Robots, Solar Power satellites, Syria, Diving into Noah’s Flood, self government, and other mail.

Mail 789 Friday, September 13, 2013

Folding our hands

Jerry:

An e-mail you posted on September 2, 2013, called attention to Jack Williamson’s 1947 story "With Folded Hands". I had no memory of reading it, but apparently I did so 40 years ago as it was reprinted in "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. II", which is somewhere in my boxes of books waiting to be unpacked.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Science_Fiction_Hall_of_Fame,_Volume_Two

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Science_Fiction_Hall_of_Fame,_Volume_Two> You mentioned the story terrified you, as the robots take care of us for our own good. It is an old fear of free men as summarized in the frequently repeated quotes from G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis.

“The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.”

G. K. Chesterton, cited by the American Chesterton society as coming from a broadcast talk 6-11-35

http://www.chesterton.org/discover-chesterton/quotations-of-g-k-chesterton/

<http://www.chesterton.org/discover-chesterton/quotations-of-g-k-chesterton/>

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

–C.S. Lewis, "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment", reprinted in "God in the Dock", Part III, Chapter 4, where it is said to have appeared originally in "20th Century: An Australian Quarterly Review," Vol. III, No. 3 (1949), pp. 5-12.

Best regards,

–Harry M.

Space Power Satellite

Dr. Pournelle,

Some questions about space-based solar power (sorry for the late comment):

1) This would have to be a satellite with very large solar panels in order to provide a substantial fraction of the power consumed by the U.S. Wouldn’t such large solar panels be vulnerable to space junk?

2) As you know, Russia and China, our major international competitors, have demonstrated the ability to shoot down satellites. In fact, it seems to me that any country or private organization that can put something in orbit can also shoot something else down. If the U.S. became dependent on space-based solar power, we would be very vulnerable. It’s easier to repair ground-based power plants, and there are many of them.

3) What are the effects on the atmosphere from the constant microwave bombardment used to transmit the gathered solar energy to receiving stations on Earth? Wouldn’t this heat up the atmosphere rather a lot locally, like a big microwave oven?

I’m not a Luddite. I just want to make sure that potential problems are addressed.

Regards,

Michael Jabbra

There is a lot of literature on this object and I haven’t time to write a primer again tonight.  There’s a lot out there. Yes, the structures are large, but they don’t mass much and space is large. Hoover Dam is big on Earth; not so large in orbit. I don’t mean to give you short shrift, but there is neither time nor room to write a general introduction to the subject here, and there’s plenty of material out there.  Regarding the vulnerability of space power satellites to military strikes, they are no more so than oil wells and refineries are to air strikes: as the strategic campaign to deny Germany fuels would indicate.

The atmosphere is constantly bombarded with radiation of many frequencies and wave lengths.  As to atmospheric heating, all the heat from the burning coal goes into the atmosphere. With solar power satellites only the solar energy converted to useful energy reaches the earth. The initial capital costs of SPS are very large, with no income return until much of the project is completed. The same is true of dams, and like dams, there are no fuel costs once they are running.  There’s considerably more in my A Step Farther Out. http://www.amazon.com/A-Step-Farther-Out-ebook/dp/B004XTKFWW

 

Syria

Every time I try to write a long piece on Syria, disaster strikes.  I’ve given up!  It’s not worth it!  I’ll make a few points:

1.  The posture toward punitive strikes was encouraging as another military adventure will work in service of harming our country rather than helping it and I can back up that argument with geopolitical evidence.

2 .  Kerry proved that he was a poor choice with his sarcasm, his attempt to take back the sarcasm, and Putin’s use of his lack of skill to create this situation: 

<.>

Apparently, once again with respect to Syria, the White House was caught off guard by events they are frantically reacting to instead of shaping. Speaking to CNN’s Jake Tapper, a White House official publicly responded to Russian President Vladmir Putin’s New York Times op-ed with the admission that Putin "now owns" and has "fully asserted ownership" of America’s current foreign policy focal point….

</>

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/09/12/White-House-Putin-Owns-worlds-syria-strategy

3. If the latest act in the circus ends without an escalation of the conflict in Syria, I hope they give Putin a Nobel Peace Prize since they gave Obama one.  Why did Obama get a Nobel Peace prize again?  I’m not asking that as a joke; I really have no idea.  The best explanation I read was that he got it because he was not Bush.  That makes sense to me, but I do not believe it justifies a prestigious award.      But, for me, until I get a clear explanation on that — and other matters — the award means about as much to me as the MTV Music Video Awards or the Pimp of the Year award.  —–Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

The limits of intel

Dr Pournelle

Someone said Assad ordered the use of Sarin in a Damascus suburb <https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=15344> .

