Star Wars, Bambi, NSA, and other matters

Mail 7845 Monday, August 05, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barrack Obama, January 21, 2009

Childless Taxpayers Funding Schools

It is a common misconception that it is somehow unfair for childless people to pay taxes that fund schools. In fact, everyone who pays school taxes is simply re-paying the cost of their own education, with interest, after inflation, and generally in proportion to how much they benefited from that education.

Thanks,

Jim Melendy

Even those who went to private or religious schools? And why should it be federal? The old notion of local school boards which also controlled the school taxes made the best education system in the world at one time.

NSA Intel Goes Domestic

Jerry,

The DEA has been using a mix of data from a massive (subpoenaed) domestic phone and internet taps database, informant tips, overseas law-enforcement partner info, *and overseas NSA intercepts* to support domestic law enforcement. This setup is called SOD, for Special Operations Division.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130805

Two problems:

The Reuters story says that SOD’s role in providing evidence is being deliberately hidden when cases come to court, by policy. Alternate explanations for how the investigators got that info are being invented and provided to the defense and prosecution. Apparently, we don’t need genuine Due Process anymore, as long as we can convincingly simulate it.

Also, the Reuters story fails to note an additional implication. As we’ve seen elsewhere, NSA "overseas" intercepts can include domestic traffic up to two additional jumps away from a connection one of whose ends is an actual overseas party. IE, DEA SOD may well be tapping deeply into the NSA domestic phone metadata (and content? There have been numerous hints, and it is technically feasible) database, then using the domestic surveillance results for prosecutions in which the defense is denied knowledge of the true source of evidence against them.

Other Federal agencies are reportedly now pushing for access to the NSA domestic database. The DEA may well already have it. How long until access trickles down to the Fawn Squad and the Bunny Inspectors? Not, on the evidence, nearly as long as you might think.

And so it begins.

ever more transparently

Porkypine

Star Wars…

Since another reader brought up the subject of Star Wars, channeling Ted Kennedy, I must ask: Haven’t at least two nations – the United States and China – public ally demonstrated successful shoot downs of dummy warheads and/or satellites? How many (or what percentage) of the USA’s GSL and spy satellites would need to be disabled and/or destroyed before our military was largely blinded? And wouldn’t achieving that be a very effective execution of Star Wars?

Charles Brumbelow

Space will be a definite theater of war for the next world war. Defense of space assets is important to war prevention.

Modern view of SDI

Dr. Pournelle,

I’m 34, and most people in my generation were raised with exactly your correspondent’s view (and Sen. Kennedy’s) of SDI. I have heard rebuttals like yours before, but I would like to know more -particularly details that I could use in conversation. It is difficult to find information about SDI that is not mixed with the contemporaneous liberal political reaction to it.

By the way, I became a fan of yours through the Mote in God’s Eye (and The Gripping Hand), which I came to through being a fan of Niven’s other works. I have since read much of your bibliography, and it’s fascinating to see the difference between Niven, Pournelle, and Niven/Pournelle books – you have complementary strengths. I have recommended Mote and Gripping Hand many times, and they have always been well received.

Thank you!

Matthew Picioccio

Dean Ing and I covered part of this a long time ago in Mutual Assured Survival. Ben Bova also did a book called Assured Survival although that phrase was first used by me and then by President Reagan. There are numerous unclassified reports of successful ABM tests. Also look up Excalibur. And if you can get Google to work, try Homing Overlay. Google seems to stop working when I look up SDI papers, including my own books. I am sure it is a coincidence.

About Star Wars

Dr. Pournelle

"Two things in America go by the name “Star Wars”. One of them is a childish fantasy of magical warfare, spectacular but incoherent, whose obvious flaws are thinly disguised by pseudoscience. The other one involves wookies." –paradoctor@aol.com

When President Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, aka Star Wars, I was a lieutenant, and I was seated in the Officers’ Club slurping down beers with my buddies at a table with a view of the O Club bar’s TV. Except for the slurping, we watched the President’s televised speech in silence. When he announced that he would abandon MAD for UAS (Unilaterally Assured Survival), we leaped to our feet and slapped high fives around the table.

