Wednesday, February 22, 2017
“The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed across the entire world.”
Donald Trump
Between 1965 and 2011, the official poverty rate was essentially flat, while the government spending per person on poverty programs rose by more than 900% after inflation.
Peter Cove
Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for the West as it commits suicide.
James Burnham
If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.
Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana
It’s been a bit hectic today. Much of the day has been absorbed by administrative details. Since part of that was recording subscriptions – thank you! – I won’t say it was devoured by locusts; at least that part wasn’t. Alas, much of the rest is best described that way.
I did accomplish some fiction work, and Ryan and Kelly report that Roberta had an excellent session with the physical therapist, so the day actually went well.
I’ll probably keep Firefox. I like much of it, and now have a fix for the worst problem.
Firefox session save
Hi Jerry,
You might want to install the following Firefox add-on. I think it does what you want.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-manager/
Good Luck!Jose Tenembaum
On the machine in the back room, where I am now, I went to Firefox add-ons, looked around for a while and found the add-on called Session Manager, installed it, reset, and all was well; there is now an option in the tools menu to “Save Session”, and it does that.
I also installed it on Eugene, the main machine in the front office, and it works there too. Now I can always reset and restore to a recent session, and that’s enough to keep me experimenting with Firefox, which I’m used to. It would take me a while to ,master something else, and this is now Good Enough.
Now if I could just figure out a way to have an ASUS keyboard on the downstairs systems. The ASUS Zen keyboard is just right: big keys, well separated; but it’s attached to a ZenBook, which is a good computer but it’s still a laptop. Ah well. I’m slowly training these big machines to do autocorrection on many of the typing errors I make: those that have a unique answer to the question “what did he mean to type?”. Salas there are still a lot that have very ambiguous answers to that question. To do that, I must right click on the red underlined word; determine if I want an autocorrect to that nonsense, or if there are too many alternate words I might have meant; then, if I decide to autocorrect I select the nonsense, and go up to the ribbon. There I find a tiny lightning bolt icon. It’s there because weeks ago I used the tiny icon that looks like a hyphen with a down-arrow under it, and which displays “Customize Quick Access Toolbar” when you hover over it, and used that function to install AutoCorrect on that Quick Access Tool Bar. Punching that opens the AutoCorrect table, and there in the “replace me” area is my selected nonsense; I type into the cell next to it what I want that nonsense to become, being very careful to do it right, click add, and the click do it, and from now on I will never see the nonsense, nor will what it turns into be marked; which is why I have to be careful about this. But autocorrect does work, and I am slowly fixing my most common errors, which speeds up my productivity something wonderful.
Science
“The great problem with science as it is understood today is that authority more and more replaces evidence. The scientists themselves love that, of course, because it means you can’t question them. But the fact is that we should be questioning them everywhere they go because the whole notion of science is that it should be open to the idea of questioning the claims that you make.” – Tom Bethell
I say an article about “breakthrough technology” and it was about the next damn cell phone.
Whatever happened to our future? We’ve go down the tubes. >>>>> less, less, less, and less…
Roger Miller
I haven’t met Tom Bethell in years, but I continue to appreciate his work. Once, long enough ago that it was the Soviet Union, not Russia, I sat with Tom in Moscow in the International Hotel bar; we both carried Atari Portfolio computers, a long forgotten PC Compatible pocket computer that really worked; there is still nothing quite like it now, and I wish I still had mine. Alas I was a touch typist then, and the keys were tiny; you could only two finger the Portfolio. I could use mine to make notes and observations, but Tom banged out a 2000 word column while we enjoyed our cocktails. He is I think the only journalist I know who shares my affection for Petr Beckmann’s Einstein Plus Two theory.
His point is well taken. There’s too much authority and too little hard facts in much of science today. Well, actually there always has been, but with grant money flowing only to those who conform to the consensus it’s really bad now.
There follows a long scientific discussion. The essence of the news is given in the very first part; the rest is discussion. You will recognize some of the participants. Fair warning: it is long.
