Acclaimed Science Fiction Author Dr. Jerry Pournelle Wins the National Space Society Robert A. Heinlein Award

(Washington DC – April 12, 2016) The National Space Society takes great pleasure in announcing that its 2016 Robert A. Heinlein Memorial Award has been won by acclaimed science fiction author Dr. Jerry Pournelle. This prestigious award selected by an international vote of NSS members will be presented to Dr. Jerry Pournelle at the 2016 International Space Development Conference (ISDC). A video of his acceptance speech is after the jump. Continue reading →

Chaos Manor View, Monday, May 16, 2016

“This is the most transparent administration in history.”

Barrack Obama

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.

It’s amusing: the new York Times came out with attacks on Trump based on interviews with his former girl friend and one of his female executives, whereupon his former girl friend shows up at Fox News and denies it all. It would be amusing if there were not so much at stake; but it is instructive and probably illustrates just what America’s newspaper of record will do in the campaign. Journalistic integrity seems to have played a rather small part in this story.

Mitt Romney, the losing Republican candidate against Mr. Obama in 2012, is frantically seeking someone to run against Mr. Trump. He’ll even try it himself. Since he knows quite well that neither party cares for him – after all, he lost against a President with rather high negatives, getting far fewer votes than Mr. Bush got in his reelection campaign, it’s a puzzlement: the more votes he gets, the more likely that Hillary will win, saddling America with at least four more years of Obama’s leading from behind, intervening with too little and too late, and smarmy foreign deals, and forty years of a liberal Supreme Court. He knows this, Nelson Rockefeller cut the ticket against Goldwater in 1964; Romney will apparently try to go him one better. We will see how the Republican Establishment behaves in this crucial election.

Some of the smartest people I know think it won’t matter. Romney is demonstrating his irrelevance. I voted for Romney because the alternative was Obama. Some anti-establishment Republicans stayed home in 2012, thus giving four more years of Obama and Depression. Romney wants to double down, which may tell you something about the New Class.

[In case you missed it yesterday]

In the May-June issue of The American Conservative. I heartily recommend it as an honest assessment by an astute observer and thinker. His invocation of Djilas and The New Class in explaining the mess we have got ourselves into, and his analysis of just what it means to be an American conservative, is worth the time of every thoughtful American, conservative or liberal.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/trump-vs-the-new-class/

Announcing Hardbound Edition: There Will Be War, Volumes I & II. The first two volumes of the 1980’s anthologies bound together in a hardbound edition. Obviously these are available as eBooks for considerably less, but if you want them as a book, this is your opportunity. From the official description:

“Created by the bestselling SF novelist Jerry Pournelle, THERE WILL BE WAR is a landmark science fiction anthology series that combines top-notch military science fiction with factual essays by various generals and military experts on everything from High Frontier and the Strategic Defense Initiative to the aftermath of the Vietnam War. It features some of the greatest military science fiction ever published, such Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game” in Volume I and Joel Rosenberg’s “Cincinnatus” in Volume II. Many science fiction greats were featured in the original nine-volume series, which ran from 1982 to 1990, including Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Gordon Dickson, Poul Anderson, John Brunner, Gregory Benford, Robert Silverberg, Harry Turtledove, and Ben Bova. 33 years later, Castalia House has teamed up with Dr. Pournelle to make this classic science fiction series available to the public again. THERE WILL BE WAR is a treasure trove of science fiction and history that will educate and amaze new readers while reminding old ones how much the world has changed over the last three decades. Most of the stories, like war itself, remain entirely relevant today. This omnibus edition contains THERE WILL BE WAR Volumes I and II. Volume I is edited by Jerry Pournelle and John F. Carr, and features 23 stories, articles, and poems. Of particular note are “Reflex” by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, the original “Ender’s Game” novella by Orson Scott Card, “The Defenders” by Philip K. Dick, and a highly influential pair of essays devoted to the then-revolutionary concept of “High Frontier” by Robert A. Heinlein and Lt. General Daniel Graham. Volume II is edited by Jerry Pournelle and features 19 stories, articles, and poems. Of particular note are “Superiority” by Arthur C. Clarke, “In the Name of the Father” by Edward P. Hughes, “‘Caster” by Eric Vinicoff, “Cincinnatus” by Joel Rosenberg, “On the Shadow of a Phosphor Screen” by William Wu, and “Proud Legions,” an essay on the Korean War by T.R. Fehrenbach.”

http://www.amazon.com/There-Will-Be-War-Volumes/dp/9527065593?tag=chaosmanor-20

‘They resent historical accounts such as those Klehr and I produced that present archival documentation of the CPUSA’s totalitarian character and its devotion to promoting Soviet victory over the United States in the Cold War.’