You and I both know that there are limits to what sigint can reveal. Misinformation comes over the airwaves as easily as information.

Like you, I am not persuaded that the intel we have is actionable. Seems like a couple of thousand civilians were gassed. Okay, I can accept that, but what does the death of a couple of thousand civilians mean? Who gassed them? Who is responsible? (And those are two different questions.) I do not believe our sigint assets can answer those two questions.

I posed this argument and was told the President has access to better intel than I. I agree that he does, but I used to work on an asset from which he gets his sigint. I know what it did, I know what it could not do, and I know its capabilities have not changed since I left that program.

The intel boys are capturing voice commo. Are they capturing all voice commo? No. Error one. They have to have that commo translated. Is any meaning lost, added, or misinterpreted in the translation? Error two. Are the speakers speaking truth or lying? Error three. Are the speakers who think they are speaking truth misinformed? Error four. There are only a few examples.

Saw a hypothetical posted on a blog. Assad happily agrees to turn over all his WMDs for audit and destruction, but he conditions his surrender of WMDs on Israel’s surrender of its own WMDs. How does that scenario play out?

BTW, a year has passed since the Benghazi tragedy. What has the House of Representatives — the national grand inquest — done about it? Not a bloody damned thing. Boehner should resign. If I still counted myself a Republican, I would be ashamed.

Live long and prosper

h lynn keith

Sarin and Syria

Jerry – I can see several possibilities for how people were exposed to Sarin in a Damascus suburb:

1) Assad ordered its use. Not bloody likely, for all the reasons you’ve explained

2) A lower-level government commander ordered its use. Not likely, but there are always a few dumb-asses with command responsibilities.

3) Someone on the government side fucked up, and launched Sarin instead of regular artillery by mistake. I don’t know how plausible this is. If it was American-supplied, probably almost impossible to do by mistake. If it’s Soviet-supplied, or Soviet-designed and locally-made, who knows?

4) Someone on the government side is secretly a rebel agent, and intentionally used Sarin to trigger international action against Assad.

5) Someone on the rebel side launched the attack and missed.

6) Someone on the rebel side launched the attack to trigger international intervention against Assad.

7) The rebels have Sarin, and Assad’s forces hit it, in a reprise of the incident at Bari in 1943 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_raid_on_Bari>

The last three require the rebels to have Sarin, which doesn’t seem plausible, but there are rumors that the Saudis have supplied them with it. On the other hand, the threat of some sort of action has pressured Assad to admit he does have chemical weapons. (Presumably for retaliation against Israel, of course.)

We’re too "civilized", but if we were going to take an "incredibly small" action against Assad, couldn’t we assassinate him? It wouldn’t take a sniper – we could drop a cruise missile on him. There would still be *some* Syrian government command structure, but it might decide to try to cut a deal with most of the rebels and calm things down, which would be a better outcome than an all-out rebel victory or an all-out government victory. And maybe the Syrian government would fragment, which would probably lead to the rebels fragmenting, and a much more intractable, but probably less bloody, civil war continuing for the foreseeable future.

Anthony Argyriou

Dr. Pournelle,

One of the things that bothers me about the current flap over the NSA is the almost constant reassurance that the people there look at the data collected only for very specific items. As you have often written, we can believe as much of that as we want to.

Congress, among others, is forgetting the basic precept that capabilities, not intentions, are what matter. Even if the NSA is pure as the driven snow, there’s so much power there that someone is sure to abuse it. As to repeated statements about protecting U. S. citizens’ privacy, Mr. Heinlein often noted that security agencies virtually can’t help snooping on their bosses. I wish someone would point this out to oh, say, Harry Reid. Congresscritters might be surprised to know how little privacy they have from the Executive Branch.

I cannot imagine why Reid’s constituents aren’t out for his hide. "Calm down! This has been going on for a while" delivered in a papa-knows-best tone remarkable for its utter arrogance was what he said when news of the Snowden/NSA matter first surfaced. If he were in my state, I’d be collecting signatures for petitions–employees who talk to their employers in that tone get fired–as should Reid.

Secure communications will henceforth involve physical copies, not digital, written by hand as there’s no other way to trust that one’s writing won’t be spied upon–and even that’s no guarantee–and Committees of Correspondence.

Maybe someone’s planning the Third Continental Congress?

jomath

Schneier on the NSA

Bruce has several good articles this week – all are worth reading. Here’s one of them: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/the_nsa_is_brea.html#comments

: Flashback: Governor Palin’s Five-Point Requirements on Military Action, familiar to you?