The earth’s mantle and British tabloids
Jerry,
Consider the article
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X16307543/#ec0040
Pervasive upper mantle melting beneath the western US
- Saswata Hier-Majumdera, , , Benoit Tauzinb
- a Department of Earth Sciences, Royal Holloway University of London, Egham, Surrey, TW20 0EX, UK
- b Laboratoire de Géologie de Lyon, Terre, Planètes, Environnement, Université de Lyon, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, CNRS UMR 5276, 2 rue Raphael Dubois, 69622 Villeurbanne Cedex, France
Abstract:
We report from converted seismic waves, a pervasive seismically anomalous layer above the transition zone beneath the western US. The layer, characterized by an average shear wave speed reduction of 1.6%, spans over an area of ∼1.8×106 km2∼1.8×106 km2 with thicknesses varying between 25 and 70 km. The location of the layer correlates with the present location of a segment of the Farallon plate. This spatial correlation and the sharp seismic signal atop of the layer indicate that the layer is caused by compositional heterogeneity. Analysis of the seismic signature reveals that the compositional heterogeneity can be ascribed to a small volume of partial melt (0.5 ± 0.2 vol% on average). This article presents the first high resolution map of the melt present within the layer. Despite spatial variations in temperature, the calculated melt volume fraction correlates strongly with the amplitude of P–S conversion throughout the region. Comparing the values of temperature calculated from the seismic signal with available petrological constraints, we infer that melting in the layer is caused by release of volatiles from the subducted Farallon slab. This partially molten zone beneath the western US can sequester at least 1.2×1017 kg1.2×1017 kg of volatiles, and can act as a large regional reservoir of volatile species such as H or C.<end>
(Article for purchase for $40, which I have not done…)
This sounds interesting, and makes me think of your past articles on Thomas Gold.
Now, I heard of this report by an item from the UK Daily Mail linked on the Drudge Report:
A huge well of molten carbon that would spell disaster for the planet if released has been found under the US.
Scientists using the world’s largest array of seismic sensors have mapped a deep-Earth area, covering 700,000 sq miles (1.8 million sq km).<snip>
What they found was a vast buried deposit of molten carbon, which produces carbon dioxide and other gases, situated under the Western US, 217 miles (350km) beneath the Earth’s surface.
As a result of this study, published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, scientists now believe the amount of CO2 in the Earth’s upper mantle may be up to 100 trillion metric tons. <snip>
In other words, the existence of a pool of liquefied carbon-based volatiles 217 miles below the earth’s surface (under the Rockies) creates a horrific risk of catastrophic global warming if it all oxidizes and mixes into the atmosphere.
Oh, wait…
“The deep carbon reservoir discovered will eventually make its way to the surface through volcanic eruptions and contribute to climate change albeit very slowly, but a sudden release could have dire consequences.”<snip>
One can only sigh and shake one’s head.
Jim Woosley
Subject: Re: The earth’s mantle and British tabloids
Reminds me of a fisk Charlie Martin did a few days back on the scare story some rag had published on the Fukushima radiation issue.
Might want to consider this as a technical Thursday post at According To Hoyt, or seeing if Charlie wants to put it up at Pajamas Media.
The best and most sensible response to all this fake science we are seeing so much of is exactly this sort of reasoned discussion. Not that the idiots will pay attention, but sensible folks just might.
Science is never “settled” damn it! Phenomena can be observed and recorded, theories to explain those observations can be proposed, but the nature of the science is always open to reasoned discussion.
On Feb 15, 2017, at 10:58 PM, Stephanie <VValkyrie@hotmail.com> wrote:
I don’t know how much the rest of you know about seismology, but it’s one of the reasons I picked up an undergrad minor in geology and did some graduate subspecialty work in geology, as well.
