Saturday, August 15, 2015

It has been oppressively hot in Los Angeles today. I have a large window air conditioner in the dining room, and another upstairs in the Monk’s Cell, and a big air conditioning system in the big upstairs complex Great Hall, Office, Bathroom, Cable Room, and Bookshelf room).  That office complex does not connect with the Monk’s Cell, which is actually one of the two bedrooms of the original house built in 1932; it was used as the room of the oldest boy while the boys were still living here, but after the last one moved out I took it over as the writing room; I kept a simple computer, and a good but simple big screen monitor  and a wireless Microsoft Comfort Curve keyboard.  There was a wireless mouse also.  The only Those were on Bluetooth wireless.  The only Internet connection was a very slow wireless connection, just good enough for sending copies of anything I wrote to the main machine in the Office complex.  No games, no phones, no books, do distractions.  I got a lot of writing done up there.

That was before the stroke. I have not been to the Monk’s Cell since the stroke: I could go up the stairs, but I am not sure I could get back down without strong help.

I can’t go up to the Office complex either.  Actually, I can, and I can get back down, safely; but if I fell while up there Roberta would have a real problem and it is taking a chance that she doesn’t want me to take, so I never go there if Alex or Eric or someone else in good health with all his strength isn’t here to be there with me.

All of which means I can’t use either of my offices, and have to make do with the old office I bought the house to get fifty years ago, only it’s smaller now because it has the staircase to the complex in it.  There go two air conditioners.  And I am damned if I will take over the dining room with more computer equipment, although if this heat wave goes on I may have to take Precious, the Surface Pro 3, in there with the fifty year old window air conditioner we bought in San Bernardino when I was working for Aerospace at Norton Air Force Base. Incidentally, Norton was then the Hq. of Ballistic Systems Division (Air Systems Division was in Texas).  BSD was in San Bernardino because Bernie Schriever, the 4 star commander of Systems Command, wanted it as far from the Pentagon as possible, and Los Angeles wasn’t far enough; to get to Norton you either had to have your own airplane or fly into Los Angeles, then drive 90 miles east to get to San Bernardino.  It was hot as hell. But people who came out for meetings really wanted those meetings, and video phones did not exist.  We got a lot of work done.  And Schriever and his successors had their own airplanes.  All 3 stars  and above in USAF had their own 707’s.  But that was then.

Our Los Angeles house cools nicely at night and is well insulated if we button up in the mornings, so while I had air conditioning put in the upstairs offices, we almost never need it downstairs in the old house.  Alas this heat wave has hot nights too, and it doesn’t cool off until not long before dawn.  No fun.

I am writing this on Swan, a Windows 10 system in the back bedroom.  If you see it before Sunday it means we have solved a bunch of problems, all simple once solved, but perplexing because Microsoft doesn’t leave some of the old ways in their new updates; the vocabulary is different.  You “initialize” a new hard drive, not “format” it, and if you don’t know that it may take you a while to find it out.

I just hit “Publish” and it did so without problems, so that’s another problem solved; we had a time getting Live Writer installed on this Windows 10 machine; there will be a report on that in Chaos Manor Reviews when our long suffering managing editor gets it written and posted.

Swan (this Windows 10 system) is in a Thermaltake case with a hard drive toaster built into the top. That is, you take a 4 terabyte (or smaller, of course) hard drive and push it in the slot, and Voila!, there it is in your system just like a thumb drive.  Well, not quite so simply; it isn’t formatted, and my first attempt produced 2 two terabyte partitions which was not what I wanted.  Eric is writing up what we had to do to make one big drive out of it.

We are building a big RAID 5 NetGear box; you’ll get the details later.  Amazon had a sale on 4 terabyte drive, so I bought 5 of them.  I figured on using it in Swan’s “toaster” drive slot and using it for backups from the other machines; a place to store critical files like unfinished novels.  But today Eric sent this:

Bare hard drive storage

http://www.amazon.com/ORICO-Professional-Premium-Anti-Static-Protection/dp/B0098R9B8S/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1439635089&sr=8-3&keywords=hard+drive+storage

    You may want to have one of these if you plan to use a bare drive for backups. One of the biggest malware threats these days is encrypting ransomware. These encrypt all of the files they find in the standard directories and of certain major types like DOC, XLS, etc. They’ll go after ever volume in a system that has a drive letter, including mapped network drive. You then get a message telling you where to send money to get the key to get back your files. In one example I witnessed, a law office paralegal’s PC was struck along with her directory on the server. Fortunately, that directory was the only part of the server her account could access.

    So far, they don’t go after cloud drives (OneDrive doesn’t get a drive letter in Explorer) or search for accessible network volumes on their own but I expect it will just be a matter of time before they gain that level of sophistication. Meanwhile, I STRONGLY recommend keeping local backup drives offline when they are not in active use. Also, don’t map network drives used for backups. Most backup software is smart enough to use a UNC location and don’t need a drive mapping.

    This is also why I recommend to businesses that they have at least one BD-R burner. This is a form of the Blu-ray spec that delivers 25 GB (pre-formatted) per disc in its most common form. A completed BD-R cannot be altered by ransomware, so provides an additional layer of safety. It’s also a cheap way to keep offsite copies of critical data. The blanks are more expensive than DVDs, largely due to lower market volume but the 5X difference in capacity more than makes up for it, and the convenience of using far fewer discs for large amounts of data is another factor.

