Chaos Manor View, Wednesday, February 17, 2016
“This is the most transparent administration in history.”
Barrack Obama
Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western Civilization as it commits suicide.
Under Capitalism, the rich become powerful. Under Socialism, the powerful become rich.
Under Socialism, government employees become powerful.
Some additions, 2430 [0030] Friday 2 / 19 / 2016
Chaos Manor Review about “Locky” and ransomware in preparation. It’s getting scary out there. Never click on any attachment to an unsolicited email, even if it appears to be from a friend. Make sure you know the source is who you think it is. And install at least Microsoft Security Essentials on all Windows systems, and contemplate additional protection; more upcoming in Chaos Manor Reviews.
The Wall Street Journal has been exceptionally good with essays this week. I will call your attention to several. I will also give links, but I can’t guarantee that will get you past the pay wall. However. If you Google the exact title – which I will cite – that often takes you to the article; it’s some sort of deal the Journal has with Google, and it’s quite legal for you to use it.
Start with an editorial today: “Regulating Education for Profit.” https://www.google.com/search?q=regulating+education+for+profit&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 and http://www.wsj.com/articles/regulating-education-for-profit-1455668757
Since I subscribe I can’t tell what will work. In any event it is a story of education regulatory officials:
To summarize, an Obama pal is the day-to-day boss of a department that succeeds in destroying 90% of the value of a politically targeted company. Then he leaves government, buys the company at a fire-sale price and announces that the problems that attracted so much negative government attention are ending—just in time for a new Administration that might not hate for-profit education as much as this one. Government mediation sure can be a lucrative business model.
Then there’s “Welcome to the legal minefield Laid by Obama and the Feds” https://www.google.com/search?q=regulating+education+for+profit&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#q=Welcome+to+the+legal+minefield+Laid+by+Obama+and+the+Feds or
http://www.wsj.com/articles/welcome-to-the-legal-minefield-laid-by-obama-and-the-feds-1455667538 by Congressman Sensenbrenner:
Through the first five years of his presidency, Barack Obama added 11,327 pages to the Code of Federal Regulations. No one knows how many criminal laws are contained in the compendium of legal rules and regulations promulgated by executive departments and administrative agencies. When I asked the Congressional Research Service to investigate, they said they didn’t have the resources to answer.
One thing is certain, though: No matter how many laws there are, Americans are subject to them all. As John Baker, a retired law professor at Louisiana State University told the Journal in 2011, “There is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime.”
It’s quite true: there is one or another regulation with a criminal penalty that you have violated this week. You violated several last week. And the fact that you did knowingly violate any law is no excuse.
For example, the Capo family in Virginia was fined $535 in 2011 after their young daughter Skylar rescued a woodpecker. The government deemed her effort to save the bird to be taking or transporting a protected species—an illegal act according to the Federal Migratory Bird Act. The fine was later rescinded, but not before it was assessed.
<snip> there was Abner Schoenwetter, who spent six years in federal prison after being found guilty in 2000 of packaging lobsters with plastic, rather than cardboard—a violation of an obscure Honduran regulation. Under the Lacey Act in the U.S., it is illegal for an American citizen to violate any fish or wildlife regulation of another nation.
Six years for packaging lobster in plastic although there is no US law mentioning lobsters in plastic. And we have, apparently, not only bunny inspectors but woodpecker inspectors who will retire after service with a pension probably larger than yours.
There will be more later. Dinner time
This is perhaps the most insidiously evil thing I’ve seen
Propaganda Games: Sesame Credit – The True Danger of Gamification – Extra Credits https://youtu.be/lHcTKWiZ8sI
This is evil run rampant as a means of controlling a population. The government even finds itself in a position of not needing jackbooted thugs to maintain public order. The public does it themselves.
Now, think a few seconds.
Doesn’t this video basically describe political correctness?
{^_^}
As well as Pavlovian Conditioning…
RE: Geothermal heat and Earth’s energy balance
Regarding John Pennell’s query, I remember looking into this a few years ago and discovering that heat flux at Earth’s surface from geothermal energy is very small compared to total solar irradiance times Earth’s albedo (about 0.3).