Seismology is really a form of optics; the very same rules apply, since you are looking at wave propagation, reflection, and refraction. (Having already just had the Optics sequence in the Physics dept., when I got to seismology in my Geology studies, I was better and faster than the Geology majors, because the concepts were all very familiar to me.) So there are various “types” of seismic waves, which is really just another way of saying they are polarized differently. (The only kind of wave that seismology has that optics doesn’t is the longitudinally-polarized wave — the acoustic wave. And so if you’ve studied acoustics, you even already have THAT.) Now the interesting thing is that certain of these wave polarizations create differing effects on the ground, and the budding science of seismology therefore named them accordingly. (A “shear wave,” which the article references, is a transverse body wave — the wave motion is perpendicular to the direction of motion, and it moves through an object like the Earth via elasticity within the object. It was named “shear” by geologists because it had a shearing effect upon structures when it arrived.)
However, just like in optics, when the medium changes, so does the refractive index. And just like in optics, the boundary between media creates a reflective surface, which in turn also generates additional polarized reflected waves. (Jim is probably familiar with this.) And this is what complicates the thing so much. But certain polarizations are easier to “read” than others, and they can tell us a lot about the various strata, including what state of matter they are in — liquids tend not to transmit some of those waves at all because, once inside the melt, they experience total internal reflection, and so you get a blank zone.
So we know when there is a blob of actual melt down there, because we get all reflections and no refraction through it to speak of. If it’s partly molten, you can get some refraction, but it tends to generate “mushy” surfaces.
The Farallon Plate is an ancient oceanic plate under what has become the Pacific Ocean. There are a few remnants of it left that have not yet been subducted under the North and South American plates; they’re most notable in the Cascadia Subduction Zone, where there are some triangular bits, now known as the Juan de Fuca Plate, and the adjacent Gorda Plate. Another notable remnant is the tongue-shaped plate (Cocos Plate) that forms the west coast of Central America, and the better-known Nazca Plate off the western South American coast. In all cases, the principal direction of motion takes them east and under the continental plates in intensive subduction zones. (It’s worth noting that these are serious quake zones, capable of generating monster quakes and tsunamis, in some cases equivalent to the Boxing Day quake/tsunami combo in 2004.) You can find out more about it by plugging in “Farallon Plate” to Wikipedia.
Now, it is also worth noting that there are volcanic and regular ranges that run parallel to, and just inland of, the west coast from Alaska/Canada all the way down to the tip of South America, and it is this subduction that is responsible for both types of ranges. Obviously the whole “big crunch” thing is responsible for the standard mountain ranges, in various forms. But since most crustal plates are a mixture of mineral types, and various families of minerals melt at different temperatures, as the plate is subducted, low-m.p. minerals melt out of the solid plate. Being liquid, they’re more buoyant and rise upward through whatever cracks and crevices and imperfections they can find, or force. When they reach the surface, blooie, volcano. Note also that the type of volcano changes as you move from coast inland; this is because, as you go farther inland, the plate being subducted is being shoved deeper and deeper into the mantle, encountering hotter and hotter temps, and thus melting out minerals with increasingly hotter melting points. This results in a separation of the minerals and corresponding chemical difference in the melts, in a smooth transition moving from coastal volcanoes and progressing inland. It’s been theorized that this is the reason why certain areas have more explosive volcanoes — the chemistry resulting from the melt leads to a more viscous lava, trapping the dissolved gases inside and allowing for pressure buildup.
There is also increasing evidence that the heat resulting from subduction was insufficient to fully melt the Farallon Plate, and the continental plates overrode the Farallon, which may have fragmented/faulted and “stacked up” in slabs under the continents. According to a NASA research group, a significant portion of the Farallon sank to the bottom of the mantle, and is much farther east, most likely under the eastern USA. (http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a002400/a002410/) The footprint area is quite considerable.
This research may also be, in part, the source of a recent news item I saw indicating that it was essentially confirmed that “fossil” fuels are NOT fossils; they are not produced via fossilized organic material (because those would have a preponderance of 14C, whereas it turns out that most petroleums/nat.gases have a preponderance of 13C).