Well, I already had an extra 4 TB drive.  Here was a nice case to keep it in.  Time to get all the really critical files onto it, and that drive in a drawer where ransomware hacker can’t get at it.  I ordered the box and we spent some time setting it up.  It appears on Swan as a drive with a letter, and thus can be found by ransomware, but not if it’s only in the toaster slot long enough to receive the critical files; meanwhile we will get the NetGear RAID 5 going; it won’t have a drive letter at all, and will be automatic in receiving backup copies of everything incrementally from all my machines.  I also ordered a Blu-Ray drive and a stack of Blu-ray disks; periodically I’ll burn copies of critical files onto that, take the disk out, and let Larry take it home.  Even if the ransomware hackers figure out how to get to disks that have no drive letters, they aren’t going to be able to do anything to a Blu-Ray DVD. I generally only work with collaborators so the chances of any significant amount of new text being lost is not all that high, but I do a lot of silly things so you don’t have to.

So we wrote all the important stuff on Swan to the big toaster drive. No problem. A lot of gigabytes, but it didn’t take all that long. Went in the other room to write Swan’s critical files – and couldn’t.  I didn’t have permission.  I could see the drive, but I could not write to it. Gnashing of teeth.  Back to Swan.  Fiddle with permissions so that I have permission to write to that drive from everywhere else on the net.  Back to Alien Artifact, and still no joy.  More gnashing of teeth.

Back to Swan:  shut down.  Didn’t want to shut down.  Task manager doesn’t work the same in Windows 10 as it does in 7 and before.  They improved it.  Maybe. I’ll reserve opinion on that.  But I finally got it shut down.  Restarted – and it said it was updating. Don’t turn off the computer.  Now that machine is set to do automatic updates; why now? Then it did it again. Reset itself again.  And finally came up – and yes, I could copy files from Alien Artifact. And from elsewhere. Did so, and that 4 terabyte disk is now in a desk drawer safe from any ransomware hacker.  The RAID 5 has built itself, but remains blank until we start backing up to it.  It has ten terabytes of storage room, in a RAID 5 configuration so one disk can fail and we can still recover.  I thought of ordering one more drive just in case and realized that is silly; big drives only get cheaper and it doesn’t take but a day or so to get them from Amazon. Let Amazon store spares for me.

Added Sunday: removing the toaster drive causes the machine to forget any permissions you set for that disk; when you put the hard drive back in the slot, go to This Computer, right click on the drive letter the system assigns it, properties, sharing, advanced sharing, permissions, and set them to allow writing to the drive from another machine – either everyone, or just yourself, as you choose.  You have to do that each time you remove and later reinsert that drive.  Makes sense, of course: you have no way of reserving that drive letter to that particular removable disk drive.

US Unable to Meet Russia in Sustained War?

This is hardly a surprise:

<.>

Behind closed doors some Pentagon officials have acknowledge that the US military has been battered by years of war in the Middle East and is not prepared for a prolonged military engagement with a major global power like say Russia regardless of how likely this scenario might be.

They cite a series of classified war games different US agencies conducted lately and military drills in Europe to support this assessment.

Surprising as it may seem, this revelation comes at a time when an increasing number of high-ranking military officials have called Moscow a key existential threat to the US. The rhetoric reflects a months-long trend. Since the outbreak of the Ukrainian crisis Washington has been increasingly belligerent towards Russia.

Yet the Pentagon seems to be worried it could well be unable to put its money where its mouth is.

Two major areas of concern are logistics and Washington’s current ability (or inability) to sustain a large troop presence in the Baltics or Eastern Europe, two officials from the US Department of Defense told the Daily Beast. NATO countries have long frivolously insisted that Russia threatens this region, which is neither in Moscow’s interests nor its plans.

“Could we probably beat the Russians today [in a sustained battle]?

Sure, but it would take everything we had. What we are saying is that we are not as ready as we want to be,” one of the Pentagon officials clarified.

</>

http://www.infowars.com/pentagon-worries-us-army-is-unprepared-for-sustained-fight-against-russia/

“everything we had” reminds me of world war and total war… This doesn’t fun… I think most of us prefer military operations to occur without an effect on daily life at home…

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Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Historically the US has not kept a large standing army; the Navy was our important agent of influence in peace time. We built armies at need.  We built them fast.  The professional German view was that we learned faster than any of their other opponents; our troops fought to win and get it over with so they could go home.  They were not professional soldiers, and couldn’t wait to get out of the military; although we did have some long serving professional soldiers.

Todays forces require a crack deterrent force; we had that in SAC although I am told that is no longer true. We have not had an objective study of long and short term military requirements in some time – at least not anything official.  The Navy has traditionally had the mission of protecting the homeland until we could mobilize. The President owned the Navy; Congress owned the Army.

Secretary of State Albright famously asked what is the good of having a powerful military if you can’t use it. and entangled us in the Balkan dispute on the anti-Slavic side, thus making historically Pan-Slavic Russia hostile; we have not seen the last of the grave consequences coming from this.  Bombing the Chinese diplomatic buildings in the Balkans  — said to be by accident – didn’t help our relations with China either. Having a standing army tends to generate reasons for using it to interfere in territorial disputes overseas.

I think most strategic analysts agree that we need a vigorous strategy of technology; a credible deterrent; and a strong Navy.  We do not have the Navy, our deterrent credibility is fading, and I do not think we are going in the right direction in our strategy of technology; not as we did during the Cold War. Were it my decision, I would allocate resources to those three missions before expanding the Army.

Detroit went from producing 5 obsolete tanks and no artillery to rolling out thousands of each per month, and did so in less than a year.  We also turned out a ship a day.  But that was long ago; many wonder if we could do it now.

The best way to survive a nuclear war is not to have one.  That takes something like SAC.

I could eliminate ISIS in a year with two Divisions, the Warthogs, and air supremacy forces. I do not think we could conquer Iran and her allies without a lot more mobilization.

Walter Lippman once said that diplomacy was like writing checks; but the account they were written against was military power.  He later added that he included industrial power in that.

