeoff on “The Scarlet Letter” but with “R”

instead of “A” would be an interesting exercise for some enterprising writer.

(SIGH) Ah well. I do prattle on.

We must not despair, for despair is a sin. But some days that is certainly hard to heed. n.b. I have found target practice helps. 🙂

Cordially,

John

There are new studies of national – not racial – IQ and its correlation with all kinds of national wealth and economy.  The correlations are highly significant.  Obviously interpretations can vary, but the measure remains predictive on a large scale, although it was designed for individuals.

 

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

Chaos Manor View, Thursday, June 9, 2016

Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western Civilization as it commits suicide.

Under Capitalism, the rich become powerful. Under Socialism, the powerful become rich.

Under Socialism, government employees become powerful.

I have enough experience with the 15” ASUS ZenBook to recommend it, but of course in my case its real importance is that the keyboard is the best I have found for me: a touch typist who lost that ability to a stroke, and must now look at the keyboard as I do two-finger typing. The ZenBook 15” is really god for that; the keys are chicklet keys, widely separated, so that may most common error, hitting two keys at once, is made less often. The screen is big enough that my ancient eyes can see details, and its screen resolution is good enough to show them. For on the road convenience the Microsoft Surface Pro is great, but for production work it is too small. Not just the screen, but the keyboard itself. I make fewer errors than I do with conventional keyboards, but I make too many; and the screen is annoyingly small for editing work.

My setup in the Monk’s Cell where I do most of my fiction writing consists of the 15” ASUS ZenBook, a powered USB hub extender that may eventually be replaced with a docking station, and a 2’’ 4K monitor connected to the ZenBook with a standard HDMI cable. I can sort of see the 15” screen while staring at the keyboard – not well, but enough to let me catch some errors as I make them – and then I use an external Microsoft redeye mouse and the big screen to edit. When I am writing I am not constantly shifting my gaze from the keyboard to the monitor; when I edit I can look at the big monitor only.

While setting this up I discovered, thanks to some experienced readers as well as my long suffering advisors, that Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection actually works. I told my main machine that he was now to accept remote logins, and saved that; then went upstairs, opened a file explorer, Network/ZEN, and right-clicked on Zen. After a bit of reasonably rational foofaraw, I was looking at my main machine, and could do anything with it that I can do from his own keyboard.

Now it’s physically difficult for me to carry a 15” laptop up and down stairs, and sufficiently dangerous that it’s not a serious option; but typing with the ZenBook and editing with a big monitor attached to the ZenBook is so much more pleasant than using the best keyboard I have found so far, the Logitech K360, on my main machine that I am seriously contemplating getting another ZenBook, whose sole job in life will be to operate my main machine through Remote Desktop Connection. That sound a bit absurd and certainly is not a cheap solution, but it is so much more pleasant and productive than what I now have that I am seriously contemplating it.

There are some advantages, including allowing me to work from the breakfast table, but actually the Surface Pro is good enough for that since I don’t do creative writing in a distractive environment, and while Precious, the Surface Pro, is too small for production, it’s fine for taking notes – particularly now that she can operate my main machine from anywhere in the house. But to do productive work, the best thing I have found – remember I am a formerctouch typist reduced to two finger andcmust stare at the keyboard – for getting work done.

So I’ll get someone to take me to Fry’s and other stores and look at all the keyboards they have, but vI suspect I am about to buy a new 15” ZenBook whose most important function will be to be the entry device for a big desktop.

As to why bother with a desktop at all, the major reason is reliability over time. Laptops tend to be reliable but fail suddenly and without warning, and nearly impossible to repair; I build, or Eric builds for me, the desktops we use, and we put in redundant components if that’s appropriate; and short of utter catastrophic hard disk failure, there’s littlecin a big cooled desktop that we can’t fix in an couple of hours.

So that’s the probable future of computing at Chaos Manor. Two ZenBooks, operating a big fast modern system with both SSD and spinning metal drives (for redundancy).

I’ve already done some good work on the Avalon interstellar colony book Niven and Barnes and I are working on, and I’m looking forward to getting going again on both Mamelukes and LisaBetta (a near future novel in which we have some interplanetary commerce; it has a lot on AI).

Time for dinner. More on this later, as well as education and some military observations.

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

Chaos Manor View, Monday, June 6, 2016

D Day; The Longest Day

D Day, the Allied invasion of Europe at the Normandy Beaches, remains the single most complex one-day event in human history.

Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western Civilization as it commits suicide.

Under Capitalism, the rich become powerful. Under Socialism, the powerful become rich.

Under Socialism, government employees become powerful.

Yesterday, Alex and I spent much of the day installing ZEN, the ASUS 15” ZenBook laptop, up in the Monk’s Cell, which is primarily a place to write fiction. We also installed a 25” external monitor that had been previously in the other upstairs where my main office used to be before the stroke and may be again as I get more skilled in going up and down stairs. My big problem is that I have trouble carrying anything, particularly coming down, but I really feel safer going up if I have both hands for the banisters. That makes it tough to get my iced coffee or whatever I want to drink up to where I am going to work, but eventually I’ll manage. Meanwhile, I have the Monk’s Cell (no telephone, no extraneous noises, cannot hear the doorbell, no games. No books; just fiction writing equipment) operating again.

