Chaos Manor View, Wednesday, March 23, 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 been hectic here, and I don’t try to track breaking news, but there are two developments that need discussing. One, the terrorist acts in Brussels, is more of a reminder than anything new. I have said from the day that The Caliphate – ISIS, or ISIL, or DAESH or Islamic State in Levant; the very confusion about nomenclature is indicative – from the day that the Caliphate declared war on the United States that we ought to take them seriously, respect what they have done, answer the challenge, and annihilate them. There is no other objective worth pursuing.

The other event is the response of the presidential candidates. Mr. Cruz has a domestic strategy, and Mr. Trump endorses it but says it does not go far enough. There are various proposals on how to increase UDS security. They are all of them not worthless, but inadequate and doomed to failure. You do not attack a mortal existential enemy by patrolling one of his recruiting grounds; and shoring up one’s defenses may be necessary, but it is almost never decisive in winning an existential war; and it certainly will not be in the present case.

Every successful attack ISIS carries out increases their strength, and increases the persuasiveness of their arguments, and appeals to more potential recruits. The Koran says that it is the will of Allah that the House of Islam – Dar al-Islam, the House of Peace and Submission – will prevail over the House of Resistance — Dar al-harb, the House of War; that the end of times will come when Allah intervenes directly into the affairs of men and establishes Dar al-Islam over all the world. Every Muslim believes this, as every Christian believes that Christ will return in clouds of glory to judge both the quick and the dead.

The Caliphate states that Allah has chosen Daesh as the instrument for bringing about that result, and that every true Muslim must join in that task, they impose the law of the Koran on the territories incorporated into the Caliphate. A further sign is their continued expansion and their successful attacks on the infidels.

This is not difficult to understand. The same fervor inspired the first crusades. The crusaders shouted Deus Vult! – God Wills It – as they charged into battle, and every victory was proof that their side was right, inspiring more to join them, until they became an invincible force, conquering Jerusalem and much of the Levant. The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem held Jerusalem itself for 80 years, and endured with Jerusalem a trucial city open to pilgrims for another century.

The only way to defeat the Caliphate is to defeat it, conquer its territories and distribute its territories to locals who do not believe they have been chosen to convert the world by the sword. The only way to do that is to engage the Caliphate on its own territories; to attack. Defense, no matter how successful, will not do it. Yes. Containment eventually brought down the Soviet Union without a central war, because the Allied efforts after WWI were too little and abandoned too soon, and after WWE II we did not understand the chiliastic objectives of Marxism until Central War was such a frightening prospect that we dared not undertake it; but we are not at that stage with ISIS – yet.

When the Caliphate first declared war on us, I warned that we should take the threat seriously. At that time one Airborne Division supplemented with naval air support and a couple of squadrons of Warthogs operating from Kurdish territory could have eliminated IDSIDS in a relatively brief campaign. The territory could then have been partitioned between Kurds, Iraq Sunni, and Iraq Shia according to wishes of the inhabitants; no permanent US occupation would have been needed. The costs would be moderate and the US casualties low.

That wasn’t done. As time went on and the Caliphate grew, I pointed out that the mission was still vital, but the costs were rising. They grew past needing two heavy infantry divisions and all the A-10’s (including building a base for them). I would estimate now that it will take two heavy infantry divisions, two regiments of Marines or armored cavalry, all of the A-10’s, and some of the USAF air supremacy force to protect the warthogs against surface to air missiles; their presence ought to be enough to deter the intervention of Iranian air jets against the Warthogs, which cannot possibly defend themselves against air-to-air fighters regardless of quality.

As to domestic measures we must take: We need them, but no such measures will be sufficient as the threat from ISIS grows with each successful act of terror. Nothing we can do here of in Europe will end the Caliphate, and policing their recruiting grounds in Europe and the US will not be decisive. Even expelling every Muslim from the US – and I do not advocate that – would not step their recruiting in Libya, France, among the Syrian refugees throughout Europe, and most of all, in the Levant itself where each successful attack against the West inspires hundreds to move from being fervent Moslems to Jihadists.

It now appears that one of those who blew himself up in Brussels was arrested in Southern Turkey as he tried to make his way into the Syrian civil war; and was deported back to Belgium. The Belgian security forces had ample forewarning of a pending attack, but apparently had no on going surveillance of this pious Muslim. They do have a program for rehabilitation of jihadists; it may or may not be working.

 

Brussels is the capital of Europe, and could be expected to be a target.

Jerry:

ISIS cannot be defeated militarily — they can only be forced into a protracted terrorist war, such as we have seen in such places as Rhodesia, the Philippines, etc.

The only way to defeat them will be to make their attacks too costly for them. However, since they already plan to DIE in order to kill innocents, the only cost which can be increased will be to use their beliefs against them.

They think that if they die “pure” deaths, they will be martyrs, and rewarded in Paradise. Thus, it is necessary to remove their expectation of dying “pure” deaths.

The easiest way to do this is to widely advertise that our bombs, missiles, bullets etc. carry something “impure,” such as bacon grease.

While this is politically incorrect, and will certainly offend a few people, I DON’T CARE. What I want is for some would-be terrorist to weigh the possibility of dying holding the card that says “Go Directly to Hell — Do Not Pass Over the Bridge, Do Not Collect 72 Virgins!” . .

.then decide it’s not worth the risk.

Until we’re willing to offend somebody, we can’t AFFECT them.

