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Harry Erwin's Letter from England I came down with "manflu". The doctor says it's a viral sore throat and since it's an English virus, I can expect to be be under the weather for two weeks. Most Americans have no idea how people are responding to the election in the rest of the world. Most people in this world live in countries (democratic and otherwise) where that would never have happened. Next year may be another 1848 or 1968. This BBC story discusses the issues in the UK: <http://tinyurl.com/6cahsq> Rumours are that Obama will have several Republicans in his cabinet. He will also be organising a number of non-partisan advisory commissions. Independent article on row over two-tier health service <http://tinyurl.com/626owt >. The UK experience of universal health care is relevant to American proposals. In particular, it gives insight into the difference between how a bureaucrat and a patient thinks about health care. ID card price rise laundered (Register story) <http://tinyurl.com/6qdyps>
Emergence of preventative policing in UK cities (Register story) <http://tinyurl.com/6gmb57 >
Mission creep (Schneier blog) <http://tinyurl.com/6ypr8x>--lots and lots of comments.
More security stupidity (Schneier blog) <http://tinyurl.com/5jy3hm>
Maybe the banks will pass on the prime rate cut after all (Times story) <http://tinyurl.com/6zfrxy>
One of those places where English universities are very different to North American (THE essay) <http://tinyurl.com/5m69k5> Having attended five universities at various times, I find the English system very parochial.
UK Government error leads to a cut in university grants (Times story) <http://tinyurl.com/5b2gu3 >
Politicians distrust UK academics (THE story) <http://tinyurl.com/68vuh7> -- Harry Erwin, PhD "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." (Benjamin Franklin, 1755)
And more from Harry Erwin: To Take Your Mind Off American Politics ID cards for foreign nationals being rolled out in the UK. BBC story <http://tinyurl.com/5skkpy> People coming up to the Home Secretary and begging for an ID card (BBC) <http://tinyurl.com/649nl4> Passport fees jump to pay for biometrics (Telegraph) <http://tinyurl.com/57vqvv > Suspended under-5's in school in the UK BBC story <http://tinyurl.com/5ff3n6> Of course this goes on their national database records. Childminders abandoning childcare jobs (Telegraph) <http://tinyurl.com/5c7cp6 > Childminders are now required to do lesson-planning and write reports on the children they mind. All this for less than $5.50 an hour. Prime Minister asked to protect terror police from prosecution. BBC story <http://tinyurl.com/5zrkch> Guardian story--mistakes unavoidable <http://tinyurl.com/5j2jtp> Mortgage lenders not passing on base rate cut Times story <http://tinyurl.com/6mnquo> Kim Jong Il image photoshopped Times story <http://tinyurl.com/5bshjj> Fear of anti-terror laws leading to increasing self-censorship THE story <http://tinyurl.com/6cnbtz> -- Harry Erwin, PhD "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." (Benjamin Franklin, 1755) ============== Subject: Contractors "As for the size of the force, all of that schooling and training takes time and the usual troop rotation standard has been two years of that for every year on the front line, plus training and schools. 750,000 troops is the minimum number. Personally I favor an 18 division Army and a four division Marine Corps. If you count all of those "civilian" contractors, (most of whom come from truncated careers in the US military) then we already have that. These people are doing a lot of military jobs that we used to fill with troops, at much lower costs. MPs are MPs. We have sacrificed command and control and unit cohesion in the name of a false economy. We need to get back to a force where everyone sings from the same hymnals." This turns out not to be the case. First and foremost, Congress sets specific limits for each service for manpower. It further limits the number who can hold specific ranks. We aren't going to simply get them to drastically up the quantity, even if we magically ignore the call for a 25% cut in military spending. However, the next thing is the belief that this contractor situation is bad. Let me point out a few things. If we hired those soldiers, we'd have to pay them. Contractors make more. Soldiers get medical coverage. Soldiers get retirement benefits. Soldiers get veteran status. Contractors don't. We checked, and soldiers and contractors cost the same, if you consider the costs which aren't base pay. Contractors are more flexible, we can put out a contract if we can afford it, but we can't just up the number of soldiers and get them by snapping our fingers. Oh yeah, lots of those contractors aren't ex-US forces. Most of our contractors are a cadre of real professionals riding herd over a bunch of third country nationals, like Kenyan truck drivers, Korean repairmen, Columbian traffic wardens, I even talked to an Egyptian college professor who taught English who was working as a generator repairman because the trivial (by US standards) pay was so much better than his normal job. Now the ones that get the attention are groups like Blackwater, where you really have to be competitive to join. That is not the normal