Chaos Manor View, Tuesday, May 05, 2015

Had several days of funk, read old Agatha Christie books and did little else, but I did keep up on my exercises. Today I put on my 2 pound ankle weights and walked down to what used to be Corvallis, about ¾ mile round trip. Broken sidewalks are a little tricky, and I think I’ll get one of those walkers with four wheels for outside the house. Not sure which one. But I much enjoyed the walk.

John is here for a story conference and lunch, so I will leave this for later. It is depressing that we are back to MAD and thinking about the unthinkable.

`

US policy toward Iran, get any kind of deal at any cost, ensures that Iran will get the bomb; and our policy toward Russia pretty well ensures that Russia will place Iran under some kind of nuclear umbrella. Meanwhile, the Iranian Supreme leaders make it clear that it is the Will of Allah that if Iran can destroy Israel, Iran must do so; and that it is the duty of the Faithful to bring about End Days if they can. The selection process for choosing the Ayatollahs to be added to the Council that selects Supreme Leaders makes it certain that all of them believe this.

Putin is rational and knows this; the US State Department officially believes that to believe this is racist, or at least bigoted.

President Putin knows this as well. Being rational, he also knows that he plays a dangerous game, and that we are back in the Cold War again, where nuclear deterrence is important. He also knows that if Iran nukes Tel Aviv, there will be enormous pressure from Americans –- Christian and Jew alike – to nuke Iran into the Stone Age. Can he deter this? In particular, would a limited strike against the US deterrent, against the war fighting capability of the US – the ground based missiles and the bombers – thus disarming the US with a million or more casualties, but sparing the cities – cause the US, now helpless, to forgo using the submarine city busters on Iran?

Of course this is a convoluted scenario, and is only one of many, but it is needed: it is time to rethink thinking about the unthinkable; and there are many details, including career paths for those manning the second strike force; building a second strike war fighting capability which can survive a first strike against it, or at least present the credible threat of survival and launching a disarming counterstrike without harming large Russian cities. We’ve disarmed you. Now we take out Iran. Stand Down or else.

Another scenario. And there are many others. Mutual Assured Deterrence – MAD – rises again when we rethink the unthinkable; and we have no choices. Iran will have the bomb not long after the next President takes office.

I note that NORAD has reclaimed Cheyenne Mountain. We have no SAC, and no Lemay to build one; perhaps we should find one, poste haste. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/05/04/military-eyeing-former-cold-war-mountain-bunker-as-shield-against-emp-attack/

It is 1964 again, and we must redesign the force as we did then. It was my first major assignment in strategic planning: I was editor of Project 75, a compilation of everything we knew about ballistic missile technology and evaluation of force structure alternatives. One conclusion was that we needed higher ICBM accuracy, and to get that we needed better guidance at lower weight, which meant massive investment in Large Scale Integrated Circuits; larger yields and bigger missiles would not give us a war fighting capability. We had to plan and design in 1964 in order to have a survivable second strike force in the future.

Now it is 2014. We need to start planning now, because we will soon have no survivable second strike force. We must rebuild SAC.

If the US State Department cannot understand this, we must be sure that Putin can and does.