Keith

 

But that is not true: unlike al Qaeda, which can exist as a ghost operation, the Caliphate must have a territory which it is governing by Sharia law, or it is not a legitimate state, and does not have the Favor of Allah.  The Belgian attack was planned in ISIS territory, and the orders sent from there.  The Caliphate can be defeated, destroyed, its territories partitioned among its enemies, that’s just the point.  If it does not govern it cannot be the Chosen of Allah and much of its attractiveness vanishes. Note that the Caliphate does not hide. It grows, and as it grows it demonstrates that it is the true and lawful instrument of the Will of Allah.

 

Happy 3/23 Day!

David Couvillon
Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; 
Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; 
Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; 
Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; 
Chef de Hot Dog Excellence;  Avoider of Yard Work

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/03/22/what-it-looks-like-when-the-internet-suddenly-disappears-in-4-charts/

What it looks like when the Internet suddenly disappears, in 4 charts (WP)

By Niraj Chokshi March 22 at 7:00 AM

Early one afternoon in November, Internet activity in Bangladesh fell off a cliff.

The drop — to 5 percent of typical activity — lasted only an hour, but traffic would not return to normal levels for weeks. The cause? A reportedly government-ordered shutdown in the wake of a court ruling upholding a death penalty verdict in a high-profile war crimes trial.

The brief interruption was just one recent example of a common problem: Internet disruptions around the world caused by myriad events. Sometimes natural disasters are to blame. Sometimes it’s power outages or other technical failures. Sometime the cables that connect the world get cut (on purpose or by accident). And, sometimes, as with Bangladesh, the government just prefers the darkness.

Akamai Technologies, which delivers a sizable share of online content for clients such as Yahoo, IBM and several federal agencies and departments, reviews such disruptions in its quarterly reports, the latest of which was published Tuesday. Here’s a look, courtesy of those reports, at the various events and incidents that made the Internet disappear, however briefly, last year.

Government intervention

Bangladesh, of course, isn’t the only country whose government has interfered with Internet access.

In Iraq, Akamai recorded a more than 80 percent dip in traffic nine times over the summer, all of them occurring during the same period in the morning. Dyn Research, an Internet performance company that also researches connectivity around the world, confirmed the outages, which were reportedly ordered by the government to prevent, of all things, cheating among students on high-stakes exams.

Last year, in January, the Democratic Republic of Congo cut Internet service to the capital, Kinshasa, in an alleged attempt to contain violent protests against the president.

Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis for Dyn, says such incidents of government controlling Internet access are no longer rare.

“I don’t know that I want to say it’s more frequent, but when it occurs, people are like ‘Oh, yeah, that’s too bad, but that’s kind of what happens now.’ It’s not that shocking of a development,” he said.

But, he added, exercising such control is getting harder as developing countries become increasingly connected to the world and more and more content gets hosted locally.

“The capacity of the whole system to absorb these incidents and overcome them is also increasing,” he said.

Cord-cutting

Snipped or nicked underwater cables also can take down the Internet for large swaths of time.

A cable-related outage in the West African nation of Gabon resulted in a near-90 percent drop in traffic there over the course of several days in April. The cause, some alleged, was sabotage related to ongoing strikes at Gabon Telecom.

An accidental cut to an undersea cable connecting Algeria and France resulted in a more than 70 percent drop in traffic to the former in October, Akamai reported. Some say vandals cut a cable serving Colombia, resulting in a drop in connectivity there in January 2015.

Late April, Nepal suffered a devastating earthquake. Thousands died, many were injured, and the recovery effort was hampered by the devastation wrought on the country’s physical infrastructure.

Immediately, traffic dropped to 11 percent of previous levels, according to Akamai. It recovered, slowly, over the course of several days. While Nepal’s connection to the world remained largely intact, local power outages and damaged cables left many within the country with spotty connectivity, according to Dyn.

A month earlier, a cyclone wreaked havoc on the Pacific island of Vanuatu, suppressing Internet traffic for about 36 hours.Countries will probably never be able to fully eliminate disruptions caused by technical issues, but they can dull their effect with more external connections to the Internet. Some countries, however, are not quite there yet, unfortunately.

Take Azerbaijan. Traffic to the small country situated to the north of the Middle East dipped to 10 percent of normal levels for about six hours on Nov. 16. Why? A data center belonging to Delta Telecom, the country’s main Internet provider, caught fire.

Roughly four-fifths of the networks in the country were affected, all of which connect to the Internet through Delta Telecom, according to Dyn.

Such problems don’t dramatically affect Internet service in more developed countries, such as the United States, because they tend to be far better connected both internally and externally, Madory says.

“It does require that there’s some single point of failure, so to speak,” he said.

Hello Jerry,

Logged on to my computer this morning and found this letter in my in basket from a former govvie work colleague and long time post retirement friend:

“I’m having a hard time sleeping this evening. I spent yesterday afternoon attending a funeral at Arlington National Cemetery, where a colleague was laid to rest. I stood in the afternoon sun while rifles fired in honor of those who served our Country, followed by the mournful notes of a bugle and the folding of the American flag. Final prayers were said and then I started the drive home past the thousands of white stones that represent the honored dead.

As I departed the cemetery I turned on the radio, hoping to hear some happier news or maybe find some music. What do I get instead? Obama speaking from Cuba, telling us he thinks we can agree on Cuba’s “universal education and free health care” as something the US should agree is great. I thought I must be mistaken. The leader of the Free World telling us Communist, drug dealing,murdering despots are providing a great education to their youth? It’s called indoctrination and brain washing. As for the great Cuban health care, please, take full advantage of it while you are there so the problem America has right now can be solved.

I arrived home, turned on the TV and saw Obama standing in front of an image of Che Guevara, holding hands with Raul Castro.

