Chaos Manor View, Wednesday, April 20, 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.
I’ve been distracted by health concerns, not so severe as to be life threatening but serious enough that they can’t be ignored, and consume time in dealing with them. So it goes. I am also doing my turn on the really excellent book Niven, Barnes, and I are doing on interstellar colonization; we’re trying to be realistic, including looking into why someone would want to colonize another star, given the problems of getting there. It’s good stuff, but time consuming, with all my work confined to two finger typing, with frequent corrections of every line, sometimes every word.
That, by the way, progresses better than you might think, but only so ;long as I use Word 2010: that version has a very easy method for adding to the autocorrect dictionary, so that qword can easily be converted to word, and words with a c at the end, or c at the beginning, can sometimes by autocorrected; the c comes from hitting the c key along with the space bar. There is also the problem of losing all my text if I hit alt-spacebar and certain other keys thereafter; the text vanishes.
I’ve overcome that by getting the habit of saving as “currentwork.doc” what I am working on at the moment, and setting AutoSave to the shortest possible interval and then clicking on the little save icon whenever I look up and correct.
Today I hit some key combination that put a black line in my Word text. I couldn’t delete it, either with the backspace or the delete key, and I couldn’t select it, so I couldn’t delete it that way. Went online and asked about undeletable black lines, but the remedy I was told would work told me to use click on items that don’t appear in the Windows 10 ribbon; what version they are for is irrelevant. I finally copied all my text and pasted it into Notepad; then I copied that, and pasted it into a just opened Word file; jimmied the definition of Normal to be what I wanted; and normalized everything. Worked but seems needlessly tedious. Apparently I did something like hit the dash key three time and Word helped me by turning that into so kind of format box, and the instructions for turning that off can’t be found; or rather I didn’t find them for Word 10. In the old days I’d dig until I solved that, but I used the Notepad trick instead. I was eager to keep writing, because it was a good scene I had been doing. Didn’t do much good, of course. Once the flow is broken, it’s hard to start up again.
But it was a good scene, and now I have time to do a View. I was describing a girl, nineteen, as she wakes up from cold sleep to find she’s still aboard a ship, not landed on new planet as she had expected when she went to sleep.
I’m about to give up on reading neo-conservative magazines, at least until after the election. They could have an article about a paleontologist discovering a new dinosaur, but before the article was done there would be a screed denouncing Trump. They’re obsessed with him and can’t write about anything else. The current Weekly Standard has an article about Hillary and her eMail and the Attorney General; and sure enough, they have to take a shot at Trump as part of it, as if he had anything to do with her keeping government business on her private server.
Trump is probably the least qualified candidate who ran for the Republican nomination this year. If you didn’t know that, you’d have to be a hermit to avoid finding it out. He also has far more delegates than any other candidate. I would think that would send a clear message to the Republican elite, particularly the country club establishment; but like the Bourbon kings of France restored after the Revolution, they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
Wouldn’t I want a more qualified, somewhat more experienced candidate? Well, of course. But the establishment wasn’t about to let anyone not within its ranks to get anywhere close to the nomination. In 1956 the goal was “anyone but Reagan” among the Republican elite. Now it’s anybody but Trump. Before Trump they made it clear to all: it’s going to be one of us, like it or lump it. We can deal with upstarts.
But they didn’t intimidate Trump, and now he’s laid all of their compliant candidates low, and they’re turning to an old enemy, Cruz, in despair. The notion is that he’ll “grow” in office; it’s for sure that Trump won’t grow under their definition of grow.
But in fact he’s likely to. He has some good advisors and he has a definite point of view that may be hard to discern because it’s masked by his blatant – loudmouthed and irritating, if you like – tactics. But he has never wavered on his desire to fill the Supreme Court with Justices as near in scholarship and view to Scalia as possible; that alone would be enough to get me to the polls for Trump if he’s nominated.
He has consistently said we need to turn control of the schools to the local districts and stop dictating to them from Washington. This has been taken as meaning that he doesn’t know what to do on a nation al scale. Well, I have news: neither does anyone else, and the attempt, even with the best of will, will always fail. The schools worked better, over all, when they were paid for by local school district taxes and run by local school boards elected by the people who paid those taxes. If you don’t believe that, get a copy of the California Sixth Grade Reader from a hundred years ago and compare it to your child’s present day ninth grade reader. Then weep.
No, he’s not a “movement conservative”, but I’m not sure I still am, and I was a protégé of Russell Kirk and Stefan Possony, and a friend of Bill Buckley and Willmore Kendall. I’ve been in that “movement” a long time. Long enough to see National Review use the egregious Frum to read most of us out of the movement.