Once it was set up I decided to see what I could do on the new system and chose to work on the novel I am doing with Larry Niven and Steve Barnes. That required some fiddling around to understand how OneDrive shares Word files. It turns out to be tricky. There is a way to work with Word OnLine, but that is very limited, spell checking and auto-correct don’t work properly, and in general if you are doing anything but minor typo corrections that you can see and know what to do about, it isn’t useful.

You can, however, open a local copy of Word, then open the on-line document (provided that its owner has shared it, and then you have the document and when you save it in the normal way (or autosave at one minute intervals) the save is to the on-line copy you opened. What you can’t do is make a new copy and store it in that online document or location: you only have access to the document, not the on-line folder that it’s in. This can and will be corrected; I’ll ask Steve to create a folder, store the draft in that, and share not the document but the folder itself; this will let me create notes files and store them in there, and do other useful things. I’m only just getting used to this method of collaboration; after all, Larry and I started working together on MOTE on Selectric typewriters, then graduated to passing 6 inch floppies back and forth (each floppy disk held about a chapter of text). When we both acquired Zip Drives we could exchange drafts of the novel; a giant sneaker net. We could then use WORD to compare different drafts, agree as to which text was best, and consolidate into a new master draft. I make no doubt that’s what will eventually happen here. Back in my BYTE days this sort of thing generated columns: if the procedure seemed complex to me, it certainly would be to readers.

I wish someone like me was still writing my BYTE User’s Colum.

Eventually we got WORD, the ZenBook, and OneDrive working properly, and I sat down to work on the book.

It was the most pleasant experience I have had in years. I could type without very many errors: the ‘chiclet’ keys on the ASUS 15” ZenBook are spaced just right. I seldom hit the alt key and the space key simultaneously, of my common typing errors, and the c key and the space key are separated enough that I seldom put a c at the end of every damned word I type, and – well, I needn’t enumerate all my typing errors. But it was a great experience not making so many.

Moreover, the 15” screen being very near the keyboard – which I have to stare at – makes it easy to correct my sentences. The result was a productive afternoon, and writing became more fun again.

That leaves me with a dilemma. I’m doing this on Eugene, my “main machine”, a big powerful desktop with big SSD and spinning metal disks and a Logitech K360 wireless keyboard which is the best I have found up to now. And I wish I had the ZenBook here.

Incidentally, I find the Surface Pro keyboard pretty good, too, but it’s small, and the screen is small, and I have never been tempted to prefer it to a big desktop; if they made a 15” Surface I would definitely try that; but a Surface Pro is, after all, a Tablet with detachable keyboard, and the ZenBook is a laptop with a touch screen; not quite the same thing.

If there were a way to fool a ZenBook into thinking it was an input device for Eugene I’d buy one in a minute; the typing experience was enough better that I’d make the money back in increased productivity in no time (well, in months anyway). Of course another and more drastic remedy is to get a ZenBook and make it the main machine, relegating Eugene to a kind of server and backup system; and I may yet do that.

Anyway the good news is that I’m writing faster and less sloppy, practice makes perfect, and I don’t hate writing any more. Even with the Logitech K360. But I’d sure rather be typing on the 15” ZenBook, then editing on a big monitor screen.

Peter Glaskowsky suggests that there are probably keyboards exactly like the ASUS ZenBook; he uses Apple, and Apple make external keyboards much like the MacBook Pro so that is big Apple workstation can be exactly like the MacBook Pro he normally carries. All I need to do is pay attention/. Of course going out to Fry’s is an expedition for me, but I’ll go investigate. Meanwhile if you know of a program to persuade a Windows 10 laptop that it’s really no more than an input device for another computer, let me know.

Wall Street Journal

Peter Thiel’s Legal Smackdown

With Gawker under attack, the press wakes up to a justice system that invites abuses.

By

L. Gordon Crovitz

A Silicon Valley billionaire’s decade-long mission to drive a snarky website out of business has the media up in arms: What happens to freedom of the press if wealthy people can fund lawsuits to bankrupt media outlets they don’t like?

Good question. Here’s a better one: Why did it take so long for journalists to discover abuses of the legal system that torment every other industry?

Media commentators have almost universally condemned Peter Thiel, a PayPalco-founder and early investor in Facebook,for how he went after Gawker, which outed him as gay in 2007. Mr. Thiel defends his actions as “less about revenge and more about specific deterrence.” Gawker, he argues, plays a “uniquely degrading role in our culture.”

Mr. Thiel, himself a Stanford-trained lawyer, was smart enough to take advantage of a radical change in the U.S. legal system. He paid the lawyers representing professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, who sued for invasion of privacy after Gawker disseminated an explicit video of the plaintiff and another man’s wife.