I have to say, the contrast between the start of my afternoon to the end of my day is as deep and stark as the difference between my America and the vision that bowing moron has for the country he apparently hates. One does not have a dialog with the Devil and “come to agreement” with Evil. Good people resist both.

Anyway, it seems like a footnote to the news jackals. For me it just confirms that there are those who would tell any lie it takes to gain power and that evil knows no boundaries. I have no idea what comes next, but the end of Obama’s reign this year will be welcome news for me. I hope his fellow travelers depart as well. I hear Cuba is a great place to go. Universal healthcare, plenty of free political indoctrination, and a nice, rent free cell in a tropical dungeon if you speak the truth. I hear a former messianic “leader” highly recommends it.”

Bob Ludwick=

I don’t believe it, a guy on the left is right for the right reasons

— just decades too late. Better late than never? Well, better than many other politicians at least:

<.>

Russian President Vladimir Putin is deploying nuclear-armed submarines “dangerously close” to the United States and European allies, a Senate Democrat said following a trip to the Arctic Circle.

</>

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2586428

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Jerry

A new kind of not-an-invasion invasion?

http://washpost.bloomberg.com/Story?docId=1376-O456J56KLVS301-5OHO56QVPTHKGV6KERV4TKI7QA

Ed

You are surprised?

: Free Trade

Free trade sounds great until you see a video of workers losing their jobs and think about the crisis this imposes on their families. Many might say you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, but I want to ask a question and maybe you can answer it:

What benefits do free trade initiatives such as NAFTA, CAFTA, GAT, permanent normalized trade relations with China, TPP, TPA, etc. do for the United States that justify the burden imposed on American workers and their families? Why are American families sacrificing for this vision? What benefits do the rest of us gain at their expense that make this course reasonable?

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

 

Free Trade

It seems to me that both free trade and protectionist tariffs are poor choices. A good strategy is to set tariffs such that they generate maximum revenue. Free trade generates no revenue because the tariffs are zero, and protectionist tariffs generate little revenue because the volume of imports is nearly zero. Tariffs that generate maximum revenue allow a reasonable amount of trade, while still providing a reasonable amount of protection.

Some economists think that free trade is better, and that no one should be collecting tariffs or getting protection. The problem is that their set of assumptions does not include consideration of the welfare and security of a nation, and those are really the primary point of having a nation.

Thanks,

Jim Melendy

The obvious answer is that each case is different. The North imposed high tariff on weaving machinery to keep the South from industrializing. When Japan could build cars that competed with Americans on quality rather than price, it was quite different from competition on price alone. When first world countries compete, Free Trade makes a lot of sense. When third world countries want to get in the act it’s a different story. I’ll have a free trade discussion another time. I’m in a tearing hurry today.

“What immigration really does is not so much increase the pie, as redistribute the wealth.”

<http://dailycaller.com/2016/03/16/harvard-economist-immigration-costs-us-workers-500-billion-a-year-video/>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

National Disgrace

If this is true, it’s a national disgrace and it completely undermines the illusion of national security if you still believe even after Deutsche and Petraeus. Deutsch was Clinton’s man; so you expected something like this but to see it happen again under another president with a general and now possibly with a Secretary of State.

If this is possible in the United States, why would you work in an organization where you could go to jail for mistakenly doing what these people seem to have done intentionally? Also, if these breeches occur doesn’t that violate national security? So what’s the point?

Without national security, we really don’t have a country. It may seem that way for a while, but as Manly P. Hall put it:

“Abuse always seems to succeed but eventually leads to the collapse of the very system being abused”.

I believe I will see “the crisis” in my lifetime if we continue on this trajectory. I believe next we’ll see leaks offering specificity if the trends, outlined below, continue:

<.>

FBI chief James Comey and his investigators are increasingly certain presidential nominee Hillary Clinton violated laws in handling classified government information through her private e-mail server, career agents say.

Some expect him to push for charges, but he faces a formidable

obstacle: the political types in the Obama White House who view a Clinton presidency as a third Obama term.

With that, agents have been spreading the word, largely through associates in the private sector, that their boss is getting stonewalled, despite uncovering compelling evidence Clinton broke the law.

Exactly what that evidence is — and how and when it was uncovered during Comey’s months-long inquiry — has not been disclosed. For the record, the FBI had no comment on the matter, and government sources say no final decision has been made.

</>

http://nypost.com/2016/03/20/will-hillary-get-charged-or-what/

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

fast food automation to eliminate minimum wage

you’ve been predicting this:
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/16/03/17/2220225/fast-food-ceo-invests-in-machines-because-regulation-makes-them-cheaper-than-employees
The CEO of Carl’s Jr., Andy Puzder, has been inspired by the 100-percent automated restaurant, Eatsa, as he looks for ways to deal with rising minimum wages. “With government driving up the cost of labor, it’s driving down the number of jobs,” he says. “You’re going to see automation not just in airports and grocery stores, but in restaurants.” Puzder doesn’t believe in [the progressive idea of] raising the minimum wage. “Does it really help if Sally makes $3 more an hour if Suzie has no job? If you’re making labor more expensive, and automation less expensive — this is not rocket science,” says Puzder. What comes as a challenge is automating employee tasks. This is where he draws the line and doesn’t think that it’s likely any machine could perform such work. But for more rote tasks like grilling a burger or taking an order, technology may be even more precise than human employees. “They’re always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case,” says Puzder in regard to replacing employees with machines.

David Lang

Perhaps the minimum wage ought to be $99 an hour; that would really guarantee a decent living for all. Well, all who could do something useful in an hour worth $100 to someone else. We would then have no more problems with low income workers.

