| Monday
August 30, 2004 Subject: Essay on
Republican Future
There's an interesting David Brooks essay on the
future of the Republican Party in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. I
can't say I agree with everything he says, but there are some interesting
ideas in the piece.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/29/magazine/29REPUBLICANS.html
Henry Vanderbilt
======
A letter from Australia
Dr Pournelle,
This might represent a different media perspective
than those you are used to.
Our own circus has just started with our federal
election being called yesterday for October 9.
Let the games begin ...
Colin (a longtime reader of your fiction and a recent
discoverer of your website)
Correspondents Report - Grieving father brings Iraq
war back into focus for US electorate
http://www.abc.net.au/correspondents/content/2004/s1187148.htm One
might have thought that the latest developments in Najaf – and the broader
issue of Americas continuing involvement in Iraq – would be a central
feature of the US presidential election campaign
==============================
Subject: Thank you
Your remarks about Homestead explain something I
observed a couple of weeks ago.
I was staying at a Homestead. I'd bought a new Linksys
wireless card, but for some reason it wouldn't work. When I borrowed BOTH of
Homestead's wireless-to-Ethernet bridges, those didn't work either, and we'd
previously established that the built-in Ethernet port on the laptop worked
fine. Now I understand what the real cause probably was.
The laptop is an OLD IBM ThinkPad, with a Celeron.
When we installed an OLD Dell wireless card, it worked perfectly. Oh well...
Thanks for the clue.
--John
We do these silly things so you don't
have to....
Subject: "spy" case -- interesting timing
It certainly is very interesting that a secret FBI
counterespionage investigation gets "leaked" the week before the Republican
National Convention. Surely it's not the simon-pure Arabists at State or
bitter careerists at CIA getting a little of their own back? Oh, no, it's
surely just public spiritedness that such a tidbit is released right before
the convention.
It certainly is very interesting that we didn't see
nearly so much press attention when a South Korean agent-in-place was busted
during the 1996 Presidential election year, while Dole was pounding Clinton
on his Korea policy.
http://www.cnn.com/US/9707/11/briefs.pm/kim.sentencing/
We also didn't see much attention when an agent for
our Egyptian ally was busted during the 1988 Presidential election season:
http://www.nti.org/e_research/profiles/Egypt/Missile/#fn87
Ariel Sharon ought to know better than to spy on the
US, because in his case the potential damage from getting caught is higher
than the value of the information received. Beyond that, I'm not sure this
story means very much.
Steve Setzer
I have no idea. But I do note that the
timing of the release isn't as important as what was found, or it is?
I make no secret that my sympathies
with the Middle East include Christians, some of whom have been there
continuously since Tiberius, and who I think have rights at least equal to
those of settlers from Russia some of whom are Jewish only by courtesy.
From: Stephen M. St. Onge saintonge@hotmail.com
Date: August 30th, 2004 subject: Judge Posner dissents
on the 9/11 Commission findings
Dear Jerry:
There's a truly excellent article on the 9/11
commission at
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/29/books/review/29POSNERL.html
(registration required, but worth it). In it, Judge Richard Posner points
out flaws in the Commission's conclusions.
Money quote: "The narrative points to something
different, banal and deeply disturbing: that it is almost impossible to take
effective action to prevent something that hasn't occurred previously. Once
the 9/11 attacks did occur, measures were taken that have reduced the
likelihood of a recurrence. But before the attacks, it was psychologically
and politically impossible to take those measures. The government knew that
Al Qaeda had attacked United States facilities and would do so again. But
the idea that it would do so by infiltrating operatives into this country to
learn to fly commercial aircraft and then crash such aircraft into buildings
was so grotesque that anyone who had proposed that we take costly measures
to prevent such an event would have been considered a candidate for
commitment. Just months before the 9/11 attacks the director of the Defense
Department's Defense Threat Reduction Agency wrote: 'We have, in fact,
solved a terrorist problem in the last 25 years. We have solved it so
successfully that we have forgotten about it; and that is a treat. The
problem was aircraft hijacking and bombing. We solved the problem. . . The
system is not perfect, but it is good enough. . . . We have pretty much
nailed this thing.' "
Hell, it's probably still impossible, politically and
psychologically. If a group of men of Middle Eastern appearance shows up at
a boarding gate, no more than two can be questioned. Anything more would be
"profiling." If those two have the equivalent of boxcutters without metallic
parts, they won't be found without a full body search. How likely is that?