contractor though. Historically, the contractor model is normal. Even in the US Army the traditional route was to have contractors do things like the commissary. It was only after the levee en mass that this changed, and cheap soldiers could be used for things which ordinarily demanded civilian contractors. Heck, at points along the way the artillery was contracted out. Now that we no longer have cheap soldiers, it isn't surprising to see reaction to put the precious soldiers into jobs which demand actual soldiers, and put contractors into jobs that just demand a modicum of skill and reliability. Indeed, we cannot, I say again, cannot, get rid of contractors. Even security contractors. For instance, the US State Dept does not submit to having soldiers guard them. They have a limited amount of security types, and hire contractors when more are needed. No expansion of the Army will ever change that. Contractors are a red herring. There are much more important things to worry about. Graves When I visited my my daughter in Giessen where she was an intelligence officer, in discussing the PX she pointed out that if we got into a war over there we'd need military personnel to operate the PX and other such facilities because we wouldn't have contractors to do it; and "They'll have to learn how to do it, and it makes sense for them to learn when no on is shooting at them." This contrasts with the modern view that soldiers are too valuable to use for anything but combat and direct combat support. I will point out that many of the Indian uprisings in the west were caused because some civilian contractor stiffed the Indians on the subsidies they had been promised by treaty. ========== Re: Officer Supply Pools Petronius wrote on Wednesday, Nov 5, that alternative supplies of officers could come from land grant "Cow Colleges". During WWII it is my understanding that my alma mater, Texas A&M University, supplied more officers to the cause than West Point. It still has a strong ROTC program and I believe is the largest supplier of officers outside the academies. There are other sources out there. We Aggies still hope (no doubt in vain) that someday we’ll get a little respect. Cheers, Mike Cheek The original Land Grant Colleges were granted land precisely so that they could have programs for training militia officers! They would not exist except that the Congress was persuaded that in the event of a war the United States would have a great shortage of officers (as was the case in the Civil War, particularly in the North) and establishing land grant colleges which would have low tuition and costs (because of their land endowments) would help with this. Now many of those colleges have become too pure to allow ROTC on their campuses. Of course in my time there was High School ROTC: if you graduated from that you were eligible for 90-day wonder school. In those days there was no requirement for officers to have a college degrees. ========== Keep cool Dear Dr. Pournelle: About the election: keep cool. Obama's no radical, and he's fairly clean, for a politician. He ran a calm, focused, and intelligent campaign; he kept his head despite crises and hardball opposition. If he can govern as skillfully as he campaigned, then these are good signs. I am cautiously optimistic. I agree that he does not follow your philosophy, nor mine, but he seems pragmatic and reasonable. For instance, he doesn't agree with you about nuclear energy, but maybe you can talk to him about solar power satellites. I think he will try to govern as a Conservative, where I use the word 'Conservative' in the non-Orwellian sense. Obama's positions are center-left, but his _attitude_ is Conservative, in marked contrast to Bush. I see him as a conservative leftist; the logical reply to the radical right. He promises change, but of course change is a given. Change is inevitable, it always is. I say, don't sweat it, just keep your wits about you, adapt and cope, and you'll be all right. Sincerely, Nathaniel Hellerstein Well we know he's clean; didn't Biden say so? In a less jugular vein, I hope you are right: I would be thrilled to have a real two party system in which I was not afraid to have either party in power. Obama has the power to make that happen, presuming that he can survive the ravenous wolves who are Democratic committee chairmen in Congress. I wish Obama well, but the rumors that his first executive acts will be to cancel drilling no matter what the population wants are not encouraging. Still, there are rumors: I have not heard Obama say this. == Comparing BO to Carter is probably unfair to Carter. JC came to Washington with his own people and ideas, which he then couldn't get adopted. Obama's campaign was predicated on suppressing every idea he actually believed in and cutting all previous personal ties. The Andrew Johnson Administration seems like a more apt comparison. BO hasn't even been President elect for a week and the Democratic Congress has already run the siege saps and parallels right up to the walls of the Oval Office. The House and AIPAC have Rahm Emanual sitting outside the door vetting all appointments and paperwork. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has seized control of foreign policy with Joe Biden and are trial ballooning Lugar or Hagel as Sec/State.. The old Clinton Administration has taken over economic policy. And they're leveraged by the bipartisan TARP that makes the Treasury Department an independent agency like the Federal Reserve. And Reid has all but announced the Senate is also setting up a Committee of Public Safety to command the Department of Defense. Mark Alas. But we shall see, we shall see. If I were Bush I would pardon everyone in sight, then resign on January 19 and have myself pardoned by the VP. That way the Democrats could save themselves a lot of trouble: they could say they can't prosecute anyone, so there's no need; and the nation would be spared the equivalent of proscriptions. I then asked