running from the police

Dear Mr. Pournelle:
I’ve been thinking about your comment that it is in general not a good idea to run from the police. I’m in part concerned because I’m seeing elsewhere some tendency to argue “well, it was their own fault they’re dead”; and I don’t think that leads us in good directions. But I think the issue is worth discussing.
A first question would be: how much do you trust the police?
A second could be: how much is at stake? For you?
It seems that, in some communities, people have come to expect that any interaction with the police is dangerous; and that your innocence or guilt is of only marginal importance. Reframe the question: would you run from an armed mugger, or submit? Some measure of trust is essential.
The second question turns out complicated. I’ve recently read articles pointing out that, for people without money, “deadbeat dad” laws are producing perverse results. In many states, you are *presumed* to be able to pay child support; evidence of your actual salary is irrelevant, the law presumes you make an average wage. Therefore if you do *not* pay child support, you are a deadbeat; therefore you are arrested, put in jail, and you lose your job… Debtor’s prison, anyone?
In such a situation, it would be not unreasonable to fear that any interaction with the police will escalate. You’ve been stopped in traffic? Now your child support comes up on the screen; and now your life crashes and burns. Running, I think, seems less insane.
I think this question is going to be difficult. I tend to trust the police, and would be much inclined to follow their instructions. But then I’ve never been given any reason to think that they are anything other than my defenders, who deserve my respect. On the other hand, it seems clear there are communities who have been given many reasons to think of the police otherwise.
This is not a stable situation, let alone just. Resolving it is important. I am inclined to think that most of the opportunities for resolving it rest with the police and with governments, not because “it’s their fault” but because they have actions and decisions available which could be productive. And of course, beyond that, as citizens who are *not* afraid of the police, it is our responsibility also.
Yours,
Allan E. Johnson

Avoiding the police is often a good idea.  Actually running from them is not likely to be successful, particularly if you leave property behind.  Your points are valid, of course.

If you have nothing better to do, here is a very old piece that is still funny: Dogs in Elk http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/dogsinelk.html#Follow

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

Tuesday, May 05, 2015

For some reason the formatting on this went insane. I did it all over with a different title; same text. Apologies, I haven’t time to figure out what happened.

Chaos Manor View Friday, May 01, 2015

Another day devoured by locusts, and it’s dinner time.

I am deliberately not commenting on the Baltimore situation. It’s clear we don’t enough. One thing is clear: not only is it a bad idea to throw excrement at an armed man, but it is general not a good idea to run from the police.

Back after dinner, I  hope.

Firefox reset

Hi Jerry.

Just want to thank you for posting the Firefox reset link:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-add-ons-and-settings

My computer (a four-year-old MacBook Pro) hasn’t been behaving properly since some add-on I didn’t even know was installed (Trusteer) had tried to update itself in Firefox a couple of weeks back. I tried to stop it from updating, but…not sure what happened at that point. Everything was slow and clunky, and memory was always maxed out. Couldn’t get the recommended solutions to work. The reset link seems to have done the trick!

Thanks!

Mike Casey

I took the morning to try it myself. It took a while to reinstall colorful Tabs, Tab Mix Plus, and Close Button – the three add-ons that make it easier to use Firefox – but eventually I managed. One bit of advice: if you listen to the radio using the web, open it in a new window making it easier to find; and close that window before closing Firefox. That makes it easier for Session Manager to restore your Firefox. The Close Button add-on puts a small close tab button in addition to the Close Firefox button op on the tool bar, and if your eyesight is as bad as linr it makes it easier to close the current tab.

EM drive

The “test” of the EM drive reminded me of something from my undergraduate days.
A scientist reported that he had found a way to extract energy from a static magnetic field. His apparatus consisted of a magnet, a holder for a drop of some iron compound dissolved in water (I’ve forgotten the compound), and a microscope through which to view the drop. Indeed, the drop could be seen to be rotating. Everyone else who replicated the experiment got the same results.
Eventually it was determined that the stage light for the microscope was heating the drop and causing a convection current.
Ever since I’ve been cautious about accepting results when the “replication” uses an identical setup. It may simply be repeating the built-in error of the original setup.

Joseph P. Martino

Whatever it is it is not convection currents in a vacuum

Seems the EmDrive passed another test.

Evaluating NASA’s Futuristic EM Drive | NASASpaceFlight.com

Evaluating NASA’s Futuristic EM Drive | NASASpaceFligh… Follow @NASASpaceFlight Home Forums L2 Sign Up ISS Commercial Shuttle SLS/Orion Russian European Chinese Unmanned Other
View on www.nasaspacefligh…	Preview by Yahoo

jd

email scam

I just encountered a very sophisticated email scam.

It would appear that the scammers have compromised 1 or more email servers.
I got an email purportedly from a friend that they were stuck somewhere and someone had stolen their luggage.
The “from” email was a hotmail account, but I know a yahoo account for that person so using another email system entirely I sent a query to the yahoo account.
The scammer responded with more cries for help. I began to wonder and called my friend to be sure.
Several others of his friends had got the same email.

