The Burning City, and the price of local self government

View 718 Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Zimmerman and Martin Photos [see last night’s mail]

While I do think the reaction to this incident has been unbalanced, my understanding is that the photo of the person flipping off the camera is misattributed (and that this not of the same Trayvon Martin who was shot).

http://www.wtsp.com/news/article/247194/19/Fake-Trayvon-Martin-picture-circulates-on-the-web-image-actually-shows-a-different-person

Ian Perry

Thanks. As I said, I have no provenance for the pictures. And we certainly have no authenticated source of information on what really happened in this Florida situation. How could we? We don’t have any of the old school journalists I grew up reading. That kind of journalism went away with the rise of the Media, and we now have to rely on do it yourself efforts. The real point here is that this is not a national case. Juan Williams in today’s Wall Street Journal http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303404704577307613183789698.html?mod=googlenews_wsj has a number of important things to say. He concludes:

Despite stereotypes, the responsibility for the Florida shooting lies with the individual who pulled the trigger. The fact that the man pursued the teen after a 911 operator told him to back off, and the fact that he alone had a gun, calls for him to be arrested and held accountable under law. The Department of Justice is investigating the incident and the governor of Florida has appointed a special prosecutor to review the case.

But on a larger scale, all of this should open a serious national conversation about how our culture made it easier for this type of crime to take place.

The conclusion that Zimmerman ought to be arrested suggests that Williams has more data than the rest of us including the local authorities, but that is assuming facts not in evidence; I suspect that’s Williams being ritually liberal. His article notes:

The most recent comprehensive study on black-on-black crime from the Justice Department should have been a clarion call for the black community to take action. There is no reason to believe that the trends it reported have decreased since 2005, the year for which the data were reported.

Almost one half of the nation’s murder victims that year were black and a majority of them were between the ages of 17 and 29. Black people accounted for 13% of the total U.S. population in 2005. Yet they were the victims of 49% of all the nation’s murders. And 93% of black murder victims were killed by other black people, according to the same report.

Of course he treats this in the usual liberal manner: this is a “social problem” and needs a “solution” through government action. One problem is that communities that have had great success in changing these dismal statistics are generally ignored by the press. There will be a few TV specials here and there, but the notion that discipline and hard work has an effect on education is generally ignored. I don’t think there is a ‘national’ education ‘solution’; there are schools that are effective.

As I write this I am listening to an advertisement for “I can afford college dot com” (maybe it’s I can’t afford college dot com) which is pretty well a stereotype: it advertises entitlements without any discussion of qualifications. Everyone is apparently entitled to college, whether qualified or not, and ‘college’ is a magic remedy, just as high school used to be. Because of the various quota laws we have adopted in the hopes of – well, it’s not clear what is hoped for – but because of the various laws and regulations we have adopted, personnel managers are forced to rely on external credentialism; which means that people of ability and character who haven’t managed to get the ‘credential’ are tossed out, while the credential factories are run as unionized bureaucracies thoroughly subject to the Iron Law. The radio add is disturbing. It is sponsored apparently as a public service advertisement. Almost as if it were a parody.

The Civil War amendments assumed that the freedmen would become American as the Melting Pot did its magic, as it had worked with the German, Irish, Jewish, Hungarian, Italian immigrants. As late as the 1960’s conservatives could and did argue that America was unique in that you could study and learn how to become an American, unlike, say, becoming a Swede or an Italian or an Irishman. All “hyphen” Americans – e.g. Italian-Americans, Hunkie-Americans, and so forth – had been discriminated against, and had overcome that. The freedmen would do the same. That was the assumption and in many places it was true. Signs of it working were the Tuskegee Airmen, the Red Ball Express, the integration – over time – of the US Army and Navy, all done without a lot of fanfare. But then came the big Civil Rights movements, and the notions of entitlement took over from the notions of civic responsibility. Being an American was an entitlement, and had no requirements whatever. An odd notion, but one which seems to prevail now. With the usual results.

The Zimmerman/Martin case is a local case for local authorities, and while there may be lessons to be learned, if it has a national legislative or executive policy effect, that effect will be to diminish libery.

A Republic of free self governing citizens will not get everything right everywhere and certainly every local community will not come up with policies that everyone else thinks are right. That is a certain outcome of liberty.