No and yes. Took less than a week for Alexander Cockburn and Counter Punch to turn against him. Rahm Emanuel and the draft picks for The Team told Cockburn all he needed to know. He lost the hard left faster than Bush lost the conservative base. Vetoes on Israel and Middle East policy has been handed to the Irgun, economic policy to the Federal Reserve and Wall Street. Senate Majority Leader Reid is already offering Obama public advice on obtaining consent. He's saying that Gates was never a registered Republican so he should stay as Sec/Def. He'll have plenty of bipartisan support in firewalling Obama from foreign and military policy. This is why the Democratic establishment coalesced behind him. Hillary would insist on making her own decisions. I can't remember anyone else subcontracting out a Presidency so fast. It's easy to see why Pelosi doesn't want a post election Congressional session. Democratic Congressional unity died with McCain's defeat. Reconvening would only underline this. Obama's honeymoon continues so long as he doesn't try to make serious policy changes. This is what they hired him to do, so he better learn to like it and focus on enjoying the perks. Mark I can hope your reading is wrong, but it's only a hope. Just for now I have fiction to do. =================== Singularity coming The reason I sent you the last message on self replicating machines was.... your writings ....... http://jerrypournelle.com/view/2008/Q4/view541.html#Distributism2 my questions begin with - what do you do in a society where machines build other machines? - what do you do when 50 years from now anyone can build a house at the push of a button? - what do you do when 20 years from now humanity doesnt need cheap labor because there are robots? - here is the kicker ... how do you deal with the middle time when anyone with a clue has the ability to build what ever they want and say I am entitled to this because..... and they are not... David C Fuchs Interesting questions, but for the moment too much production is probably not our immediate problem. Comes the Singularity, Comrade! I continue to point out that Belloc/Chesterton distributism is the antithesis of socialism. Belloc called socialism "The Servile State". Distributism sought to give real property to real people, no strings attached, vastly increasing the size and independence of the middle class. The Soviet Union toyed with the notion when standing down to become Russia, but of course they didn't do that. ========= Terrorist fiction Dear Jerry: The story about the high school student who was turned by his own family and arrested for a short story does send a chill. I've just finished reading John Dos Passos' 1962 book, "Mr Wilson's War" which is very readable and pulled together a whole bunch of facts about World War I that I've never seen in one place. Seems Nixon's was not the first "Imperial Presidency". Censorship and arrest for political thought did happen back then. In, yes, a Democratic administration. Hysteria knows no party. As I recall, this was when Roger Baldwin and a few others founded the American Civil Liberties Union. This incident in Kentucky is why I continue to be a member, despite the fact that I don't like a lot of what they do either. Obviously, there is a need. Sincerely, Francis Hamit The classic book on how we were "Colonel Housed" into World War I is Walter Millis, The Road to War. It's very much worth reading, and important reading for those who want to understand the classical liberal view of American foreign policy. Millis was no right winger. The book is good scholarship on how Wilson got us into the war having run on a platform of "He kept us out of the war." ========= A plea for assistance from your readership - please help me identify this WWII USAAF veteran. Dr. Pournelle, I'm writing you today with an unusual request - I'm desperately trying to locate a WWII USAAF veteran and/or his family, a former B-17 pilot or co-pilot who took a flight in the Collings Foundation <http://www.collingsfoundation.org > owned-and-operated B-17G, Nine O Nine, on 20May07 at approximately 18:22 local, at Moffett Field, California, near Mountain View. I photographed him ingressing the aircraft, of his flight, and of him egressing the aircraft and returning down the flightline. His daughter was there, and she gave me a piece of paper with their names and email addresses, and asked me to write them when I posted the photos. Unfortunately, I misplaced both the CF card with the photos and the slip of paper inscribed with the family's contact information. Luckily, I've finally located the CF card I used for this