Until recently Mr. Thiel’s backing would have been a crime, known as “maintenance” and dating from 13th-century English statutes aimed at preventing feudal lords from interfering with the legal process. English jurist William Blackstone defined maintenance as “officious intermeddling in a suit that no way belongs to one” and characterized it an “offense against public justice, as it keeps alive strife and contention and perverts the remedial process of the law into an engine of oppression.” But laws against maintenance, as well as the related offenses of “champerty” and “barratry,” were repealed in most U.S. states in the 1960s, when lawyers persuaded policy makers that funding to encourage more litigation was good for society.

It was long understood why only parties to a lawsuit should have an interest in it: The wealthy could influence others’ cases, outside funding would encourage “vexatious” litigation, and conflicts in interest between funders and litigants would corrupt the legal process. Example: Mr. Hogan’s lawyers excluded a claim that would have activated Gawker’s insurance to pay its fees and damages, and they rejected settlement offers. It looks as if the lawyers’ primary loyalty was to Mr. Thiel, who signed their checks, not to their client. [snip]

http://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiels-legal-smackdown-1465163232

There is a great deal more in this article, and it’s all worth your reading.

When I was growing up, lawyers did not advertise, and ambulance chasing lawyers were a figure of fun. When I was a professor of political science at Pepperdine, many of my students were pre-law, and were still required to learn about barratry and maintenance; now, I suppose; that’s all forgotten. Lawyers advertise of TV, scout around for clients whom they hope to use in filing class action suits, and it’s all supposed to be better now; and you can believe as much of that as you want to. I suppose it is far too late to suggest that the common law was wiser than we knew.

Walter Olson, author of “The Litigation Explosion” (1991), explained in his Overlawyered.com blog that Mr. Thiel’s approach was predictable after maintenance “metamorphosed around the 1960s into what we now know as the public interest litigation model: foundation or wealthy individual A pays B to sue C. Since litigation during this period was being re-conceived as something socially productive and beneficial, what could be more philanthropic and public-spirited than to pay for there to be more of it?”

With maintenance decriminalized, Mr. Olson warns, “It will be used not just against the originally contemplated targets, such as large business or government defendants, but against a wide range of others—journalistic defendants included.”

Oh, well.

Everyone talks about how slow the recovery from the Great Recession is. It’s certainly slow. But is it recovery? And is this a Recession? From all I can see, it’s a Depression, and we’re still in it. They say unemployment is lower, but what they really mean is that more people have given up looking for employment. There are plenty of people out of work, but they don’t count as unemployed because they know they’ll never find a job, or be competitive in getting it if they do.

This used to be a free country.

How to Kill the Internet

Steve Case reminds us that AOL flourished with Web freedom—the sort now in danger.

By

L. Gordon Crovitz

http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-kill-the-internet-1462139582

The 20th anniversary of the launch of The Wall Street Journal’s website last week was a reminder of a simpler time. No one at Dow Jones had to ask permission of any government agency or gatekeeper. The company developed its own business model—the then-revolutionary idea of charging a subscription fee. Consumers decided if access was worth the original $49 a year.

This era of permissionless innovation has slammed to a halt. President Obama insisted last year that the Internet be regulated as an old-fashion utility, with bureaucrats setting rates, suppressing innovation and discouraging investment. AOL founder Steve Case’s new book, “The Third Wave,” warns what could happen next.

When his company launched in the 1980s as America Online, it was a closed network. Internet access was limited to the government and universities—it was actually unlawful to use the Internet for business. That changed after a bipartisan consensus led to deregulation. In its heyday, AOL accounted for half of Internet traffic. “For most Americans,” Mr. Case recounts, “AOL was, for its time, Google, Facebook,Twitter,Amazon, Spotify, YouTube and Instagram combined.”

Mr. Case describes how that first wave of innovation was followed by a second wave of rapid creation of websites and services. Google, Facebook and thousands of other companies launched products and services into the open, unregulated Internet.

If today’s Internet regulations had been in place, AOL would have been stymied. One key to AOL’s success, he writes, was “striking deals with media companies that had trusted brands in order to attract a mainstream audience.” The 2002 how-to book “AOL for Dummies” described how to use the service to gain access to premium news: “Reading a two-paragraph newswire story is one thing, but reviewing an in-depth analysis of those same events in The Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times is another thing entirely.”

The new Internet rules put access to selected content through mobile subscriptions at risk. The Federal Communications Commission is considering a ban on inexpensive plans, including selected Web access, offered by T-Mobile,AT&Tand Verizonto millions of Americans. Similar regulations in India prohibited Facebook’s Free Basics for daring to offer a free version of the Internet.

As a federal appeals court in Washington considers whether to invalidate Obamanet regulations, the FCC is doubling down. Last week the Democratic majority voted for the first time to regulate the price of business broadband, such as the dedicated lines linking banks to ATMs.[snip]

There’s more, but you get the idea. What we need, they say, is more regulations. There are people out there working without permission. Don’t they know that’s a crime?

What’s Killing Jobs and Stalling the Economy

A toxic regulatory brew, from Dodd-Frank to state licensing laws, has poisoned the formation of new firms that drive growth.