I understand there are demonstrations for higher minimum wages.

“This will be the most transparent administration in history,”  said President Obama, as Dr. Pournelle is fond of reminding us.

US govt sets record for failures to find files when asked

By TED BRIDIS and JACK GILLUM, Associated Press

Associated Press – Associated Press – Fri Mar 18 09:30:00 UTC 2016

When it comes to providing government records the public is asking to see, the Obama administration is having a hard time finding them.

http://a.msn.com/r/2/BBqBI6v?a=1&m=en-us

Nerve Cell Stimulation ‘may recall memories’ in Alzheimer’s Patients.

<http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/mar/16/nerve-cell-stimulation-recall-memories-alzheimers-patients>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

more reaping of the whirlwind

https://www.aei.org/publication/an-open-letter-to-the-virginia-tech-community/

Charles Murray explaining fact vs. politics to Virginia Tech.

—

Phil Tharp

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

Chaos Manor View, Monday, March 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.

Various medical emergencies have devoured our time and continue to do so, but we are weathering our way through them. I managed to do some good work on Call of Cthulhu, which is the working title for the interstellar colonization that Larry Niven, Steve Barnes, and I are working on. It was pretty good, and I’m beginning to comprehend how I can work on-line for small stuff, and change to a local copy of Word for larger work, yet still get it to save to both a local copy and upload to the on-line copy, thus keeping them both more or less up to date. If two of us are working on the same document at the same time I dunno what happens. Even though we are working on separate parts; there needs to be some kind of signal to send. “SAVRE your work now, tell me when you have done so, and I have a big save. But if there’s an auto-save? Does it overwite his newest work with the old copy? I need to look into this.

Long time ago, Larry and I would work on what the heck we wanted to, save on a Zip drive, and when we got together it was trivial to merge the two documents; where they differed it showed both the original and the changed text for a given instance. We could choose which we liked. But that was the old Word. They’ve improved the process in the new versions, and so far I find neither Larry nor I have figured out how to do it. I’ll have to do some experimenting, I suppose. I used to like doing that, but then I was getting paid to write columns about it. Of course some of you are paying me to this.

I have many interesting comments on the free trade issue, but they will have to wait until I have a bit of time. Apologies.

If you are at all interested in public education, read this, then see that everyone else you know reads it. It explains very simply one of the major roadblocks to any reform of the public education system.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/on-the-front-lines-of-the-teacher-tenure-battle-1458504511

On the Front Lines of the Teacher-Tenure Battle

I agonized as unionized staff defended a system that protected bad teachers but not children’s futures.

By

Cami Anderson

March 20, 2016 4:08 p.m. ET

An appeal is under way of the landmark 2014 Vergara v. California ruling in favor of nine public-school students who courageously challenged state laws they said deprived them of a quality education. The ruling by a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge struck down California’s teacher tenure, dismissal and “last in, first out” layoff laws on grounds that they violate the equal protection clause of the state constitution and “disproportionately affect poor and/or minority students.”

Opening arguments in the appeal, which began Feb. 25, had me reflecting on the disheartening lessons I learned regarding teacher’s contracts and labor laws during the five years I served as superintendent of New York City’s Alternative High Schools and Programs (District 79).

In 2006 my team and I were charged with improving the lives and academic outcomes of some of our city’s most at-risk young people. About 30,000 students ages 16 to 21, most from low-income families of color, attended our education programs in drug-treatment centers, juvenile detention, in jail on Rikers Island or in the basements of high schools. From the start it was clear that many of these resilient and brilliant young people—trapped in what some call the “school-to-prison pipeline”—had limitless potential, if only they had caring, quality educators.

Not long into my term, however, the ugly reality of the dysfunctional systems working against our students hit me. Far from setting the high expectations our students needed to beat the odds, many teachers and staff reinforced our students’ deepest self-doubts. The young people who needed the best, most motivated educators sat downwind of policies that meant they too often got the least-effective educators.

At the time, most teachers attained tenure after three years in New York. In District 79, most teachers had attained tenure decades before I became superintendent. (Under California’s now-unconstitutional tenure law, teachers achieve tenure even more quickly: 18 months or less.) [snip]

The rest of the op-ed essay gives more facts. Ninety-nine (99) per cent. of the high schools receive a “Qualified” rating in their annual assessments, while fewer that 40% of high school students graduate. It costs $100,000 and takes two years to fire a teachers who habitually show up late, or abuse students, and even if the Superintendent can get a termination through, it can and often is overturned by arbitration.

“More shocking, if a teacher is merely incompetent and delivering mediocre lessons, the process is twice as long and costly, even though, as evidence in Vergara v. California established, the damage to students is equally as devastating.”

There’s more. And of course the California court decision cannot be implemented. It is being appealed, to state courts, and if they do not overturn it, eventually it will reach the Federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal. Meanwhile, the poorer the school the fewer resources they have to resist the transfer of unwanted teachers to their schools; not that it matters much. The upper classes have, for the most part, abandoned the public schools entirely, except for a few favored ones such as Carpenter in Studio City; it is considered one of the best in LA School District. In any event it will be a while before the decision will ever be implemented; I expect it never will be.

A Logic Named Joe: The 1946 sci-fi short that nailed modern tech . The Register

Jerry

Dig this: 70 years ago Murray Leinstar published a brainstorm –

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/19/a_logic_named_joe/

Ed

Published just before I discovered Astounding. Still interesting. But don’t forget “The Twonky”, an AI story of much the same vintage by Henry Kuttner and Catherine Moore. And much darker, of course.