If they are kept off the plane, what's the chance that we'd get the
hijacking pilot each time? So at most we stop two hijackings, and two still
get through -- unless they have an abort scheme, wait a week to run it
again, and get all four.
One of these days, we are going to turn on our TVs,
and watch live coverage of a city or four that have just had nuclear
explosions go off in them. I don't think there's a damn thing we can do to
stop them till it happens. Afterwards? Go reread Mr. Heinlein's _Solution
Unsatisfactory_.
Sincerely (alas), Stephen
DELENDAM ESSE SAUDI ARABIA!
We have decided to make war on the
American People rather than asking the people to participate in the war on
our enemies, and the results will be predictable.
The way to prevent hijackings is to
say we ain't going to put up with them. You can't stop plane crashes but you
can make them rare, and you can make it impossible to use them as cruise
missiles for people unable to make missiles or airplanes of their own.
I was minded of just how thoroughly we
have lost the war on terror in Dulles Airport watching all the useless TSA
people put the citizens through rat mazes; and watching Americans meekly put
up with being herded around. The sense of loss was nearly overwhelming. And
of course I dutifully did as I was told, and avoided pointing out how well
they were doing the job of intimidating the American people.
=========================
Dr Pournelle,
Silk purses and sows ears
Way back when I was much younger than now, I read a
book by a British academic, Michael Young, called The Rise of the
Meritocracy. It was published in the early 1960s and today seems to be out
of print and almost unobtainable; my own copy has been long since ‘borrowed’
and never returned by I-don’t-remember-who. I had forgotten about it until
reminded by a reference in a newspaper article today.
It had taken me some time to realise, even then as I
read the book, that this was not an academic thesis (although it is the
style adopted) in favour of a meritocratic society, but rather a dystopia in
the tradition of Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984.
Young’s thesis was that as education and society and
the workplace becomes more and more efficient in ensuring that all the
clever people rise to the top and all the thick people sink to the bottom,
those and the children of those at the top will stay there and those at the
bottom and their children will stay there too. It’s worth noting that Young
put very little store by the ‘politically correct’ belief of his day, which
was that intelligence was the result of nurture rather than nature. He was
very much a ‘nature’ man.
Anyway, he contended that this will, over time, have
more and more significant and serious consequences for society. It will
lead, among other things, to more and more geographical segregation of the
areas where the top people live and work from those where what Marx called
the lumpen proletariat, the bottom people, live and perhaps work. The
lifestyles and outlooks of the top people and the bottom people will more
and more diverge. Those who in the past were in the ‘middle’ will increasing
find they are obliged to choose (or have chosen for them) between top or
bottom. The gap between the two groups will gradually increase.
I suppose the ultimate sort of future this might lead
to was set out much earlier than Young by HG Wells in The Time Machine,
where he visualised a humanity diverged into two species, the Elois (the
‘top people’) and Morlocks (the ‘bottom people’).
Well, perhaps in the very distant future. But in the
meantime, I think we can already see the early effects of the divergence
that Young wrote of.
As the education system and society in general becomes
more and more effective at sorting out the wheat from the chaff, a greater
and greater proportion of life’s ‘failures’ will tend to congregate together
in areas that people who ‘succeed’ would not want to be seen dead in. There
are other factors that Young did not know about that will help emphasise the
division. One is universal mega-channel television for the Joe Six-Packs of
this world. The other is cheap and powerful computers and the internet,
where the social and knowledge-access divide between those with access and
those without has already been pointed out by many.