Trump is not a movement conservative, but his inclination is to set goals and get people working on them, not to jail and fine them for not doing so. He understands that being served by mindless minions is not the path to glory or wealth. Compared to Hillary or Sanders or anyone in Obama’s train, I’ll take Trump any day. I would prefer someone with government experience – some, not one whose only experience is in government – but we seem to be fresh out of those. I suppose I’d rather have establishment country club Republicans than anyone likely to be nominated by the Democratic establishment even if a plague took all the present candidates; we tried that with Bush I, who cleared the White House of Reagan people the day after inauguration, and proceeded to saddle us with the Americans With Disabilities act and a new Federal bureaucracy; but that’s another story.
Trump is a pragmatic populist. I can live with that.
Trumpism and Clintonism Are the Future
I know this guy. He’s not a conservative, but he’s smart.
It is certainly an analysis worth reading.
Zubrin: ‘The profound global warming of the past four centuries cannot be plausibly ascribed to anthropogenic causes, but it certainly has happened, and the greens cannot deny it.’
<http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/04/where_are_americas_drowned_cities.html>
—————————————
Roland Dobbins
New EmDrive Theory – MIT Tech Review
Dear Dr. Pournelle,
A recent article in the on-line edition of MIT Technology Review describes a new EmDrive theory. The theory may account for the EmDrive’s apparent violation of conservation of momentum. Moreover, the article suggests fly-by anomalies (described as unaccountable “jumps in momentum observed in some spacecraft as they fly past Earth toward other planets”) provide supporting observational evidence. Here is the link:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601299/the-curious-link-between-the-fly-by-anomaly-and-the-impossible-emdrive-thruster/#/set/id/601302/
Yours truly,
Jim Bonang
Fascinating.
For all you Star Trek Fans
Almost fell off my chair!
Star Trek – The Lost Episode
Although the lost 80th episode was never aired, this trailer has been uncovered through the diligent efforts of …
Brice Yokem
This is intolerable. You don’t arrest six-years-olds at their school for NOT being in a fight which didn’t even occur at the school.
First-graders cuffed, arrested, charged; Murfreesboro outraged
Jessica Bliss, The (Nashville) Tennessean
USA TODAY – USA TODAY – Wednesday, April 20, 2016
Police handcuffed multiple students, ages 6 to 11, at a public elementary school in Murfreesboro on Friday, inspiring public outcry and adding fuel to already heightened tensions between law enforcement and communities of color nationwide.
Vaccines and Antigen Load
Hi Jerry,
I’d just like to point out a couple of things about your argument about vaccines. I’m willing to accept as plausible the idea that a harmful level of vaccination exists but I’m a) a little unclear why what we are doing today is considered “too much” (or potentially so) and what we did 5, 10 or 20 years ago isn’t? It sounds somewhat arbitrary especially when b) the antigen load – the amount of foreign material is actually lower today than it was in 1983 when we covered only seven diseases. Back then we were putting 15 000 antigens into a child by age four. Today it’s something like 400. So with regard to the foreign substances anyway today’s vaccine schedule is lower than the one I had when I was a kid.J
And it will take years to determine the effect on number of autoimmune disorders
Out-of-date apps put three million servers at risk of ransomware (ZD)
About 2,100 servers across 1,600 different networks have already been compromised, meaning they can be infected with malware at any time.
By Zack Whittaker for Zero Day | April 18, 2016 — 14:56 GMT (07:56 PDT) |
More than three million internet-facing servers are at risk of hijack by ransomware because they are running out-of-date software.
Cisco-owned Talos Group said in a blog post that they had conducted a search of machines that were already compromised, which showed at least 2,100 servers across 1,600 separate networks, belonging to schools and universities, government departments and aviation companies. were vulnerable to infection.
Malicious actors are using out-of-date versions of Red Hat’s JBoss enterprise server, a middleware software that integrates devices, data, and users across different platforms, as the initial point of compromise.
The security research team warned that these servers could be infected by Samsam malware at any moment, a new kind of ransomware that infects through compromised servers and locks up files until a ransom is paid.
Hackers targeting servers is a relatively new kind of attack for ransomware actors, given that a network’s most sensitive data rests on the server rather than individual computers. That raises the stakes, and makes it more likely that the ransom will be paid.
Some of the compromised servers belonged to schools running Destiny, a content management system developed used to keep track of books and other items. Follett, which maintains the Destiny software, immediately issued a fix for the flaw, which researchers said it was “imperative” that all users install the patches.
Talos researchers said in their advisory urged administrators to remove external access to the server, but added that ideally reimaging the system and installing patches would be better.
Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.
