Chaos Manor View, Wednesday, April 27, 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.

I’m still working hard on fiction; just returned from lunch after a conference with Steve Barnes, Larry Niven, and a short confab with Dr. Jack Cohen in England; we definitely have a book, and now to plunge ahead and write it. AS also hear from our agent that “Call of Cthulhu” will not be popular with the sales force of any publisher interested in this book, so it is very unlikely to be the actual title. It will be the third book in the series The Legacy of Heorot followed by Beowulf’s Children, and incorporates the events of The Legend of Blackship Island which chronologically comes between Heorot and Beowulf’s Children. These are the stories of the first interstellar colony, in a realistic universe that has no faster than light travel (which is what scientists believe we live in now, what with Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity).

Now a second colony ship comes from Earth and appears to be matching orbits with Geographic, the ship that the Avalon colonists came in and which orbits their colony world. In this hard science fiction book we explore the realities and speculate on the motivations of those who go to live among the stars, given the cost of getting there in slower than light vessels. If that sounds like I am practicing writing blurbs for this book, you’re probably right, but it’s as accurate a description as I can come up with; I hope it intrigues you. Sand if you haven’t read the first two books in the series, you may find them to your taste if you’re a hard science fiction fan.

Anyway, that’s much of what I’ve been doing.

I suppose you can call this a pre-announcement: shortly we will announce that There Will Be War, Volume XI, will be published in November and is now open for submissions. It’s not the formal announcement because I don’t have the web addresses for formal submission. I don’t open attachments to emails to me (obviously with some exceptions which I’m not going to tell you) because I only read plaintext in Outlook, so sending me stories to Chaos Manor isn’t going to work; I’m sure I’ll have the web addresses very shortly.

Publisher is Castalia House. There will be a hardbound edition and eBook editions. We buy nonexclusive anthology rights only: that means we buy previously published works, and if you send an original work – a lot of people do – understand that if it is accepted you still have first serial rights until after November, after which they no longer exist for anyone. Payment on acceptance is an advance against royalties: royalties vary in this strange age, so it’s hard to say exactly, but they are competitive, and contributors receive a pro rate share of half what I receive.

My contribution is a volume introduction, and individual story introductions. I have been known to make editorial suggestions, particularly to original contributions. I have also been known to make other contributions, fiction and non-fiction, as I find necessary.

The series has done well, even the nearly thirty year old volumes. Three stories in Volume X were nominated for Hugo’s (Hugo’s to be awarded in August at MidAmericon II).

Once again it has become too late for me to write an essay on Conservatism, Populism, and Democracy. I will once again remind you that a primary axiom of conservatism, There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide,” was accepted by nearly every member of the Philadelphia Convention of 1787. The goal was to establish a survivable Union of states with wildly and violently opposite views about some very fundamental principles, Slavery being only one of them. The tendency for a democracy to quickly degenerate into class warfare was always on their minds. How could that be prevented?

This was no joke. Britain was poised to take advantage of any disunion. There were other threats to liberty.

Was the goal. No one was entirely pleased with the result; the Federalist papers, once published as essays in popular newspapers, and now considered to difficult for lower division political science majors, address some of the problems.

So long as Washington was President, there was reasonable harmony. The Hamilton-Adams-Jefferson-Burr election went to the House, and resulted in a sitting Vice President shooting his opponent dead in a duel. A ruling class emerged, but that didn’t work. Then the beginnings of a Party system.

We are at a turning point now. For decades the upper-lower class and the lower-middle class have felt themselves ignored by both parties, devoid of influence and power, and losing ground every year.

This election is likely to be crucial. Will they be persuaded that “Hope and Change” – which translates into soak the rich and get free stuff – is the only answer? If not. What is? And who’s listening?

Of course it was inevitable:

Army regs be dashed – she wants to wear the hijab

Chad Groening, OneNewsNow.com April 27, 2016 at 11:55 am 78 Fresh Ink, Lead Stories

Share!

A national security expert says political correctness may once again prevail in the case of a female Muslim student who wants to wear a headscarf with her Army uniform during ROTC events.

The U.S. Army recently granted an exemption to a captain who wanted to wear a beard and turban in accordance with his Sikh faith. Now the historic Citadel military academy in Charleston, South Carolina, is considering whether to grant the request of a female student who wants to wear a Muslim head scarf, known as a “hijab.”

According to The Washington Post, the school is considering a second request as well from the student: that she be allowed to cover her arms and legs during exercise. The Post also clarifies that the woman has been “admitted” to the school but has not yet chosen to attend. [snip}

Army regs be dashed – she wants to wear the hijab

Trump foreign policy speech today

https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/donald-j.-trump-foreign-policy-speech

You could have written the whole thing.

-- 

Phil Tharp

Well, I would say some things differently, but the principle revealed are not all that different from what I have said for years. I would have to read it more closely than I have before endorsing it, but nothing in my reading stands out for objection. I will have more on that when I have more time.

This should make you happy

http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/04/27/donald-trump-win-40-states/

Look at paragraphs 9 and 10.

finally….

-- 

Phil Tharp

In the sense that it seems Mr. Trump is demonstrating his ability to be Presidential, I am pleased that any candidate can do so. But do understand, I have not endorsed Mr. Trump. I do refuse to denounce him.

What Could We Build With Extra-Strong, See-Through Wood?     (journal)

Scientists in Sweden came up with a hybrid that’s considerably stronger than acrylic and lets in far more light than normal wood

By

Daniel Akst 

April 21, 2016 12:06 p.m. ET 

Wood is a great building material because it is strong, affordable and renewable. If only it were transparent!

That, at least, was the thought that occurred to a team of scientists in Sweden, who went ahead and made it so—after a fashion. They came up with a hybrid of wood and acrylic that retains some of the advantages of each material. Their Franken-wood is considerably stronger than acrylic, they report, and it lets in far more light than normal wood, which makes it a promising possible building material. 

The team, at Sweden’s Wallenberg Wood Science Center and the country’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology, relied on nanotechnology, the science of very small things. Previous research in this vein has yielded foldable transparent paper, and in 2012, a member of the transparent-wood team, Lars Berglund, was part of a group that managed to create a transparent crab shell. They did it by extracting calcium carbonate, protein, lipids and pigments, replacing them with an acrylic resin while preserving the shell’s shape.