Jerry:

It appears that Governor Palin has been learning from either you or the founding fathers about foreign policy. The use of the phrase "dragons to slay" is telling.

http://conservatives4palin.com/2013/09/flashback-governor-palins-five-point-requirements-on-military-action.html

James Crawford=

What works in America

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

I thought you might appreciate this article about an Indian international student’s observations in America: To wit, he strongly appreciated the integrity he found here, something not seen in China or India.

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-weirdest-things-about-america-2013-8

… So maybe there’s hope for us after all?

Oh, yes. He also notes that American girls aren’t nearly as promiscuous as Hollywood would leave you to believe. Heh.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

An interesting thought,

Jerry

I left my subscription renewal to Av Week go until the last minute. So three August issues were delayed. At the end of the August 19 issue I found this:

“Speaking at the Risk and Network Threat Forum in a City of London pub, Sarb Sembhi, a director at business security consultants Incoming Thought, suggested it made little commercial sense for private companies to store customer data—call logs, e-mails, SMS (short message services, aka texts)—if the NSA was doing so. Why not then just let the government cache the material, so industry can concentrate on providing better applications and services, he asked.

“I was being tongue-in-cheek—it was meant to be a light-hearted look at the issue,” Sembhi tells Aviation Week. “But applications are valued by the public. They value getting these for free, and . . . completely overlook privacy. They’re up in arms about what their government is doing, but don’t realize that the information the government is getting comes from these same organizations they willingly supply it to.”

Aviation Week & Space Technology Aug 19, 2013 , p. 53

(http://www.aviationweek.com/awin/ArticlesStory.aspx?id=/article-xml/AW_08_19_2013_p53-605191.xml)

Food for thought.

Ed

‘For this pro-Israel American Jew, it is unacceptable for AIPAC to use the funds of donors like me to lobby Congress to go to war, especially in a situation where even President Obama admits there is no imminent threat either to the U.S. or to our allies, where the risks have been poorly thought out and the costs lied about, and where the primary beneficiaries would be Islamists’ murderous ambition and Barack Obama’s unsalvageable credibility.’

<http://spectator.org/archives/2013/09/09/aipac-gone-wild>

—

Roland Dobbins

‘Perhaps the most crucial, piercing question that the people in academia should ask themselves is this: “Are we really needed?”’

<http://crypto.junod.info/2013/09/09/an-aspiring-scientists-frustration-with-modern-day-academia-a-resignation/>

—–

Roland Dobbins

National Geographic Channel and an other Dr. Pournelle

Dr. Pournelle,

I am watching a Nat Geo archeology piece "Diving into Noah’s Flood" with a segment partly featuring the work and an appearance by Dr. Jenny Pournelle. Of course, I was slightly familiar with this subject from links from your blog and from her fiction, but this was a pretty good presentation. Very interesting show and interesting work.

-d

The episode Diving Into Noah’s Flood is interesting; the last half hour is Dr. Jenny

 

abated vs. bated

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

I have been a long time reader (Science Fiction, Byte, and I don’t know why a Radio Amateur magazine keeps coming to mind) and was enthralled recently to find Chaos Manor still operative – and yes, I am now a subscriber.

English is my native language, though having been born in The Bronx, that might be open to debate.

I am trying to write a novel (doesn’t everyone?) and have found that nuances (and double [and treble] entendres) can be very important to the more educated reader.

So, when I run across a word used by an author I respect, that doesn’t quite fit the the sentence as I understand it, I analyse the word very closely to see what I’m missing.

Your usage of the underlined word in the following paragraph has me at a loss:

"The only problem here is the Federal government which is being furiously lobbied by the existing health technicians unions (one can hardly blame them; perhaps they deserve some early retirement plan?) which seeks to protect their jobs. We can watch the outcome with abated breath…"

unless it’s just a typo for the usual: "bated".

Gary D. Gross

Not a type. Affected perhaps.  But I get so weary of seeing ‘baited breath.=’… 

Sally, having swallowed cheese,
Directs down holes the scented breeze,
Enticing thus with baited breath
Nice mice to an untimely death.

But see   http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2010/Q1/view607.html#**

 

 

Twerking Fail Becomes Media Fail

http://patterico.com/2013/09/12/twerking-fail-becomes-media-fail/

Twerking is VERY sexually suggestive dancing thrusting the hips around.

There is a video that is supposedly a twerking fail. The girl catches her pants on fire when she falls over.

It acquired 9 million views almost instantly starting with no publicity.

It was staged.

The full story takes way too many words. View the videos involved at Patterico’s site. It’s a MAJOR MSM fail with darned near all media picking up on the story and never checking it out.

{^_-}

Jerry,

This is necessarily somewhat long, to explain my off-consensus view of the current state of the Syrian war.