Clinton, Deutch, and classified material

Dear Jerry –

All of the current affaire Clinton reminds me strongly of the John Deutch case, which you may remember. From May 1995 to December 1996, Deutch was DCI of the CIA. After his term was over, he took a number of government-issue computers with him under a rather dodgy set of consultant contracts, and it was later determined that some of these, despite being labeled “Unclassified”, did indeed have classified data on them, with the possibility that many more had been destroyed before the CIA (which acted very slowly to scoop up the suspect machines and media) had the chance to collect them. In addition, several of the machines had been connected to the internet and so were vulnerable.  A rather curious condition of bureaucratic lethargy followed, including the destruction of the collected machines before really detailed forensics could be performed (Deutch was adamant that his privacy might be compromised). The bureaucratic foot-dragging by several of Deutch’s supporters was considerable.

Eventually – after more than 2 years – the case was referred to DOJ, who declined to prosecute.

Deutch was preemptively pardoned by Bill Clinton on his last day in office.

See http://fas.org/irp/cia/product/ig_deutch.html for the Agency’s report.

Regards,

Jim Martin

“I just wanted to open a bank. I didn’t think that much about it.”

<http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9b4b95a4-4256-11e5-9abe-5b335da3a90e.html>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

Chaos Manor View, Thursday, August 13, 2015

Hot today. Still working on fiction. I am appalled at Mrs. Clinton’s mishandling of classified materials; when I was in that business, TOP SECRTET NOFORN was a fairly big deal, not to be removed from a secure facility and disclosure on a need to know basis and if access to the document was given it was to be signed out and access recorded. Sometimes, when I was working on a report with a partner whose clearance I knew there ,might be some relaxation of those rules, but not much; I certainly wouldn’t have let him take it out of the room.

When I worked on Project 75, the survey of all known ICBM technology (we were pre-designing the ICBM force to be installed in 1975, this being 1964) the document itself was so sensitive that although I wrote every word in it – or edited it if I didn’t write it – the entire document was at a need to know above mine, so although I could have any chapter, I turned it and signed for a different document when I finished a chapter; never saw the completed document which described all the possibilities for a missile force, and analyzed the vulnerabilities of each. I could hardly complain; I can’t think what the GRU would have paid for it.

I doubt they’ll find much on Mrs. Clinton’s server, as I am sure she has erased all the files and copied them over with harmless files, then reorganized the disk; possibly several times. On NCIS they would magically find it all anyway, but in the real world, I doubt it. Still, you never know, except she would have to be extraordinarily stupid to leave classified files intact on an unsecured system. I presume her house was well guarded while the files existed.

Still, I hear rumors of copies made on thumb drives; they tell me that intelligence people fill all the thumb drive slots with epoxy glue…

Shillery Emails: The Vice Slowly Tightens

Ah, I love the subtitle of this article “the vice slowly tightens”.

This is the latest on the Clinton email scandal:

<.>

The political class is seriously underestimating the impact of Hillary Clinton’s email controversy. They see it mainly as a problem of public opinion and electoral politics, where it has been increasingly costly but not yet fatal. The political damage—the drip, drip, drip of revelations—has been bad, but there is worse to come.

Hillary Clinton’s big problem now is legal, and it could well be insurmountable politically. Here’s why. Once a “political” issue finally moves into the legal system, as the Clinton email server has, it moves forward with an independent logic. That logic will slowly ensnare Secretary Clinton.

You can already see it happening. Two weeks ago, the Department of Justice acknowledged that it “has received a referral related to the potential compromise of classified information.” The referral was not criminal, and the Clinton camp immediately pummeled the New York Times’ sloppy reporting that it was. But that’s small ball and misleading at that. The DOJ is not investigating a civil matter here.

It is investigating a crime. As that investigation moves forward, it will take on a life of its own, as it should in a government of laws.

Even if the Department of Justice is highly politicized—and it is—there is a powerful legal procedure here that will be hard to kill off. It began when the intelligence community’s inspector general, I.

Charles McCullough III, and his counterpart at the State Department, Steve Linick, made a referral to DOJ, saying that classified materials may have been compromised. McCullough also wrote Congress that a spot check of 40 Clinton emails showed that “four contained classified [intelligence community] information.” That meant classified materials were being held in an unauthorized, insecure site—the Clinton server.

In fact, the materials were also being held in a second unauthorized site. Clinton had given the materials to her attorney, David Kendall, on thumb-drives for his safekeeping. Since the communications are, by her own admission, official business and possibly classified, she may not have been authorized to transfer them, nor he to receive them.

The FBI has clear legal responsibilities when it is presented with such a referral. It must investigate and secure the materials.

Fortunately, the FBI is run by a director with a reputation for independence and integrity. James Comey’s agency has now gotten the server and thumb-drives, the ones Clinton said she would never give up. She had no choice but to surrender them or face obstruction-of-justice charges.

</>

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/08/13/hillarys_private_emails_the_vice_slowly_tightens_127758.html

The article continues and it’s worth reading.

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Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

TOP SECRET//SI//TK//NOFORN

I’ll assume you know the meaning of TOP SECRET//SI//TK//NOFORN; SI being a subset of SCI, I don’t see how Clinton can avoid criminal prosecution. Look what happened to Petraeus for much less…

You and I both know there is no excuse for this; you can’t even think of one. Let’s see what the FBI says.

The Daily Beast summarized the situation aptly:

<.>

In short: Information at the “TOP SECRET//SI//TK//NOFORN” level is considered exceptionally highly classified and must be handled with great care under penalty of serious consequences for mishandling.

Every person who is cleared and “read on” for access to such information signs reams of paperwork and receives detailed training about how it is to be handled, no exceptions—and what the consequences will be if the rules are not followed.