By

Marie-Joseé Kravis

http://www.wsj.com/articles/whats-killing-jobs-and-stalling-the-economy-1464992963

An economy that has struggled for growth for seven years showed fresh signs of trouble Friday with a sobering jobs report. Nonfarm payrolls climbed by a mere 38,000 in May—the fewest since September 2010. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also reported that a record 94,708,000 Americans were not in the labor force last month, as the labor-force participation rate fell to 62.6%, from 63% two months earlier.

When thinking about what has stymied the U.S. economy, I sometimes recall a biology lesson about the role that cell death plays in explaining embryonic development and normal growth of adult tissue. In economics, as far back as Joseph Schumpeter, or even Karl Marx, we have known that the flow of business deaths and births affects the dynamism and growth of a country’s economy. Business deaths unlock resources that can be allocated to more productive use and business formation can boost innovation and economic and social mobility.

For much of the nation’s history, this process of what Schumpeter called “creative destruction” has spread prosperity throughout the U.S. and the world. Over the past 30 years, however, with the exception of the mid-1980s and the 2002-05 period, this dynamism has been waning. There has been a steady decline in business formation while the rate of business deaths has been more or less constant. Business deaths outnumber births for the first time since measurement of these indicators began.

Equally troubling, the latest analysis of Census Bureau data by the Economic Innovation Group points to the increasing concentration of new business formation in a smaller number of U.S. counties. The findings show that 20 counties account for half of new businesses and that most counties had fewer business establishments in 2014 than in 2010. Even accounting for so-called dynamic counties, the total number of firms in the U.S. remains lower than it was in 2004. [snip]

Isn’t that the definition of depression? It certainly is not a growing economy.

But perhaps the problem is that we do not have enough regulations. If that’s the case things ought to get better, because nothing can be more certain that both Democrat candidates believe we are too unregulated, and they want to fix that.

If Bill Kristol and the neo-cons have their way, one of the Democrats, probably Hillary, will get the chance to fix it good.

I remember growing up in a free country.

But we have inequality! We have to fix THAT.

Empire: A Path Forward?

This antiwar site may reveal the grand strategy needed by US policy makers, moving forward:

<.>

After repeatedly warning the Iraqi forces in recent weeks against doing anything to slow the buildup of troops around Mosul, US commanders are now advising that Iraq put the offensive on hold for several months, as a recognition that Iraqi troops are “exhausted” and need a break.

Officials say Iraqi troops are struggling with logistics on any offensive outside their territory, and that the US has to basically ferry food and water to them to keep the troops supplied when on an offensive. The Pentagon insists without this the Iraqi offensives would’ve already stalled.

</>

http://news.antiwar.com/2016/06/05/pentagon-iraqi-troops-exhausted-not-ready-to-advance-on-mosul/

They fought Iran for seven or eight years, cut down cables, and electrocuted advancing forces in swamps. Now they’re tired? This is a serious problem.

We can try to use air power, special forces, and logistics and be leaner but we’re going to need to have a credible force to cast and be prepared to commit those personnel and materiel.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Well, we had someone keeping Iran busy: the Baathist regime in Iraq. We destroyed that. We had someone to keep Libya going: it was Khadafy. We killed him, and ISIS moved in.

Perhaps it’s time to build up the American forces and use overwhelming force on anyone who decides to be an active enemy. It won’t make us loved, but it might make us respected. But lest you think there is not much else at stake in this election:

10% of lower, federal judgeships are up for grabs:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/waiting-for-next-president-confirmations-of-federal-trial-judges-stall/2016/06/05/9b626aa4-222f-11e6-9e7f-57890b612299_story.html

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Scott Adams: ‘But Clinton supporters have convinced me – and here I am being 100% serious – that my safety is at risk if I am seen as supportive of Trump.’

<http://blog.dilbert.com/post/145456082991>

This is the best subversive commentary on the Left’s behavior in this election cycle to date.

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

Is comment needed?

Arthur Clarke’s Superiority.

Your afterword seems to have been prescient. And we can extend it: the aircraft carrier was new, untested in war, but built in quantities and ready for WWII, nearly 20 years after its invention. The atomic bomb was new tech, but procured in its crude state and used. It arguably did not reach usability until the late 50’s, about 16-18 years after it was invented. The laser-guided bomb/missile was new, tested in Vietnam War, found promising but not ready, constantly improved until it was used in Desert Storm nearly 20 years after its debut. The A-10 was the culmination of incremental improvements when it was introduced in the early 1980’s – in quantities. Our still reaches for that tool in every crisis. The F-15 was built as the culmination of the air superiority fighter, yet in its incarnation as a bomber (the F-15E), it is better than stealth when it flies “in the weeds.” Electronic warfare was introduced as new technology, but proved itself and was constantly improved until it was killed in the USAF to leave money for the F-35. Stealth is heavily relied-upon to solve all problems; yet improvements in radar – and we haven’t seen the advent of multi-static radar yet – is washing away its advantages. Where will electronic warfare be when we need it?