This time, Dr. Berglund and his fellow researchers worked with small pieces of balsa. They first had to remove most of its lignin, a naturally occurring substance that strengthens plant-cell walls, darkens wood and blocks light. Wood with the lignin removed looks white, but it scatters too much light to be transparent.

Lars Berglund explains nano cellulose

So the scientists injected it with prepolymerized methyl methacrylate, a version of the material used in such acrylic panels as Plexiglas, and then heated it at around 158 degrees Fahrenheit for four hours. The result was see-through wood that, thanks to the plastic infusion, was even stronger than before, Dr. Berglund reports. “We are making plywood at this very moment,” he says by email, adding: “We make each layer separate and then laminate them together.”

In their experiment, the scientists were able to dial up or down how much light passed through the wood based on the volume of the chemical infusion, but thickness makes a big difference too. The scientists report that a thin piece of wood—just 0.7 mm thick and treated with their process—let through 90% of light. But when they used a piece 3.7 mm thick (about a seventh of an inch), only about 40% of the light passed though.

The desired transparency would depend on how the material is employed. The scientists foresee its being used someday in construction to let more natural light into buildings, where complete transparency might not be welcome. The transparent wood isn’t as clear as glass, but its haziness can be a virtue in solar panels, the scientists say, because it means light could be trapped for longer in a solar cell. “Longer trapping time means better interaction between light and active medium,” they write, “which can lead to better solar-cell efficiency.”

“Optically Transparent Wood from a Nanoporous Cellulosic Template: Combining Functional and Structural Performance,” Yuanyuan Li, Qiliang Fu, Shun Yu, Min Yan and Lars Berglund, Biomacromolecules (March 4)

Moore’s law spinoffs continue. And the Law is inexorable.

Doctor Pournelle,

Wikipedia succumbs to the Iron Law.

Wikipedia Is Basically a Corporate Bureaucracy, According to a New Study

Wikipedia Is Basically a Corporate Bureaucracy, According to a New Study By Jennifer Ouellette Wikipedia is a voluntary organization dedicated to the noble goal of decentralized knowledge creation. But as th…

I cannot see any attribution to Doctor Pournelle, though this is clearly describing the Iron Law in action.

Best regards

Paul T.

Well, I never expect acknowledgement but it is pleasant when it happens.

Criminal responsibility

Dear Jerry –

Some research on the Murfreesboro arrests suggests that there may be rather less here than meets the eye. Keeping in mind that I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on television,

Criminal responsibility is ordinarily a pretty common-sense concept. From a related case,

“A person is criminally responsible for an offense committed by the conduct of another, if:

(2) Acting with intent to promote or assist the commission of the offense, or to benefit in the proceeds or results of the offense, the person solicits, directs, aids, or attempts to aid another person to commit the offense;”

In other words, if A is assaulting B, and C prevents B from running away, C is held criminally responsible for the assault on B, even if C did not actually assault B.

Furthermore, under some circumstances a person does have a legal obligation to intervene, but this is apparently applied to parental relationships, and forms the basis for charges of child neglect. A parent who willfully permits his or her child to be harmed is clearly doing something wrong, and criminal charges in these cases does not seem to violate common sense. It’s hard to imagine how such a legal duty can be applied to children 6 to 11, so I’m dubious that it is.

In the case of the Murfreesboto arrests, I’d guess that either the spokesman being quoted was confused, or the reporter reported selectively. To be fair, I suspect the spokesman was constrained in his discussion by the fact that the arrested were minors. I don’t know Tennessee law, but I suspect that in such cases not much information can be released.

That said, an arrest of this sort suggests one of two possibilities: either the police wildly overreacted, or the “fight” which started things off was a very nasty, “Lord of the Flies” bit of work and somebody got seriously injured. In the course of time all may be made clear. Or, since this is a juvenile case, maybe not.

In either case, I doubt that the police are, in fact, implying a general duty to intervene, so my previous comments are probably not really valid.

Regards,

Jim Martin 

“Criminal responsibility”

Jerry:

In Warren v. District of Columbia, the US Supreme Court has decided that a law enforcement officer has no legal responsibility to prevent a criminal offense (in this case, violent rape and torture).

If the POLICE have no legal responsibility to make any effort whatsoever to prevent an offense, what responsibility does anyone else have?

There is a certain irony in the police constantly telling people not to take the law into their own hands, then arresting schoolchildren for obeying those admonitions.

Keith

Murfreesboro and guns

Dear Mr. Pournelle,
I agree that the Murfreesboro arrests open rather too many cans of worms; but I note some immediate responses on the order of “we need to be armed.”
I grew up hunting. I am not afraid of guns. But I am also quite aware that they are not magic wands, which you wave and the bad guys fall down. From everything I can learn, actually hitting your *target* at a time of danger and stress is very difficult. Hitting bystanders instead seems rather likely.
I am convinced that anyone who thinks they should have a gun for self defense or to keep order should be expected to undergo regular combat training. Otherwise, it’s just daydreams.
Yours,
Allan E. Johnson

SUBJ: “Dear Scrotty Students . . .”

This letter was a hoax of sorts, posted somewhere on the internet as a response from Oxford to students attending as Rhodes Scholars to remove the statue of Oxford Benefactor Cecil Rhodes.

Not sure who wrote this. Best line to the students: “Understand us and understand this clearly: you have everything to learn from us; we have nothing to learn from you.”

http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com/archives/27886-Dear-Scrotty-Students.html

Perhaps extreme, but tempting…

Police Power to Detain Drivers

Your correspondent John and the headline from the link he provided both inaccurately describe the decision of the 9th Circuit. The decision did not enlarge police’s authority to detain drivers. All the decision resolved is that officers have no obligation to truthfully tell a detained driver why a detention is occurring. In other words, the police can lie to you. This is hardly news. If an officer sees a driver obeying all traffic laws, but the officer has a reasonable suspicion based upon articulable facts that there are illegal drugs in the car, the officer can legally stop the driver. The officer can then falsely tell the driver that she is being detained because the officer saw the driver fail to signal a lane change. If the driver later moves to get any evidence discovered during the stop excluded because she did signal all lane changes, the police can defeat her motion by establishing their reasonable suspicion of illegal activity.
Rene

And this is all right with you? I’d need time to think about this. Is this not exonerating false arrest? Now true, if the car is full of contraband, the officer will probably not be punished, but will the drugs be admissible?

Police lying to suspects

Jerry:

I am NOT appalled by the court ruling that cops can lie to suspects.

