| Wednesday,
August 3, 2005 Subject: Report from on the
road-- Francis Hamit
Dear Jerry:
Our hotel has a free email connection, so I thought
I'd give you an update on how it went in Federal Court last Thursday.
Basically, very well.
I did feel like I was crashing an all-lawyers party,
since I was the only freelance writer who showed up to speak. There was an
amendment to the settlement becuase Thomson Gale sold rights to Highbeam in
November and to Amazon in April. This caused someone to propose that, for
those articles so infringed, that those writers in Category B who had
articles so infringed be moved, for those articles only, from Category B to
Category A which pays ten times as much. The joker in that deck is that
those accepting that deal also grant a non-exclusive license to continue to
use those works.
On the plane there I was going over my various
documents and did some simple arithmetic. Thomson Gale, per a recent
article, services 60,000 public libraries in 60 nations. That does not
include their sales of articles to other libraries, to corporate intranets,
or to Lexis-Nexis and Factiva and Dialog.
So let's take that as just one market and add in the
fact that Kern County Library pays about $20,000 per year for their
subscription to one Gale database. They are part of a larger consortium to
save money, but let's take that as an average, and multiply that by the
60,000 libraries. That's 1.2 billion dollars a year in revenue, of which the
publishers get between 30 and 70 percent, depending on their deal with
Thomson Gale. (The lawyer there for Thomson Gale was seen to visibly wince
when I mentioned this to Judge Daniels.)
Now let's take the 20 million full-text articles in
that Gale database and divide it into 1.2 billion dollars. That is $60,000
per article per year in revenues. Yeah, I didn't beleive it myself and did
the numbers several times. This is the revenue stream the publishers and the
aggregators and database providers are trying to keep from the freelancers
whose rights have been infringed.
They are trying to buy some of these for as little as
five dollars each. Those in Category C will get only a maximum of $60.00 per
article, those in Category B a maximum of $150 per article...and that
includes the right to keep using the work. Forever.
Judge Daniels shut down attempts by Plaintiff's
lawyers to keep me from speaking based on the fact that I've opted out of
all this. "I want to hear what he has to say" he said. So I gave him that
and a bit more and asked for permission to submit some additonal material.
His stack of paper on this, as he said, is already inches growing rapidly to
feet, but he allowed it. So I've more to prepare. When I get back.
I am troubled by the fact that no one was there from
the so-called writer's organizations that have their names all over this
thing. They left it to their lawyers. I find that a bit dismaying, as I do
the lack of enterprise by the media. This should be a very big story. No one
was there except for a Ms. Trotsky who is a member of both the NWU and the
ASJA and thought I gave a good presentation, as did one of the Plaintiff's
lawyers, who was kind enough to say that it was better than most lawyers
would have done.
Anyway, I am doing Civil War research for the next two
weeks and we're not back until mid-month. The new date for the Fairness
Hearing is September 27th at 10 AM, and it would be very useful if some
other writers would show up and speak. This judge doesn't like repetition,
so there is no point in me going back, but, if we are actually to have
fairness, some other people need to step up and speak to this.
Sincerely,
Francis Hamit
Mr. Hamit is doing a service for all writers. It is
probably a doomed effort. The lawyers seem to have cut a deal which enriches
them and gives their clients little to nothing; but that is the way things
work now.
However, as Mr. Thompson notes
below, Francis could improve his math skills a bit...
============
The following addresses a number of subjects:
Dear Dr Pournelle:
Given your rather hostile response to my satiricle
comments regarding Neo Jacobites, I've stayed away from your sight. However;
after the latest shuttle launch, I couldn't resist the temptation to check
in to see what you and your fellow paleocons were up to. I see you have an
interesting and amusing solution to the problem of the shuttle's external
tanks shedding insulation. I would be happy to donate one of my condoms to
the effort, but the NASA technicians will have to trim it to fit.