What all of this proves is that the balanced approach you advocated in 1981 is still the best approach. It suggests that the incubation time on technology is 18 years or so. More specifically, maintaining the A-10 (or the improved version due to arrive (Real Soon Now™) and improving electronic warfare (a combination of research and procurement) are things we need to do. It looks like the F-35, for which so much else has been sacrificed, is a dog: it can be defeated aeronautically by the F-16A, 35 years old. Its stealth can be defeated by radars today, and during its lifetime it will be defeated by multistatic radar (uses multiple purpose-built radar transmitters) and ambient radar (uses ambient radio sources as transmitters, combined computation-intensive receivers to figure out where the targets are)(BTW – this tech was shown to work some years ago for ATC).

Yup. Superiority all right. I have seen a comment on that story that points out that the names of the scientists used in the story reflect some of the real names of WWII engineers who provided advanced technology, like the much-ballyhooed Norden bombsight.

Today it seems that the function of the USAF is to keep Lockheed in business, not to defend the nation.

Ed

I really should try to revise The Strategy of Technology. The generation that had that book as a text is retiring.

And then:

This is something I didn’t expect:

<.>

“I don’t want to vote for Trump. I want to vote for Bernie. But I have reached the point where I feel like voting for Trump against Clinton would be doing my patriotic duty. … If the only way to escape a trap is to gnaw off my leg, I’d like to think I’d have the guts to do it.”

To be sure, not all of my Sanders-supporting readers would vote for Trump. But only a minority would ever vote for Clinton, and I’d guess that a lot of them would just stay home if she were the nominee.

</>

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/wall-street-2016-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-213931

Word around the campfire is that about 30% of those Sanders supporters could go to Trump and that’s why Trump is out in California, apparently inviting violent radical to assault citizens and peace officers while the San Jose mayor attempted to blame Trump the violence. Apparently, Donald Trump is the first human in history who can hijack the nervous systems of people and incite them to riot as soon as he sets foot in their city. The mayor was since forced to renounce the violence.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

You recently wrote:
” “All Economists know that minimum wages either have very little effect, or produce unemployment; that’s not a statement, that’s a definition,” Milt Friedman used to say (my source is David Friedman, Ph.D.) If you didn’t know that you should not claim to be an economist.”
I am probably your source, but I was quoting Jim Buchanan, not my father. My memory of how Jim put it is that all economists agree that increasing the minimum wage increases the unemployment of low wage workers, and that is not an observation but a definition of “economist.” But that’s not verbatim, since I’m going by a memory of a conversation from about forty years ago.

-- 

David Friedman

I’m fairly certain I heard you say your father said that, but it was long ago. Still, it serves.

Thoughts on the minimum wage.

The notion that a minimum wage law must increase unemployment is both correct, and wrong.
If the government of Bangladesh decreed that the minimum wage would be increased to $10 USD/hour, that would not make the nation prosperous. Bangladesh simply does not have the per-capita resources and capital to support a high standard of living. It would result in either massive inflation or unemployment or something like that, and the average Bangladeshi would remain dirt poor.
However, minimum wage laws are still useful, just not the way most people think. A minimum wage law cannot create high wages – but it can stop employers from creating poverty! Suppose the natural rate (based on supply and demand) for wages for unskilled labor was $15/hour. A business could make a lot of money importing illegal immigrants and paying them $5/hour – unless that was illegal and the law was enforced. If a business could not undercut prevailing wages by importing foreign nationals to work for less, they would not bother, because there would be no profit in it.
I believe that Finland has used a strictly enforced minimum wage law specifically to tamp down in illegal immigration from Russia.
If we had kept the 1960 minimum wage law indexed to inflation, and actually enforced it, we would not now have a significant problem with illegal immigration. And wages really would be higher, because there would be fewer people competing for jobs, and productivity growth has been high.
The dirty little secret about California’s minimum wage law is that it is not being enforced. You really think all those migrant farm workers and gardeners etc. are being paid minimum wage? Not a chance. It’s all for show.
And as for high domestic wages resulting in jobs fleeing to other, lower-wage countries: does this mean that the advocates of ‘free’ trade now admit that, yes indeed, free trade really does result in a ‘race to the bottom’ in wages? That ‘free’ trade will drive US wages down? It would seem that this debate is now settled.
And robots: yes indeed, someday robots will be cheap enough and flexible enough to significantly impact the labor market. But as of this writing the number of janitors and maids that have lost their jobs to a Roomba vacuum cleaner is about zero.
When Mark Zuckerberg stops pushing for ever more immigration and ever cheaper labor I will accept that finally robots are making human labor obsolete on a significant scale, but one problem at a time, surely.

TG
The worst effect of minimum wage is on the apprentices and others just entering the work force. The entry level jobs are always the first to go.

I doubt the demand for hand washers in car washing places is high. Automation proceeds. By 2025 half the jobs out there will be able to be performed by a robot costing no more than the annual wage of the worker it replaces. But of course laws not enforced have another kind of effect.