I’m not at all sure how they could intercept my reply, but whatever they are doing, they are good at it.
Be careful out there. The bad guys are getting better at what they do.

Chris Barker

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

Chaos Manor View Thursday, April 30, 2015

This morning I got spam telling me that “stated income- it’s back & it’s legal”. I don’t know if it is a scam as well as spam, but given that we’re in a Depression— I know, officially we are recovering from the Great Recession; believe that if you like—and either way it’s a bit frightening. Wasn’t TARP, son of TARP, grandson of TARP, and all the special subsidies enough? We’ve spent enough to end poverty and then some if the money had actually gone to poor people, but apparently it wasn’t enough—although the service employment union members ought to be happy.

I started that paragraph at 1045. It is now 1523 and I just finished it. Most of that time was taken because I had a 1300 appointment with physical therapy, where I learned that I am not ready to try a cane instead of walker and wheel chair, but we didn’t leave until 1210 so that wasn’t what kept me from writing it.

When I got to TARP in the paragraph above I went to Firefox to look up TARP – and discovered that I would be searching with ASK. I had no desire to search with ASK, or Yahoo for that matter. I had noticed that somehow Firefox had made the inefficient Yahoo engine my default, but I hadn’t taken the time to do something about it, I just lived with the fleas. But ASK, as far as I can tell, is the real thing real live Malware, worse than fleas and liable to infect everything.

So I stopped writing about TARP and searched “how the hell do I remove the ASK search engine?” You get different results depending on the search engine you use.

Then I sent a help message to my advisors,

I have ASK in my Firefox.  Looking for how to get back to Google, I found this:

http://www.removeware.com/remove.php?malware=Ask&download=3081bm-partners&gclid=CJaJ5fzFnsUCFdSTfgod7FQA7g

Should I or is this more trouble??

Does what it says about ask bear some relation to the truth?

Jerry Pournelle
Chaos Manor

And got back

    Most likely came as part of a Java update. MalwareBytes should do the trick.

    My rule: ALWAYS do a custom install to make sure you have the choice to refuse ‘extras’ that otherwise get automatically installed.

Eric [Pobirs]

And from Peter Glaskowsky

What Eric said, plus this:

Don’t download from that link! It’s going to give you a different malware package (SpyHunter) that is a bit scammy. Not as scammy as some others, but it’s grief you don’t want.

Generally, Googling for solutions to specific malware problems is a good way to find more malware, since the bad actors blanket the Web with deceptive offers and Astroturfed “reviews.” They figure people who have one infestation are probably vulnerable to more.

I notice that Mozilla.org itself recommends using the “Refresh Firefox” feature to fall back to a factory-fresh state while preserving saved bookmarks, passwords, and cookies as well as the state of open windows. This method also resets some advanced features such as modified preferences and security settings, so you have to be careful with it.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-add-ons-and-settings

.              png

Needless to say I hadn’t done anything other than send that message; meanwhile over on the Surface Pro 3 there was available a whole new build, so I started downloading that. Then I looked up MalwareBytes, and downloaded that. They offer both a free and a “professional” version, and I’m perfectly willing to pay for what I’m using, but they don’t tell me how much I’m to pay! Flog that. I downloaded the “free” copy, and at every stage they exhorted me to upgrade to the professional, but still neglected to say how much; finally came a screen that said only pennies a day, but that might be 99 pennies a day for 365 days a year; anyway I didn’t know and I didn’t want more hassle, I took the free version.

It installed fine, but it was running before it told me it advised shutting down all programs. I let it run while I saved all my Word files, and open Outlook stuff, and shut those down, then shut down Firefox. I must have got it done in time because at the end it showed several ASK programs it wanted to dismiss, as well as some others I never heard of. I let it do that, and now, with all the programs shut down, ran MalwareBytes again. This time it took about ten minutes, and found nothing significant. I now fired up Microsoft Security Essentials and let that do a quick scan and started opening programs. They all seemed normal, and the ASK stuff was gone from Firefox, and it was time to go to physical therapy.