<http://blog.victimsofcommunism.org/qa-with-john-earl-haynes-part-i-soviet-subsidies-in-america-guilty-spies-and-karelian-fever/>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

The Cold War against the USSR is over, but it remains in many American institutions.

I don’t agree with all of this, but it is worth your time reading it:

The Smallest Minority

                An interesting last post from a blogger calling it quits for now.

http://smallestminority.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-last-uberpost.html

Why Machines Should Learn From Failures

Science is biased toward success. But to build reliable artificial intelligence, looking to scientific failures is important too.    (journal)

By

Daniela Hernandez 

May 6, 2016 8:33 a.m. ET

It’s often said that some of life’s most valuable insights stem from failures. The same might hold true for machines. 

Scientists at Purdue University and Haverford College devised an algorithm that can learn to predict new crystal recipes based on its analyses of not just chemical reactions that yielded other crystals, but also chemical reactions gone wrong. They reported their findings in a study published in the journal Nature this week.

Although the study focuses on chemical applications, Alex Norquist, the study’s lead researcher, said in an interview the approach has the potential to liberate large amounts of potentially powerful information that’s been traditionally ignored.

“In science we fail, and we fail a lot. We fail more than we ever really succeed, but the scientific literature is really biased toward success. We pretty much only tell each other about the successes,” the Haverford College chemist said. “But failures contain really valuable information. We wanted to create a mechanism by which we could learn from [that].”

In an age when machines are increasingly being used to help scientists and companies make decisions, looking to forgotten data sources could serve up unexpected wins—and open up new avenues of research. 

Here are edited excerpts from the conversation with Dr. Norquist.

WSJ: What effect does biasing data toward successes have on the machine-learning algorithms we’re hoping to use to make new scientific discoveries?

Dr. Norquist: If all or most of the data is success, then the model won’t really know where failures are going to come in. That paints a very different picture from what we see in reality. As we remove this bias, it opens up a lot more information. The approach we’re using can be generalized to a lot of different types of science. The more that we don’t bias the data that we look at, the better our understanding will be.

WSJ: In which other areas might this be useful?

Dr. Norquist: Our approach is designed to help us get to the end stage more quickly by making the materials discovery component faster. A lot of the initial machine-learning work was done by pharmaceutical companies working on drug discovery. We’re always looking for new materials that have better properties, better batteries, better photovoltaic [cells].

WSJ: Why is it important that our machines learn both from successes and failures?

Dr. Norquist: Knowing what to do is just as important as knowing what not to do. It’s only when we look to both that we’re really able to see the boundaries between successes and failures. Really understanding those boundaries and why those boundaries are as they are [is] where the real power in these failures comes from. For example, if nearly all reactions whose temperatures were above 130 degrees Celsius fail, we know to keep the temperature lower than that level. It tells us where we strayed into a bad neighborhood. 

WSJ: How difficult is this to do?

Dr. Norquist: The main thing is accessibility. Most of failures in science often times just exist in lab notebooks on a shelf somewhere. It’s hard to get at them.  

WSJ: What steps are you taking to liberate the failures data?

Dr. Norquist: We have made our [data] publicly accessible. We invite anybody who wants to contribute their own to the project.

WSJ: Data is proprietary. Companies guard their information. Why would they make data publicly available?

Dr. Norquist: The way that science works is that we all rely on the experiments of others. The old saying is that you can save a week in the lab by spending an hour in the library. 

WSJ: Is there anything particularly difficult about teaching machines using failures data, apart from getting access to that information?

Dr. Norquist: Not really. The algorithms don’t care.

Natural Selection: Dawkins’ Weasel and Martin’s Monkey

Dear Jerry –

Greetings, and I hope you are doing well.

I’ve been doing a bit of exploration which I thought you’d find interesting.

I expect you remember about 30 years ago when Richard Dawkins came up with his Weasel program as a demonstration of the power of random variation and natural selection. While his results were striking, I’ve never come across any sort of systematic exploration of the Weasel’s performance.