 

 

 

thoughts on required minimum wage

“Required … minimum wage”…
My personal point of view…
after forty-five years in the work force.
The battle for a reasonable or ‘sane’ minimum wage is more or less lost. There will be long term detrimental effects for decades to come.
Ah So! Can we take a page out of the Left’s playbook and start a new game? What is to prevent the Congress (that’s the Congress that we gave to the GOP that they, to date, have done nothing with) from creating a new ‘to be named later’ Federal Wage guideline low enough to guarantee employment to any person under the age of twenty-one that is willing to work and wants to learn how to do a job. Any job.
Yes, I know. That has been proposed in the past. But since it falls within the province of the Unions, and the Unions demand a much higher wage for their apprentices (so the Union dues won’t wipe out their first paycheck) the toadies in Congress go along with that reasoning, even through the Union hiring is anything but fair or unbiased. The main victims of this are the black urban youth that (in truth) desperately need the income and the discipline of a real job. But frankly this is beginning to be a problem for everyone under the age of twenty-five. It is amazing to me that today it is not unusual to find a young adult twenty-five years old that is only now starting their first job. To me that is astounding! I had my first paying job that freed me from the childhood ‘allowance’ at the age of thirteen. Actually two jobs; a local paper route and that summer a part-time job with a builder. The paper route is self explanatory, the builder had me picking things up, carrying things from one place to another and (shudder!) scraping stickers off the pane of glass of every window in a newly built house. I actually got fired from the second job, I screwed it up. And that’s the point.
If you don’t get the chance to screw up when you’re a teen, then you are not going to enjoy your first job if it comes at twenty-five. Federally imposed rules for the workplace are not going to help when they are applied to twenty-plus adults.
So lets get more of those teens a job, but it isn’t going to be a job at the ridiculous rate of $15/hour, a buck an hour over the maximum that a retired Senior will get to live on (who probably isn’t living with their parents anymore). But closer to $5/hour. Enough to buy work clothes, gas, lunch money and a future.
Their own future, not the future envisioned by the unemployable plutocrats in Washington.

John The River

 

Von Neumann Machines Are Almost Here
Jerry,
From the article: “Imagine a swarm of programmable spider robots which could repair a damaged ship in real time, or be utilized for dangerous missions in space.”
http://www.dailydot.com/technology/siemens-spider-robots/
All these spider bots need now is self-replication ability.
Can’t wait for your latest Janissaries book!
Live long and prosper.

Brian Claypool

 

 

 

Robot article in the Wall Street Journal
What can robots really do?
http://www.wsj.com/video/how-sophia-the-robot-mimics-human-expressions/711FE5C6-BC68-412C-974B-27A87FC6FAF3.html

Beuce Jenks

Astonishing, and a bit eerie.

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

Chaos Manor View, Thursday, June 2, 2016

Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western Civilization as it commits suicide.

Under Capitalism, the rich become powerful. Under Socialism, the powerful become rich.

Under Socialism, government employees become powerful.

I have a new ASUS ZenBook Touchscreen, 15”, with half a terabyte on an SSD disk. There was a huge hours long sale announced Saturday, and I had just been to the bank; I had an IRS refund check to deposit, meaning unallocated money. Not a lot, but enough for a new machine. The computer in the Monk’s Cell, where I write fiction, was an aging ThinkPad beginning to fail; I figured the ASUS would last at least four years for what it was to do, and might turn out to be useful for a lot more. This is the biggest laptop I have ever had.

I had already taken the opportunity to play with Carl Lembke’s ASUS at LASFS Thursday night, and the keyboard is chicklets. I hated those on the PC Junior all these years ago, but since the stroke I am strictly a two-finger typist and need separated keys. Even so I hit two at once perhaps 20% of the time, so correcting a sentence takes about as long as writing it; with the big laptop screen I don’t have to raise my eyes much to edit, and ZEN is fast – really fast – so entering text is much faster with ZEN than it is with any of my big machines and the Logitech K360 wireless keyboards I use. I can’t recommend the ZenBook without some more use, but I do say you might seriously consider it – provided that you can stand chiclet keys. If you’re a two finger typist you will love it.

Installing Windows and Office 365 took some time, because Windows 10 does things the way it always has, but has buried the process deeply in odd places. Eventually I got ZEN named, and installed visibly on my internal wireless net so that other machines could talk to it. The frustrations came when the commands I needed were buried somewhere; I’d ask the search lady to find out how to add a computer to the wireless net, and she’d open a Microsoft help file off the Internet; it would tell me exactly how to do it – for Windows 7, 8.1, 8.0, Vista, and various other versions, but for Windows 10 the help files were strangely silent.

This became infuriating, and I don’t think well when infuriated. Fortunately my advisors calmed me down, and eventually I was able to use the improved Control Panel to find it all. Indeed, it makes sense – once you have seen it done. Why Microsoft can’t simply provide examples of common setup features I don’t know; a secret full employment act for gurus?