The ongoing problems with the shuttle naturally
inspire you to renew your proposal for SSTO spacecraft. Thanks to your
prodding, I actually did some math which confirmed that although the mass
ratios are huge, an SSTO vehicle using current propulsion and structural
technology is theoretically feasible. However; the continuing problems with
the shuttle's external tank insulation and thermal protection system
highlight the key problem with SSTO. Can you build a vehicle that has a high
enough mass ratio to reach orbit and still be robust enough to survive
reentry and landing?
My suspicion is that the answer to the above question
is no. However; the success of SpaceShip One demonstrates that a vehicle
using a dramatically different design philosophy than has been prevelant at
NASA might be able to be light enough to reach orbit and survive reentry.
NASA's approach to the reentry problem has been inspired by two sources, the
design of reentry vehicles for nuclear missiles and your beloved DYNOSOAR
project. RV's for missiles were designed to minimize drag in order to
maximize their accuracy. Because of their relatively small size, it was
feasible to equip them with enough structural mass to survive the heating.
The DYNOSAUR concept is far more sophisticated, but once again the
fundamental goal was to minimize drag. This approach was first intended to
allow the vehicle to fly a complete circuit of the earth using a rocket that
was capable of boosting it to only suborbital velocities. When more powerful
boosters became available that could launch the DYNASOAR to orbital
velocity, this approach was retained to give the vehicle cross range
capabillity. While this design philosphy makes perfect sense for a
reconsance/strike vehicle, is it really neccessary for a vehicle that is
simply an orbital cargo truck? I think not, especially if you get smart
enough to use an equitorial launch facillity which would reduce the DeltaVee
requirement and simply launch timing.
Your proposal for X-prizes makes perfect sense. Unlike
a normal government developement contract, X-prizes would inspire
independant groups to experiment with various design philosphies. SSTO types
like yourself might be able to purchase SSMEs and external tanks at scrap
prices. A tank with seven SSME's bolted to its butt would reach orbital
velocity with perhaps a few tons of payload. Of course you'd have to figure
out how the crew would survive peak accelerations of tens of gees and I
seriously doubt if even my condoms would be able to survive the heat of
reentry.
You might want to check out the concept for an orbital
launch system that has been proposed by ATK industries. This proposal forced
me to reconsider by disdain for any concept that calls for a winged first
stage that launches horizontally. ATK's design uses turbojet propulsion to
take off and gain altitude just like Rutan's White Knight. However; it uses
a mass injection system that allows the turbojet engines to boost the
vehicle to Mach 3 and an altitude well in excess of 100,000 feet. At this
altitude, aerodynamic loads are low enough to simplify the vehicle
seperation problem. ATK's proposal calls for the first stage vehicle to
launch a multistage rocket. However; since the mass ratio equation is an
exponential function, it is obvious that the altitude and velocity boost
imparted by the first stage vehicle might make it possible to build a single
stage vehicle that could then reach orbit and survive reentry.
Another approach to the launch problem is offerred by
the understanding that the ultimate goal of any reusuable launch vehicle is
to make space flight relatively affordoable. While it would be nice to send
people into space for a few hundred dollars a head which is the price of a
coach ticket on an airline, meeting the price of transporting overpaid
executives on private business jets which works out to tens of thousands of
dollars per executive trip would have a profound effect on the economics of
space developement and exploration. The hybrid rocket motor technology used
by SpaceShip One offers the possibillity of building a core vehicle that is
reuseable but uses expendable hybrid propulsion modules to boost into orbit.
A shift to LOX rather than the NOX that Rutan and Bensen favor would
probably be needed to get the ISP high enough to make the mass ratio
tolerable. However; if the LOX tank and complex and expensive pumps (powered
perhaps by a turbine with a hybrid gas generator?) were part of the
reuseable core vehicle, the expendable hybrid fuel/motor modules could
probably be mass produced at a reasonably small multiple of fuel costs. The
resulting vehicle could then be reasonably cost effective while retaining
the operational simplicity of discarding rather than trying to recover the
hybrid modules.