Looking into this, I’ve developed my own program, which I call (with all due seriousness and self-importance) Martin’s Monkey. This approach replaces Dawkins’ fecund weasel with A Monkey At A Typewriter. Instead of breeding generations of offspring, the monkey simply tries to copy a line of text. Alas, being a monkey and easily distracted, it makes random errors, with a probability P of a mistake for each keystroke. For this exercise I’ve arbitrarily picked a P of .01, a 1 in 100 chance of making an error. The typewriter has only 27 working keys, 26 caps and a space. After each line of text, the result is compared with a target text, and if the monkey’s output is closer to the target text, it becomes his new standard. “Closer” is simply distance on a 27-element ring. So if C is desired, B and D have an error rating of 1, A and E have value of 2, space and F are 3, Z and G are 4, etc. The error values are simply summed over the characters of the text to produce an overall error value. The Monkey starts with a random text, and the target text is also randomly selected for each run. Each attempt from start to termination by the Monkey is a generation.

First, of course, the baseline. Let’s say the character set size is M, and the number of characters is N. If the text lines were randomly generated and you terminated the process upon a perfect match, you’d expect a match in ((M/P)^N)/2 generations. In this case, with M = 27, and an error probability of .01, a random process will require (2700^N)/2. This sort of exponential gets crazy very quickly, of course. For N = 20, it’s about 2 x 10^68, for N = 40 it’s 9 x 10^136, for N = 60 it’s 4 x 10^205, and for N = 80 it’s 1.6 x 10^274.

So, how does the Monkey do? Well, I’d like you to think about this for a bit, if I may. What would you expect? Just as importantly, how do you think it should respond to increasing N? I only ask this because, unless you’ve invested a bit of energy in thinking about it, the real results won’t mean much. For what it’s worth, I’d expected some sort of exponential with an exponent smaller than the random version, but not that much smaller. Aggregates of random processes often exhibit square root behavior – would that seem a reasonable starting point? Exponent equals N/2? Just suggesting. Think about it.

****

Ready? If you just got impatient and didn’t spend any time, that’s OK, but I thought I’d give you the chance.

I ran a series of simulations using the Monkey, and the results are included in the attached graph (Weasel.png). Each point represents the mean of 100,000 runs using random start and target sequences. I’ve got a decent machine and the compiler I use produces fast code, but it still took 3 days to produce the data. I also kept track of the minimum and maximum number of generations for each N, and they are pretty consistently within a 25% to 400% band around the mean, particularly for N greater than 15 or so. I’ve attached this as Weasel Full.png, if  you’re interested. 

And the results are pretty startling. For 80 characters it only takes about 28,000 generations. Compared to 10^274 that’s what you might call decent efficiency (I’m willing to define any efficiency greater than a google as “decent”). Even more interesting is the trend with increasing N. It’s actually not linear (it’s slightly concave upwards, and I can explain part of that if you wish – it’s a variant of the Birthday Paradox) but the contrast with an appreciable exponential is noticeable.

As Dawkins pointed out 30 years ago, this is not a model for biological evolution. Genetic mutations come in all sorts of scales, up to and including chromosome duplications and deletions, and the duplication and elimination of long stretches of DNA within a chromosome is well-known. Changes in regulatory genes will presumably have enormous consequences. The model has no equivalent of neutral mutations. Fitness functions are not anything like as simple as presented here. The point is simply to look at the effects of random variation combined with selection for any beneficial change, no matter how small.

With that said, I find the results fairly remarkable, and food for thought if you ever are tempted to dismiss “mere randomness” as a possible driver of evolution.

Regards,

Jim Martin

On the other hand, natural selection can’t see where it is going; there is no design that it has in mind. As Fred Reed once said, it is not obvious that a random lump of inorganic dancing atoms will evolve to write Shakespeare’s plays, perform Swan Lake, go to the Moon, and build the Trump Towers.

“We did end up with a monopoly.”

<http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/elon-musk-rocket-defense-223161>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

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

Chaos Manor View, Sunday, May 15, 2016

“This is the most transparent administration in history.”

Barrack Obama

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.

Hard at work on many things. New essay tomorrow.