portion of the shoot, and uploaded the photos to Flickr here: <http://www.flickr.com/photos/ The gentleman in question is here: <http://www.flickr.com/photos/null0/ with his Collings Foundation B-17 flight tag visible, and the number '8' written on it. If any of your readers know this gentleman and/or have contacts at the Collings Foundation who can help me locate this gentleman and/or his family, I'd really be grateful, as the Collings Foundation folks don't seem to answer their email nor respond to voicemail messages. There's no need to provide me with any information at all, just please forward the abovementioned URLs for this set of Flickr photos, and ask the family to contact me via FlickMail. I feel terrible not getting the photos processed and uploaded before now, but I hope to try and make them available to these folks, if at all possible. Thank you so for posting this request, sir - if there's any way your readership can help me make contact with these folks so that they can see their photos, I would really, really appreciate it. Thanks again! ----- Roland Dobbins =========== > "An orderly desk denotes an orderly mind," An empty desk denotes ... I'm at least as messy as you are, except in my lab, where I am obsessively neat. Sloppiness/messiness in a chemistry lab can have tragic results. -- Robert Bruce Thompson =================d
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November 11, 2008 Jerry, I respectfully submit that the most innovative, yet most intrusive, technology ad of the holiday season is the series of Garmin GPS receiver ads set to the Carol of the Bells. (Of course, I hear the lyrics of the Lovecraft version.... The Carol of the Old Ones <http://www.cthulhulives.org/solsticecarol.html> ) J Thanks for the reminder. The Old Ones indeed ========= Subject: the true red-blue dichotomy Dear Jerry Jim wrote on Thursday: "The traditional "red state-blue state" polarization hides the essential fact that our societal dichotomy is largely between urban populations seeking federal assistance to pay the higher costs associated (by supply and demand) with their higher geographical concentrations of population -- and the people who are paying the bill for that excess." I live in New Jersey, the most densely populated state. Every county in the state is considered metropolitan by the US Census Bureau. New Jersey residents pay the second highest federal taxes per capita of all states. New Jersey ranks 38th in Federal dollars spent in the state per capita. New Jersey ranks 50th out of 50 for Federal spending received per dollar of tax paid, $0.61. The three states with three largest cities, California, Illinois and New York all received less Federal spending then taxes paid. CA $0.78 IL $0.75 NY $0.79 Six of the seven states with the lowest populations; Alaska, Montana, North and South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming all received more in Federal spending than taxes paid. In Alaska's case, it was $1.84 in spending per tax dollar paid. The seventh, Delaware, only got $0.77. These numbers are according to the Tax Foundation (www.taxfoundation.org) for 2005. The position that the rural areas are "paying the bill," is not supported by these numbers. The "urban populations" would probably be quite happy to keep their money for their "excessive" needs. Glad you are getting your energy back since the radiation treatment. Looking forward to Mamelukes. Even though the CoDominium has been overtaken by actual history in the last 30 years, I for one, would greatly enjoy more stories from that now alternate history. Especially those including Falkenberg, Lysander, Blaine and/or Renner. I will be buying "The Prince" soon as my copies of the individual novels are falling apart after many years of reading. Sincerely, Larry Bayern PS What will be the basic plot of your next "hitting the Earth with something big" book? You have used natural disaster and act of war. What's left, accident moving asteroids to Earth orbit for mining? <g> You both misunderstand. The purpose of government is to hire and pay government workers. All other purposes are secondary; if government happens to do the jobs the workers were hired to do, so much the better, but do it or not, the purpose is to collect taxes and pay them; hence there is never a question of laying off government workers, even when the purpose of the agency has long been fulfilled, or when an economic downturn makes the task a luxury no longer affordable. Government never has to persuade customers to make use of its services; and Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy always applies. The Prince contains scenes original to that compilation. My late friend Van Vogt called a novel built up from a number of previous works with some interleaved scenes "a fixup." The only problem with the Falkenberg universe is that it was based on an assumption about the Cold War that ended in 1991, some 20 years after the first story in that series. It has become "alternate history", and that has never been my specialty. I do agree that the Spartan Hegemony period that follows The Prince is an interesting period, and perhaps worth salvaging. I finished the first draft of the proposal for Lucifer's Anvil last night. You'll see. ========== And you thought Mote Prime was fictional . . . Click on the video link and watch it all the way through: <http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/11/06/60minutes/main4579229.shtml> -- Roland Dobbins ========= UK Censorship Independent stories about new UK secrecy laws: <http://tinyurl.com/5lakj8 > <http://tinyurl.com/5lf2kk> Or as Bruce Schneier points out: "Secrecy is anathema