You of course continue to maintain your pessimism
regarding Iraq. My own opinion is that while the picture isn't rosey, it is
far from hopeless. The situation would be far better if the French hadn't
coerced Turkey into refusing us permission to bring the Fourth Infantry
Division in from the north. The addition of those highly mobile and heavilly
armed troops would have allowed us to force the Iraqi army into an organized
surrender rather than allowing them to disperse. Iraq would also have
remained more stable if Teddy Kennedy hadn't succeeded in imposing peace
time procurement rules on the Iraq aid package. Rapidly pumping a few tens
of billions of dollars of aid into the economy would have been a much more
effective and cheaper technique to pacify the country than the PaleoCon
approach of deploying an occupation force of half a million troops. As grim
as the situation seems, the fact that so many of the insurgents are
foreigners suggests that contrary to the Paleocon mantra, Iraq is not
fundamentally incapable of evolving into some semblance of a democratic
republic.
My basic disagreement with the PaleoCons is that they
fail to provide any reasonable alternative strategy to address the threat of
radical Islamic countries and/or terrorists aquiring WMD. Contrary to the
rantings of useless idiots like Ambassador Wilson, Saddam Hussien hadn't
abandoned his hopes to aquire WMD. He had sanitized his country suffeciently
that the UN inspectors probably would have certified him as being in
compliance if the US had allowed those inspections to continue. The likely
result is that the sanctions would have been lifted which would have allowed
Saddam to generate enough cash flow to begin rearming. The US would have had
no choice but to accept this because the alternative would have been an
Iraqi military that was too enfebled to deter much less survive an attack by
Iran. Given the eagerness with which the Russians, French and Germans sold
military hardware to Iraq in violation of sanctions when Oil was less than
$20 bucks a barrell, can you imagine what they would be willing to sell
Saddam now that oil is at $60 a barrell?
The only strategy that has been embraced by the
PaleoCons is to simply withdraw our military from the middle east as well as
our support of Israel in the hope of appeasing the Islamicists. Given
Islam's hitory of militarism, conquest and conversion at the point of the
sword, I suspect that such an approach would only embolden them. The likely
result would be the complete radicalization of the middle and the forcible
occupation and conversion of Africa. The Europeans would no doubt get down
on their knees to placate this renewed, Islamic empire while Idia would
probably result to using nuclear weapons to defend itself.
Finally, Popular Science recently had an article on
proposals to reverse the Greenhouse effect. Two that caught my attention
were to fertilize a barren area of the Antarctic ocean to stimulate plankton
growth which would sequestor carbon from the atmosphere and building a giant
sun shade at the Earth Sun Langrangian point to reduce solar radiation.
Building the Ocean Thermal systems that you described in A Step Further Out
and deploying them in the tropics would do far more to stimulate plankton
growth and sequestor carbon. Solar Powere Sattellytes deployed in
Geosynchronus orbit would be much cheaper than the Langrangian sun shade and
they could be used to provide power as well as reduce solar radiaton.
Pauline Crawford
Addressing your points more or less in the
order they are made, with the understanding that I am not anything like a
spokesperson for the people who call themselves paleo conservatives, and I
certainly differ with most of them on many issues:
SSTO is preferable for
operational reasons, presuming it can be made to work properly. USAF tested
the concept in HAVE REGION, in which cross sections of a theoretical SSTO
were built and tested for strength. The conclusion was that sufficient
strength with adequate mass ratio for at least 1% GLOW payload was achieved
with existing materials.
Having said that, I point out that I am
hardly opposed to some kind of first stage in a two stage to orbit system,
and I would be happy to see the concepts reduced to hardware. What we need,
as I have repeatedly said, is more flight date. All our payload calculations
are 3rd decimal place theory, while all our data are second decimal place
numbers; we do not know if the payload for a 600,000 lb GLOW SSTO ship is
positive or negative, and estimates range from negative to 12,000 pounds
(about 2%) to orbit. We won't know until we fly such a ship, and I would not
at all be astonished to see that the first tail number does not make orbit.