Meanwhile, the best wiring I’ve seen on the current political/philosophical situation I have seen in some time is by George Mason professor F.H. Buckley ,

Trump vs. the New Class, In the May-June issue of The American Conservative. I heartily recommend it as an honest assessment by an astute observer and thinker. His invocation of Djilas and The New Class in explaining the mess we have got ourselves into, and his analysis of just what it means to be an American conservative, is worth the time of every thoughtful American, conservative or liberal.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/trump-vs-the-new-class/

It’s getting toward dinner time on a Sunday; more tomorrow. But I do urge you the read this. If you haven’t a clue as to what we mean by Djilas and The New Class, I don’t blame you; it was mostly a Cold War topic, very important in the days when the Nomenklatura ran the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but its application to “the end of history” was neglected after the fall of the USSR. It shouldn’t have been. The New Class was in many ways an inevitable consequence of the Iron Law of Bureaucracy, and developed in the Western “Democracies” as well as in the USSR; we just didn’t think of it that way.

Newt for VP

Afternoon Dr. Pournelle.

Hope this note finds you well. We are expanding our R&D spending for Dragonfly Aerospace and I am wondering if this may be the best time in 20 years for us to grow. 

I just watched Newt Gingrich on Fox saying that he would probably accept the position of VP for Trump if asked. Do you think it likely and if so what would it do for our industry if they got elected?

With thanks,

Christopher Gaska

Dragonfly Aerospace

It would be a very good thing for American Space; Newt is a Space Cadet from the gitgo, always has been since I have known him. I suspect he would want to see the National Space Council revived with the VP as Chair. When Dan Quayle was VP and Chair, Max Hunter, General Graham, and I talked him into the SSX program; there wasn’t enough money for the full SDSX, but we did get the DC/X, not years of study, but flying hardware.

Romney ridiculed Newt for proposing a Moon Base by 2020 in the 2012 Presidential debates. The Republican Establishment laughed along with Romney.

The Strengths and Weaknesses of NERVA

Jerry,
Some sort of nuclear powered propulsion is going to be needed to make interplanetary commerce a reality. The current generation of NERVA engine designs, all dating back to the late 1960’s, certainly have some advantages over chemical engines, including high specific impulse and long ‘burn’ time. They have some disadvantages, however, including fairly poor thrust to weight ratios and environmental release of radioactive waste. The disadvantages preclude the current NERVA designs from being used as booster stages. There is also the issue of ensuring safe failure during launch.
One of the other issues surrounding the NERVA design is that practical engines, at the time, required about 5 gigawatts of output, making them the most powerful nuclear power plants ever built. I do know that NASA test fired a 4.4GW NERVA engine, which still stands as the most power nuclear power plant ever operated.
My son and I looked over the current NERVA documentation last summer and we have concluded that modern materials science and other technological advancements warrant renewed interest in the area of nuclear propulsion. We think that lighter, more efficient, and non-polluting designs are now possible that could be used as booster engines.

Kevin

I would be astonished if modern materials have not made it possible to design nuclear engines for interplanetary travel that are much better than NERVSA was; it was, after all, built in the 60’s and designed somewhat earlier. I do know we got Isp approaching 1000 from NERVA; I would be astonished if we could not do better than that now.

A NERVA or better, eternally in orbit, as a shuttle between space station and lunar base, would make travel to the Moon economical and routine.

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

3:06:29 PM 05/12/2016

 

his is more of a test than anything else. Livewriter, which I have been using, seems to have gone mad.  This WordPress direct, and I find it tedious.  It takes two separate operations to get the date and time in here. If there’s a way to paste stuff in here it’s not obvious, but I’ll try.  I can’t experiment because I can’t leave the page. Now it’s telling me the connection has been lost.  No reason why. It seems to publish when it darned well wants to

 

Chaos Manor View, Thursday, May 12, 2016

“This is the most transparent administration in history.”

Barrack Obama

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.

2300 Thursday, May 12, 2016

Well, the server had problems earlier this evening, and I went to LASFS about 1830 I couldn’t get to my site with Livewriter, WordPress, or anything else; since WordPress direct is working on-line, it’s no wonder that it wasn’t working at all. That problem seems to be over, but I can’t test things too well because I am in the back room, and the setup I need to test is in the Front Office. I still do not operate out of my suite upstairs with the Great Hall and my main office; perhaps someday. When I built the upstairs office suite Mr. Heinlein told me, “You young fellows just turn off the gravity, but you’re going to regret these stairs one day.”