In the real world, people with high-level clearances are severely punished for willfully violating such rules. At a minimum, those suspected of mishandling things like NSA “signals intelligence”—intercepts calls, emails, and the like—have their clearances suspended pending the outcome of the investigation into their misconduct. Any personal items—computers, electronics—where federal investigators suspect the classified wound up, wrongly, will be impounded and searched. If it has TOP SECRET//SI information on it, “your” computer now belongs to the government, since it is considered classified.

What, then, does all this means for Hillary? There is no doubt that she, or someone on her State Department staff, violated federal law by putting TOP SECRET//SI information on an unclassified system. That it was Hillary’s private, offsite server makes the case even worse from a security viewpoint. Claims that they “didn’t know” such information was highly classified do not hold water and are irrelevant. It strains belief that anybody with clearances didn’t recognize that NSA information, which is loaded with classification markings, was signals intelligence, or SIGINT. It’s possible that the classified information found in Clinton’s email trove wasn’t marked as such. But if that classification notice was omitted, it wasn’t the U.S. intelligence community that took such markings away. Moreover, anybody holding security clearances has already assumed the responsibility for handling it properly.

As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton had no authority to disseminate IC information on her own, neither could she make it less highly classified (a process termed “downgrading” in the spy trade) without asking IC permission first.

It is a very big deal and less connected people who do this sort of thing ruin their lives, as any IC counterintelligence official can attest. During my NSA time, I saw junior personnel terminated for relatively minor infractions of security regulations. While the U.S.

government unquestionably does over-classify items on the policy side, where almost everything in the Defense and State Departments gets some sort of classification stamp, not usually at a high level, intelligence reporting by its very nature is classified. If you don’t want the responsibility of a high-level government position, which inevitably brings with it TOP SECRET//SI access, then don’t accept that burden.

</>

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/12/the-spy-satellite-secrets-in-hillary-s-emails.html

Yeah, exactly; don’t accept the burden and then say “well I thought it would be easier if I just did things my own way and ignored the law.”

After all, “at this point what does it matter”? And we’re all worried about what a jerk Trump is and how many lions are dying.

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Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Hackers Cut a Corvette’s Brakes Via a Common Car Gadget [Wired]

Car hacking demos like last month’s  over-the-internet hijacking of a Jeep have shown it’s possible for digital attackers to cross the gap between a car’s cellular-connected infotainment system and its steering and brakes. But a new piece of research suggests there may be an even easier way for hackers to wirelessly access those critical driving functions: Through an entire industry of potentially insecure, internet-enabled gadgets plugged directly into cars’ most sensitive guts.

At the Usenix security conference today, a group of researchers from the University of California at San Diego plan to reveal a technique they could have used to wirelessly hack into any of thousands of vehicles through a tiny commercial device: A 2-inch-square gadget that’s designed to be plugged into cars’ and trucks’ dashboards and used by insurance firms and trucking fleets to monitor vehicles’ location, speed and efficiency. By sending carefully crafted SMS messages to one of those cheap dongles connected to the dashboard of a Corvette, the researchers were able to transmit commands to the car’s CAN bus—the internal network that controls its physical driving components—turning on the Corvette’s windshield wipers and even enabling or disabling its brakes.

“We acquired some of these things, reverse engineered them, and along the way found that they had a whole bunch of security deficiencies,” says Stefan Savage, the University of California at San Diego computer security professor who led the project. The result, he says, is that the dongles “provide multiple ways to remotely…control just about anything on the vehicle they were connected to.” <snip>

EPA acting like a criminal

Colorado river and the Cement Creek spill.

The EPA uses private contractors to clean up sites. Does anybody have any info on who contractors were and how much time/money they saved by their “accident”.
Or has my trust in government hit a new low,
BTW spill just dumped higher concentrations of stuff already present in runoff from mineral rich Rockies. So only transient effects will occur sort of like Gulf oil spills.

Tom

Electric Car-Aid Acid Test

http://www.wsj.com/articles/electric-car-aid-acid-test-1439249158

Wall St. Journal

A line of electric cars and newly installed charging stations are seen in front of the Portland General Electric headquarters building in Portland, Oregon. Photo: Don Ryan/Associated Press

Aug. 10, 2015 7:25 p.m. ET

To the list of subsidies for elite lifestyles in the name of fighting climate change, you can now add charging stations for luxury plug-in cars and other electric vehicles. A growing number of states are forcing all consumers to pay for these green amenities that only a fraction of them will ever use.

The fleet of battery-powered cars is rising, and their owners are more than twice as wealthy as most Americans. An Experian Automotive study found that more than 20% of them are middle-aged professionals who make more than $175,000 a year. But deploying the new equipment to keep these affluent drivers on the go isn’t cheap, and states and power companies are starting to socialize the cost of these green frills over all rate-payers. <snip>

China fired another shot in the ongoing currency war:

<.>

High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/444c5bc8-3fca-11e5-9abe-5b335da3a90e.html#ixzz3iYWfgzZK 

China on Tuesday carried out the biggest devaluation of the renminbi in two decades to boost its slowing economy, marking an escalation of international “currency wars”, surprising markets and risking a political clash with Washington.

The 1.9 per cent downward move by the central bank was its biggest one-day change since 1993 — and since China abandoned its tight currency peg for a managed float in 2005. It pushed the renminbi’s “daily fix” to Rmb6.2298 against the dollar, compared with a Rmb6.1162 rate the day before. Before Tuesday, the biggest shift this year had been a 0.16 per cent adjustment.

The move, coming as economic growth has flagged and the currency has been under upward pressure from its informal peg to the rising dollar, is in sharp contrast to policy during earlier times of stress when Beijing resisted pressure to devalue. It should help combat an unexpectedly large fall in China’s exports fuelled by the renminbi’s relative strength.

It also came as China is pushing to have the renminbi accepted as a global reserve currency alongside the dollar, yen, euro and sterling by the International Monetary Fund, which this month cited the need for great exchange rate flexibility as a key requirement.