On the one hand, this levels the playing field, because the suspects often lie to the cops.

On the other hand, it gives cops the chance to make contact with suspects who (as in this case) are committing felonies in the background, but being squeaky-clean to observers. It is certainly a lot less drama than that involved with a “felony stop” event. Compare the risk to bystanders of rolling up on the suspect vehicle, guns drawn, and dragging out the occupants (who may be armed and less than willing to be dragged out), vs. pulling them to the side of the road, saying “you didn’t signal that lane change,” getting them to choose to get out of the car (and away from weapons), THEN making the arrest.

On the gripping hand, this also gives the cops a chance to listen to the suspects respond to accusations of something they know they didn’t do, where they might make incriminating comments regarding the things they ARE doing.

All of this is taking place prior to any arrest, crossing of the Miranda threshold, etc. I would be appalled if the court said that cops are allowed to lie on their paperwork or in court, but the initial contact is an entirely different situation.

Keith

The rulings on admissible evidence were first applicable only to federal officers; it was only relatively recently that the Supreme Court found among the penumbras a right to enforce against the States. Are you convinced that this is a Federal matter at all?

Dinosaurs weren’t wiped out by that meteorite after all

Jerry

You may find this interesting. Seems that geological factors such as separating continents and volcanoes in the Deccan Traps were already browbeating the dinos, so that the Chicxulub impact was a coup de grace:

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/04/dinosaurs-werent-wiped-out-by-that-meteorite-after-all/

Since the flowering plants that we think of as trees evolved around the same time, I wonder how the change in herbage entered into the mix.

It seems the dinosaurs had a string of bad luck. Lucky for us.

Ed

There went our few years of fame…

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

Chaos Manor View, Tuesday, April 26, 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.

I have been in manic phase, turning out fiction for Call of Cthulhu – not a Lovecraft parody, but the working title of the third book in the Avalon series about the first interstellar colony, which Larry Niven, Steve Barnes, and I are working on. We have 20,000 words and a fairly detailed synopsis, and soon enough we’ll be ready to send a proposal to our agent for circulation to publishers. Tomorrow we have a lunch conference. I’ve done a lot with the outline as well as a few thousand words of actual scenes. Wore myself out, I did.

I seem to have been nominated for a Hugo. “Best Editor, Short Form”. The only work mentioned for the year 2015 is There Will Be War, Volume Ten” released in November. It is of course a continuation of the There Will Be War series which appeared in the 1980’s and early 90’s, of which the first four volumes were recreated with a new preface during 2015; the rest are scheduled to come out in the next couple of years. I’ve edited a lot of anthologies, starting with 2020 Vision in 1973 (I think it will come out in reprint with new a introduction and afterword’s by the surviving authors next year. I did a series of anthologies with Jim Baen that was pretty popular, and one-off anthologies like Black Holes and The Survival of Freedom, amounting to more than twenty over the years, but this is the first time anyone has ever nominated me for an editing Hugo – and actually the first time I ever thought of it myself.

When I first started in this racket, Best Editor Hugo usually meant one for the current editor of Analog or Galaxy. That spread around over the years, but it meant Editor in the sense of someone employed with the title of Editor, not a working writer who put together anthologies, sometimes for a lark.

I used to get Hugo nominations all the time in my early days, but I never won. My Black Holes story came close, but I lost to Niven’s “Hole Man”. Ursula LeGuin beat me for novella. There were others. Our collaborations routinely got nominated, but again usually came second, so at one point I was irked enough to say “Money will get you through times of no Hugo’s much better than Hugo’s will get you through times of no money,” and put whatever promotion efforts I had time for into afternoon and late night talk radio shows and stuff like that. Which worked for sales, but not for Hugo awards. I’m unlikely to get this one – I’m a good editor but that’s hardly my primary occupation – but I admit I’d like to. I was already going to Kansas City this August, so I’ll be there, but I doubt there’s much need to write a thank you speech.

The Republican Establishment, and some of the anti-establishment people I have considerable respect for, are in panic mode as Trump moves closer to inevitable First Ballot Nomination. It’s easy to see why the Establishment is terrified. Then there are the others.

1. He can’t beat Hillary. Doesn’t he know that? The media are playing along with him now, but they hate him, and the instant he’s nominated they will turn on him with a vengeance.

A few months ago it was considered impossible for Mr. Trump to be the nominee. He’d drop out soon enough. Didn’t he realize it was impossible? Yet, here he is. As to the media, does anyone believe that Trump doesn’t know they hate him? And even if he were that naïve, is everyone around him also that stupid? It is not rational to think Mr. Trump can be astonished at the notion that he is not popular with the drive by media.

He has already attracted a significant number of Democrats to his camp. Mostly white working class, who feel betrayed by the Democrat machines but certainly were not going to turn to Wall Street and the Republican Country Club establishment for relief. They want jobs, not free stuff; domestic tranquility, not diversity schemes; some expectation of being important again as they were in the long dead times after World War II. They don’t trust Hillary. They don’t trust the Country Club. They have discovered that the Democrat Establishment has expelled the New Democrats who elected and reelected Bill Clinton, and Hillary has gone over to buying their dignity with free stuff. She doesn’t care.  Bill maybe was once one of them, but she never was.

It may be a close race, but then they said Reagan was just an actor, and that his would be impossible. Better Establishment candidate Gerry Ford… .

2. He’s no conservative.

No. He’s not. He accepts the conservative alternative to many problems, but he’s not an ideological anything. He’s a pragmatic populist. I will have to write more about the differences between Populism, Conservatism, and Democracy, but not today; I’m running out of time.

I will remind you that the one phrase nearly every one of the Founders in Philadelphia were agreed on was “There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide.” They founded a Republic, not a democracy, a nation of states that did not agree on many matters, but were determined to preserve their own way of life.

Despair is a Sin

I just had an important discussion with some folks and I decided to undercut their positions and say that I was no longer talking about the subject but the principles underlying it and I asked them if they thought they couldn’t make it better? And then I said despair is a sin. Now I understand what you mean and I thank you for repeating that to me over and over again so that now I can understand it. Despair is a sin, and more descriptively, it is a semantic blockage.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Our Webmaster reports:

Malware via Advertising

DANGER, WIL ROBINSON !!!
I’ve been getting these via what appears to be a ad-delivered malware attack. They have looked like Flash updates before, but today’s was a bogus/malwared FireFox update.