The second might. As Max Hunter said when we proposed SSX (of which DC/X was
a scale model) we need to fly these
things, find out where they are overly strong and bore holes in them to
lighten the structure, tweak engine designs, and so forth; that is why this
was and is proposed as an X vehicle, not, as everyone seems to insist on
building, a design prototype. The original X-3 Stiletto was designed to take
off from a runway, go supersonic, and return. It did that. It was not a
prototype for anything, but from building it we learned how to build the
F-104 Starfighter, an airplane that dominated military aerospace for a
decade.
I would be extremely happy to see a series
of X projects properly designed as such: the best SSTO candidate we can
build, one or more TSTO systems, etc. All together would cost less than NASA
wastes trying to fix Shuttle.
Two stage systems come in two varieties,
recoverable and expendable first stages (I am assuming the first stage is
reusable in any event.) Each concept has operations problems. Expendables
limit your launch sites and azimuth (you have to have a safe place for the
debris to fall). Recoverables also have limits on azimuth and launch
locations but those are not as severe. There are also two concepts in
recoverable first stages: boost for velocity and altitude, and lift for
altitude only. The White Knight / SS1 concept was altitude only. This gets
one past atmospheric drag and sea level ISP limits, and that is worth a good
bit. Air lift/ air drop altitude only first stages make sense, and may be
the right way to go. We will not know until we build some SSTO and TSTO
ships and test them, and I have been trying to get the X projects going
again since the Council I chair first proposed that in about 1986.
Your economic observations are applicable
but that has been discussed elsewhere and often. The goal is to get space
access for more people than just corporate executives and those Touched By
The Hand of NASA. No one supposes that this will happen in the first ships,
just as air travel remained expensive and limited for a long time. The
question is what one is working towards.
Rutan's Space Ship One clearly has no path
to orbit. His latest sub-orbital proposals may. Space Ship One was designed
purely and simply to win the X-Prize, and did so. The re-entry system could
not be used at high Mach numbers nor is there any thermal protection. As to
hybrid engines, I have followed their progress with decreasing enthusiasm
since George Koopman proposed them to the Council I chair, and engaged by
respected friend Phil Chapman to work up the case for them. They remain
theoretically attractive, but every time they are used there seem to be
problems, and nearly all flight and static tests have shown chugging and
other problems of combustion instability. I would bet you reasonable sums
that composites have no primary role to play in orbital flight;
which does not preclude continued development, but I would prefer to see
engine development X projects in expander engines using propane or methane
and LOX, both well understood materials. I point out that hybrids with LOX
forfeit one of the stronger theoretical advantages of hyprids (no
cryogenics).
Incidentally, I do not think the
proponents of hybrid engines would appreciate their engines being called
"expendable" since they are not dropped in flight. I agree that we probably
need a word for recovered but not reused components. SS1 employed
hybrid engines that come in modules; the used engine is removed and another
inserted. I do not think the used ones have been recycled although there is
no reason why they could not be. I do point out that the concept has the
disadvantage that the engine can never be tested before flight. I am no fan
of hybrid engines; once again this is not
a matter to be settled by debate. If hybrids with sufficient ISP and
reliability can be built I will cheer; I just don't think that will happen.
========
Regarding Iraq and what
to do, and a national strategy:
Your arguments for the invasion echo the
new NeoConservative line, and while many of my paleo conservative colleagues
find them risible, I find them nearly persuasive. Not sufficiently so that I
would have been in favor of the invasion had they been made at the time
(they weren't; we invaded under a different rationale); but not unpersuasive
now. The real question is, to whom was Iraq under Saddam a threat? And I
would argue "Not to the people of the United States" I continue to
advocate a foreign policy of being friends to liberty everywhere but
guardians only of our own. I would have favored the Afghanistan invasion. I
would have opposed the Iraqi invasion on the grounds that there are worse
monsters if all we want to do is go abroad seeking monsters and dragons to
slay; the criterion ought to be threats to the United States, and Iraq
didn't pose much of one.