I laughed at the time. I don’t regret building my office suite, but it’s not likely I’ll ever recover the cost: the value of this place is now in the lot. They’re mansionizing the neighborhood. Reasonably tastefully, and you could say I get an early start on doing that, but mostly they tear down these 20’s and 30’s houses and build from scratch.

If the layout looks strange – and it does – it’s because Word Press direct publishes and you work online, and I was having trouble getting Livewriter set up, and the first part of this was published before I wanted to. Don’t worry about it. We’ll settle down to normal soon enough.

This is still Pledge Week, and I’m still bugging you about subscribing if you’ve been reading this without subscribing, and renewing if you don’t remember when you last renewed. Pledge Week comes about when KUSC, the classical music station in Los Angeles, holds their pledge week. This place operates on the public radio model: it’s free, but if it gets too few subscribers I can’t keep it up. I admit the content has been a bit thin recently, but part of that was medical, but most of it was technical – besides, I’m working on three fiction projects, and I haven’t abandoned them. And things are getting more normal.

If you haven’t subscribed, do so. Now. If you haven’t renewed in a while this is a good time to do it. Here’s more on Paying For This Place.

Do understand, I’m after discretionary income, not rent money. I’d rather have you as a reader than not, whether you pay or not.

The Microsoft Philosophy seems to be: make it simple and relatively easy to use, but do not bother to tell people how it works now.  Newcomers will figure it out.  old timers will keep on trying the old way, and eventually figure out that won’t work, and either pay for lessons, go mad, or find another way out.  not our problem. 

 

They seem also fascinated with the Chinese commercial philosophy: deliver quality goods, and when the customer gets used to buying them, cut production prices, but never say you have done that.  Goods quality falls gradually but no one notices.  Finally they do notice and say something and then notch up to better quality although generally not to as high a level as you started with.  Now cut production costs gradually. Quality of goods will fall, but at first no one notices…

 

 

3600-Year-old Swedish Axes Were Made With Copper From Cyprus.

<http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/archaeology/1.719125>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

I knew there was sea trade between Britain and the Mediterranean cities in BC times, so I am not all that surprised that some of the Bronze Age manufactured goods from Mediterranean shops found their way into the Baltic. Bibby’s Four Thousand Years Ago can tell you a lot more. Out of print now, alas, but used copies can still be found. Apparently Viking Traders have been with us a long time…

‘That raises the question, how and why did the animals get into the cave?’

<http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150904-the-bizarre-beasts-living-in-romanias-poison-cave>

It’s strangely depressing to note that the BBC apparently don’t know how many people have actually visited the Moon, nor care enough to check – and that this number is likely to remain a constant for the remainder of my lifetime.

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

Bizarre. And yes, it is depressing. Newt Gingrich wanted to build a Moon Base by 2020, but in 2012 Mr. Romney made fun of Newt for doing so, ridiculing him in fact. Romney had a 59 point detailed Pan. Or maybe it was 83 points.

And Roland found this:

Writing With the Machine.

<https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/writing-with-the-machine/>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

Read it. You won’t forget it. Certainly I won’t.

Mexican Threat to United States

Maybe we can get our president to “appear to bow” to the Mexican leader to smooth this one over?

<.>

If a new U.S. administration blocks the flow of remittances — the estimated $20 billion that Mexicans working in the U.S. send home each year — then joint efforts to stop money laundering and other illicit forms of finance will be dealt a dangerous setback, a senior Mexican official warned Thursday.

</>

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-fg-u.s.-mexico-remittances-20160512-snap-story.html

Or maybe our president can tell the Mexican official that failure of a state to control illicit finances and organized criminals indicates a failed state and it would be unfortunate if the US had to take a more forward leaning role in managing the failed state?

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

I do not think our current President believes in Sovereignty and the principles it implies.

Dodging the Computer Kidnappers    (nyt)

By J. D. BIERSDORFER MAY 9, 2016  

An up-to-date antivirus program on your PC or Mac can help warn you of attempted ransomware infection. Credit The New York Times 

Q. My computer’s antivirus program is going nuts lately blocking something called “Locky.” What is this and why am I getting so many alerts about it?

A. “Locky” is a type of malicious software known as ransomware, which as the name suggests, encrypts the files on your computer and will not release them until you give a hefty payment to your unseen attackers. Ransomware, which has been featured as a plot device on some television shows, has become decidedly more prevalent and large-scale in recent months, especially with attacks on hospitals in California and Kentucky, as well as on a municipal utility company in Michigan.