“[Sheriff’s Deputies] wearing bulletproof vests stood alongside a Humvee with a gun turret on top.”
An armored vehicle with a (machine?) gun turret atop it, for a local sheriff to use on the citizens who elected him.
But nothing is wrong in these United States, during this Presidential election.

Protesters block main road to Ariz. Trump rally

By NICHOLAS RICCARDI and JACQUES BILLEAUD, Associated Press

Associated Press – Associated Press – ‎Saturday‎, ‎March‎ ‎19‎, ‎2016

Protesters blocked a main highway leading into the Phoenix suburb Saturday where Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump was staging a campaign rally…

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

The practice of disrupting political opponents’ rallies with thugs is hardly new; it is only in modern times that the disruptors are excused, while those holding the rally are blamed.

CRISPR A Cautionary Easter Update

Dear Jerry:

One of the great tales of exploration has expired at the hands of molecular biology.

Legend has it that a defrosted haunch of mammoth somehow found its way from Siberia to New York to be served at the annual dinner of The Explorers Club in 1951.

Last year, a call for souvenirs of the event went out, and it is now reported that DNA testing has revealed that the dish was actually Mock Mammoth Soup, based on post-pleistocene turtle meat, quite possibly the quality canned product then marketed by Bookbinders fish house in  Philadelphia.

But this discovery pales in comparison to the promise of more exotic fare, now that molecular chefs have got their hands on the new CRISPR gene editing technique :

http://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2016/03/can-presidential-banquets-survive-6th.html

Happy Easter to all !

—

Russell  Seitz

Fellow of the Department of Physics Harvard University 

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

Chaos Manor View, Friday, March 18, 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 went to bed reasonably early, and slept through the night, woke up just before 8, didn’t need a Sudafed, went beck to bed and got up essentially just in time to be dressed by 10. Felt good enough to tell myself I was really recovering from my cold, but an hour or so later I knew better. Today was better than yesterday, and I’m pretty sure that tomorrow will be better still, and we’ll make church and brunch Sunday, but I have to take it easy. I still can’t work very long or indeed very well; which is a problem because there are parts of the book I’m doing with Niven and Barnes that I’m needed on, and I have a lot of work to do on the asteroid mining AI novel John DeChancie and I are working on, and it is about blooming time to finish the next Janissaries novel. All of them are whacking good stories and ought to sell well, which is just as well because I don’t work very fast since the stroke. I have to painstakingly correct half the words I type since I keep hitting two keys at once. It’s still faster than writing with a quill pen, as I keep telling myself.

And no, I wouldn’t be better off giving this place up, because I put in all the time I have energy for on fiction; alas, as I get older, I have less of that, but at least I can talk about scenes with my partners; that’s not as frustrating as having to correct every darned sentence so that I forget what the next sentence was going to be. I suspect I am going to have to change my work habits. Maybe it really is time to learn to dictate. Tough after all these years, of course.

I’ll have more on free trade when I can think better. Sand I haven’t forgotten education and how to resuscitate the public education system.

I wrote this in another conference in response to some comments about the former governor of California:

You misunderstand Arnold.

I first met him at an agency party (we had the same agent); he was then the strongest man in the world and that and Conan was all we knew about him. He was very pleasant, and by chance the next day he met my wife in Nieman Marcus — it was a pre-Christmas party, and she was shopping for a present for me, we just having made a big sale (may have been Hammer, it was that long ago). He spent half an hour helping her look.

I know other such stories, all true.

He ran for governor as a lark, and when he was elected he got a pretty damn good team together to draft some fundamental propositions and constitutional amendments. They were pretty damned good.

The campaign for governor didn’t get very bitter — most thought he was a joke and the pro’s didn’t bother spending any money smearing him.

But the long knives came out over those propositions. Nurses in uniform at rallies screaming curses at him although most of the health professionals I know thought his reforms were needed and good; but wow did the unions hate them. It was the same all over: organized labor in particular called him the Austrian Hitler. He hated it. It really hurt him — he has a thinner skin than you might imagine. It got uncomfortable at home, too, what with his wife being a Kennedy clanswoman.

So when his propositions failed, he said the hell with it. They want crony government and gemutlicheit they can have it. Never took the job seriously again.
I’m not excusing him; he took the job, and he didn’t resign when he lost interest in it. He spent the rest of his office years making nice with everybody. Sure he became a joke and knew it, but it was better than nurses in uniform screaming NAZI at him

I also wrote, in response to some remarks about Operation Paperclip which brought a number of German technical people to the USD after The War:

Did you ever meet any of the Paperclip people? I did. One worked for me, another was a consultant, and we all learned to respect Werner. They were Germans, but I never met a Nazi; certainly none who did not deny believing in Nazi ideals. I was Willi Ley’s successor as science editor of Galaxy; he left Germany early; but he was friends with a number of the Paperclip people who stayed. About half the Verein fur Raumshiffart stayed in Germany during the 30’s; many of the others came here and formed the American Rocket Society, and the Society for the Advancement of Space Travel. They welcomed the old VfR who came with Paperclip.

We learned a lot from them. Shouldn’t we have?