From Wikipedia:
The geothermal heat flux from the Earth’s interior is estimated to be 47 terawatts . [8] This comes to 0.087 watt/square metre, which represents only 0.027% of Earth’s total energy budget at the surface, which is dominated by 173,000 terawatts of incoming solar radiation . [9]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_energy_budget
I’m not sure where John’s geologist acquaintance got his degree, but I think earth’s habitability might be improved if we had no geothermal energy (e.g. we would have no supervolcanoes like Yellowstone ready to decimate life on earth).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervolcano
Best regards,
Doug Ely
Quite possibly, but how much energy applied where will cause, say, El Nino, which has an astonishing effect on North American, South American, and African weather for years? A small amount of energy applied in the right way can be catalyst for very large changes in weather. Collimate is what you predict; weather is what you get
r.e. Charles Murray on Trump’s America
Dear Jerry
I bought and read Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart” several years ago. His work was moderately acceptable with respect to describing the deteriorated state of the white working class he symbolized as “Fishtown”. I found his exposition of the upper 20%’ers he identified as “Belmont” to be opaque to the point of willful obfuscation. And he completely ignored the emergence of the Oligarchs.
Murray also completely avoided the toxicity of the Orwelllian so-called “Free Trade” agreements our domestic Oligarchs have made with the one party Chinese dictatorship. And Murray’s tendency to equate Houston petroleum engineers with Silicon Valley denizens, or Bakken oil & gas field roughnecks with tenured Harvard academics in his upper income bracket also left much to be desired. He similarly ignored the adverse effects of broken borders immigration and affirmative action hiring preferences on the white working class.
Ultimately Murray implied that Fishtown’s plight was primarily due to its failure to attend church as often as the Belmonters, and to marry and to stay married. And here he ignores the well established effect of economic stress on divorce rates. There’s no easy way to say this. The only acclamation that Murray’s book deserves is the braying sound of a donkey.
I find that Joel Kotkin has done an inestimably superior job in a shorter space in clearly analyzing Trump’s America. And he does the same for the GOP Establishment’s America, Hillary Clinton’s America and Bernie Sanders’ America. While I disagree with many of his forward prescriptions I find his descriptions of present reality to be spot-on.
Best Wishes,
Mark
I disagree on your opinion of Murray, although I don’t follow his conclusions so much as his data, which are pretty meticulous. I don’t know that he said he had found a cause: he said that Fishtown did not attend Church, and Belmont did; you infer cause and effect, but Murray does not state that. And the statement is true: Belmont has a far higher attendance at Church or Temple than Fishtown. I might see a common cause in economic success and the incentive to go to church, obey the laws, and work hard. And, for that matter, I can see how the tendency to go to church would have an effect on divorce ad its attendant stress.
Murray was trying to avoid racial and controversial issues. Perhaps he was too successful. Thanks for your input.
I fear I do not share your confidence in the daily beast and its data or analyses.
Jerry,
Via Instapundit, http://www.aei.org/publication/trumps-america/
Charles Murray, author of “Coming Apart”, methodically lays out where Mr. Trump’s current wave of support comes from. Long, and impossible to do justice to by a few short quotes, but here are a few anyway.
“If you are dismayed by Trumpism, don’t kid yourself that it will fade away if Donald Trump fails to win the Republican nomination. Trumpism is an expression of the legitimate anger that many Americans feel about the course that the country has taken, and its appearance was predictable.
It is the endgame of a process that has been going on for a
half-century: America’s divestment of its historic national identity.”
“The new upper class consists of the people who shape the country’s economy, politics and culture. The new lower class consists of people who have dropped out of some of the most basic institutions of American civic culture, especially work and marriage. Both of these new classes have repudiated the American creed in practice, whatever lip service they may still pay to it. Trumpism is the voice of a beleaguered working class telling us that it too is falling away.”
“Another characteristic of the new upper class—and something new under the American sun—is their easy acceptance of being members of an upper class and their condescension toward ordinary Americans.”