Locky is aimed at Windows systems and has been spreading this spring through waves of phishing spam messages. The ransomware can arrive on your computer hidden in an email attachment, like an infected Microsoft Office document (one that prompts you to enable Office macros) or as a bit of JavaScript code tucked inside a .zip file. (Because it can better evade some antivirus programs, the JavaScript version has been increasingly widespread as of late.)

You can take basic steps to protect yourself from ransomware infection. Keep your antivirus program and operating system up-to-date with the latest security patches. Do not open any unsolicited file attachments from unknown senders — or even unexpected attachments from people you know, in case their computers have been compromised.

Disable macro commands in Microsoft Office files you receive by email and if possible, log into your computer with a more limited standard account instead of the all-powerful administrator account. Some ransomware can encrypt files on drives attached to the PC, so back up your computer’s files regularly, and keep a copy of the backup on an unconnected external drive or server.

Ransomware is not just a Windows problem. Mac users should also be on guard against the OS X/KeRanger-A ransomware and its variants, which can extort a high price in exchange for getting your computer’s files back.

How Long Before It’s Too Late?, Other Questions

Dear Dr. Pournelle,
We (the United States and/or the Human Race) need to start colonizing space Real Soon Now. So, How Much Time do we have to start building O’Neill colonies before ‘The Limits To Growth’ make it impossible to colonize space?

Also, do we really need NERVA engines or other nuclear propulsion to gain useful access to Mars, Ceres, Callisto and the rest of the Solar System? If so, can we have enough of a nuclear industry to get NERVA engines, WITHOUT national leaders saying, “Oh, we don’t need Solar Power Satellites because we have nuclear power.”?

Also, what can I do to get more pro-space government officials elected and to also get anti-space freaks removed from office?

Sincerely,
Mike Brill

Taking these one at a time: I used to have a terrible sense of urgency, and it comes through in A Step Farther Out, but Larry Niven developed a talk called Waldemar XXIII: eventually a tyrant will emerge if resources are smaller all the time, and one of these may have vision; so there is always a chance. And there is a space commerce business developing, in part because of the Commercial Space Act passed back in the 90’s after being proposed by the Council I chaired during the Reagan takeover. But we certainly do not have infinite time. Harrison Brown, The Challenge of Man’s Future, pointed out long ago that we have used up most of the easily available resources; it will take high technology to get the next layer; we cannot collapse too far, or recovery becomes really hard.

Most of the resources available to man lie in space. As I used to say, it’s raining soup out there; we need to build soup bowls, not better forks.

We need something like NERVA for interplanetary commerce. We tested NERVA to a sea level Isp of 900 something; we know we can get over 1000. Doubtless there are better, but NERVA we can build now, and we should.

When Newt Gingrich proposed a Moon Base by 2020, Romney ridiculed him to the delight of much of the Republican Establishment, which probably explains some of my dislike of some of those people. Democrats were no better, although when John Kennedy propose a Moon Landing it was thought to be far more difficult then than a Moon Base would be now. We’ll build one someday; it makes economic sense.

We need dreamers, people who see far into our future; and we need to support them

Subj: Why we had to lose Detroit

We had to lose Detroit because the managers of the Big Three American auto makers were *stupid*.

Those managers, wallowing in the profits their effective collective monopoly gave them after WW2 flattened Europe and Japan, refused to learn from Deming, who taught the Japanese quality after the Americans blew him off. Those American auto execs (mostly at Ford) who did, in desperation, in the eighties, finally listen to Deming were in due course replaced by successors who knew not Deming, and followed the old short-term thinking back down into the Void.

When the Toyota came in and, in the NUMMI joint venture with GM, *showed* them how the Toyota Production System works, … GM shut it down. Rejected the whole set of ideas and practices, like a body rejecting a transplanted organ.

The Big Three committed suicide by willfully leaving their own brain-rot untreated, and they dragged Detroit down with them because Detroit was a devoutly single-industry town that didn’t have anything to fall back on — as Pittsburgh After Steel fell back on its universities and their high-tech spin-offs.

There are plenty of cars being manufactured in America — just not in Detroit, and not by the Big Three.

Tesla now owns and uses the factory that once was NUMMI.