The domain was registered today, so is bogus. Screenshot below (IP address and location blanked)

The usual warning: although updates a good (and recommended), make sure that you get them from a reliable source. Don’t click on popups.

…Rick….

 

IGNORE this message from me. Message follows:

I did not send this – to myself or anyone else. I have never asked for confirmation of subscriptions. Be warned.

From: Chaos Manor – Jerry Pournell [mailto:jerryp@jerrypournelle.com]
Sent: Monday, February 22, 2016 2:20 PM
To: Chaos Manor – Jerry Pournelle
Subject: Subscription confirmation

Chaos Manor – Jerry Pournelle Subscription confirmation To finish your subscription, you need to confirm your e-mail address here. If you can’t click the link above, copy and paste this url into your browser: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor?simpleSubscribe=1&a=s&sb=c609868c97a805efca4d32cac1d7cf1e049fb27a&i=183   Here from the Website Master is why you ignore it: Dr. P. I noticed just after the malware warning your warning about subscription verifications. You state that you don’t send out those. The actual fact is that those notification are valid. .There is a ‘subscription’ signup on Chaos Manor (and Chaos Manor Reviews) that will notify subscribers of a new post on either site. When you sign up, you get a confirmation mail (to ensure that it was actually you that subscribed), which has to be clicked to activate the subscription. After verification, the subscriber will get email notice of new content on the sites. This is different from what you were thinking of — your paid subscriptions. The email notice that you warned about is actually valid, and should not be ignored, if the subscriber wants to be notified of new content.. …Rick…

What we have here us a failure of communication. Sorry

 

 

Mini Ice Age AD536-660, New Sci 13 Feb, p. 18

Procopius notes that around 539 AD

“At that time also the comet appeared, at first about as long as a tall man, but later much larger. And the end of it was toward the west and its beginning toward the east, and it followed behind the sun itself. For the sun was in Capricorn and it was in Sagittarius. And some called it “the swordfish” because it was of goodly length and very sharp at the point, and others called it “the bearded star”; it was seen for more than forty days.”
It is likely that this is the same comet that Gibbon talks about in his Decline and fall of the Roman Empire
“Eight years afterward [comet Halley’s 530 AD apparition], while the sun was in Capricorn, another comet appeared to follow in the Sagittary:  the size was gradually increasing; the head was in the east, the tail in the west, and it remained visible for 40 days”
Procopius’s description above implies to me an observed comet with an anti-tail.  Also, Procopius gives us some information of when the comet was seen. He tells us that the sun was in Capricorn.  The date when this occurred during the writing of Procopius was the last few days of December, and the first three weeks of January.  It appearing in Sagittarius at this time may tie in well with the Chinese account of it being seen in S. Dipper?  So it is possible that we have two accounts of the same comet.  If this is the case then Gibbon seems to be out by a year. 

In his list of comets, Ho gives comets in the years 530 (Halley), 533, 535, 537, 539(the above comet) and 541.  If these comets were noticed by many people then we can see how perhaps the comets of 535 and 539 may have been remembered as harbingers for the following volcanically induced climatic events.  Indeed, the two comets of 537 and 541 which appeared during the climatic events may have also been viewed as ill omens. The following is purely speculative, but to an ignorant and/or superstitious population, they may have viewed the comets as a cause of the climatic events, not knowing that distant volcanoes were to blame.  Indeed, while the educated and perhaps more rational/sober may have recorded what they seen as heavenly events, the general populace may only have had stories of myth and legend to fall back upon to try to understand what was happening at the time?

Jonny

It has been colder (4^th and 5^th Century; Little Ice Age) and warmer (Roman Warm, Viking Era) than now in historical times, all well before the Industrial Revolution. The hockey stick is a contrived falsehood.

This was actually sent in February. It is relevant today.

Cell phone security,

Jerry

The FBI wants Apple to divulge its security by creating a back door. Apple would do well to create a subsidiary in, say, Japan or Singapore to write its OS – or at least to convert the output of its Silicon Valley engineers to final code. US legal people often engage in extra-territoriality, but locating it in a state where the government can stand up to bullies is required.

The alternative is to see sales leak to Samsung, Nokia and other non-US companies. I hope the logic is clear: no one will trust US products, and they will buy from elsewhere. It’s a slippery slope: dead terrorists, live terrorists, purveyors of child porn, kidnappers . . . child custody cases, etc. It would be like Men in Black, where all the aliens were abandoning the planet because we had a Bug.

Ed

‘Wouldn’t it be simpler for the Air Force just to blow up Vandenberg and Cape Canaveral launch sites?’

<http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/exposed-us-air-forces-war-destroy-americas-space-industry-15925>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

College men and women obsolete categories

Dear Jerry:
We read today in “The Chronicle of Higher Education” that student categories of male and female are to be superseded on college application forms.
The prospective students will still be asked to state their “sex assigned at birth.” It remains unspecified as to just who it is who has the authority to assign sex at birth to a prospective college student or whether the applicant will have to provide documentary evidence of that assignment. I can see this becoming a matter of dispute. Also it is unclear whether stating “sex assigned at birth” is optional or required.
Once the touchy business of sex assignment at birth is out of the way, the students themselves will get to specify their gender identities without all the confusion of considering physical or biochemical evidence.

From the Chronicle:

Common Application to Change Gender-Identity Options

[Updated (4/26/2016, 12:01 a.m.) with news of the Universal College Application.]
Starting this summer, students who use the Common Application will be asked to state their “sex assigned at birth.” There also will be an optional free-response text field in which applicants may describe their gender identity.
Those changes, announced on Monday by the Common Application’s leadership, follow calls from students and advocates to change how the standardized application form asks about gender. Currently, applicants are required to choose “male” or “female.” The new prompts are meant to help students express themselves in a way they feel most comfortable with, said Aba Blankson, a spokeswoman for the Common Application: “The feedback from our members and advisory committees has been consistent that, yep, this is the time, this is the right way to go.”
Continued at
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/common-application-to-change-gender-identity-options/110674
Best regards,
–Harry M.

Is comment needed? The Republican Establishment holds both Houses of Congress, doesn’t it? Is this the Will of the People?

finally an Ah Shixit button for pilots

http://www.popsci.com/xavion-ipad-app-can-make-emergency-airplane-landing-autopilot?src=offramp&loc=region-3&lnk=img

Very, very, cool.