It went well, if a bit exhausting. I do not yet have the balance I need to rely on a cane rather than as walker, but there are plenty of reasons to hope. I just have to do the exercises and build confidence: I have the strength, just not the balance. Of course I had almost no balance before the stroke; the radiation treatment that made me a brain cancer survivor took care of that. I do hope to get to where I was before the stroke, which was with a cane, nor a walker. Wish me luck.

When we got back I discovered I’d got rid of ASK but not Yahoo, and searching for how to get rid of that led me to settings, and I set the default search engine as I usually do – Bing is not an option – and of course nothing happened. Still have Yahoo. To get Google I have to Yahoo Google and click on Google, which is annoying. I’m about to give up on Firefox and join the dark side. And of course Session Manager lost all my open windows, so I wasted more time restoring some of them.  I am really annoyed.

And it’s getting late. Another day devoured by locusts, the chief locust being Mozilla Firefox and their love affair with Yahoo. I am quite annoyed.

As to what I started to write, I don’t think I need to tell you just how poor an idea “stated income” as a basis for home loans is.

emdrive works in hard vacuum

Jerry, you were kind enough to publish my article regarding the EmDrive back in the beginning of August, 2014.  The following is excerpted from nasaspaceflight.com (a site not affiliated with Nasa):

April 29 2015
“Paul March, an engineer at NASA Eagleworks, recently reported in NASASpaceFlight.com’s forum that NASA has successfully tested their EM Drive in a hard vacuum – the first time any organization has reported such a successful test.

To this end, NASA Eagleworks has now nullified the prevailing hypothesis that thrust measurements were due to thermal convection.”

The full article is here:
http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/04/evaluating-nasas-futuristic-em-drive/

Jerry, I fully understand the skepticism that such a game changing space drive generates.

But the evidence is mounting; and there comes a time when we should seriously examine the claims, and not dismiss them out of hand.

To quote an earlier scientist, from another time:
“Eppur si muove”… “And yet, it moves.”

Regards, Charlie

Variable G 

Jerry,

Regarding this item from you Tuesday view:

http://physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.com/

Stephanie and I have (briefly) consulted, which is certainly not the same thing as an analysis, but we’re both certain that if Newton’s constant G were variable in the amount suggested by this article, it would be evident in the changes in the light curve of nearby stars (including the Sun) during the period of historical telescope observations.

Jim

It’s a small, small world.

<http://www.computerworld.com/article/2915904/it-outsourcing/fury-rises-at-disney-over-use-of-foreign-workers.html>

Roland Dobbins

The Tyranny of One Man’s Opinion.

<http://www.unz.com/anapolitano/the-tyranny-of-one-mans-opinion/>

Roland Dobbins

Hello Jerry,

You followed Mike’s note yesterday on the impact of ‘big data’ on science with this:

“And to climate scientist “peers” the models are more important than the evidence.”

I sent this to Dr. Curry yesterday and thought that it may be relevant: 

“I was reading the comments on the course on ‘Making Sense of Climate Denial’ and followed matthewrmarler’s link  (April 28, 2015 @ 2:31 PM) to RealClimate:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2015/04/an-online-university-course-on-the-science-of-climate-science-denial/

. 

Reading the article and associated comments on RealClimate accomplished a few things:

a.  Convinced me that CAGW truly poses an existential threat, in that the people with the mind set demonstrated by the commenters on RealClimate are in charge of setting our energy and ‘climate change’ policies, as well as the policies in virtually every other aspect of the societies which make up what is loosely known as ‘Western Civilization’.

b.  Showed that there is a subset of ‘climate denialists’ with at least one member (me) who came by their ‘denialism’ via a mechanism not addressed by the usual Koch funding/big oil/creationism/AM Radio propaganda/etc  theories postulated by the authors and commenters on ‘RealClimate’.