We have spent $300 billion in Iraq. I am
quite certain that there are many ways we could have spent that much money
that would have made the US far safer than invading Iraq made us. Larger
navy (how will they get at us if we control the seas?); better border
security (even the liberals believe that for $40 billion over 5 years we
could pretty well eliminate the illegal alien population); if they can't
invade us by sea or air, they have to get into the US some other way, and
billions of dollars is real money; one can accomplish a lot of border
control with that kind of money, and do it without blunting the fighting
edge of the Army and nearly destroying the National Guard and Reserves.
I would say that if containment worked for
Communism it will probably work to contain radical Islam. The West's
cultural weapons of mass destruction -- rock music, videos, blue jeans, iPOD,
Internet including pornography, etc. -- are quite enough to bring down
military jihad Islam over time. So is the picture of Western decadent
luxury. Contain them so they cannot expand; defend the borders; and allow
the market place to work on the rest. If they choose to keep out Western
influences they will end up like Burma and North Korea; if they don't, the
Cultural Weapons of Mass Destruction and the promise of earthly delights
will have their way on their youth. In either event we give them far less to
shoot at. It's much easier to persuade someone to attack troops on your soil
than to get them to travel a long way to blow themselves up in order to vent
rage on the Internet or a rock band. Even the English case proves my point:
is that the worst they can do? (No, but 911 wasn't as bad as many things can
be and have been; and that was the worst they could do at the time when we
had little warning.)
As to the cost of not having the 4th
available in the invasion if you care to look you will find I said so at the
time. We had to arm the Kurds and make use of Kurdish militia, exacerbating
the centrifugal tendencies in Iraq. I am not myself certain of why we so
insist on an indivisible Iraq given that the nation didn't exist before
World War One, and was artificial when formed; but perhaps that is an
argument for another time. I will agree that it would be a mistake simply to
run out now, handing the militant jihadists a victory compared to which 911
was trivial. Had we merely gone in, deposed Saddam, and departed the lesson
would have been very different; but we did not choose to do that. Had we
gone in, used Saddam's army to set up our own puppet regime and made Iraq
into a client state, that would have been proper Imperial conduct (of course
I would have opposed that, but at least it would make sense). We have now
committed ourselves to invading Iraq not for our national interest but for
Iraq's own good, and that may be a larger mission than we can accomplish.
Your fear of Islam taking over Africa's
poverty is not my own nightmare. So far the militant jihadists do not seem
to be capable of creating and running any kind of modern state. The Taliban
in Africa? Hard lines on the Africans, but really --
And why do you assume that the Africans
can never resist these invasions? I can tell you from first hand experience
that Haille Sellassie had first class troops at his disposal. It's a
question of leadership, actually.
Finally regarding
Global Warming, I can only hope that the world is catching up with the
proposals I made in A Step Farther Out thirty years ago; but I do not think
that carbon reduction will have much effect on global temperatures. It may
well be worth doing -- this high a CO2 level is an experiment I wouldn't
care to continue running if there's an easy way to avoid it -- but until we
understand what is going on a lot better, I would prefer to put my money
into studies and data collection on climate == and put my real money into
ways to make the US more energy independent. Solar power satellites, nuclear
power, better research into use of electricity for transportation vehicles
-- I can think of much we might have done with, say, $200 billion of the
$300 billion the Neocons have spent on the War In Iraq.
And I fear I am not persuaded to adopt Big
Government Conservatism, whatever that is, by any accomplishments of the
Bush regime. That hardly means I have an love for the Clintons.
I fear we Old Republic advocates are
doomed to watch as neo=Jacobins and Socialists fight it out for control of a
new Imperial state. But despair is a sin.
==================
Sir:
Perhaps you are wiser than I. But I have doubts that
your theory that those things you refer to as " the cultural weapons of mass
destruction -- rock music ... (etc.)" will in time undermine the jihadists.
Exposure to the Western culture (debased as it is) seems not to be working
to ameliorate the long-standing warlike core of Islam, it seems to be
increasing its existing violent nature. All the London bombers knew the
West. So did the 9/11 people. So did Sayyid Qutb, who helped give us the
Muslim Brotherhood.