I think Admiral Rickover once described a bunch of Navy contractors as “boils upon the rump of Humanity.”

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

I knew I could rely on you to come up with that. I will point out that the Unions cooperated with that action. The Iron Law prevails. Always.

r.e. Free Trade

Dear Jerry,

“But I’d like to see a regulatory tariff with Mexico, China, India and so forth. They can either enact similar labor and environmental laws as us, or we’ll add a compensating tariff at the border.”

This seems correct and is a perfect illustration of why the “bad trade deals” Trump discusses need to be junked and new ones negotiated.  Automation, robotics and computers have now made it certain that the unit labor cost of producing anything is trending towards 0.   The result is the remaining line items in “Cost of Goods Sold” are becoming relatively more important.  These remaining costs divide into two main categories.  The first is the cost of energy and raw material inputs and the second is the cost of “political overhead”.

Hillary and the Democratic party overall openly support doing everything possible to raise both category costs without limit, and apparently until the entire country reverts to an 18th Century agrarian manual labor state.

Unfortunately the existing Congressional Stupid Party program is also openly hostile to low domestic energy and raw material costs.  In the emerging conditions promoting the export of the US natural gas surplus via LNG terminals and now also revoking the petroleum export ban is just plain dumb.   To expose our remaining industries to “world market prices” for hydrocarbons and derived energy means to kill one of their few cost advantages over Chinese producers.  For example, Russian industry has been subject to this policy since 1992.  No noticeable benefit has resulted in that instance.

Best Wishes,

Mark 

Racist trees

No it’s not from _The Onion_. They couldn’t make this one up.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/262727/racist-trees-our-national-parks-daniel-greenfield

Just a sample . . .

“Now Alcee Hastings, an impeached judge, and a coalition of minority groups is demanding increased ‘inclusiveness’ at national parks. High on their list is the claim that, ‘African-Americans have felt unwelcome and even fearful in federal parklands during our nation’s history because of the horrors of lynching.’ What do national parks have to do with lynchings? Many national parks have trees. People were hung from trees.

It’s racial guilt by arboreal association. Trees are racist down to their roots.”

Cordially,

John

The Principle Of Mr. H. W. Wickes

Dear Jerry,

The controversial British author and historian David Irving tells this story in an interview. In about 1963, shortly after the publication of his first book, which became a best seller and made him a bit of a celebrity, one evening a strange little man was hovering outside Irving’s London home. He introduced himself as Mr. H. W. Wickes, and he told Irving he needed to talk to him. Irving invited him in, and listened to his story.

“Let me tell you what they have done to me..” began the odd little man:

In 1936 Mr. Wickes had taken out an insurance policy from a large firm, made all the premium payments, subsequently broke his leg, filed a claim, and the insurance company refused to pay. Knowing his rights as an Englishman, Mr. Wickes picketed the offices of the insurance company in The City of London. He was arrested for Criminal Libel, sentenced to six years confinement in his Majesties prisons, and thereby hangs a tale. Mr. Wickes embarked on a life long campaign for justice, no matter the odds.

After some small commiseration, Irving managed to send Mr. Wickes on his way, though for years afterward he would receive an annual Christmas card from Mr. Wickes. Irving thought he was finished with this character.

Several years pass, and Irving is researching in the correspondence of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He comes across a letter sent to FDR from England, and it begins with Mr. President, let me tell you what they have done to me…” and signed “Mr. H. W. Wickes”

Then, a few years after this, in the German archives, while researching the official correspondence of Adolf Hitler, there it was again: “Herr Hitler, Let me tell you what they have done to me…”

More years pass, and in Rome, in Mussolini’s files: “Duce, Let me tell you what they have done to me…”

It is my theory, after once having met mine own version of Mr. H. W.

Wickes, that the moment one gains ANY small mote of public notoriety, and in my case it is a exceedingly small mote indeed, there is a central office that has a room full of various versions of Mr. H. W. Wickes, and a little red light blinks. Seeing the red light, the next iteration of this personality steps to the front of the room, receives a sealed packet with your personal information, and is immediately transported to your vicinity, no matter if you are at home or in Upper Egypt for the Hippopotamus hunting season.

I’ve not yet met a writer who has not had this experience.

Perhaps there is a book idea here, with the title “Let me tell you what they have done to me…”

Petronius

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