It’s chancy trying to understand this war from what can be gleaned on the net – much is disinformation and much more is wild rumor, speculation, and panic. In particular, I distrust the current common perception that the Assad regime is now steadily winning (and to a lesser extent the perception that the rebels are entirely dominated by

jihadists.) Some very skilled propagandists (including the people who invented "disinformatsiya") have a strong vested interest in selling those lines.

(And the benefits of sleep-before-send on long contentious pieces manifest here unusually clearly – strategypage.com just posted a piece paralleling and amplifying many of my points, at http://www.strategypage.com/qnd/syria/articles/20130911.aspx. Of particular note: "Iran has apparently told the Assads that the economic sanctions on Iran (for its nuclear weapons program) mean that the Iranian cash canno[t] keep coming indefinitely. The Assads have to either crush the rebellion or come up with a peace deal." And "The rebels don’t lack for volunteers, with over 80,000 armed men in action.

About 10-15 percent of these are Islamic radicals and they get a disproportionate amount of publicity. This is intentional, as Russia, China and Iran have their foreign language news organizations pumping out stories (some true, most not) about Islamic radicals fighting for the rebels." And "Syrians are resigned to another civil war after the Assads are gone, to deal with the Islamic terrorists.")

The perception of ongoing Assad regime progress seems to largely stem from Lebanese Hezbollah a couple months back sending 5000 or so of their best-trained fighters to assault some rebel-held towns on a key rebel western supply route. The rebels sent in hundreds of fighters from elsewhere to help the defense, but lost anyway.

The common assumption became that this would be the new pattern, but that missed three points: The Hezbollah brigade was there because Syria is desperately short of their own infantry well-trained enough (and politically reliable enough) to conduct successful urban assaults, the Hezbollah brigade took significant casualties in that operation, and Hezbollah doesn’t have many more such well-trained troops at all – they had to thin out their forces opposite Israel considerably to gather these, and they risk their entire position in Lebanon if they send more.

I take it as indicative that there has been a distinct lack of such ambitious operations since. (FWIW, some recent reports now have the Hezbollah soldiers complaining that the rebels are using tactics against them that they’ve used against the Israelis.) My estimate is that, after some initial gains, the situation is again largely a stalemated attrition war. Much then depends on the Assad family’s assessment of how long they can keep feeding the grinder. I would not assume their public display of confidence necessarily reflects their private numbers.

It is possible – not proven, but possible – that they’re a lot more desperate than they appear. (Addendum: Strategypage asserts that Iran has in fact told the Assads that their funding is not endless and Syria needs to settle this thing soon.)

The rebels still hold a significant area of eastern Damascus suburbs.

They seem to have been pushed back in recent months from immediately threatening the airport or major ground supply corridors, but they’re still in position to do so again on short notice given a shift in the balance of resources. Unskilled Syrian troop assaults just get expensive armor destroyed by rockets, the government can’t spare enough skilled troops to take the area, and random artillery bombardment

(historically) mainly just improves the defenders’ fighting positions.

What’s a badly overstretched ruthless family oligarchy to do?

I generally trust western intel leaks not to be knowing falsehood.

Slanted and selective, yes, misinterpreted, often, occasionally gullible swallowing of deliberate misdirection, but not usually made up out of whole cloth. Recent leaks (or outright releases) seem to say: It was sarin (IE short-persistence, suitable for preparing the way for assault troops), it was definitely delivered by artillery rockets, and those rockets may actually have been spotted being fired from government-held areas. A rebel false-flag is not impossible, but seems the less likely explanation.

Recent leaks also say there were multiple (German) comms intercepts before the attacks of Assad himself denying requests by local commanders to use gas, and also an unattributed comms intercept post-attack of the Syrian defense ministry phoning the local chemical warfare unit to ask what the hell is going on.

Among the leading possibilities I see: There actually was strong pressure from local commanders (themselves under strong pressure to get results with scant resources) to let them use gas to solve their local tactical problems, and one local commander then used gas without orders.

Or, a senior Assad in a fit of impatience broke consensus and decided to solve their eastern suburb problem with gas, bypassing the defense ministry and giving the order directly. Or, (I think most likely but far from certain) the permission denials were deliberate disinformation, the gas use deliberate policy, and the chain-of-command bypass covert SOP. Or, things could just have gotten confused enough in the field that some junior artillery captain fired the wrong batch of rockets.

Or, a rebel faction could have acquired the chemicals, mixing and filling facilities, specialized rockets, and launchers, figured out how to operate it all properly, then transported and fired the rockets correctly (and completely covertly) from a location within a few miles of the Government’s chief stronghold. I see that as very unlikely, absent a covert foreign power sponsor – who? The Saudis? Us? (That last possibility is just too barking mad to contemplate, not that the net hasn’t already thrown it up also.)