That said, it strikes me that the Daily Fail (as I’ve heard some UK-dwellers term it) has once again gotten its science mixed up. I can’t tell for sure because the page doesn’t want to load and stay loaded, so I can’t finish reading the article. However, the Daily Mail article references the same area that the Science Direct article does. And the Daily Fail does link to the article that Jim specified from Science Direct.
They, of course, immediately focus on the fact that the Yellowstone supercaldera is supposedly in the middle of it. (I’d really love to know where they got their graphic, and how accurate it really is, relative to what they think they’re talking about.)
HOWEVER:
1) The DM article immediately assumes that the entire volume of “volatiles” is carbon, when the first volatile mentioned by the science paper is hydrogen. And even that is speculative, denoted by the phrase, “such as.”
1a) Typically the constituents of volcanic gases are: water vapor, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, nitrogen, methane, carbon monoxide, hydrogen, and several of the noble gases such as neon, helium, and argon. (Other gases may be found in trace quantities as well.) According to Wikipedia (and this matches my training), “The abundance of gases varies considerably from volcano to volcano. Water vapor is consistently the most common volcanic gas, normally comprising more than 60% of total emissions. Carbon dioxide typically accounts for 10 to 40% of emissions.”
2) The Yellowstone hotspot is separate from the Farallon Plate structures, and goes far down, into the mantle. Its upper regions have been 3-D mapped, and are not a part of the Farallon structures. More, it has a tracked geologic history of eruptions, with fossil calderas that can be traced back from its current location, regressing southwest all the way to the northeast corner of California. There is no indication of catastrophic gaseous emissions of which I am aware; the volume of ejecta ultimately came from much deeper. The danger from a Yellowstone eruption is in the massive blast which would devastate the area for at least 1-2 hundred miles in every direction, followed by the truly titanic volume of ash which would be pumped high into the atmosphere. There have been discoveries of fossilized, fully-articulated herd animals in mass deaths from acute silicosis as far east as, if memory serves, the vicinity of the Ohio River valley.
Is it possible for some of these volatiles to “leak” into the Yellowstone magma chamber? Sure it is. That’s how natural gas and petroleum gets around, after all, not to mention groundwater. But there are limits; impermeable strata effectively block such migrations (which is how artesian wells occur).
And frankly, if we have a Yellowstone eruption, we got way bigger, and much more immediate, problems than trying to figure out how much carbon dioxide the thing is belching.
~Stephanie Osborn, “The Interstellar Woman of Mystery”
http://www.Stephanie-Osborn.com
Award-winning author of the Division One, Gentleman Aegis, and Displaced Detective series
FWIW I got an email from one of Jerry’s blog readers earlier tonight, basically inviting me to visit Australia one of these days. Which I’d love to do. But he’s seen my moniker enough on Jerry’s blog to be interested in meeting me face to face, apparently. And to have visited my website and found the contact form.
But yeah, if Jerry isn’t interested, we could modify it for any or all of the other things you said. Or hell, for that matter, Jerry can put it up, get the “scoop,” and then we can maybe expand on it for an article for Sarah or for Instapundit or whatever/whoever. Sarah, are Instapundit and PJmedia the same thing? I never have quite understood the connex, if any…
Anyhow, y’all work out who wants dibs on posting it. I’m game and appreciate the exposure regardless. And am available for additional questions.
I’m not a pro geologist (though I thought about it at one point — I mean, goodness knows, I got all the other degrees), but when I visited the Johnston Ridge Observatory at St. Helens, well. I was fascinated, and I could watch the recording drums for the various seismo stations they had on the mountain, while WATCHING the mountain. So I’m standing there watching, and muttering, “Rock fall… rock fall…quake…phreatic eruption…rock fall…” as I interpret the graph. But I didn’t know there was a ranger standing behind me. He moved up beside me and asked if I was a pro seismologist. (Not geologist, seismologist.) I was a little shocked, and explained that no, I wasn’t, but I’d studied, yada yada. Well, we got into a rather in-depth discussion of backgrounds. He had a degree in forestry, and had had to do special studies in the Parks Service in order to be stationed there, so he’d know the geology. But I was explaining stuff to HIM, and of course I also remembered the eruption.