to security: -- Harry Erwin, PhD "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." (Benjamin Franklin, 1755) =========== Halliburton files for a patent on patent trolling This has to be seen to be believed! <http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20081107/0118162765.shtml > -- Harry Erwin, PhD "If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning." (Catherine Aird) Incredible, Unbelievable. And not surprising. ========== The Ravening Wolves Dr. Pournelle, As you wrote, " the ravenous wolves, who have already denounced the loss of revenue that results from the tax exemptions on earning from 401K and IRA accounts, will seek to end that revenue loss while "guaranteeing" the retirement savings by putting those in the "Trust Fund." Again I refer you to British recent history. After making similar promises in the forties, Aneurin Bevan once commented that "the great secret about the National Insurance Fund is that there ain't no fund". Which is to say, they took people's (compulsory) contributions, and p'ed them up against a wall somewhere in current spending, hoping that future taxation would bail them out. Hence we now have about a Łtrillion of totally unfunded public sector pension liabilities, every penny of which will fall on our children and grandchildren - those of them who don't work in the public sector themselves, of course - in tax. There is no investment whatever to support those promises. "Those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it" Andrew Duffin =========== Re: Contractors as Managers? emailer Graves writes: "Most of our contractors are a cadre of real professionals riding herd over a bunch of third country nationals, like Kenyan truck drivers, Korean repairmen, Columbian traffic wardens..." Hm. I remember reading an article about Afghanistan, which quoted an ancient Encyclopedia Britannica entry on the same: "[Afghans] are resourceful and determined, and make some of the best troops in the world when led by white officers." Seems like Graves is describing a similar situation--although, of course, if you said it straight out these days, you'd be pilloried. -- Mike T. Powers ============= Contractors and unit cohesion Dear Jerry: The extensive use of contractors for jobs previously performed by military personnel is a recent phenomena. During the Vietnam War we hired thousands of locals for various kinds of casual labor on our bases. That went from the Mama-san who did your laundry to most of the people in the mess hall kitchen to the guys who collected the garbage. Now these were contractors; in fact they paid us for the privilege. But the guys in the kitchen worked directly under the supervision of an experienced mess hall sergeant. And got paid every week in the local currency. Mama-san likewise got paid by the troops themselves. (Mama-san had the job because there were no washers and dryers available and it was a way to pump money into the local economy.) There was no company like Halliburton raking huge percentages off the top. We had secretaries who were "VGS" Vietnamese General Schedule, also paid directly by the U.S. Government in local currency. Yeah, it was a security nightmare. More of that below. But compare this with Iraq. Going back to that on-the-ground journal that Ginmar published, where Halliburton failed to show up entirely in some places during the invasion and occupation, and the troops were living on one MRE a day, or where the troops had no shower facilities and Halliburton employees wouldn't share theirs. The State Department went to contractors instead of Marines because there were no longer enough Marines to staff embassy security details and maintain unit integrity in the main forces. In the old Army Security Agency every one, including the cooks and the truck drivers, had a Top Secret/Crypto security clearance. This was both a security measure and for unit cohesion. You also had to be smart. Minimum GT of 115 (about 130 on the Stanford Benet). It was, until 1970, an all volunteer unit. During the Vietnam War it tripled in the number of personnel. At first levies were sent to other Army units for non-intelligence MOS jobs, like the motor pool. Then they started just sending draftees directly from Basic to be trained on the job. In Vietnam, I taught a Miss Toi, our VGS secretary, how to type perfect Army flight records. Given the nature of our mission there was nothing else we could do with her and we couldn't refuse her help without disclosing our true mission , which was Top Secret. She spoke no English at all, and I spoke maybe a dozen words of her language, so it was slow going. Lovely girl. Giggled a lot, as I recall. The flight records were the document for awarding the Air Medal and simply had date and length of mission, but not where it was performed. Fairly safe. The draftee clerk assigned to my newspaper in Frankfurt had not graduated high school and couldn't type. He learned to do that and