</>

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/444c5bc8-3fca-11e5-9abe-5b335da3a90e.html#axzz3iYVh35TL

The average person has no idea what this means. So China is devaluing its currency; why should I care? Oddly enough, Trump is calling it:

<.>

“They’re just destroying us,” the billionaire businessman, a long-time critic of China’s currency policy, said in a CNN interview.

“They keep devaluing their currency until they get it right. They’re doing a big cut in the yuan, and that’s going to be devastating for us.”

<..>

“We have so much power over China,” he told CNN. “China has gotten rich off of us. China has rebuilt itself with the money it’s sucked out of the United States and the jobs that it’s sucked out of the United States.”

</>

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/11/presidential-candidate-trump-china-devaluation-will-devastate-us.html

I suppose now they’ll accuse him of being racist for these comments.

I’m not a Trump supporter, but I’m either not supporting or am directly opposing the others as well..

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Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303480304579578462813553136
Stephanie Osborn

“The Interstellar Woman of Mystery”

The Myth of the Climate Change ‘97%’

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303480304579578462813553136

What is the origin of the false belief—constantly repeated—that almost all scientists agree about global warming?

By

Joseph Bast And

Roy Spencer

Last week Secretary of State John Kerry warned graduating students at Boston College of the “crippling consequences” of climate change. “Ninety-seven percent of the world’s scientists,” he added, “tell us this is urgent.”

Where did Mr. Kerry get the 97% figure? Perhaps from his boss, President Obama, who tweeted on May 16 that “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” Or maybe from NASA, which posted (in more measured language) on its website, “Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities.”

Yet the assertion that 97% of scientists believe that climate change is a man-made, urgent problem is a fiction. The so-called consensus comes from a handful of surveys and abstract-counting exercises that have been contradicted by more reliable research.

One frequently cited source for the consensus is a 2004 opinion essay published in Science magazine by Naomi Oreskes, a science historian now at Harvard. She claimed to have examined abstracts of 928 articles published in scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and found that 75% supported the view that human activities are responsible for most of the observed warming over the previous 50 years while none directly dissented.

Ms. Oreskes’s definition of consensus covered “man-made” but left out “dangerous”—and scores of articles by prominent scientists such as Richard Lindzen, John Christy, Sherwood Idso and Patrick Michaels, who question the consensus, were excluded. The methodology is also flawed. A study published earlier this year in Nature noted that abstracts of academic papers often contain claims that aren’t substantiated in the papers. <snip>

The Future of Russia
I came across an interesting article on the Economist web site:
http://worldif.economist.com/article/2/what-if-russia-breaks-up-the-peril-beyond-putin
It suggests that the break-up of Russia might be a greater danger than Putin’s expansionism.

Bill

How I missed hearing about this, I don’t know. I heard all about the new Ferguson shooting almost as soon as it happened, but this is almost a week old, and I’m just now hearing about it. Did any of the rest of you hear about this before now?

http://www.denverpost.com/environment/ci_28608746/epas-colorado-mine-disaster-plume-flows-west-toward

http://www.newsweek.com/epa-causes-massive-colorado-spill-1-million-gallons-mining-waste-turns-river-361019

http://www.newsweek.com/epa-animas-river-spill-now-three-million-gallons-orange-toxic-waste-361654

The EPA, of all groups, after blocking other groups and threatening them with federal charges for years, went in with earthmovers and a plan to drain the mine without even checking the condition of the mine or the water level in it first. Then they didn’t tell the various governors about it for a full day. And it happened last WEDNESDAY, and they are STILL not releasing information about how much of what is in there!

There are not enough words in my vocabulary for this stupidity, and I have a pretty large vocabulary.
Stephanie Osborn

“The Interstellar Woman of Mystery”

Fortunately, nature tends to correct human error; but imagine the penalties if a private company did this. I think not one head has rolled or one person’s pay was docked… Naybe we are getting all the government we pay for. Good and hard.

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

Chaos Manor View, Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Conference with Steve Barnes and Jack Cohen (ain’t Skype wonderful) on the new book; Larry Niven had a dentist appointment. We’ll have one more Wednesday conference before the SF WorldCon. The planning of the book proceeds nicely; so does the text, but now it’s time for some text only I can write. We need a big scene with most of the characters in the book and a good bit of technical detail. And a large expository lump; I generally do those and have since MOTE. And I’ve got to work on LisaBetta with DeChancie. And there’s always Mamelukes. I’ll be in fiction mode a while if I don’t starve. Of course starvation is no bad incentive for a writer to work.

We had some interesting experiences getting Live Writer, which is an intermediate step in getting this journal into publication, installed on Swan, the Windows 10 machine we’ve set up so I can work at night in the back room with disturbing my wife. It’s a relatively fast machine with a big 27” monitor, and a Logitech K360 keyboard just like the one on Alien Artifact (the main machine I write this on).

The names come from their appearance: both are Thermaltake cases, and the cases are elegant but somewhat ornate. Not unappealing; just a bit startling. They are both over a year old, and while more costly than plainer cases, they justify the extra money by being quiet and cool with plenty of power, as well as being convenient to work with. Swan may have been brought up as Windows 8 – frankly I forget – but has been Windows 10 since the developer test program existed, and is now just plain Windows 10. I have to say I am becoming rapidly more fond of 10, and I would upgrade my Windows 7 system to it except for a few reservations.

One is Total Annihilation, which worked on Swan with Windows 10, but won’t now: that is, the program runs, but not all of it is on screen. Some driver has been improved, and that made it unusable. While that game is not a vital necessity, what else won’t run? I use some pretty old programs because they work. One is DiskMapper, which I am pleased to say works just fine even though it was developed for Windows NT! I just used it to find and annihilate some redundant programs and data files on Precious, the Surface Pro 3, and it works quite well.