Osama himself is anything but unfamiliar with our
culture, and Muslims in this country and throughout Europe danced in glee at
the fall of the twin towers. Theo van Gogh in Netherlands was not killed by
someone who just walked in from Iran. So the cultural undermining of
Islamism, whether of the Salafi variety or the Wahhab or the Shia, seems to
not be happening. As you once said, "that turns out not to be the case".
This would seem to bode poorly too for a policy of
containment. Containment worked adequately against the Sovunion for many
reasons, most of which you know better than I. But one reason is that the
Sov's intended to survive any conflict. The jihadi's seem to be unconcerned
(at best) with personal survival, and some seek death. That makes certain
types of deterrence difficult. Second, we have not yet seemed to be willing
to define the situation in the moral terms that Reagan did, that of
portraying those who have declared themselves our enemies as being our
enemies. Instead we hear "religion of peace" nonsense, which does not square
with the historical record. Third, one component of the Third World War was
that we made it known, occasionally, that we had a voice too. We had RFE and
Radio Liberty, etc. beaming into Poland and Russia and Ukraine, etc. Today,
we have Saudi-financed mosques in London and New York and LA, etc. preaching
without much hindrance a message of hate and jihad, but Bibles are
prohibited in Arabia, converts are killed, and non-Muslims have a tough time
just staying alive as far away as Thailand. So long as we give the Muslims a
"what's yours is mine, what's mine is negotiable" situation, defeat is a
matter of time. Their leaders speak daily of us as their enemies. They seem
to believe it and they act accordingly. Perhaps we should do so as well,
before they are once again knocking at the gates of Vienna.
Iraq under Saddam may not have been a direct threat to
the US, although the term "US interests" has often been morphed to fit as
needed. Neither was North Korea, but we saw some action there. Neither was
Mussolini's Italy, but ditto. Other examples might be found, our (illegal)
support for the Brits prior to our entry to WW2 for example. Some may argue
the wisdom of some of these actions, but we've certainly done it before. I
like your use of "being friends to liberty everywhere but guardians only of
our own". But it has occasionally been stretched a bit. As has "consent of
the governed". I'd be in favor of rediscovering both as operation
philosophies of government, but then there is the Pearl Harbor record. So
perhaps we set the limits further out. Looking at the
Finally, will we EVER see a re-issue of Inferno? My
tattered copy disappeared, along with Oath of Fealty and most of my Heinlein
works, about three moves back, somewhere along I-40 near Jackson, TN and I
haven't found a replacement yet.
Regards,
Rog Martin
Your point is well made, and I have no
definitive refutation: certainly the home-grown jihadists in Britain were
subjected to the temptations of the West, and went in another direction.
And yet: I wonder if, absent US and
British troops in the Middle East, it would have been so easy to persuade
those young people to give up their lives in order to destroy some subway
trains and busses and kill a few British subjects, some of them English?
What, really, did they accomplish? And what, really, will future recruits
see as an incentive to join them?
Perhaps I have unconsciously assumed that
if we give up our quests to find overseas dragons to slay (so long as
we don't actually win anything or profit from our conquests) we will also
give up the suicide of the west that invites the enemy in, disarms our own
culture, and encourages those who hate it. Liberalism is a philosophy of
consolation for Western Civilization as it commits suicide. And perhaps that
assumption is wrong. I agree, if we do not even attempt to spread the
positive message of the West (in addition to the cultural weapons of mass
destruction) we forfeit much; but I am not at all sure that sending in the
troops is a good substitute.
However: I do think it evident that if we
were to build our own civilization and mind our own business, and pay
attention to what is going on through use of intelligently managed
intelligence services, we can keep the mayhem against us to a minimum. We
will never eliminate it all, as we will never eliminate those who get drunk
and beat their wives; but we can see that when we interfere the result won't
be, as it was when Crook required Geronimo to give up his drunken
wife-beating, a long military campaign and the slaughter of settlers.