That would be the one by which a person who is not an official ‘scientist’, but who has worked in technical fields all their life, examines a whole bunch of proclamations from the ‘experts’, notices that the ones concerning subjects about which he DOES have some technical knowledge appear to be patent BS, and concludes that the remaining proclamations are ALSO more than likely to be patent BS. 

Examples:

‘Annual Temperature of the Earth (TOE) warmest since records began in 1880!  Smashes previous record (by a few hundredths of a degree)!

This implies that we can place the years since 1880 in rank order of their TOE.

This in turn implies that since 1880 we have had an instrumentation system place that can determine the TOE with a precision and accuracy that makes anomalies of a few hundredths of a degree statistically meaningful.

I don’t believe either.  I am willing to bet that two teams of climate experts cannot INDEPENDENTLY deploy data collection systems to my county in Northern VA using their choice of instrumentation, collect data for a year, determine the ‘annual temperature of my county’, and have the two readings agree within a few hundredths of a degree.  I definitely do not believe that the planetary temperature archives allow the TOE in the 19th century to be determined with anything like hundredths of a degree precision.  When someone claims that they CAN, and that public policy should be founded on their claim, my BS Detector detonates.

‘Ocean heat content has risen by 27e22 joules since 1957!’:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/09/what-ocean-heating-reveals-about-global-warming/    )

That is an average increase of around 5e21 joules/year, which certainly sounds like a lot. 

And it is, until you realize that that enormous amount of heat is enough to raise the temperature of the top 2000m of oceans by a few millidegrees.  Over 50+ years.

Since heat content of the oceans is determined by the specific heat of seawater (highly variable with temperature and salinity) and its temperature, the graph provided implies that we have been able to measure the temperature of the top 2000 meters of the entire ocean with milli-degree precision since 1957.  The ‘experts’ may convince themselves that their data supports the graph; a guy like me, who has spent some time attempting to collect temperature data with ONE degree precision from a PID controlled, heavily insulated laboratory heat chamber—not so much. 

Not only do the experts claim that their planet wide ocean temperature measurements have millidegree precision over 50+ year timeframes, they further claim that the plotted millidegree anomalies can be attributed to ACO2 and that the anomalies are proof of looming catastrophe absent government mitigation policies.  According to Cook, 97% of non-insane, scientifically literate people believe all the above.  Mark me as an insane Luddite.

EVERY disaster, in any category, is attributed, at least in part, to ACO2.  The most recent of course the disastrous earthquake in Nepal:  http://dailycaller.com/2015/04/28/scientists-say-global-warming-will-cause-deadly-earthquakes/ .  All very plausible and certainly preventable with sufficient government control over ACO2. I’d believe it if I weren’t a mentally challenged ‘denier’.

I could go on ad infinitum but you get the idea.  When someone presents me with unrefuted and, more importantly, unrefutable ‘facts’ that clog up my BS detector, it seems reasonable to me to question other similar proclamations from the same sources about subjects about which I have no personal experience, especially when every single one of their ‘scientific’ products, the ones that I view with a jaundiced eye and the ones that I know little about,  are cited as justification for massive increases in taxes and government power, with concomitant decreases in personal autonomy.  Even MORE especially when the demands for government mitigation present NO evidence that the demanded policies will have measurable efficacy in controlling the climate in any way OR include any hint that any or all of the policies may have any NEGATIVE impacts. 

I am an old (government) retiree whose only interaction with oil companies is at the gas pump.  Which, by the way, they are still supplying at 25-30% of the price of water at the same gas station.  Consider the gyrations Exxon/Mobil has to perform to get the gas into my tank from three miles below the surface half a world away compared to Coke running the water from the public water system through a filter, putting it into a plastic bottle labeled ‘Dasani’, and charging three or four times the ‘ripoff price’ of gasoline.  Then consider that the folks setting the public policies in every important arena think that of the two, the oil companies are the ones ‘ripping them off. And shudder.

By the way, thanks for your efforts to introduce some sanity to the subject. 

Bob Ludwick”

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