-- 

Phil Tharp

New Plant Designed to Push GE Further Into Digital (journal)

It sure ain’t. It also shows that manufacturing jobs are not coming back.  Meet Mr. Robot, his co-worker Miss 3D printer  and their dedicated process control counter parts. It’s really cool. I just don’t know what we will do with the IQ 100 types.

Phil Tharp

On 4/24/16 4:49 PM, Jerry Pournelle wrote:

It sure ain’t Chevrolet…

Jerry Pournelle

Chaos Manor

New Plant Designed to Push GE Further Into Digital

• (journal)

• By 
• Angus Loten
• .

A new incubator-like facility, to be launched Friday, will allow General Electric Co.GE -1.39% to test real-world applications of big data, the Internet of Things, and a range of IT tools in the industrial manufacturing process, the company said.

Advanced Manufacturing Works, a 125,000-square-foot facility housed within the company’s sprawling Greenville, S.C., industrial complex, is equipped to produce working gas turbines, jet engines, wind-turbine blades and other power-industry parts and products.

But it also includes advanced capabilities to apply big data, IoT, 3-D printing, automation and robotics to that process. The $73 million facility is operated by GE Power, the company’s power-generation unit.

Through digital technologies, it seeks to create streams of data linking industrial processes and systems that often are isolated at more traditional manufacturing plants. GE calls the stream a “Digital Thread.”

The goal is to develop tools to more quickly adjust to input from across the supply chain and other external sources, use insights drawn from the data to fine-tune production on the fly, and get new parts and products to market faster, GE Power Chief Information Officer Johnson told CIO Journal.

He said it can be difficult to insert new technologies into the traditional manufacturing process without slowing down or even shutting off production. Industrial plant managers and engineers can spend days or even weeks analyzing data in a spreadsheet before initiating any changes. In the meantime, the plant keeps churning out faulty parts, or stays idle, Mr. Johnson said.

To address this issue, the new facility will act as a testing ground for applying data instantly, through automated processes, to make those changes in real-time, using streams of data to create a “digital feedback loop,” he said: “A true digital loop is about seeing data and using that to make adjustments to the process without human intervention. That’s the next stage” of IoT, he added.

To further speed up the process, the facility will use 3-D printing and 3-D modeling to create rapid, intricate prototypes for parts and products, to share quickly with customers along the supply chain.

Digitized processes that test successfully will be applied at the company’s main manufacturing plants, GE Power CEO Steve Bolze told CIO Journal.

“We can innovate offline and introduce these technologies into one of GE’s largest manufacturing facilities,” Mr. Bolze said. “It’s going to be a hotbed of the latest technology for more speed, more performance and cost competitiveness,” he said about the Greenville plant.

On top of the initial cost of getting the plant up and running, GE plans to invest a further $327 million into the facility over the next few years, Mr. Bolze said, largely on new equipment, additional buildout and prototype development.

It is expected to create at least 80 new engineering and manufacturing jobs, he said. The company estimates each job in advanced manufacturing supports 3.5 jobs through the supply chain. [snip]

Gen Mattis: ‘I Don’t Understand’ Speculation about Presidential Run

Jerry,

Another example of Heinlein’s “Crazy Years.” Regards, Charles Adams, Bellevue, NE

<http://www.military.com/daily-news/2016/04/22/mattis-i-dont-understand-speculation-about-presidential-run.html>

Mattis: ‘I Don’t Understand’ Speculation about Presidential Run

Apr 22, 2016 | by Hope Hodge Seck

Following his lecture on the Middle East and Iranian aggression, Mattis, the former four-star commander of U.S. Central Command and a current fellow at the Hoover Institution in California, implied he was mystified by the buzz surrounding his hypothetical candidacy.

“It’s been going on for 15 months. Since coming back from overseas, this is more of a foreign country than the places overseas,” he said. “I don’t understand it. It’s like America has lost faith in rational thought.”

And Trump swept all five states today.

Corruption in drug tests

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

I believe that I should bring the case of Annie Dookhan to your attention:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2015/10/massachusetts_crime_lab_scandal_worsens_dookhan_and_farak.html

“Dookhan was sentenced in 2013 to at least three years in prison, after pleading guilty in 2012 to having falsified thousands of drug tests. Among her extracurricular crime lab activities, Dookhan failed to properly test drug samples before declaring them positive, mixed up samples to create positive tests, forged signatures, and lied about her own credentials. Over her nine-year career, Dookhan tested about

60,000 samples involved in roughly 34,000 criminal cases.Three years later, the state of Massachusetts still can’t figure out how to repair the damage she wrought almost single-handedly.

By the close of 2014, despite the fact that there were between

20,000-40,000 so-called “Dookhan defendants” (depending on whether you accept the state’s numbers or the American Civil Liberties Union’s), fewer than 1,200 had filed for postconviction relief.*

…

“In Massachusetts it doesn’t even end there. Only a few months after Dookhan’s conviction, it was discovered that another Massachusetts crime lab worker, Sonja Farak, who was addicted to drugs, not only stole her supply from the evidence room but also tampered with samples and performed tests under the influence, thus tainting as many as

10,000 or more prosecutions. Records show Farak used cocaine, crack, or methamphetamines daily or almost daily while she was at work, as well as ketamine, MDMA, ecstasy, phentermine, amphetamines, LSD, and marijuana. Farak pleaded guilty and served 18 months behind bars.”

========

I believe I mentioned the first thing we should do is restore integrity to our institutions, and this is definitely an example of that crying need; while quite a few of those defendants would probably be in prison anyway, there’s still thousands of people in jail on falsified evidence. The bottom line seems to be: Don’t take a drug test if you can help it, and stay out of the legal system if

you can help it. At least in Massachusetts, but slate reports that

we have had 20 drug lab scandals in multiple states, so we can’t assume the problem is isolated.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Everything is going to hell, and we wonder why Trump is rising? We got Hope and Change, and we got it good and hard; we elected Republicans to both Houses of Congress; and the beat goes on…

More on the EmDrive

Dear Dr. Pournelle,
Been reading your columns since 1982, when I started reading Byte. Started reading your fiction not much later, and been hooked on both ever since (Alas, kudos on the Robert Heinlein prize you won the other day).
Regarding the EmDrive you wrote about recently, I’ve been following the matter with interest, and just came across a surprisingly well-written article which goes beyond the maddening shallowness I’ve seen so far, but is still very approachable by the a layman: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601299/the-curious-link-between-the-fly-by-anomaly-and-the-impossible-emdrive-thruster/
Thought you’d be interested.
Cheers,
—
Durval Menezes.