What I meant to say there was that a low
level of hostile activities is likely to be around forever, as will be
traffic accidents, teens killed on prom night in drunken escapades, children
killed by police when someone goes mad and begins shooting at his neighbors
and the police while using his own children as shields, and so forth. There
will always be such; but they become "terror" crimes only when we become
terrified. I suspect that it is a bit harder to recruit people for suicide
squads in Britain now: their first team killed itself, their second team was
incompetent, and while the death of the Brazilian was regrettable, the
no-nonsense attitude of the police may have sent a message. I think Britain
would be better off without its attempts to disarm its subjects, but then it
has always had subjects, not citizens, and government has always been at the
pleasure of the Crown, not from consent of the governed. They seem to find
that a congenial way to live, and that is not my business, and certainly
they are no threat to us. I do find our relations with Britain an exception
(a welcome exception in my judgment) to the axiom that nations have no
friends, only enduring interests. I think we have been friends with our
Mother Country for a long time, and this is a good thing for us both; but I
offer that as a personal observation.
I guess what I am saying in this rambling
answer is that our Cultural Weapons of Mass Destruction will do a pretty
good job of disarming the jihadists at the level of state activity, and I
think we can live with the less coordinated actions of those infuriated by
the west. I do note that in general those who recruit the suicide bombers
don't get themselves killed; and I note that for all the proximity,
motivations, and the rest of its enemies, Israel is still very much alive
and kicking.
So, I think, will we be. It may well be
that the West needs a Moral Rearmament, but that name seems already to have
been taken. Still, teaching our students about the West, and our national
history (as opposed to teaching a long list of misdeeds as if that were all
of our history) might be a refreshing alternative to sending our soldiers
out to spread democracy on the points of their bayonets.
If this is a bit rambling and
disconnected, I beg forgiveness; I seem to have a touch of summer influenza.
As to Inferno, we are at this moment at
work on a sequel which will be published along with a reissue of the (mostly
unchanged) original.
==========
Of course our Cultural Diversity leads to
this sort of thing, and perhaps it is already too late:
Subject: Maribel's day in court.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-maribel3aug03,0,3947280,full.story
- Roland Dobbins
And while blowing up a bus is not in the
same league as armed police terrorizing children and dragging them kicking
and screaming to the jail house over throwing rocks at bad boys,
terrorization is terrorization, and the messages are not dissimilar: it will
be our way, resistance is futile, and we no longer have tolerance for much
of anything. Sir. Have a nice day.
I much like the excuse "that we are only
doing our jobs, and it wasn't really our fault that we characterized this
girl as a larger and more dangerous monster".
On the other hand, perhaps the good people
of Fresno will make use of real democratic institutions to make some changes
in their police and local government. That certainly would have happened
when I was young. But then in those days we didn't need to make a Federal
Case out of everything. Certainly there will be Federal NGO's come to Fresno
now, and the locals will have little to say about what happens next.
==============
====================
Subject: Heavy weather.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7753
- Roland Dobbins
I have been saying this for years;
suddenly it is 'breaking news"?
===========
Subject: $60,000 per article per
year?
>> Now let's take the 20 million
full-text articles in that Gale database and divide it into 1.2 billion
dollars. That is $60,000 per article per year in revenues. Yeah, I didn't
beleive it myself and did the numbers several times.<<
Well, when I do the math, $1.2 billion divided by
20,000,000 comes out to $60 rather than $60,000. Quite a difference, and one
that significantly affects Mr. Hamit's arguments, even if the rather large
assumptions he otherwise makes are accurate.
-- Robert Bruce Thompson
My
apologies to all. Apparently my summer flu is worse than I thought; I
certainly should have caught that. It does affect the argument, but not, I
think, the principle. (and see below)
===========================
Subject: The World is Round.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18154
- - Roland Dobbins
The restriction of knowledge to an elite group
destroys the spirit of the society and leads to its intellectual
impoverishment.
-- Albert Einstein
NeoLiberalism in a nutshell...
==============
Subject: the poor do not know how to be poor
Jerry
Fred has some thoughts on poverty in America:
http://www.fredoneverything.net/Poor.shtml
Ed
I wrote more or less the same thing 30
years ago. Indeed, I know people who do live like kings on "poverty" income.
Ah, well. Freedom is not free... (and see below)
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