After that, for as long as I was there, when a tourist would come to him with a question about the volcano, etc…he sent ’em to me…
I guess I’m good at answering questions.
That said, I learned a lot while I was there. And I got to hear the entire recording of David Johnston’s broadcast message — most people don’t know that it’s truncated for public dissemination. If you don’t know who he was, he was the geologist stationed on the ridge immediately to the north of St. Helens, and who saw it go. He’s the guy who made the radio transmission, “Vancouver, Vancouver, this is it! This is it!”
But, you see, he was directly across from the point where the pyroclastic flow broke out. And only about four and a quarter miles from it. And it was moving at very nearly Mach 1, according to all accounts and to reconstructions.The mountain ranges there run east-west, except for a few spurs. East of the volcano was Spirit Lake, at the base of a N/S spur. The pyroclastic flow emerged from the failing slope, roared north, slammed into the ridge hard enough to turn the timber into sawdust — there’s nothing on that slope of the mountain bigger than MAYBE an inch — and scour the soil right down to bedrock, and take off part of the bedrock. The ridge diverted part of it, and some of it headed east, slamming into Spirit Lake and knocking it something like 1000ft up the side of the mountain spur. The main body of the pyroclastic flow topped the ridge and came down the back side, taking out the timber; slammed into the next ridge and stripped every tree trunk of limbs and bark, laying them all over, pointing away from the volcano, following the slopes. It topped THAT ridge and slammed into the next ridge, still with sufficient force and heat to strip the limbs — but not flatten the trees — and leave nothing but charred trunks standing. The fourth ridge was more or less intact, but showed signs of damage…and it was the 20th anniversary when I was there.
The Toutle River valley, around St. Helens itself, was still a moonscape 20 years later, and there were still bluffs of tuff and unconsolidated ash 30ft high, miles down the Toutle River.
But the ridge on which Johnston sat was unnamed at the time he sat there. And, like I said, whenever a documentary airs, they always truncate his broadcast. What he really said was, “Vancouver, Vancouver, this is it! This is it! This is…it…” His voice cracked that last time, and you can hear in his voice that he’s just realized he’s about to die.
I asked a ranger how long the carrier signal from his radio lasted after he made that final call. She thought for a moment, then said, “About fifteen seconds.”
They never found any sign of his body or his camp.
And now the ridge is named Johnston Ridge.
~Stephanie Osborn, “The Interstellar Woman of Mystery”
http://www.Stephanie-Osborn.com
Award-winning author of the Division One, Gentleman Aegis, and Displaced Detective series
Oh, I’m going to put it up once I gathered enough information on what is pretty well confirmed, what is good speculation, what is plausible and what is far-out speculation or probably refuted.
I have never seen an actual refutation of Gold’s theory. But I have sure been ridiculed for talking about it; and as I don’t know enough I put it aside for another time. But I never saw it refuted, just as no one including my daughter has been able to convince me that CO2, man made at that, is the real climate change driver. (Freeman Dyson is not convinced either, which makes me feel better.)
The earth’s mantle and British tabloids
CO2 is a minor component of any greenhouse gas effect. Water vapor is a much larger factor. And never forget that without CO2 most plant life dies off.
But CO2 can be tied to manmade events so it must be attacked and demonized to serve the narrative of the extreme environmentalists.
And in my humble opinion the so called fossil fuels are simply the end result of plant and animal matter decomposing into complex hydrocarbons over time.
Larry
The earth’s mantle and British tabloids
We know that hydrocarbons are found in great quantity in the universe. There’s entire methane oceans within our own solar system. Comets have lots of hydrocarbons, and the blackish coating that forms the “dust” is composed of hydrocarbons. There are hydrocarbons aplenty in the spectra of distant nebulae. There are even hydrocarbons in the spectra of some very cool stars.
If there are truly differences in the isotopic composition of, say, coal, where 14C is found along with obvious plant fossils, and petroleum/crude, where apparently there is a preponderance of 13C, rather than 14C, then the sources must be different.