got his GED, and became our Sports Editor. But he and his fellows did not fit well with our all-volunteer outfit and created morale problems for themselves and others. It was often necessary to remind them that they were in the Army in a most forceful way. We had moral problems anyway, because of the cultural upheavals of that era and the fact that an Army haircut made you a marked man; a bit of a social outcast. One of the very good things about ASA was the shared sense of mission. It was not what anyone had signed up for; mostly clerical work of various kinds, truth to tell. In Vietnam, to maintain our cover, we pulled our share of the base chores without complaint even though doing so had a negative operational impact. One of our MPs got a Purple Heart when a convoy he was guarding was ambushed by the VC. I kept the guys on the garbage truck from smuggling out two classified manuals for the Huey Cobra (which may have been my best day's work the whole tour) and we manned a section of the perimeter every night. Sometimes our courier runs (In a U-6 Beaver) were diverted to accommodate hitchhikers from other units. Some of the Regular Army guys in that unit were a problem. Timeservers, drunks, guys who thought that they had a safe career and would never see combat. That things you've said about those who can't handle troops being sent to Intelligence was very much a factor. Before the war, morale had been high. It was considerably degraded by the time I got in. But that was true of the Army generally. Conscripts are a measure of last resort. The society has decided that we won't use them anymore, but substituting contractors, who hold themselves to be outside of the military chain-of-command, is even worse. Functions that can be contracted out state-side in peacetime cannot, as your daughter pointed out, be done so in a combat zone in time of war. It just doesn't work. It boils down to patriotism. Everyone in the U.S. military holds up their right hand and swears to uphold the Constitution and to defend us from "all enemies foreign and domestic". You cannot reasonably expect contractors who are just there for a paycheck to do the same, especially if they are citizens of other countries with their own loyalties. This is why we make the military a quick path to citizenship for foreign nationals. I have a sneaking suspicion that the Draft is coming back. I was at the West Coast Civil War Roundtable Conference in Clovis this past weekend. A retired Major General was there and mentioned that he was looking for people to serve on local Selective Service Boards. Why would they need this, if the Draft is not coming back? Would an Obama Administration actually reinstate the Draft? This may be one of those "Only Nixon can go to China" moments. I am sure that it will be sold as National Service with options for working in local communities or the Peace Corps or the like as well and it will be both men and women. And the best and brightest of the draftees will be shown that there are places where they can employ their talents to great advantage if they simply volunteer. (this is the way that many chose to dodge the draft, yours truly included.) A less selfish society and one that understands the military would result. And while private contractors will have a role, they will not be such a large portion of the true force. We need soldiers. In the military everyone is a trained killer. Capable of defending their units and fellow soldiers. That's the way it has to work. Degrading that simply to save a little money is madness. Sincerely, Francis Hamit You will not get a Conscription Act past Congress in my judgment, but liberals are always willing to believe they know what's best for others: there might be people conscripted for "community service" and the like. ========== Economics and Unemployment For 3 weeks now, I have been a statistic. I have extensive experience in IT; Unix (all flavors), Windows and Linux (several flavors). But after 3 weeks I'm finding the jobs are hard to find. The IT arena is no stranger to economic hard times. Especially in the past 6 years. Since 2002 I have worked 12 consecutive months only once. And it still spanned two employers. I have been cutting back on personal expenses during this period in an effort to make the next layoff easier to bear. I own a 1989 Ford van, which still runs great, and a 1996 Toyota Corolla, also runs great. I seldom use a credit card. I have built 3 of the computers in my house from parts I rescued from garbage. I have also modified a used computer to add more disk space. I haven't purchased a new computer in about 8 years. I have a Dell laptop from 2001, that I received on an old job. It is held together with tape, literally. Still works, mostly. I use Fedora on 2 computers, and I have an old Sun Ultra Sparc that I have upgraded to Solaris 10 (free version). Maybe a thread should be started on how laid off IT workers extend the lives of their home computers. Might be more relevant now that the economy may _really_ get bad. Don Wood Memory and drive space are cheap, but so are desktops now. I have to admit I haven't analyzed how to keep things going and make do. Some of my Linux using friends are using pretty old stuff but they're happy with it. ======== Hey Jerry Who says the Cold War is over?