The consequences of this segregational drift, based
not on race nor religion nor sexual preference but ability, will be
extremely serious if taken far enough. For instance, it is difficult to see
how democracy as we understand it can continue for long under an extreme
variation of these circumstances. But I’ll leave all that to one side for
the moment and concentrate on one aspect: education.
One result of this change is that the schools in the
places where the lumpen live: sink estates, ghettoes, slums, call them what
you will—even rural areas as the better-abled are drawn to the pleasant
circle cities surrounding the ghettoes—are going to have a harder and harder
time trying to teach students who are not only have a steadily-lowering
ability as time goes by, but are being brought up within a local culture
where academic ability is not considered normal nor advantageous nor
acceptable. So demoralising will this be that fewer and fewer able teachers
will be prepared to teach in these locations.
I would suggest that this might go a long way towards
explaining the declining quality of education in certain parts of the land.
If so, the answer is not a question of pouring more money into education, or
even pouring in less: that is besides the point. It’s more a matter of
trying to make silk purses from sows ears. Has anyone figured out how to do
this yet?
Jim Mangles
Modern education does not seem to
realize that this is not Lake Woebegone and while some kids need classic
education, generalist style, others need training in skills. Both are
valuable, you can't live without the skillful any more than you can live
without the educated, but as Aristotle notes, there is injustice in the way
we operate now.
And see below
====================================
Subject: Silk purses and sows ears
This was the real point made in "The Bell Curve." Too
bad it was obscured by the hysteria over the incidental observation that,
for the very large and diverse sample studied, race was a predictor of IQ.
Jim
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0029146739/qid=
1093892626/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-2646897-6064834?v=glance&s=books
James Utt
Indeed. Not many seem to have noticed
that. Of course most of those who denounced the book proudly had never read
it.
==================
Subject: military laser
Very interesting: defensive "directed energy" weapon:
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/laser-04r.html
--Mark Allums
And other such in the wings...
====================
Subject: John Dvorak's article on Word
I was underwhelmed by this article. It's long on
handwaving and short on actual facts. He doesn't like the HTML that Word
writes, so he didn't even try the XML. His Word install is broken, but
others say they have a similar problem, so he didn't even try to reinstall.
The "save as text" dialog has too many options. Conclusion: the Word code
base should be scrapped.
Nope, not buying it.
Mind you, at one time I did work on Word and I have
seen the Word code base (I doubt Mr. Dvorak ever has). Word could use a
massive cleanup. But Mr. Dvorak isn't qualified to say the things he said,
and Microsoft would be insane to throw out the entire code base.
All that said, I encourage people to try OpenOffice
and see how that works for them. I use it myself these days and I like it.
Perhaps Mr. Dvorak can test OpenOffice and write an article about how
compatible it is with all his documents; that would be an article worth
reading. This one wasn't.
-- Steve R. Hastings "Vita est" steve@hastings.org
http://www.blarg.net/~steveha
Mr. Thompson states that he can now
use Open Office in Linux to write his books using the O'Reilly template that
formerly worked only with Office. I have not tried that yet, but I will when
I get home.
I fijnd Office 2003 quite useful, and
we'll have words on that, too, in upcoming column.
==================
I repeat my proposal that all men who do dangerous
jobs for the good of society (soldier, firefighter, etc.) be allowed to have
a woman become their widow + mother of their children posthumously via sperm
routinely frozen at the beginning of their service. The family of the fallen
hero would have the right to select which of the women who apply to become
part of their family gets the sperm (and the life insurance, pension, etc.
that a widow with children would normally get), but the family could not
select "nobody".
This proposal would provide more of what America needs
most--financially responsible fathers who pass on societally-valuable
characteristics to their progeny. It would also lessen the pain of losing a
son in a noble cause--one would still have a shot at grandchildren.
Jim
Leonidas took only men with living
sons to Thermopylae
===============================
Subject:
The British Meritocracy
It's a modernization of the Chinese mandarin system.