This morning’s mail opened with this:

New and improved ransomware. Swell

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3045206/security/teslacrypt-ransomware-now-impossible-to-crack-researchers-say.html#tk.rss_all

Eric Pobirs

Given all my frustrations I suspect that having to pay ransom for all my files would be a bit more than I could bear, and since I wasn’t being very creative this morning anyway, I decided I’d spend part of the day disarming that threat anyway. The only sure solution is backup files they can’t get out without they burn down my house, and actually even that wouldn’t do it if I do things right. The solution is to have three enormous off-line disk drives, and back up to each in rotation. One stays in the safe deposit box or a fireproof safe. The other two are in the house. They are put on line only when I am backing up to that particular drive, and it comes off line before I put another on. Then, periodically – ideally every week, but it’s more like every month – I burn an incremental update backup from the big RAID assembly Eric built and everything backs up to. That results in a fair number of disks nor; when I first started to save all my work, I could get just about everything I have ever written on one DVD, and actually if I confine myself to my own works I still can; but if I include all the Outlook pst files, it takes many.

It took about for hours to be sure I have everything redundantly backed up, but that wasn’t really time I could spend on anything else. I could read the new Robert Goldsborough Nero Wolfe prequel, in which Archie tells how he met Wolfe and came to work for him. It’s not bad; Goldsborough hasn’t got 19 year old Archie fresh from Ohio perfectly, but then that would be a very difficult task for anyone. Archie’s style changed over the years, and post-war Archie writes a lot better than Fer-de-lance Archie did – whether Rex Stout get better, or he planned it that way would be a good writing class discussion. But the Goldsborough book reads well. He seems to have forgotten that Saul Panzer was married in the early Depression era books, before Panzer became indispensable, and he’s too hard on the early Orrie Cather, but it’s a good read. If you liked the early Nero Wolfe stories, you’ll probably like this.

Rick Hellewell says:

Firefox and ad-blockers

I use Firefox (latest version), and have the settings set to block all popups (in about:preferences#content  – type in that in the URL bar), and don’t have a problem with popups.

I ignore all the ads.

I wouldn’t recommend his ‘I don’t use any other automatic updating’. IMHO, that is asking for trouble.

…Rick…

And in fact the hijacking of my system by Windows 10 seems to have also removed mu AdBlocker extensions to Firefox, which is why I didn’t get all those horrible popups on Alien Artifact before Windows 10, and also why I haven’t been getting them on Swan and Precious, which have always had AdBlocker going. I had to reinstall it – it’s easy – and I have no more problems. I don’t understand why anyone would pay for the popups I was getting; they’re unendurable, so the effect is to make you avoid the sites where they happen, especially if they actually take you to a new Tab and open a new site. Why would anyone ever go back to a site that did that to them? They can’t have any respect for their readers. And I had to correct every single word in that sentence. So I’m getting tired and I’ll have to close up shop soon.

Eric adds:

                Earlier today, Ace of Ace of Spades HQ ( ace.mu.nu ) was lamenting that he was at risk of having his site do something awful to one of his readers.

                This is why I run AdBlock. It is a thorny issue, in that I don’t want to deprive deserving sites of the ad revenue but the risk is just too great. These days, it looks to me that advertising feeds on web sites are the biggest source of malware infections. E-mail attachments are still a big one, too, of course.

Eric Pobirs

Considering that I grew up in a radio station announcer-salesman’s house (my father later became General Manager of WHBQ right after the War, starting as a commission only radio advertisement salesman in the early days of the Depression), I’ve got a healthy respect for advertisements and one’s duty towards the people who pay for your entertainment, but despite rumours we never put subliminal advertisements on the air.

Romney’s Trying To Help – Run Away!

Jerry,

I see Mitt Romney has endorsed Ted Cruz – but in what I fear is an amazingly damaging way. Tempted as I am to see deliberate GOPe perfidy here, it’s probably just more of the same utter GOPe cluelessness that disastrously lost 2012.

I’ll quote myself from a letter I wrote you in February of that year, when Romney and Gingrich were going at it hammer and tongs in the primaries:

“..Romney seems to only win so far (or effectively tie, in Iowa) by using negative ad barrages that depress Republican turnouts.”

and “This is at least assurance that Romney’s organization is competent at driving down opposition turnout, something that may well be a factor in the general election…” Only Romney wimped out in the general and treated Obama far more gently than he had his conservative primary opponents (making it abundantly clear who he saw as the real enemy.)

and “..will the beaten-down turnout among Romney’s Republican opponents linger? In Florida, that could lose the election.” There, and elsewhere, it did.

In other words, Romney not only planted the seeds of the current anti-GOPe revolt, he did it so clumsily that an amateur outsider could spot the problem (well, the immediate problem; I don’t pretend to have predicted how it would metastasize four years later) the winter before that election.

Today, Romney posted this on his Facebook page:

“The only path that remains to nominate a Republican rather than Mr. Trump is to have an open convention. At this stage, the only way we can reach an open convention is for Senator Cruz to be successful in as many of the remaining nominating elections as possible.”

“I like Governor John Kasich. I have campaigned with him. He has a solid record as governor. I would have voted for him in Ohio. But a vote for Governor Kasich in future contests makes it extremely likely that Trumpism would prevail.”

“I will vote for Senator Cruz and I encourage others to do so as well, so that we can have an open convention and nominate a Republican.”

Is it just me, or might he just as well have said “vote for Cruz tactically, so we your self-appointed betters can then nominate yet another GOPe squish at the convention. We will subsequently be really surprised when once again you all stay home and we once again lose.”

Mitt, if you’re going to endorse Cruz, ENDORSE CRUZ, or shut the hell up.

disgustedly

Porkypine

I’m sure Romney thinks he is being best for the party, but his abysmal lack of understanding the voters is why Trump was able to get where he is. In a well-run party he would never have given a thought to running.