Anyway, ZEN can now see and be seen by the other machines, files can be transferred, I have Office 365 installed but not yet the features like Word and Outlook, and I haven’t imported all the applications I will need, so ZEN is still downstairs where he can be reached by an Ethernet cable; tomorrow will probably do it for that, and he’ll go up to take the ThinkPad’s place and become my main creative writing machine. That means an hour a day on Mamelukes until this volume is done. I also have LisaBetta, an asteroid mining technology level no faster than light story which has some new thoughts on artificial intelligence; it will be a novel of a bit under 100,000 words, of which John DeChancie has done about half from our agreed plot, and now it’s my turn. I need to weave in a character. You’ll never know which one once I’m through.

And Larry Niven, Steve Barnes, and I, with some consultation with Dr. Jack Cohen who used to work with Anne McCaffrey and Terry Pratchett. It’s the next book in our series on interstellar colonies in a universe of no faster than light travel. The first book in that series was The Legacy of Heorot, (there is also an audio book). This was about the first years of the first interstellar colony, and some biological dangers the colonists didn’t expect. The second, Beowulf’s Children (audio) is an even better novel (and the first was pretty good) about even more unexpected life forms causing new problems for the few hundred colonists. We’re writing the third, and should have it done possibly this year, almost certainly next. And if you haven’t read the first two, you should.

I’ve been busy, really I have. When I get ZEN installed there will be a full report. I’ll also compare its utility to the Surface Pro, which I can now recommend if you can use a much smaller tablet/notebook. It’s reliable, snappy, and easy to carry and use. We’re blessed with some good technologies.

The Hole In The Sun.

Jerry,

The UK Express “Hole in the Sun” story is a grossly sensationalized exposition about a large but not abnormal coronal hole – which is to say, a cool spot in the sun’s “atmosphere.” Stephanie and I dismissed the absurdity yesterday – she noted that the same web site had posted a similar story during a large coronal hole last year.

The only practical implication is that the earth has the glory of aurora without the accompanying mess of a large X-ray solar flare.

Jim Woosley, Ph. D.

 

 

Hole in the Sun

Yeah, that’s about the size of it. And yeah, this particular UK paper has a habit of, as Tommy Lee Jones once said, of going “…over the top, and keep on going.” I’m not infrequently getting Facebook tags by people who have been scared half to death by their yellow-journalism treatment of a perfectly normal astronomical phenomenon. And this is the second time they’ve done this, as Jim says. In fact, when he sent me the article link, I had to go double-check that it really was recent, and not the one from last year.

Which actually makes me think, I might want to go post a commentary over on Facebook, to ward off a panic…
Stephanie Osborn

“The Interstellar Woman of Mystery”
http://www.Stephanie-Osborn.com

“Sometimes you gotta say what’s in your heart… And you have to stand for what you believe. No matter what.”
~’Dr. Michael C. Anders,’ Burnout: The mystery of Space Shuttle STS-281

Which, I think, wraps it up quite well.

thoughts on required minimum wage

Working at low end jobs used to be mostly for high school and college kids making extra money. Not career choices. Working at the local burger joint, mowing lawns etc. You can fill this in better than me. The left while in power has made most of that full time jobs for the illegals. Now they want higher “living wage” minimum wages. OK, let’s really do it. In the bay area, 15.00/hour is not a living wage. There is no way a normal person can live on that here. That’s 30K / year before taxes. Even if both spouses worked, that’s 60K / year. Just where would they live? So, let’s setup a federal requirement that local boards calculate what it takes to live in their areas and set that as a minimum wage. Around here, that will be around 150K/year. That’s a rental wage. Doing this will drive out all the illegals and bring in automation, but at least we won’t be kidding ourselves any longer.

-- 

Phil Tharp

“All Economists know that minimum wages either have very little effect, or produce unemployment; that’s not a statement, that’s a definition,” Milt Friedman used to say (my source is David Friedman, Ph.D.) If you didn’t know that you should not claim to be an economist.

When people tell me they support $15 an hour minimum wage in California, I usually say, no, that’s not enough, make it $25. Sometimes I even suggest $100 an hour. That always gets the reply that I can’t be serious, at which point I order iced coffee or something and try to change the subject. There is no point in a serious discussion.

Either the market dictates wages appropriate to the job, or someone dictates them without regard to their worth. The only exceptions tend to be contrived. A motel keeper with a monopoly on low wage jobs in a town of much labor surplus; that sort of thing. Once you start price controls and labor wage controls, you are on a path that has little ending. Minimum wage actually raising the take home pay of the same number of people doing the same jobs?

And in this era it is a stimulus to automation or job exportation, or more likely, both. By 2020 about half the jobs in the US can likely be done by a robot costing no more than the annual wage of the workers that do it. It will probably have a useful life of ten years, and ten to fifteen of these robots can be supervised by a single employee. That’s a blue sky prediction but I am willing to defend it given present trends.

Raise the minimum wage enough and there will be no apprentices; and all the foremen will be teaching robots. Well, OK, you can think of exceptional situations. I grant you that. But do understand that a recent college graduate of our terrible colleges is not worth a lot to a prospective employer. Does it make sense to take from the productive to subsidize the unproductive? Always? Only sometimes? But few think about these questions.