Now, whether any of this is so or not, I don’t know. And unfortunately I cannot for the life of me find the article I looked at just a couple of days ago. I had not previously heard of the abiotic theory for organic fuel formation, let alone that it is apparently so hotly contested. I find that interesting in light of the fact that there’s tons of the stuff out there in space.
So I guess leave out the whole carbon-13 vs carbon-14 thing, Jerry. Because I can’t provide you a reference. Dammit.
~Stephanie Osborn, “The Interstellar Woman of Mystery”
http://www.Stephanie-Osborn.com
Award-winning author of the Division One, Gentleman Aegis, and Displaced Detective series
You don’t have to do anything; I’ll make it plain that you are not asserting abiotic oil and Tommy Gold’s theories. Since I’m on public record as having been personally persuaded by Dr. Gold in some long arguments, they can put that all on me. I do point out that abiotic oil or no is irrelevant here. A trillion tons of liquid carbon – even if only 10% of it is carbon and the rest is pollutants – is nothing to joke about.
And the abundance of the stuff in the universe was what got Gold to wondering how it could be fossil remnants. It still has me wondering. Of course if you believe in panspermia… I seem to recall arguing this with Sagan once. Of course he didn’t want ever to get in a fight with Tommy, so if he had criticisms they were always theoretical. But to this day I have heard no reasonable theory about hydrocarbons on lifeless bodies…
The earth’s mantle and British tabloids
Panspermia isn’t required for the notion of non-fossil hydrocarbons. Like I said, there’s great gajillions of tons of hydrocarbons in stellar atmospheres, in nebulae, in cometary bodies, etc.
~Stephanie Osborn, “The Interstellar Woman of Mystery”
http://www.Stephanie-Osborn.com
Award-winning author of the Division One, Gentleman Aegis, and Displaced Detective series
Panspermia has always held a lot of allure to me, but I’m not sure it’s to the rational or the writer side of me.
Sarah
Jerry, I doubt I could recover the source, and I don’t recall if I noted it to you or not, but I saw another item a couple of years ago that I took as verification of Thomas Gold’s hypothesis. That said, this one could go both ways, because a pool of volatiles forming on the remnants of a totally subducted continental plate could come from high temperature/high-pressure reduction or hydrolysis of organic fossil detritus.
(Incidentally, did you see today’s news that appears to confirm that New Zealand should be considered the visible surface of a complete, if small, continent? This isn’t the link I first found on the subject, but it’s a reputable source for coverage – the tabloids appear to be having a field day with this as well: http://www.businessinsider.com/zealandia-continent-new-zealand-australia-2017-2.
(Note that this item is relevant to the discussion and turned up serendipitously while searching for the New Zealand article:
https://m.phys.org/news/2017-02-scientists-geology-ceres.html)
Frankly, I suspect that Gold’s hypothesis of primordial hydrocarbons and the conventional hypothesis that petroleum is formed from the remains of primitive organisms are complementary. Gold’s hypothesis very likely accounts for the hydrocarbons that existed before the first organic life, and it seems very plausible that life has assimilated only a fraction or the originally available carbon. The rest may be available from somewhere, and the idea that petroleum is a mixture of primordial hydrocarbon and fossil organisms is nothing more than a squishy version of “from dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return.”
Jim Woosley
This conversation ended abruptly with the storms in Southern California and the Studio City sinkhole, so there is no resolution. The important part is the trillions of tons of liquid carbon and how it trickles upward. I do not accept the consensus theory of man made climate change; we know too little about alternate sources of CO2; we know too little about temperature measurements and the reliability of any data older than thirty years (reliability to a tenth of a degree from buckets of sea water hauled up by a British tar?). We do have good evidence that the Earth was warmer than at present during the Viking era and the early Roman Republic. We know for a fact that it has been much colder, not just in historic times, but many times over the millennia; and we know that the cold was a lot more than a tenth of a degree.