Anyway, the story of Live Writer is interesting, and you’ll find it in Chaos Manor Reviews along with much other good stuff http://chaosmanorreviews.com/ . Be sure to go look at CMR if you haven’t lately.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/electric-car-aid-acid-test-1439249158

Electric Car-Aid Acid Test

Forcing poor rate-payers to subsidize green autos for the rich.

To the list of subsidies for elite lifestyles in the name of fighting climate change, you can now add charging stations for luxury plug-in cars and other electric vehicles. A growing number of states are forcing all consumers to pay for these green amenities that only a fraction of them will ever use.

The fleet of battery-powered cars is rising, and their owners are more than twice as wealthy as most Americans. An Experian Automotive study found that more than 20% of them are middle-aged professionals who make more than $175,000 a year. But deploying the new equipment to keep these affluent drivers on the go isn’t cheap, and states and power companies are starting to socialize the cost of these green frills over all rate-payers.

Historically in the regulated electric markets, public utility commissions have allowed utilities to recover only the costs of “fair, just and reasonable” capital investments that benefit everyone. This is the sensible principle of “user pays.” Now regulators are demolishing this barrier and inserting the tab for charging stations into higher electric rates, regardless of a consumer’s income or the kind of car he happens to drive. <snip>

More concessions to the ruling class. Madame Defarge is watching. And knitting…

My new story collection is out in paperback. At one time SF was dominated by short fiction. No more. But I think we’ve lost sight of something amid the flurry of novels. Stories, especially fantastic stories, have a keener edge if they are short and to the point. They can cut deeper, probe more pointedly. They can also vouchsafe epiphanies and other bursts of illumination. They can suggest offbeat worlds that spring into existence like virtual particles. Besides, they are not huge investments of writing time. If one doesn’t sell, you’ve not wasted a year or more. Just a few of the many reasons I continue to perfect the art of short fiction.

Far Cries: Collected Stories: John DeChancie: 9781514179208: Amazon.com: Books

John

John is of course my collaborator on LisaBetta which is a novel proceeding quite nicely. I don’t disagree with his analysis of the market, and of course Niven writes short stories; but it’s not my cup of tea. I have a few, but I always found that when I had a story idea it came out better in 50,000 words or more; and when I first got into this racket, 50 to 60 thousand words was a novel; there weren’t so many 100,000 word novels. But I never did work on short stories. I wish I had some.

The Starborn 

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

This isn’t directly related to your question, but I think it worth mentioning even so.

In church on Sunday I spoke  to a woman who had fertility problems, so she had her eggs harvested. Since she was determined that all fertilized embryos would be brought to term if possible, they created 8 fertilized embryos , and put them in the freezer until such time as it was possible to try to carry them.

8 embryos, 3 survived pregnancy, and now she has three lovely girls. Ironically, though the oldest and youngest girl are about seven years apart physically, the were *conceived at the same time*  — it’s just that the years that the oldest was developing , the other spent in a freezer. 
It made me wonder — we often talk about cold-sleep as one way to travel between stars. While the techniques to induce long-term hibernation in adult human beings are under development, the techniques to hibernate fertilized embryos exist * today *.
I was wondering if that might be another way to start an interstellar colony — to ship the colonists as frozen embryos.  This would require some kind of ‘caretaker’ to thaw them out and raise them up into functioning adults, either a robot crew or a generation ship “caretaker” family, a family of priests, as your other commenter mentioned, who could maintain their lives and their teachings, passing them through the generations, until planetfall, at which point it would be their jobs to literally act as mothers and fathers to the newly thawed colonists.
This would naturally make the caretakers a literal aristocracy which might cause friction among their children — especially if, several hundred years down the line, there is no more obvious difference between thawed and caretaker, but the caretakers still retain their privileges. Sequel fodder?
In any event, I would suggest that teaching in interstellar colonies will look remarkably like the teaching methods we have used to date. Reason: As you have argued in other books,  it isn’t practical to maintain a high-technology civilization on a new colony.  So until a new industrial base can be created, humans will have to use sustainable resources. Horses instead of tractors.  Animal labor in place of machines. Mechanical calculators and abacus devices instead of electronic calculators. They may eventually develop the tools to build the tools to create such things , but until they do any kind of sophisticated memory transfer technology will have to wait — or be the privilege of the caretaker family.
Some thoughts and ideas. I hope they are useful!
Respectfully,

Brian P.

This is an important theme in our new series on the first interstellar colony. There never will be all that many adults in the first years of a colony; what the children are taught is all they will know. We address these problems