“For its part, mainstream America is fully aware of this condescension and contempt and is understandably irritated by it. American egalitarianism is on its last legs.”
“..the central truth of Trumpism as a phenomenon is that the entire American working class has legitimate reasons to be angry at the ruling class.”
Any Republican – any conservative, any American – who hopes to end this year with a chance to begin fixing the damage and pulling the country back together should read this piece and think hard.
I wrote recently about part of what Murray addresses, the erosion of our middle classes at the lower margin. My takeaway from this piece:
<bold>Our upper classes and their destructive cult of progressive virtue-signaling must also be addressed.</bold>
Not taxed out of existence to pay for far vaster entitlements as Bernie Sanders proposes – that simply won’t work. Nor are Mr. Trump’s current blunt repudiations of parts of their foolishness sufficient. Enjoyable and long overdue, yes, but not sufficient.
Our ruling classes, our self-anointed betters, require persuasive explanation of how far they’ve strayed from the essence of being American, along with a combination of shaming and cajolement to induce at least some of them to start rejoining the old ideal of the country.
The candidate that can do this, with that deft amiable Reagan touch (which as you point out, he made look easy, but it’s anything but) will burn Bernie, bury Hillary, out-trump Trump, and likely take 40+ states.
Not because he’ll immediately convince the ruling class – they took decades to drift into that state, they’ll take time to climb back out – but because a large majority of the country knows we’re crumbing but hasn’t yet heard a persuasively reasoned fix.
I wouldn’t rule out Trump being the one to do this. It’s a logical extension of what he’s been doing, and he is certainly a capable man.
It does require far more hard work (and risk) than he’s committed to so far.
Is there anyone else among the current candidates who also might gain then wield the bully pulpit thus? Cruz has the combination of deep intelligence and utter lack of need for establishment-approval it’d take. One or two others seem to have the intelligence…
Interesting times.
Porkypine
Socialism
Jerry:
Socialism is only supported by two kinds of people.
The first group expects to become the masters.
The second group expects to be such perpetual failures that they will need the government to give them what has been taken from those who were NOT failures.
Keith
It eventually runs out of easily obtained money as those who made it flee or are killed, and must resort to force. The result produces what the Yugoslav writer Djilas called, The New Class.
|
||
|
||
|
Would you bet against sex robots? AI ‘could leave half of world unemployed’
Scientist Moshe Vardi tells colleagues that change could come within 30 years, with few professions immune to effect of advanced artificial intelligence
Re: Would you bet against sex robots? AI ‘could leave half of world unemployed’ (Guardian)
I see no problem with folks buying sex robots, any more than I see a problem with them buying “pocket pussies” or dildos.
Both of those, though, are cheap and easy to make.
And human beings are easy to make, all the components are free, and making them is fun.
The raw materials for creating human replacements are NOT free, acquiring them in quantities to replace humans would require enormous economic investment and the use of resources that are rare and in demand for other things, and at the end of the day, why pay a ton of money for something you can get for free?
It’s delightful that the great minds of the century are worried about this, though. I’m guessing they aren’t getting laid too regularly.
And the availability of purchasable companions with personalities better than the strident anti-male, all-sex-is-rape women still pervasive in this country does offer a nice alternative for men with limited needs. I just told my sons not to waste their time on middle- or upper-class American women.
No man needs to be saddled with a princess-wannabe.
Cheerfully,
Holly Lisle
Yet some of my friends are upper middle class technocrats who can’t find girls appropriate for them. Sad.
: Mini Ice Age AD536-660, New Sci 13 Feb, p. 18
Of possible interest . . .
Since Leroy mentioned my name, I thought I would alert to the location of this brief summary for those with an interest.
https://www.academia.edu/22153847/The_Climate_Crisis_of_530-545_CE_in_Chinese_Sources
David
On Feb 18, 2016, at 15:34, Hermann Burchard <vollskeptiker@yahoo.com> wrote:
Dear Leroy, Mike & all,
only a few days ago, when Googling AD 536 I got into an interesting discussion with a co-author of Mike Baillie’s (he posts as Jonny on Cosmic Tusk). As you probably know, the evidence for cosmic impact 530-540 has been dubious. The lake Ilopango in El Salvador is accepted tentatively by many as an ET astrobleme for that epoch. There is more to consider.