I have no proof of Tommy Gold’s theory of abiotic fossil fuels, but there must have been a powerful lot of dinosaurs given the amounts of oil and gas that we are pumping. We don’t seem to have reached peak oil yet.
Tax Bots
Dr. Pournelle,
You linked an article headlined [by Bill Gates] “The robot that takes your job should pay taxes.”
I think this is an excellent idea, although my definition of robot is probably different than Bill’s (or that of the writer of the headline). Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle are welcome to start paying my taxes as reparation for the thousands of clerical jobs eliminated by office automation, and for those lost in the printing, publishing, typewriter, and adding machine industries. At minimum, there ought to be a fine paid by the software industry equal to the national debt for the sheer quantity of nonsense presented to citizens via PowerPoint and other multimedia software.
-d
Well, I probably wouldn’t go that far. At least not without a fair amount of good brandy.
Jerry,
Thanks for collecting that background info on l’affaire Flynn. It was already obviously a political vendetta, but this clarifies the matter of by whom: An alliance between the “Deep State” faction of the permanent intelligence bureaucracy out to get Flynn, and the departing Obama Administration out to sabotage this new Administration in general.
Perhaps not yet provable (pending serious investigation) but the tracks left behind are not subtle.
One useful addition to The Atlantic’s timeline that occurs to me is the dates of the Obama Administration’s last-second opening-up of access to raw NSA phone and email intercept data to 16 Federal intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. (Previously, NSA passed along only data filtered of any identifications of US persons.)
The new policy was signed by DNI Clapper December 15th, by AG Lynch January 3rd, and announced January 12th – the same day Ignatius broke the story in the Post based on egregious leaks of NSA intercepts.
Not that this policy was hastily conceived – it’s been in the works since 2008, with details under review by the Obama Administration since 2009, and written about publicly at least a year ago.
But that this policy was only implemented as Obama headed out the door does allow some reasonable conclusions.
Absent more data, it’s hard to make a convincing direct connection between this new policy and the Flynn vendetta, though AG Lynch’s signoff just around the time her people would have been reviewing Flynn recordings may or may not be coincidental.
But one obvious reason for the Obama people to get this done right before heading out the door is to empower their Deep State stay-behind allies in the various intel and law-enforcement agencies for the guerilla struggle to come. (This will also make it harder to figure out exactly where future politically targeted intercept leaks come from, by multiplying the possible sources.)
Somewhat speculatively, this may be an attempt to retroactively legitimize what could well have been serious rules violations about tapping raw NSA data for identifying info on US citizens who just happened to be involved with the incoming Administration. That deserves serious investigation. Hasty track-covering tends to be less than 100% efficient. The evidence may still actually be available.
In general, it is a seriously bad state of affairs when the old Kemalist “Deep State” designation has become totally appropriate for a major segment of the US federal bureaucracy. As someone recently pointed out, there is no “4th Branch Of Government” in the U.S. Constitution. This Deep State is a part of the Executive Branch that is in not-very-covert revolt against the new Chief Executive.
Porkypine
Well, it did smoke out Sally Yates, although she stuck around long enough to see that no career Justice attorney spruced up President Trump executive order on immigration, so that despite black letter law the Ninth Circuit found some tendrils of possible constitutional error and was able to confirm an injunction against the whole order, not just some part of it. President Trump should have learned a lesson about Deep Government that he ought not ever forget. The hate him in there.
The Offer that Turns the Gaza Strip into Singapore
by Bassam Tawil • February 21, 2017 at 5:00 am
- Last week, Hamas received an offer that no sane entity would turn down. The offer did not come from Hamas’s allies in Iran and the Islamic world. The offer, to turn the impoverished Gaza Strip into “the Singapore of the Middle East,” came from Israel.
- “The Gazans must understand that Israel, which withdrew from the Gaza Strip to the last millimeter, is not the source of their suffering — it is the Hamas leadership, which doesn’t take their needs into consideration… The moment Hamas gives up its tunnels and rockets, we’ll be the first to invest.” — Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman.