thanks & grab bag

Dear Jerry: 
I haven’t checked in in quite a while, been dealing with some health issues of my own (nothing near as serious as yours but debilitating nonetheless), so there are a number of things:
First, a huge roaring THANK YOU for posting the link to the video of the Feynman lectures!!!
I’ve been a huge Feynman fan since hearing SURELY YOU’RE JOKING, MR. FEYNMAN! on public radio’s Radio Reader 20 some years ago.  Remember Dick Estelle and how good he was?
Anyway I’ve tried to plow through the hard copy of the Lectures, but never got far.  The videos are an absolute treat, and in my opinion a national treasure (maybe after Windows ME and Vista Bill Gates CAN still get into Heaven).
But that voice!  I’d never heard Feynman speak before.  If he wasn’t consciously channeling Ralph Kramden on the Honeymooners he and Jackie Gleason must have grown up within a few blocks of each other.
It gives a whole new meaning to “To the moon, Alice!”  Or it’s like Fred Flintstone waking up one day with a genius-level IQ.
Anyway, many thanks.
Computer stuff:
NEW DESKTOP:  I can’t believe how much computer you can buy these days for $1200.  I recently got a new ASUS desktop from Best Buy (model CG5290) which comes with Intel Core i7 CPU @ 2.66Ghz, NINE gigabytes of fast DDR3 memory, a Hitachi terabyte HD spinning at 7200 RPM, and an nVidia GTX 260 with 892MB of dedicated video memory, plus a ton of ports, DVD, etc.  The only thing missing from my perspective was wifi, which I solved with a Belkin USB “N” adapter which works slicker than a smelt.
What’s this got to do with you?  Well, only that you were right: given enough horsepower – as in EIGHT cores and NINE gigs of memory – Vista64 doesn’t suck dead bunnies performance-wise any more.  On this machine it starts and stops and is about as responsive as my bottom line Mac Mini running OS X.  Happy happy joy joy!
But the ASUS is a sweet machine for the bucks, I don’t know how much you’d spend building the equivalent desktop but as my time is valuable (at least to me) I’m happy with the bargain I made.
DEVICE OF THE DECADE: well, maybe not, but I wanted to get your attention.  Maybe you know about the Thermaltake Blacx bare drive docking stations already; if so skip this.  If not I think one of these devices might be the answer to your storage and backup prayers.  Take a quick peek here:  Thermaltakeusa » Storage » BlacX
I’m sure like me you have a multiplying stable of bare drives hanging around not doing much: the BlacX easily and cheaply puts them back to work.  Even if not why buy external drives and keep paying for the case, controller, and cables with each and every one?  I just picked up a Hitachi terabyte bare drive, OEM edition (but 7200 RPM + 16MB cache) for $74.95 on Amazon.
I would think this could be the perfect solution for your backup needs as I’m sure you’re constantly rotating drives to and from offsite storage.  Works with both laptop and desktop bare drives, and the eSATA model means your data transfers are going to be many times faster than either USB 2 or even FireWire 800.  As somebody I know would say, “HIGHLY Recommended.”  Shop around, I got mine from Amazon for $43.38, a hefty slice off list price.
NIFTY NEW PRODUCT:  Intel has released the second generation of their top-line X25M SSD drives, and I have a 160GB on order.  The price is down from nearly $700 to $500, and according to Anandtech the speed and reliability are up.  Be careful to get the “G2” model.
MY NEW FAVORITE KEYBOARD:  Logitech’s Illuminated.  Great touch, four levels of key illumination, sleek looks, well thought out set of added “function” keys, what’s not to like?
WORLD OF WARCRAFT GOODY:  So how’s your Pally doing?  I’ve got three 80s now and two 70s on their way up, all classes.  Obviously I play way too much, but I don’t hardly turn on the TV any more, so…
Anyway the new goody is Logitech’s G13 game board.  Comes with a very nicely thought out WoW profile, auto-detects the game, and I find it very much more comfortable for long sessions than any regular flat keyboard.  A little pricey but if it saves me from carpel tunnel?  Check it out here: Logitech > Keyboards > Keyboards > G13 Advanced Gameboard
QUESTION OF THE MONTH:  Windows 7?  Why?  Sure it’s a bit faster and prettier, but where’s the beef?  Hopefully if you know you’ll share in a column soon.
Okay, I’ve taken enough of your time, I hope this finds you well and you find some of this useful and/or humorous, as ever all the best,
Tim

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/mail/2009/Q3/mail579.html#Feynman

I have one of the Thermaltake drive connectors on Swan, and I just got five 4 terabyte drives…

Dr Pournelle

RE: TFX @ https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/still-in-fiction-mode-slave-prices/

This is the story of the TFX and me.

I was 6 years old. We had moved to the ranch in the summer. That winter, I walked out the back door and headed for the barn to pull out bales and hay the cattle.

At this time, General Dynamics was experimenting with the TFX at their Fort Worth plant. All their flights were secret, and they never flew the same route twice.

I heard a noise and looked to the southwest. I saw two jets in fingertip formation approaching at a high rate of speed. I estimate that they flew 50 feet off the deck. They traversed from my right to my left and passed within 300 feet of me. They popped over the ridge to the northwest and disappeared from my sight.

All the while the wingman was doing slow rolls.

At that moment, I knew I wanted to be an Air Force pilot. Took me 20 years from that point, but I made it.

Live long and prosper

h lynn keith

I was on the preliminary design team for TFX and had a minor part in the strategic analysis showing that a single design couldn’t do all the missions required of air power. Eleven military boards awarded TFX to Boeing, but the contract went elsewhere; the common appellation for the F-111 was the LBJ. The F-111 was a good recce/strike and battlefield interdiction plane, and one of them could generally accomplish more (for those missions) than 8 sorties by other aircraft; but of course it wasn’t a match for MIGS in air to air combat.

http://randomthoughtsandguns.blogspot.com/2015/07/excerpts-from-emails-with-friend.html

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

Chaos Manor View, Tuesday, August 11, 2015

I had dinner with colleagues last night and a lunch conference today; still mostly in fiction mode. Now it’s dinner time.

The Chester Creek Wireless Visionboard is useless for me; the keys are larger but not separated so that I often hit two at once, and the alt key is right next to the space bar and far over to the right, so hitting alt along with space is nearly inevitable. Alt-Space does odd things to Word, and endangers all your text if you then hit the wrong sequence; since I have to look at the keyboard rather than the screen it is extremely dangerous, but with the Chester Creek it is damn near inevitable. I have retired the Chester Creek. Incidentally, it requires a screwdriver to install or replace the batteries, and the receiver seems somewhat delicate and squirrelly.

It is dinner time – I got up late and then had lunch with John De Chancie to discuss LisaBetta, our novel of an AI using near future when we are just reaching to the asteroids. LisaBetta is a young girl just reaching puberty who has mostly been raised by an advanced AI. She owns her father’s asteroid mining ship, but it is very advanced and the object of desire to a number of powerful people… It reads damned good so far, and now that I can type I can add some scenes myself as well as touch up the excellent work John has done. We look to finish it by the end of the year.