I will believe it when I can be at the test… twice.

Rethinking Humanity’s Roots.

<http://discovermagazine.com/2016/march/13-rethinking-our-roots>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

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

Chaos Manor View, Thursday, April 21, 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.

I think I have the full handle on the mysterious black line that sometimes appears in WORD documents and cannot be deleted. It’s not the feature called “Border lines” that I have never needed, but which can be erased by backspacing over them; this is far more persistent, and neither backspacing nor select/delete will get rid of them. Backspace literally does nothing; and you cannot select the line, and thus you can’t delete it. It looks like thus.

[Pasting into LiveWriter did in fact erase it; oh well.]

If I (in Word) backspace over that line, the result will be that text above the line is deleted; but the line remains. It can drive you mad, or at least had that effect on me.

It turns out to be a feature I will almost certainly never use, and there is a way to get rid of it. The feature is called “borders” (as opposed to border lines), and you can get such a line by:

1. Clicking anywhere in the paragraph above the lin. The line is a border to the paragraph above it.

2. Looking at the ribbon when “Home” is selected. At the bottom of the ribbon are some labels for boxed sections above them. The third section from the left is labeled “Paragraph”. The Paragraph box contains some icons. At to bottom right of those rows of icons is one that looks like a box with a cross in it. (At the bottom right of the whole box, to the right of the word Paragraph is a tiny icon all by itself. Ignore it for now.) At the right of the cross in box icon is a down arrow. Click on that.

3. This gets you another menu. The first four choices will get you a border for the paragraph you clicked before starting all this. The fifth choice is “No Border”. Click on that.

4. Close this menu and get back to the text you were writing; Lo! the ugly line is gone.

5. Note that by default this feature is set to “no borders”, but you can get it if you are a sloppy typist hitting multiple keys at once, which is how I got it; and no, I don’t know what keystroke sequence caused it. Yesterday I got it for perhaps my fourth time in decades of using Word, so it’s not a frequent problem

The “Border lines” Feature is similar to this paragraph border feature, but it is entirely different. By default it is on. When you type three or more consecutive = or – characters followed by Return, a line of them appears; this is not a paragraph border. It’s a standalone line, and it actually can be erased by backspacing over it. Indeed, when you first type Return creating that line, a small icon appears with it; clicking that icon offers a menu, one item of which is to erase that line. You can turn this feature off by the tedious process of File>Options>Proofing>AutoCorrect Options>AutoCorrect As You Type and then look for a box called “Border lines”; if the box is checked, you can make these Border lines with three or more ___ or — or === (and possibly other characters) followed by Return. I’m not sure you’ll ever want them, but if you do, that’s the way to get them.

My thanks to Eric Pobirs, Rick Hellewell, and Peter Glaskowsky, hard working Chaos Manor Advisors, who dug all this up for me. Thanks also to reader Kenneth Mitchell.

My typing is awful today, sloppier than usual, so I’ll hold off on writing more about Trump. Do note that I am not endorsing him neither am I condemning him. I am merely trying to assess him as fairly as I can. Unlike Andrew Jackson, our first populist pragmatist president, he is not a general with command experience, but he does have managerial experience of large projects.

As Newt Gingrich, whom I consider one of the most astute politicians I have ever known, says, Trump learns fast; when he began this campaign, it was well known that many Republicans rejected the Establishment (the rejecters included Newt), but no one except Trump had any faint notion that Trump would be the front runner in Republican delegates by April, 2016. If anyone had been sure of that, they could have cleaned up in Los Vegas. Yet Trump learned fast – faster than anyone Newt has ever known. It would be foolish to imagine that someone who can learn that quickly about electoral politics would not be able to do the job of President.

Pure management is not so difficult; having great vision is more important.

Which again is not an endorsement; it is an argument against rejecting him out of hand.

The final straw…

Considering the incident in Murfreesboro where grade school children as young as first graders were arrested and handcuffed for NOT trying to break up a fight, I suspect that was a “damned if you do damned if you don’t” situation. Had they tried to break up the fight, odds are they would have been arrested and handcuffed for fighting.

“…the kids were charged with “criminal responsibility for the conduct of another,” which according to Tennessee offense criminal code includes incidents when a “person fails to make a reasonable effort to prevent” an offense.”

That opens a can of worms!

Suppose an individual with a handgun carry permit is legally armed and sees someone running from the convenience store across the street with what appears to be a bag of money in one hand and a gun in the other. If the legally armed individual takes no action, that could be considered justification for a charge of “criminal responsibility”. If the legally armed individual does take action the result could range from a detained and ultimately arrested robber and a commendation for the armed individual to a wounded or dead robber with the armed individual arrested and in jail charged with murder. Or the armed robber could shoot and kill or seriously injure the legally armed individual and make an escape. Or in an exchange of gunfire innocent bystanders could be wounded or killed.

Seems to me as though the Murfreesboro police stepped in a pile of **** by their actions here.

FWIW I live about thirty miles south of Murfreesboro.

Charles Brumbelow

I agree; I certainly do not see how intrusion into a criminal act can be made a citizen responsibility under the threat of pains and penalties for inaction; at the same time, self-government requires some citizen responsibilities.

And of course in your example the running man could be the store owner fleeing from unarmed robber whom he declined to shoot and was subsequently attempting to escape brutality. I could come up with many other scenarios.

Murfreesborough school arrests and gun control

Dear Jerry –

The arrests in Murfreesborough would seem to have a remarkable unintended consequence – the Murfreesborough police are apparently claiming an affirmative obligation on bystanders to intervene when a crime is committed. From the article you linked: “The arrests at Hobgood Elementary School occurred after the students were accused of not stopping a fight”.

If so, this would seem to fly in the face of the advice of many big-city police forces and gun-control advocates, who say “Let the police handle it. They are trained and equipped to do the job.”

And if we, as citizens, are obligated to intervene, it’s hard to argue that we should be prohibited access to the tools needed – guns.

Of course, the article may have garbled the facts of the incident (which would not be a total surprise). It’s entirely possible that, given the age group, the kids essentially forced the combatants to fight – but that is not what is being reported. I’m sure you remember incidents from your grade school years when this sort of thing happened – I do. A ring of bystanders forms around an argument, and the two are goaded into a fight while the onlookers urge them on.

Interesting development.