SDI gave us the chance to do what we had sworn to do: defend the United States. None of us cared to hold a gun to the heads of the Russia people with the threat that if they shot we would.

Some of my buddies worked on kinetic kill (missile interception of incoming ICBMs). Some worked on directed energy kill. Later, I worked on launch vehicles to put their platforms in space. The work was not spectacular, but it was coherent. I do not recall any flaws, obvious or otherwise, but I do recall numerous technical and management difficulties that we overcame. None of us did pseudoscience.

‘Man who says thing cannot be done should not interrupt man doing it.’

Surprised and pleased to see that aol still runs. I thought they had gone the way of the dodo.

Live long and prosper

h lynn keith

In my original report to President Reagan I pointed out that the Constitution provided for the common defense, not the common destruction, and if it were technically possible the United States had a constitutional obligation to defend the American people.

My friends at SAC were cheering after Reagan’s Star Wars speech.

Dr. Pournelle,

Star Wars humor:

Chewbacca decided to retire from spaceflight. Needing employment, he considered opening a restaurant, but hair net problems aside, being called a ‘wookie cookie’ didn’t appeal to his ego. Therefore, he sought a partnership with Norm Abram from PBS, and the two will open, when Norm finishes the building, an extraterrestrial sex shop selling masturbatory aids for aliens. They will call it "The New Wookie Yankshop."

jomath

Deer

An emailer writes: "There’s a lot of deer in the woods after all."

You betcha, and that’s the problem. The deer do just fine keeping their numbers up without squeamish dogooders and well-meaning Aunt Nellies saving the poor sick babies. Deer are herd animals, who evolved to keep their species alive through fecundity; now that humans have killed all the predators, deer expand without limit. Trying to save baby deer is like trying to save a cup of pond scum.

"What about hunters," you might ask. And the problem there has the same root. People think deer are cute, so they pass laws making hunting illegal.

Then you might ask "how can the government have the power to pass laws like that", and that is one that nobody has a good answer for.

Well, that is certainly a reasonable but likely to be unpopular view…

Terror threat

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

Is it unduly cynical of me to read this and immediately think "Security theater?"

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/08/05/embassy-closures-extended-until-saturday/

Also, it appears that Newt Gingrich is at least willing to contemplate the idea that neoconservatism was a fallacy.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/aug/4/newt-gingrich-rethinks-neoconservative-views/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS

That’s about 2 years after I came to the same conclusion, and about 50 years after you did :). So long as McCain keeps pushing for intervention my own relationship with the Republican party grows ever more strained.

Respectfully ,

Brian P.

View 784

You write "In 1859 the only long insulated wires in the world were telegraph lines."

I assume that you mean that the wires were insulated from the poles by glass spacers rather than that the wire was wrapped in insulation as is common in commercial wiring? Ezra Cornell was a clever guy but I don’t think he was as clever as all that….

—

Tim of Angle

Yes, of course. The original telegraph wires were bare copper, although they had cloth insulation in leadins. The point is that there were plenty of fence wires where there were no fires, but any long lines insulated from ground generated a good bit of electrical potential.

One reason many are afraid of inoculations:

Subj: CDC Admits 98 Million Americans Received Polio Vaccine Contaminated With Cancer Virus

http://tinyurl.com/pnhu4zr

Removed from the CDC website – this is cached copy:

http://tinyurl.com/p6ta9an

THE LAST CUP OF BRANDY

The Doolittle Raiders last meeting.

Verified. The item below is from CNN, April 4, 2013, by Bob Greene.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/14/opinion/greene-doolittle-raiders

There are additional pictures and video at the web site.

Most have never even heard of them; it’s not PC and might "offend" someone to know there were men that were this patriotic.