Peggy Noonan today

http://www.wsj.com/articles/will-the-gop-break-apart-or-evolve-1458257138

Every time I read an article like this, I think of Obama. Obama had no qualifications to be president and yet he was elected twice. Trump has successfully run large corporations and made money and payrolls. The problem with the political class is they really think they know best when in reality, the people who live in this country know best.

My 10 year old was studying last night for the name the states test. I got to looking at the map. There is a vast part of this country beyond the coasts!

—

Phil Tharp

 

I have always found Peggy worth listening too, but she has been in with the Republican Establishment for many years after she was first snubbed as a Reaganite by them. She gets Trump and his supporters better than most of the Washington Establishment.

Good American Thinker post
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/03/death_of_america_why_this_presidential_election_isnt_as_important_as_people_think.html

Gerald Turner

So Much For Transparency…

Jerry,
An article posted on MSN from the API… “US govt sets record for failures to find files when asked” (http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/us-govt-sets-record-for-failures-to-find-files-when-asked/ar-BBqBI6v?li=BBnbcA1).
WASHINGTON — When it comes to providing government records the public is asking to see, the Obama administration is having a hard time finding them.
In the final figures released during President Barack Obama’s presidency, the U.S. government set a record last year for the number of times federal employees told disappointed citizens, journalists and others that despite searching they couldn’t find a single page of files requested under the Freedom of Information Act. In more than one in six cases, or 129,825 times, government searchers said they came up empty-handed, according to a new Associated Press analysis.
The FBI couldn’t find any records in 39 percent of cases, or 5,168 times. The Environmental Protection Agency regional office that oversees New York and New Jersey couldn’t find anything 58 percent of the time. U.S. Customs and Border Protection couldn’t find anything in 34 percent of cases.[snip]

Kevin L Keegan

How Does America “Reshore” Skills That Have Disappeared?

<http://craftsmanship.net/reshore-skills-disappeared/>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

Good question.

more reaping of the whirlwind

https://www.aei.org/publication/an-open-letter-to-the-virginia-tech-community/

Charles Murray explaining fact vs. politics to Virginia Tech.

—

Phil Tharp

If you have not read this from Murray, you simply must. It’s important to follow the rules in social science or you get voodoo.

Subject: Search functions on modern computers

Jerry, the other day you quoted Eric Pobirs as saying, “The search function is designed to find, quickly, user files, not system or program files. This is how mature modern systems work. Much like the modern automobile owner doesn’t need to know much about how the stuff under the hood works. New cars are not nearly so friendly to tinkering as their ancestors but as consumer products are far more reliable and refined.”

I have to take issue with this. As you know, I run Fedora Linux on all of my computers. I use the Xfce Desktop Environment, but that’s not important here. From my point of view, and that of millions of other people around the world, Linux is a mature, modern system. I don’t know of any search function in Linux, either in a CLI or a GUI, that limits you to your own user-created (or downloaded) files. All of them allow you to search any directory you’re allowed to read, including those containing the system files owned by root. In fact, there’s a command, whereis, that will tell you exactly where any Linux command is located, and where the manual page for it is. There’s also the command which, that tells you which version of a command you get if you don’t specify the path. (This can be a help if you have a non-standard form of a command in a directory that’s either not on your path, or after the directory with the standard version.) If this is what Microsoft now considers a “mature modern system,” I’m very, very glad that I stopped using their products long ago, especially with their current attitude toward allowing users to decide if and when they’re going to “upgrade” to Windows 10.

Joe Zeff

True for those interested in the details and what’s under the hood. I just want to get my work done. I find I need Word and can use other Office tools, and they work; and they are often revised in response to security threats. I haven’t time to be a UNIX or Linux guru.

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

Chaos Manor View, Wednesday, March 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.

The saga of my Windows 10 hijacking continues. Alien Artifact, an Intel Core i7 2600K CPU running at 3.4 GHz with 16 GB of memory – a sweet spot computer when he was built – has run Windows 7 until Sunday morning – see Sunday’s View – when I found that during the night he had been hijacked by Windows 10, and there didn’t seem to be much I could do about it.

Before you start writing me about that. Some notes. First, I know that I could have done something about it; it’s simple and easy or nightmarishly complicated depending on your computer sophistication, mental awareness, patience, and time available. For various reasons I decided to accept the fait accompli and live with Windows 10. I had an awful experience with Windows 8, and better but still dismaying experiences with early versions of Windows 10, but I have also got Windows 10 on my Session Pro 3 (not much choice there) and on two desktops, both built later than Alien Artifact, so I have been learning to use 10; but my main system was Windows 7 until it was hijacked.

Second note: if you want to know what your CPU is, you have to remember it’s Control Panel > System. Cortana doesn’t know. And when you do find it, don’t expect to copy it to paste into what you are writing. For reasons known only to the Microsoft Genius Club whose members think of ways to annoy users, you can’t copy any of the data in Control Panel > System.

Today I was trying to catch up on Luanne, a comic strip that’s in my wife’s newspaper but not in mine, and discovered that Windows 10 allows terrible things to happen with Firefox. Firefox looks the same on Windows 7 and 10, but on 7 I never had this problem, and now I’ve got it: I’m getting hijacked by popup ads, and if that wasn’t bad enough, popup new tabs taking me to all kinds of places I don’t want to go. It has been happening all week, but generally when I ;look at places I’m not familiar with: but this was the same Luanne tab I have been using for years, only now I get new tabs advertising odd things I don’t want, as well as popup ads that cover the cartoon and can’t be closed.

I didn’t have all that with Windows 7; I’ve had it ever since 10 was forced on me. And my recovery from my cold is taking a while; I’m not undertaking any tasks that require cerebration.