Regards,

Jim Martin

The principles involved deserve discussion. That is what legislatures are supposed to do.

Norway Violated Rights of Anders Behring Breivik, Mass Killer, Judge Rules – MSN News

He thinks his isolation in his three-room suite with a window and fresh air, a treadmill, refrigerator,  t.v., DVD player, and PlayStation is “torture” — his word, and that the government is “slowly killing him.”
He should watch MS-NBC and see how prisoners in isolation are treated in the United States and be BLOODY GRATEFUL that this is his prison sentence for murdering 77 people,  most of them teens, out of religious bigotry — the plan for which he had made on his computer in his bedroom in his mother’s house.
He is upset that they won’t let him use the Internet to communicate with other white supremacists in other countries.

What happens in American prisons is barbaric.  What is happening to him is a mercy beyond privilege, given his crime.

Norway Violated Rights of Anders Behring Breivik, Mass Killer, Judge Rules

By HENRIK PRYSER LIBELL

The New York Times – The New York Times – ‎10‎:‎41‎ ‎AM

Mr. Breivik had argued that the conditions of his confinement, including restrictions on communication, were a violation of the European Convention of Human Rights.

http://a.msn.com/r/2/BBs1ROu?a=1&m=en-us

If I had a complaint about the terms of his sentence, it would not be that it wax inhumanly unpleasant; were I a relative of one of his victims, I would have a great deal more to say.

New EmDrive Theory “ MIT Tech Review Subject : New EmDrive Theory “

Jerry,
I have been disappointed in the apparent ‘scientific’ response to the EmDrive. If we have tests that show it works, and ‘scientists’ respond by saying ‘It cannot work if I cannot explain how it works’, then we have returned to the times of the Inquisition, just short the burning stakes. Does anyone recall that steam engines were built before we had any good explanation for how they worked? Thermodynamics and statistical mechanics were inspired by the effort to understand the theoretical basis for the steam engine. Then, they were used to design better steam engines.
Reading the MIT article, I note that the theory put forth by McCulloch appears to require a variance in the speed of light at the different ends of the drive cone. Any such difference could be accounted for by differences in the medium the light is passing through. It’s a thought.

Kevin

Peter Glaskowsky observes:

I’m unqualified to have an opinion about Unruh radiation or whether it might explain these observations, but I will note that there is considerably less experimental evidence for the EmDrive thruster than there is for cold fusion, and that turned out to be pathological science, so this might also be.

.               png

I was once a fusion enthusiast (see Twenty Twenty Visions), but  practical fusion plant has been (according to enthusiasts) thirty years away for fifty years, and remains so now even for the most enthusiastic of its supporters. If we are to be saved by controlled fusion, it will be our great grandchildren who achieve it.

 

lying to federal investigators

Jerry,

I don’t know how we got into this mess, but I think the founders would be rolling in their graves about the idea of lying when not under oath in court being a federal crime. Apparently, lying to just about any federal investigator is now a federal crime.

-- 

Phil Tharp

I completely agree. Signing a false document under penalty of perjury or lying under oath is an obvious crime; but it is now best never to talk to Federal Officers, even to give your name or the time of day. Cooperating with them and later shown that you were wrong can get you charged with a felony. “Icht will gar nicht sagen,” is better.

Nice Trio

Jerry,

A little relief from the very silly season

The Comet, the Owl, and the Galaxy : <http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap160421.html>

Regards, Charles Adams, Bellevue, NE

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

Chaos Manor View, Wednesday, April 20, 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.

I’ve been distracted by health concerns, not so severe as to be life threatening but serious enough that they can’t be ignored, and consume time in dealing with them. So it goes. I am also doing my turn on the really excellent book Niven, Barnes, and I are doing on interstellar colonization; we’re trying to be realistic, including looking into why someone would want to colonize another star, given the problems of getting there. It’s good stuff, but time consuming, with all my work confined to two finger typing, with frequent corrections of every line, sometimes every word.

That, by the way, progresses better than you might think, but only so ;long as I use Word 2010: that version has a very easy method for adding to the autocorrect dictionary, so that qword can easily be converted to word, and words with a c at the end, or c at the beginning, can sometimes by autocorrected; the c comes from hitting the c key along with the space bar. There is also the problem of losing all my text if I hit alt-spacebar and certain other keys thereafter; the text vanishes.

I’ve overcome that by getting the habit of saving as “currentwork.doc” what I am working on at the moment, and setting AutoSave to the shortest possible interval and then clicking on the little save icon whenever I look up and correct.

Today I hit some key combination that put a black line in my Word text. I couldn’t delete it, either with the backspace or the delete key, and I couldn’t select it, so I couldn’t delete it that way. Went online and asked about undeletable black lines, but the remedy I was told would work told me to use click on items that don’t appear in the Windows 10 ribbon; what version they are for is irrelevant. I finally copied all my text and pasted it into Notepad; then I copied that, and pasted it into a just opened Word file; jimmied the definition of Normal to be what I wanted; and normalized everything. Worked but seems needlessly tedious. Apparently I did something like hit the dash key three time and Word helped me by turning that into so kind of format box, and the instructions for turning that off can’t be found; or rather I didn’t find them for Word 10. In the old days I’d dig until I solved that, but I used the Notepad trick instead. I was eager to keep writing, because it was a good scene I had been doing. Didn’t do much good, of course. Once the flow is broken, it’s hard to start up again.

But it was a good scene, and now I have time to do a View. I was describing a girl, nineteen, as she wakes up from cold sleep to find she’s still aboard a ship, not landed on new planet as she had expected when she went to sleep.

I’m about to give up on reading neo-conservative magazines, at least until after the election. They could have an article about a paleontologist discovering a new dinosaur, but before the article was done there would be a screed denouncing Trump. They’re obsessed with him and can’t write about anything else. The current Weekly Standard has an article about Hillary and her eMail and the Attorney General; and sure enough, they have to take a shot at Trump as part of it, as if he had anything to do with her keeping government business on her private server.

Trump is probably the least qualified candidate who ran for the Republican nomination this year. If you didn’t know that, you’d have to be a hermit to avoid finding it out. He also has far more delegates than any other candidate. I would think that would send a clear message to the Republican elite, particularly the country club establishment; but like the Bourbon kings of France restored after the Revolution, they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

Wouldn’t I want a more qualified, somewhat more experienced candidate? Well, of course. But the establishment wasn’t about to let anyone not within its ranks to get anywhere close to the nomination. In 1956 the goal was “anyone but Reagan” among the Republican elite. Now it’s anybody but Trump. Before Trump they made it clear to all: it’s going to be one of us, like it or lump it. We can deal with upstarts.