Put Down Your Beverage; Clinton

Her campaign’s reaction to the State Department’s report is typical:

<.>

The State Department’s watchdog report was especially damaging, given the official nature of its source. The report claimed that Clinton never sought approval for her “homebrew” email setup, that her use of the system violated the department’s record-keeping rules and that it would have been rejected had she brought it up to department officials.

Clinton’s allies attempted to paint the office as partisan in the weeks ahead of the report’s release, but the effort failed to leave a lasting impact.

</>

http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/281554-clinton-email-headache-is-about-to-get-worse

That Republican-controlled State Department is the latest pawn in the right-wing conspiracy to suppress Hillary Clinton!

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Of course no one expects the Obama Justice Department to do anything about this.

‘The Air Force has not only lost the capability to penetrate well-defended airspace with strike aircraft — with the loss of its electronic warfare expertise, it has lost the capability to know that it has lost the capability to penetrate well-defended airspace.’

<http://warontherocks.com/2016/04/low-altitude-penetration-stuck-on-denial-part-iii/>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

Yes. Tactical planners must factor this in. One reason why it will now take a full Corps supported by Corps Level assets and considerable Wing Level assets to destroy ISIS now; they have had a chance to deploy new surface to air weapons. We could have done it with a single division and the A-10’s but we waited too long.

‘Buying this mature low-cost weapon with its unique capability seems like a no-brainer, but the Air Force continues to reach for expensive exquisite solutions to pedestrian problems.’

<http://warontherocks.com/2016/05/stealth-is-king-the-world-is-flat/>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

Not unrelated to the above.

A-10
Air Force working on Super A-10??
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/will-america-build-next-generation-10-warthog-16374
And, if the Air Force brass performs to their past standard, we might see one in service in another 20 or 30 years performing a dozen different types of missions! And, they say the decision to retire the A-10 is budget driven. Give them more money and they’ll put it into buying F-22 and F-35 and then ask for more money to spend on an A-10 replacement.
“Air Force leaders had previously said that the emerging multi-role F-35 would be able to pick up the close-air-support mission. With its sensor technology, 25mm gun and maneuverability, there is little question about whether the F-35 could succeed with these kinds of missions.”
But there is a lot of doubt about the F-35s ability to survive an A-10 mission!
All I can say is that I will believe in the Super A-10 when I see it in the air!
On a different topics, Mamelukes; it has been the case that a co-worker and I were worried that you’d live long enough to finish it. Now that we’ve both been retired for a while, we’ve been worrying whether we’d live long enough to see you finish it. Live long, prosper and finish Mamelukes plus it’s sequel! Please!
Pete

The Air Force does not want the close support mission; it reminds them of the Army Air Corps days. The Army needs air support badly. This is why I sometimes say we should abolish the Air Force and Defense Department and go back to a Department of War and a Department of the Navy.

I’m working on it.

Film Producer Reveals Truth About Christopher Marlowe’s Death

Here’s something I thought you might like to take a look at:

https://www.prlog.org/12561790-film-producer-reveals-truth-about-christopher-marlowes-death.html

Hi:

This is our latest press release. Please pass it on.

Thanks,

Francis Hamit

I think I should talk to you about press releases, but perhaps I am the wrong person to do it. I agree that your play has significant new data on the era of the Spanish Armada and the British/Spanish conflict. I was fascinated.

“Anti-semitism”; a misnomer

Dear Jerry Pournelle:
You note that Israel-haters and Jew-haters in the Arab world are themselves called Semites; so “anti-Semitic” seems a misnomer. I agree. “Semitic” is a flawed category for a region of the world with so many visitors and invaders, with consequent gene-mixing. Likewise, Jews have picked up genes from all over.
Instead of “anti-Semitism”, I recommend “anti-Judaism” or “anti-Zionism”. Both terms are more accurate. Note that these are two different terms, with overlapping but distinct referents. My own position re Israel is principled pessimism.
– Nathaniel Hellerstein

Yes, but perhaps I emphasized it too heavily: my point was that the debate had become unintelligible. I have been accused by the anti-defamation League of being anti-semitic at the same time as I was being denounced in the opposite direction.

Another nail?

I realize that none of this is news to you or your readers, but the source is interesting.

https://www.technocracy.news/index.php/2015/10/30/former-president-of-greenpeace-scientifically-rips-climate-change-to-shreds/

Richard White

Austin, Texas

The debate is not settled because we do not know enough. But no one seems to notice that.

Mamelukes

 

Just finished re-reading the three Janissaries books and am still wowed by how good they are. Hope you finish Mamelukes soon, so we can continue this terrific tale…. Got to be a big fan of your works, including Mote in God’s Eye, War World series, Falkenberg’s Legion series, and There Will Be War series. Love it all, and am in great agreement with your opinion of Mr. Obama and clone Hillary. Not a great Trump fan, but far better than Clinton/Obama II. Anyway, just a fan saying you’ve given me a lot of entertainment over many years with your stories. Keep it up as long as you feel the urge……

Tom Williams – alias Spaceman Spiff

 

My first fifty candidates for President didn’t run.  One works with what one has.  We know what Hillary will do.

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