And Eric found the reason Live Writer started to install on Swan, the Windows 10 machine in the back room, so I can add to this tonight. With the Logitech K360 I make far fewer typos per sentence – too many, especially when I am tired or enthusiastic about what I am writing. Then I see all that red on the screen when I glance up, and have to fix it, and by then I have to rethink what I was saying. It slows things a lot.

With luck a lot more later; the batteries in my hearing aid just died, and it’s dinner time.

Currency War

China fired another shot in the ongoing currency war:

<.>

High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights.http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/444c5bc8-3fca-11e5-9abe-5b335da3a90e.html#ixzz3iYWfgzZK

China on Tuesday carried out the biggest devaluation of the renminbi in two decades to boost its slowing economy, marking an escalation of international “currency wars”, surprising markets and risking a political clash with Washington.

The 1.9 per cent downward move by the central bank was its biggest one-day change since 1993 — and since China abandoned its tight currency peg for a managed float in 2005. It pushed the renminbi’s “daily fix” to Rmb6.2298 against the dollar, compared with a Rmb6.1162 rate the day before. Before Tuesday, the biggest shift this year had been a 0.16 per cent adjustment.

The move, coming as economic growth has flagged and the currency has been under upward pressure from its informal peg to the rising dollar, is in sharp contrast to policy during earlier times of stress when Beijing resisted pressure to devalue. It should help combat an unexpectedly large fall in China’s exports fuelled by the renminbi’s relative strength.

It also came as China is pushing to have the renminbi accepted as a global reserve currency alongside the dollar, yen, euro and sterling by the International Monetary Fund, which this month cited the need for great exchange rate flexibility as a key requirement.

</>

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/444c5bc8-3fca-11e5-9abe-5b335da3a90e.html#axzz3iYVh35TL

The average person has no idea what this means. So China is devaluing its currency; why should I care? Oddly enough, Trump is calling it:

<.>

“They’re just destroying us,” the billionaire businessman, a long-time critic of China’s currency policy, said in a CNN interview.

“They keep devaluing their currency until they get it right. They’re doing a big cut in the yuan, and that’s going to be devastating for us.”

<..>

“We have so much power over China,” he told CNN. “China has gotten rich off of us. China has rebuilt itself with the money it’s sucked out of the United States and the jobs that it’s sucked out of the United States.”

</>

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/11/presidential-candidate-trump-china-devaluation-will-devastate-us.html

I suppose now they’ll accuse him of being racist for these comments.

I’m not a Trump supporter, but I’m either not supporting or am directly opposing the others as well..

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Here’s Eric on Live Writer and Windows 10:

    Essentially, it came down to downloading the correct file to start the install. For reasons that defy my understanding, Microsoft has never done a good job on how they manage the Live suite of apps. My impression is they regarded it more as something for OEMs to bundle with new PCs, like the MS Works suite of yore, and didn’t put the proper effort into presenting it to individuals downloading the product.

    There were three major generations, 2009, 2011, and 2012. The earliest does not like post-XP versions of Windows. The middle version was intended for Vista, and the last version for 7 and 8.x. It was odd for a Microsoft program to display such compatibility issues but there it is. The 2011 version never gave me problems on Windows 7 but the only portion I used extensively is the Mail app, which has a long history as Outlook Express.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-live/download-windows-essentials#wetabs=we2012

    Microsoft pulled the earlier versions from download availability but they are still offered on numerous sites that are likely to show up in search. They’re hard to distinguish because they always have the same wlsetup.exe file name, rather than carrying some clue to their version up front. Some people are still obsessively attached to the 8.3 file naming convention.

    So, I made sure I was downloading the 2012 version and it simply worked. Notably, it showed a different icon than the one downloaded to Swan previously. The .NET 3.5 runtime must have been installed on Swan at some point because it didn’t ask for it as it did on my Windows 10 test machine a few days earlier.

And I can only say that I thought I was dealing with the official Microsoft site on Explorer not Firefox, and I got impossibly stuck; thank Eric for knowing what to do.

Eric Pobirs

Adjusted Sunspot Activity

It had to happen eventually. If the data don’t prove what you want it to prove, “recalibrate”.

“New sunspot analysis shows rising global temperatures not linked to solar activity”

“A recalibration of data describing the number of sunspots and groups of sunspots on the surface of the Sun shows that there is no significant long-term upward trend in solar activity since 1700”

(http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2015/aug/07/new-sunspot-analysis-shows-rising-global-temperatures-not-linked-to-solar-activity)

How very – predictable.

Braxton Cook

Predictable and predicted.

Lord of Janissaries

Part of my Baen monthly bundle.
Previously read the first two books and looking forward to reading the full series when Mamelukes is finished.
Glad to see your health improving.
I know from experience how difficult it is, I was 36 years old and battled stage 4 cancer for a year. Now at 69, the battle would be three times as hard.

Bud Pritchard

A random thought to be thunk upon

A bit of random speculation, not really deserving of publication…

On the one hand, we have the EM Drive, which appears to do something for which we have no theory whatsoever, and which threatens to be real.

On the other hand, we have the E-CAT, which appears to do something else for which we have very little theory, and which also threatens to be real.

Imagine the implications for humanity if BOTH of them turn out to be real.

The Solar System is ours, immediately.  With that come unlimited resources.  The E-CAT provides the power to get there, and do Interesting Things once you’re there.  The EM Drive provides the way to get there.

More interestingly, we gain access to flatter space, and much longer baselines, for doing physics experiments.  (“Pioneer anomaly”, anyone?)  What do you get if you build a REALLY BIG Michelson-Morley interferometer?

–John

It would be wonderful, but we still have not proved either is real; now, though, there are some grounds for hope.

This modification is a test

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