This is something that has been lost in the dust of time! To all I send my thanks for their service.

Skol

Stand your ground

Jerry,

you wrote that "I think the requirement to retreat before employing deadly force is reasonable so long as you are not in your own home. Or perhaps it is not."

Here is why this is not (necessarily) a good idea. Several years ago I lived in South Carolina, and I took (and passed) a concealed carry class. According to SC law, every aspect of the class has to be approved by the state police. The instructor spent a good deal of time talking about legal repercussions. He also pointed out that Stand Your Ground arises partly because of court cases where a duty to retreat was taken too far. He mentioned one case where a shop keeper retreated from a robber in to a back room. He shot the robber, who then sued him, claiming the shop keeper did not meet the duty to retreat because there was a small window high up on the wall that he could have theoretically used to flee further. Presumably, had he asked the robber to give him time to get a stepladder or pile some boxes up so he could reach this window, he would not have had to shoot.

Rick C

RE: Stand your ground

No legal wording will protect you from fugghead prosecutors out to make headlines

Jerry Pournelle

Absolutely true. It’s been probably 6 years so I don’t have the details fresh any more but the way I remember it, this was a case of the robber had a better lawyer. A reasonable person wouldn’t conclude that a small window that may have been 6 or 7 feet off the ground was a reasonable escape hatch and that failing to go through it meant you didn’t meet your duty to retreat.

This, of course, is the problem with phrasing the law as "Stand your ground." These laws simply state that if you have a legal reason for being somewhere, such as a place of work, you don’t have a duty to retreat, exactly as if you were at home, where you also generally don’t have such a duty. The instructor’s point is that a sharp lawyer, or a fugghead prosecutor, can try to twist the wording of the law to go after you this way, or the way the state went after Zimmerman.

Rick

Zimmerman had no path to retreat when he fired the shot. He was prevented from retreating by Martin. The Stand Your Ground law had no influence on the jury verdict. I doubt it influenced Zimmerman’s actions. He may have been a busybody, but he had some reason to do so. We have no way of knowing who said what to whom, but it is not unreasonable to assume that Martin decided he was going to stand his ground. The question is who struck the first blow. Given the discrepancy in the sizes and known past patterns of behavior it is not likely that Zimmerman assaulted Martin.

Subj: Is MIT killing its Hacker Culture?

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130730122632843

>>[T]there has been a persistent undercurrent of concern over the past

>>several years that MIT’s hacking tradition is being vitiated by a

>>perceived increasing tendency to interpret hacking as a criminal

>>activity. Some of the concern stems from incidents in 2006–2008 where

>>students engaging in “unauthorized access” to various areas of campus

>>ended up in Cambridge District Court, charged with breaking and

>>entering with intent to commit a felony. … How can we prevent a

>>robust hacking tradition from becoming a casualty of the Aaron Swartz

>>tragedy? … Where does MIT draw the line between risk-avoidance, so

>>as to protect its more parochial interests, and risk-assumption, to

>>promote those things in which it is interested?<<

It would be a tragedy if MIT were to eviscerate itself, but there’s a larger issue: To what extent has America’s past superiority in technology rested on a permissive Hacker Culture that would appall the political masters of authoritarian regimes like China’s? Will that superiority evaporate as our own regime becomes more authoritarian — as research funding, for example, gets channeled more effectively away from dissenters from "consensus" positions and toward those proficient mainly in toadying to self-perpetuating cliques of peer reviewers?

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

 

First burger made of TEST-TUBE MEAT to be eaten on August 5

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/29/test_tube_burger_to_be_eaten/

Just the beginning, of course.

What will the vegetarians-out-of-conscience do now?

Ed

Subject: LA Schools Out of Money? Hardly

The LA schools are buying an iPad for every single student. The initial purchase will be $30million. I don’t want to hear that there is not enough money for education ever again.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/26/4559066/free-apple-ipad-school-children-la-district

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Dwayne Phillips