But they didn’t intimidate Trump, and now he’s laid all of their compliant candidates low, and they’re turning to an old enemy, Cruz, in despair. The notion is that he’ll “grow” in office; it’s for sure that Trump won’t grow under their definition of grow.

But in fact he’s likely to. He has some good advisors and he has a definite point of view that may be hard to discern because it’s masked by his blatant – loudmouthed and irritating, if you like – tactics. But he has never wavered on his desire to fill the Supreme Court with Justices as near in scholarship and view to Scalia as possible; that alone would be enough to get me to the polls for Trump if he’s nominated.

He has consistently said we need to turn control of the schools to the local districts and stop dictating to them from Washington. This has been taken as meaning that he doesn’t know what to do on a nation al scale. Well, I have news: neither does anyone else, and the attempt, even with the best of will, will always fail. The schools worked better, over all, when they were paid for by local school district taxes and run by local school boards elected by the people who paid those taxes. If you don’t believe that, get a copy of the California Sixth Grade Reader from a hundred years ago and compare it to your child’s present day ninth grade reader. Then weep.

No, he’s not a “movement conservative”, but I’m not sure I still am, and I was a protégé of Russell Kirk and Stefan Possony, and a friend of Bill Buckley and Willmore Kendall. I’ve been in that “movement” a long time. Long enough to see National Review use the egregious Frum to read most of us out of the movement.

Trump is not a movement conservative, but his inclination is to set goals and get people working on them, not to jail and fine them for not doing so. He understands that being served by mindless minions is not the path to glory or wealth. Compared to Hillary or Sanders or anyone in Obama’s train, I’ll take Trump any day. I would prefer someone with government experience – some, not one whose only experience is in government – but we seem to be fresh out of those. I suppose I’d rather have establishment country club Republicans than anyone likely to be nominated by the Democratic establishment even if a plague took all the present candidates; we tried that with Bush I, who cleared the White House of Reagan people the day after inauguration, and proceeded to saddle us with the Americans With Disabilities act and a new Federal bureaucracy; but that’s another story.

Trump is a pragmatic populist. I can live with that.

Trumpism and Clintonism Are the Future

I know this guy. He’s not a conservative, but he’s smart.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/opinion/campaign-stops/trumpism-and-clintonismare-the-future.html?_r=1

It is certainly an analysis worth reading.

Zubrin: ‘The profound global warming of the past four centuries cannot be plausibly ascribed to anthropogenic causes, but it certainly has happened, and the greens cannot deny it.’

<http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/04/where_are_americas_drowned_cities.html>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

New EmDrive Theory – MIT Tech Review

Dear Dr. Pournelle,
A recent article in the on-line edition of MIT Technology Review describes a new EmDrive theory. The theory may account for the EmDrive’s apparent violation of conservation of momentum. Moreover, the article suggests fly-by anomalies (described as unaccountable “jumps in momentum observed in some spacecraft as they fly past Earth toward other planets”) provide supporting observational evidence. Here is the link:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601299/the-curious-link-between-the-fly-by-anomaly-and-the-impossible-emdrive-thruster/#/set/id/601302/
Yours truly,
Jim Bonang

Fascinating.

For all you Star Trek Fans

Almost fell off my chair!

Star Trek – The Lost Episode

Star Trek – The Lost Episode

Although the lost 80th episode was never aired, this trailer has been uncovered through the diligent efforts of …

 

Brice Yokem

This is intolerable.  You don’t arrest six-years-olds at their school for NOT being in a fight which didn’t even occur at the school.

First-graders cuffed, arrested, charged; Murfreesboro outraged

Jessica Bliss, The (Nashville) Tennessean

USA TODAY – USA TODAY – ‎Wednesday‎, ‎April‎ ‎20‎, ‎2016

Police handcuffed multiple students, ages 6 to 11, at a public elementary school in Murfreesboro on Friday, inspiring public outcry and adding fuel to already heightened tensions between law enforcement and communities of color nationwide.

http://a.msn.com/r/2/BBs1uxm?a=1&m=en-us

Vaccines and Antigen Load

Hi Jerry,
I’d just like to point out a couple of things about your argument about vaccines. I’m willing to accept as plausible the idea that a harmful level of vaccination exists but I’m a) a little unclear why what we are doing today is considered “too much” (or potentially so) and what we did 5, 10 or 20 years ago isn’t? It sounds somewhat arbitrary especially when b) the antigen load – the amount of foreign material is actually lower today than it was in 1983 when we covered only seven diseases. Back then we were putting 15 000 antigens into a child by age four. Today it’s something like 400. So with regard to the foreign substances anyway today’s vaccine schedule is lower than the one I had when I was a kid.

J

And it will take years to determine the effect on number of autoimmune disorders

Out-of-date apps put three million servers at risk of ransomware (ZD)

About 2,100 servers across 1,600 different networks have already been compromised, meaning they can be infected with malware at any time.

By Zack Whittaker for Zero Day | April 18, 2016 — 14:56 GMT (07:56 PDT) | 

More than three million internet-facing servers are at risk of hijack by ransomware because they are running out-of-date software.

Cisco-owned Talos Group said in a blog post that they had conducted a search of machines that were already compromised, which showed at least 2,100 servers across 1,600 separate networks, belonging to schools and universities, government departments and aviation companies. were vulnerable to infection.

Malicious actors are using out-of-date versions of Red Hat’s JBoss enterprise server, a middleware software that integrates devices, data, and users across different platforms, as the initial point of compromise.

The security research team warned that these servers could be infected by Samsam malware at any moment, a new kind of ransomware that infects through compromised servers and locks up files until a ransom is paid.

Hackers targeting servers is a relatively new kind of attack for ransomware actors, given that a network’s most sensitive data rests on the server rather than individual computers. That raises the stakes, and makes it more likely that the ransom will be paid.

Some of the compromised servers belonged to schools running Destiny, a content management system developed used to keep track of books and other items. Follett, which maintains the Destiny software, immediately issued a fix for the flaw, which researchers said it was “imperative” that all users install the patches.

Talos researchers said in their advisory urged administrators to remove external access to the server, but added that ideally reimaging the system and installing patches would be better.

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