- Hamas does not want a new “Singapore” in the Middle East. Hamas wants Israel to disappear from the face of the earth. The welfare of the Palestinians living under its rule is the last thing on the mind of Hamas. The dispute is not about improving the living conditions of Palestinians, as far as Hamas is concerned. Instead, it is about the very existence of Israel.[snip]
I suppose no comment is needed.
Sweden today
Horowitz: Sweden now rape capital amidst Muslim immigration http://video.foxnews.com/v/5248024459001/?#sp=show-clips
It’s long (just over 10 minutes). It’s discouraging. It’s important to watch the whole thing. The Swedes he interviewed at the end are not cherry picked. Swedes I have emailed with are in the same deluded state as those interviewed. Reality could drop a piano on their heads and they’d still insist gravity didn’t exist.
I feel sorry for Sweden. I feel sorry for Europe. I feel sorry for Britain. If they cannot wake up VERY soon now, Europe will become a Muslim hell hole. They are all importing the worst of the worst of Islam.
{o.o
Again, I wonder just how long those Vikings will put up with this.
a10
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170217-bringing-the-soviet-unions-flying-tank-back-to-life
found this on the BBC compares it to Your favorite ‘plane A10
Well, that’s not quite true. Flying tanks are not always my favorite airplane. I would be happy to let the Air Force have what they need for the air superiority mission, which they think only they can do, if they would give close support of the field army which the Air Force johnnies don’t want anyway. Let the Army have an Army Air Corps again.Air Corps again.
DCX
Dr Pournelle
You have your DCX now. But it’s called Falcon.
CRS-10 | Falcon 9 First Stage Landing
Live long and prosper
h lynn keith
Republican Control
“They have the White House, both houses of Congress, most state governors, and in fact most local offices outside the big cities in New York and California. Of course they tremble in fear even so: the media says they should.”
——————-
But how did they manage to do that? Most of the Federal Government have an R after their name, true, but to accomplish that
did they have to loosen up the principles the Republicans are supposed to stand for? I have seen that going on for years.
If a number of R’s are RINO’s, than what has been accomplished? Is the Iron Law in operation here, where the leadership has
done what best benefits the party?
B-
I suspect some will grow less timid. But it is a time of party realignment. Even the Black Caucus is getting some dissidents as crime rates grow. What the poor need is jobs; to get them they need [people who will pay them for something they can do.
Sidestepping word “improvements”
Dr. Pournelle:
I, too, have trouble with my typing. Mine is due to neuropathy, but that’s neither here nor there. What I have done to help alleviate my situation is to use KeyTweak keyboard remapper. I used it to turn off Caps Lock and the dedicated Windows keys. Turning off the Alt key may not be an alternative in your case, but it’s possible.
When I bought my new desktop about eight months ago I also “upgraded” my 2003 version of Word to the 2016 version. What a stinker: all of the menus were “improved” to the point it was like learning a new program. To add to my misery, Microsoft changed its licensing so users no longer own it outright. I’m now renting Office Suite for a year. Feh!
I’ve downloaded Open Office and find it much more suited to the skills ingrained from Office 2003. Once my rented Microsoft Suite expires, I’ll be exclusively Open Office.
I hope KeyTweak offers some help.
–Pete Nofel
I haven’t come to that yet, but I may. Some improvements really are, but others ought to be optional.
Obama’s 30,000 and NPR on Trump
Obama’s 30,000 agitators have a protesting manual; more evidence for a RICO investigation, etc. if the left starts rioting this spring:
https://nypost.com/2017/02/18/obama-linked-activists-have-a-training-manual-for-protesting-trump/
And, I heard this on NPR on Thursday or Friday and forgot until seeing an article now and I laughed when they said it. NPR is fake news!
<.>
After eight years of Barack Obama putting his office into permanent campaign mode while keeping his campaign machinery in constant operation, NPR is accusing Donald J. Trump of waging a “permanent campaign.”
</>
This article doesn’t mischaracterize what they said at all. I heard all of it and it was a joke.
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Most Respectfully,
Joshua Jordan, KSC
Percussa Resurgo
Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.