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

The Black Panthers have raised the amount of the reward offered for Mr. Zimmerman’s whereabouts. And there are threats to burn down cities if they cut back on entitlements. News at eleven. We can learn about this kind of government from Greece.

http://p.washingtontimes.com/blog/watercooler/2012/mar/27/picket-spike-lee-re-tweets-incorrect-address-trayv/

Last night’s mailbag had a note about fusion experiments in France. I have today:

Michio Kaku was almost certainly referring the ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) project currently being constructed in France. This is funded by a consortium of countries, with the EU (not just France) funding 45% and the US funding 9%. First plasma is planned for November 2019 which ties in with the "8 year" timeframe. However, D-T operation is expected start in 2026.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

From that article:

"ITER’s mission is to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion power, and prove that it can work without negative impact. Specifically, the project aims:

To momentarily produce ten times more thermal energy from fusion heating than is supplied by auxiliary heating (a Q value of 10).

To produce a steady-state plasma with a Q value greater than 5.

To maintain a fusion pulse for up to 480 seconds.

To ignite a ‘burning’ (self-sustaining) plasma.

To develop technologies and processes needed for a fusion power plant – including superconducting magnets and remote handling (maintenance by robot).

To verify tritium breeding concepts.

To refine neutron shield/heat conversion technology (most of energy in the D+T fusion reaction is released in the form of fast neutrons)."

If all goes well, ITER is to be succeeded by a demonstration commercial fusion reactor, known as DEMO:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMO

Planned to start operating in 2033.

Alex

I used to follow fusion closely; for a long time fusion was the great hope for energy. Over time it became clear that we would have workable fusion energy Real Soon Now, but the date when we would have it continued to recede into the far future. I waited for some indication of real breakthroughs, but after a while I began to follow something else.

Energy either comes from the Sun or it’s nuclear.(Well, there’s tidal but that’s not the point.) “Fossil fuels” were (most think) originally solar energy gathered over a long period of time. All of the renewable stuff like green slime and rooftop solar are subject to the solar constant limit of about 1.2 KW/meter^2 meaning that it takes a big area to generate a lot of energy. Moreover that’s when the sun is shining. Growing green slime is just as subject to day/night cycles as any other; green slime, on the other hand, does accumulate the energy gathered. Rooftop solar needs to be used when generated or stored. Storage is the big problem. That makes rooftop particularly appropriate for hot summer day air conditioning since air conditioning demand is one of the major factors in setting peak power generation requirements. It is very close to economic to invest in rooftop solar for schools in southern areas where the summer skies tend to be clear – in particular in Los Angeles, given the state subsidies. Private schools are finding rooftop solar very economic, but alas, that depends in part on local political considerations and subsidies.

Green slime production has similar limits – you need long days of sunlight without clouds. Such areas are generally called deserts. Green slime requires a lot of water. Transporting water to deserts is – well you get the idea.

Nuclear power would solve a lot of problems; it can even solve water problems. I have often said that Los Angeles ought to build a nuclear power plant and use its power to pump the outfalls of the Hyperion sewage treatment plant up to the top of the Angeles Forest and let it run down refilling the water table and the artesian wells. That would save pumping water across the San Joaquin Valley where much evaporates while the various Sacramento delta critters are endangered. But Los Angeles can outvote the rest of the state so we have the numbers so we get the water. This is democracy in action. Welcome to the conversion from Republic to Democracy.

It’s late and I still have errands. At least I have energy.

The Secret of Black Ship Island continues to sell well. We are going to fix some minor formatting problems, but they are sufficiently minor that we are in no hurry, and you shouldn’t be concerned about buying it – they really are minor, and don’t really break the empathy in the story. We will fix them. There is a “review” on Amazon that complains that the book can’t be read in landscape as opposed to portrait mode. That concerned us, and we tested it. The problem appears to be with the commenter’s reader: we can read it landscape or portrait. By we I mean me, several advisors, and some readers. The “reviewer” gave us only 3 * rating because of this flaw, but it’s not our flaw. I don’t think that’s particularly fair, but it’s one of the growing pains of eBooks; at some point it will all even out. Despite the 3* rating (essentially that of a single person who says he did not read the book) we have

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,159 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)