Some local casualty estimates indicate 50-100 of the dead were rebel fighters, fwiw. The attacks may well have been intended to be decisive and just failed – lack of coordination with ground troops seems a likely problem under a lot of the possibilities. I’ve seen no mention at all of any ground assault following the gas, which could be a major clue or could just be the press being clueless and distracted. But then WW I experience was that gas attack effects were too variable and unpredictable to be decisive most of the time even when they were properly coordinated with a ground assault.

Would senior Assads have read that history? Quite possibly not. Could hard-pressed Assad regime types have convinced themselves despite that history that their strategic deterrent against Israel was also their miracle weapon against rebels? Quite possibly so. Or, respecting their rationality more, might the Assad regime have thought it worthwhile to do the attacks not to be tactically decisive, but rather to induce terror, reduce rebel morale, and boost their own side’s (likely

slipping) morale? If they privately see their days as numbered (how much longer can Iran afford them?) quite possibly so.

I don’t yet assume it’s proven that Syrian government forces fired the gas rockets, but I see that as the way to bet. Given that, I see somewhat better odds that it was a top-level covert decision than a rogue local commander, given it happened right there in Damascus. As for the stupidity of such a decision, well, at this point they apparently have a decent chance of not just getting away with it, but benefiting from it, thanks to our wondrously dexterous diplomacy. (Our statecraft deficit, alas, is now a predictable enough factor to very likely have been included in the Assads’ risk/benefit calculations.)

Two things I am in no doubt about whatsoever: The Syrian situation is an unholy mess. And until we install competent management again we should stay as far out of it (and any such messes) as possible.

Porkypine

We certainly agree on the conclusion.  I suspect that if you could offer the Iraqis the chance to go back to where they were before the US invaded, Saddam Hussein might win a fair election…

ALERTS TO THREATS IN 2013 EUROPE

From JOHN CLEESE

The English are feeling the pinch in relation to recent events in Syria and have therefore raised their security level from "Miffed" to "Peeved." Soon, though, security levels may be raised yet again to "Irritated" or even "A Bit Cross."

The English have not been "A Bit Cross" since the blitz in 1940 when tea supplies nearly ran out. Terrorists have been re-categorized from "Tiresome" to "A Bloody Nuisance." The last time the British issued a "Bloody Nuisance"

warning level was in 1588, when threatened by the Spanish Armada.

The Scots have raised their threat level from "Pissed Off" to "Let’s get the Bastards." They don’t have any other levels. This is the reason they have been used on the front line of the British army for the last 300 years.

The French government announced yesterday that it has raised its terror alert level from "Run" to "Hide." The only two higher levels in France are "Collaborate" and "Surrender." The rise was precipitated by a recent fire that destroyed France ‘s white flag factory, effectively paralyzing the country’s military capability.

Italy has increased the alert level from "Shout Loudly and Excitedly" to "Elaborate Military Posturing." Two more levels remain: "Ineffective Combat Operations" and "Change Sides."

The Germans have increased their alert state from "Disdainful Arrogance" to "Dress in Uniform and Sing Marching Songs." They also have two higher levels:

"Invade a Neighbour" and "Lose."

Belgians, on the other hand, are all on holiday as usual; the only threat they are worried about is NATO pulling out of Brussels.

The Spanish are all excited to see their new submarines ready to deploy. These beautifully designed subs have glass bottoms so the new Spanish navy can get a really good look at the old Spanish navy.

Australia, meanwhile, has raised its security level from "No worries" to "She’ll be right, Mate." Two more escalation levels remain: "Crikey! I think we’ll need to cancel the barbie this weekend!" and "The barbie is cancelled." So far no situation has ever warranted use of the last final escalation level.

And as a final thought, Greece is collapsing, the Iranians are getting aggressive, and Rome is in disarray. Welcome back to 430 BC.

Life is too short…

Regards,

John Cleese

British writer, actor, and tall person

Pritchard

Citizens vs. Cartels

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

I thought you might find this interesting: Citizens in Mexico are forming up into self-defense groups to take on the cartels, doing for themselves what the government won’t.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/in-central-mexicos-hills-a-battle-against-a-drug-cartel/2013/09/09/3d7b7258-1433-11e3-a100-66fa8fd9a50c_gallery.html#photo=1

This is what our second amendment was originally for, yes?

Respectfully,

Brian P.

The problem with self government is that it requires the governed to do some works at governing.  This is one of the attractions of aristocracy.