For all the irritations – mostly incredibly silly user interface and help files – Windows 10 really is more productive – at least for me – than Windows 7. And once I recover from this cold – I just know I will – I’ll get back to doing other silly things so you don’t have to.

 

 

‘The benefits from trade to the American economy may not always justify its costs.’

‘What seems most striking is that the angry working class — dismissed so often as myopic, unable to understand the economic trade-offs presented by trade — appears to have understood what the experts are only belatedly finding to be true: The benefits from trade to the American economy may not always justify its costs.’

<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/business/economy/on-trade-angry-voters-have-a-point.html>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

I’ve always intended to write a rigorous analysis of free trade, in particular looking at the assumptions, both explicit and hidden, in David Ricardo’s theory of free trade and the various extensions since then. It is a standard belief of libertarians and most conservatives that free trade is a nor very mitigated good, and that free trade nations are nearly always better off than their counterparts.

The alternative to free trade is protective tariff; a tax on imported goods because they are imported, collected at the customs houses; tariff for a long time was the principal source of revenue for the United States. When I was a lad, we learned in school that the Democrats wanted “Tariff for revenue only” (don’t raise tariff, but keep it reasonable so you get more money) while Republicans were for “protective tariff” (keep tariff high so that industry can develop here; they only sell you cheap goods so that you won’t develop industries).

In the “solid South” I grew up in, there were few Republicans; it was almost a joke. One reason for that was that the Union States, where most of the manufacturing and weaving and general factory goods production was centered, imposed very high tariff on industrial equipment. This kept the prices of manufactured goods high by preventing the South from competing; the South had not many factories, and had to pay the high prices charged by the North, since we couldn’t buy the equipment to build our own factories.

I won’t argue the truth or falsity of this proposition: I merely state that it was taught in public school classrooms and was universally believed.

Lincoln did not believe in free trade (which was a good reason for Southerners to relish it). His famous analysis on tariff was: “All I know is that if I buy a shirt from England, I have the shirt and the money goes to England. If I buy it from Massachusetts, I have the shirt and the money stays in the United States. The arguments then centered on whether we had a favorable balance of trade: did exports exceed in dollars brought in the money that imports cost in dollars paid out? That argument is made to this day. Except for China, the US generally exports more dollars’ worth of goods (airplanes, for example) that it imports. With China it is not that way, and the US economy was once described as opening containers of consumer goods and borrowing the money to pay for them.

The usual arguments against free trade generally come down to “don’t export jobs.” American workers can’t compete with people who work for what is to us starvation wages; imports bring good at lower costs, but you don’t save THAT much on consumer goods – the savings don’t have that much effect on your life – while the worker whose job is lost has been ruined. Look at the hell hole Detroit and its environs have become! In 1940 to 1045 Detroit was the symbol of American know how, and produced tens of thousands of tanks, artillery weapons, airplanes, trucks: we won the war with that, and we would not have had we been buying our cars from Japan and China!

A compelling argument in its way, and not easily refuted, especially when talking to a once middle class family now living in an old house requiring a great deal of maintenance and eating surplus cheese and whatever is available for food stamps; possibly with a little subsidiary income from under the table hiring out for handyman work. You are unlikely to convince that family that Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage proves they are better off than they would be if we put tariffs on imported cars.

I will add that that family’s friends, who still have middle class jobs, are paying the taxes for those food stamps, and Obamacare for our worker family and are terrified that their jobs may be exported; or to the more skilled worker who discovers that his work as a house painter is being automated on new construction houses, and meanwhile he can’t save money because he must pay the taxes to pay for Earned Income Tax Credits, otherwise known as negative income taxes. From his point of view, if they were all working, he wouldn’t have to pay taxes to support his out-of-work neighbor and kids with Entitlements; and perhaps he workers who will pay for his entitlements when his job is gone.

And I’m out of energy, it’s time for a dinner I don’t feel like eating, and we can return to this theme when I’m feeling better. I know that economists say there is no question about it, you just have to read Ricardo and you’ll know that free trade is better that high protective tariff; but I’ve read Ricardo and I didn’t see anything about the externality of Negative Income Tax and Entitlements; and I’ve yet to see an economic model that does take account of them. I do know that we have a median personal national debt of over $50,000 for every man, woman, and child (illegal immigrants excluded I sup[pose) and while I just might be able to come up with my wife’s share, and my share, I don’t think all of us together could pay off the debt owed by my wife and I and our children and grandchildren, or what we’d have left to live on if we did; and I know I’m nowhere near the worst off of my friends and acquaintances.

So I really think the economists need to do a better job of explaining free trade rather than just saying Smoot-Hawley over and over.

 

CJCS

http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2016/03/keep-americas-top-military-officer-out-chain-command/126694/?oref=defenseone_today_nl

Salient points made here.  Our government/military mix has always been that the military is commanded by the President – a civilian.  The JCS was created to provide that military advice to the President and coordinate military actions/budget across the services – in effect liaison to the Congress and President.  Even without being in the chain-of-command, the CJCS still wields considerable power and influence – but cannot direct troops anywhere.

David Couvillon
Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; 
Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; 
Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; 
Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; 
Chef de Hot Dog Excellence;  Avoider of Yard Work

 

‘Instead, the design of the QWERTY keyboard was designed for Morse code, with significant regard given to putting the most frequently used letters on the home row.’

<http://hackaday.com/2016/03/15/the-origin-of-qwerty/>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

Amusing; I must admit I always believed in the standard theory, but on reflection I don’t know why. Neither will you after you read this.

 

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