1.) In case of comet, we always expect multiple fragments impacting on account of the fragility of these loose agglomerations of ices, rocks and metals. For 536, one of many, many impacts from late Pleistocene and Holocene occurred in the Sunda strait between Java and Sumatra (if you take David Keys’ word for it and that of Paul Wheatley (see their Wikipedia pages). Wheatley has sources for an incident in 536-540 when trade missions failed between Malacca and China, loud bangs heard in Nanking, and yellow dust covered the ground. The trade mission failure is securely dated to 536 but Keys’ Javan records written on palm leaves appear to have a false date of 416, explained away as due to tropical climate trouble. Wheatley’s book is quoted by Graham Hancock: https://grahamhancock.com/voutec1/
2.) Napier, Asher, Bailey, Steel in their recent paper on the comet menace & the Centaurs put the Taurid ancestor at 30 Ka BP, however, this should probably be set at 40 Ka followed shortly by the Campi Flegrei eruption. The date of the Laschamp geomagnetic excursion is indicative of an ET impact according to Prof. Richard Muller of UC Berkeley. There are several confirmed cases: The Australasian tektite impact in the S-China Sea is co-dated at 780 Ka BP with the Brunhes-Matuyama reversal — the reversal has a slight time-delay, but the co-dating is secure from Chinese loess beds containing micro-tektites. The Campi Flegrei was again later than Laschamp. Also the Eltanin impact at 2,559 Ka BP coincides with the Matuyama-Gauss reversal (impact site in Southern Ocean near or on S America) which is the official end of the Pliocene, onset of the Pleistocene.
Best,
Herman
From: Leroy Ellenberger <c.leroy@rocketmail.com>
To:Sent: Thursday, February 18, 2016 3:47 PM
Subject: Mini Ice Age AD536-660, New Sci 13 Feb, p. 18Mike & All, FYI, the 13 Feb New Scientist runs a news item “Mini ice age linked to fall of empires in late antiquity” incited by 3 large volcanic eruptions with no nod to the cometary portents which were also active at that time as documented by Baillie and McCafferty in “The Celtic Gods: Comets in Irish Mythology” (2005) and researched recently by David Pankenier at Lehigh Univ. Here’s the news item:
IT WAS a cold century. In AD 536, the first of three giant volcanic
eruptions ushered in a mini ice age that coincided with a plague
epidemic, the decline of the eastern Roman Empire, and
upheavals across Eurasia.
Now we have the first evidence that the disruption to climate
continued for more than 100 years, rather than around a decade, as
previously thought. The cold lasted until around 660, affecting
Europe and Central Asia, and perhaps the rest of the world, too.
Ulf Buntgen at the Swiss Federal Research Institute in Birmensdorf
and his team have used tree ring data to show that the eruptions
were followed by decades of cooler summers–in some cases
4 C cooler–probably thanks to the volcanic dust in the
atmosphere (Nature Geosciences, doi.org/bcdq).
The social turmoil at this time included the plague sweeping
across eastern Europe, the Slavs expanding across the continent,
the transformation of the eastern Roman Empire, and dynastic
change in China. “There was dramatic social, cultural and
political change,” says Shaun Tougher, a historian at Cardiff
University, UK. “Perhaps aspects of the changes were exacerbated
by a colder period.”
“Suggesting climate caused complex events in history like the
fall of empires is controversial,” says Francis Ludlow of Trinity
College Dublin in Ireland. “Ultimately [though], there can be
very little doubt that these sorts of climatic events place great stress
on societies, and can sometimes tip them over the edge.”
Perhaps some “gentle reader” might offer a letter to the editor with
respect to the cosmic vector also present at that time which inspired
the lore associated with the Arthurian Legend, as Baillie and McCafferty
showed in 2005.
Cheers, Leroy
David W Pankenier
Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.