Secondary students are required to choose their career at 16 or 17 (prior to
their A-levels), and for many their university education is so narrow that
it's almost impossible to change later. There's often no continuing
education requirement, so the skills and knowledge taught in a university
education quickly become obsolete. Students usually choose their A-level
subjects to maximize their marks, so most hard subjects are very unpopular.
Trade is looked down upon (as in Rome and Greece).
-- Harry Erwin, PhD, Senior Lecturer of Computing,
University of Sunderland. Computational neuroscientist modeling bat
bioacoustics and behavior. http://osiris.sunderland.ac.uk/~cs0her
I believe the late C Northcote
Parkinson made much the same observation a generation or so ago...
And see below
=========================
Subject: More good news from Iraq
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110005543
This war is far from lost.
===== Kent Peterson urquan@rocketmail.com
"... there was always a minority afraid of something,
and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the
past ..." - Ray Bradbury, _The Martian Chronicles_
I am more than pleased to hear that. I
have less encouraging news from another source which I will put up tomorrow.
The game is worth the candle if winnable.
========
Jerry:
Regarding Leander's comments:
It is probably true that any defensive shield is
cheaper than the weapons which can penetrate it. Does that make defense
immoral? What are the costs of NOT defending against the weapon? Both in
terms of potential damage, and the strategic implications of such a
vulnerability?
Jerry notes one reason why a terrorist bomb is harder
to deliver than most people might suspect. There are other reasons, such as
the NEST team and not-much-discussed nuclear sensors in divers places. But
the bottom line is that terrorists are committeed people -- if they have a
nuclear weapon to deliver, they will keep throwing people at the problem
until it succeeds, or until they run out of people.
The only moral response is to do everything possible
to block both sources of nuclear delivery. It is an open secret that the
reason for the push for deployment of a GMD system now is to assure that NK
cannot blackmail the US. The system may not be perfect, but any defense is
better than no defense. And we're doing quite a bit to make sure that they
run out of people...
Anon & Ibid, Inc.
=============
Subject: I'd mention that Superiority by Arthur C.
Clarke appeared inter alia in Men of War There will be War Pournelle, J.E.
editor - In 1984
Too bad you can't post a buy it here link!
MEN OF WAR - There Will Be War (2) (ii) Two: The
Weapon; Time Lag; On the Shadow of a Phosphor Screen; Cincinnatus; Code Name
Feirefitz; Allamagoosa; Technological War; 'Caster; Proud Legions; And Baby
Makes Three; In the Name of the Father; Superiority (ISBN:0812549538)
Pournelle, J. E. (editor) (Joel Rosenberg; David
Drake; Eric Frank Russell; Fredric Brown; Poul Anderson; Stefan T. Possony;
Eric Vinicoff; T. R. Fehrenbach; Doan Van Toai; Arthur C. Clarke; William F.
Wu; Joel Rosenberg; David Drake; Eric Frank Russell), Illustrated by Alan
Gutierrez;
Book Description: New York and London: Tor Books,
1984. Soft Cover. 368 pp. Cover art by Alan Gutierrez. Contains: The Weapon
by Fredric Brown; Time Lag by Poul Anderson; On the Shadow of a Phosphor
Screen by William F. Wu; Cincinnatus by Joel Rosenberg; Code Name Feirefitz
by David Drake; Allamagoosa by Eric Frank Russell; The Technological War by
Stefan T. Possony and Jerry Pournelle; 'Caster by Eric Vinicoff; Proud
Legions by T. R. Fehrenbach; ..and Baby Makes Three by Doan Van Toai; In the
Name of the Father by Edward P. Hughes; Superiority by Arthur C. Clarke;
Final Muster by Rick Rubin; Parable of the Phantom Limb (poem) by Edward C.
Garrett; Forbidden Lines (poem) by Robert Frazier; Two Poems by Steve Rasnic
Tem; and To Provide for the Common Defense; and Peacekeeper by Jerry
Pournelle. Allamagoosa by Eric Frank Russell won the Hugo Award for best
short story in 1955.
Clarke
===========
Indeed. I thought I had reprinted it.
Those were pretty good books, too.
===
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