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php? After all, Putin's the guy who puts into words the Russian yearning for Empire. Ed With Romanov Eagle, not sickle and hammer; hmm. ==========
Of course if you want reasons to denigrate the Tutsi, they are fairly easy to find, too. But the real question, is, will American blood get mixed in here>
For a PDF copy of A Step Farther Out:
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November 12, 2008 Subj: Whither Conservatism? - National Review + Hillsdale College plan conference http://nrinstitute.org/events/witherconservatism111908.php Q1: Is the "witherconservatism" in the URL a pun or just a typo? The only names I recognize seem to be the Usual Neocon Suspects. Oh, wait -- I remember Jeff Bell running as a Republican for Congresscritter or Senator in NJ. I don't think I've ever met but one *conservative* Republican politician here in Princeton NJ. Piles and piles of country-club Republicans, respectable number of libertarians, but no conservatives I can think of, other than my former Congresscritter, Mike Pappas, who squeeked in for one term after multiple liberal Republican opponents devoured each other in the primary. Hmm... The Ethics & Public Policy Center web site shows Bell collaborating with Robert P. George, a conservative faculty member at Princeton. http://www.eppc.org/scholars/scholarID.86/scholar.asp I don't remember Bell being particularly conservative, but Professor George sure is. http://www.winst.org/fellows/george.php I don't remember hearing of the EPPC before, either, but maybe I just was not paying proper attention. I hope they archive a webcast of the conference. Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com We must understand that we will have to cooperate with the neocons and even some country clubbers; what we must not do is let them control everything as they like to do. As an example, there was a lot of good in some of the military reforms. We did build a smaller and more powerful army. What the neocons either forgot or never knew is that Legions cannot hold territory: and army of Legions is not useful for holding an empire. For that you must either have competent imperialism, building auxiliaries and puppet kingdoms (it would have been easy to replace Saddam with a puppet so long as we gave up the idiocy of planting democracy in the Middle East as a policy); or you must give up the goal of empire. But building better Legions was good. I could continue with such examples; and for that matter, an inactive King Log country club Republican might be a good president if we can control the size and scope and jurisdiction of government. No sane man wants that office, but there are some who feel entitled to it. Let them have it if we can set policies. More on all this another time. ========== Subject: pretty good article on transition Jerry, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122634566690314635.html Pretty good. Phil =========== Economics and Unemployment For 3 weeks now, I have been a statistic. I have extensive experience in IT; Unix (all flavors), Windows and Linux (several flavors). But after 3 weeks I'm finding the jobs are hard to find. The IT arena is no stranger to economic hard times. Especially in the past 6 years. Since 2002 I have worked 12 consecutive months only once. And it still spanned two employers. I have been cutting back on personal expenses during this period in an effort to make the next layoff easier to bear. I own a 1989 Ford van, which still runs great, and a 1996 Toyota Corolla, also runs great. I seldom use a credit card. I have built 3 of the computers in my house from parts I rescued from garbage. I have also modified a used computer to add more disk space. I haven't purchased a new computer in about 8 years. I have a Dell laptop from 2001, that I received on an old job. It is held together with tape, literally. Still works, mostly. I use Fedora on 2 computers, and I have an old Sun Ultra Sparc that I have upgraded to Solaris 10 (free version). Maybe a thread should be started on how laid off IT workers extend the lives of their home computers. Might be more relevant now that the economy may _really_ get bad. Don Wood Memory and storage are cheap. And I have machines that have been running for years.... ========== Blogging the Muse » Blog Archive » Author Interview Series #34 - Francis Hamit http://travisheermann.com/blog/?p=163 Francis
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November 13, 2008 Comment in response to Tuesday's Mail, re Don Wood's "laid off IT workers extend the lives of their home computers"
Memory and drive space are cheap, but so are desktops now. I have to admit I haven't analyzed how to keep things going and make do. Some of my Linux using friends are using pretty old stuff but they're happy with it. I volunteer at a curious Portland (Oregon) institution, Freegeek <http://www.freegeek.org> which occupies half a city block in this very Blue town, and which is replicating itself in several other cities ( <http://freegeekarkansas.org/> Chicago <http://freegeekchicago.org/> , Columbus <http://freegeekcolumbus.org/> , Fayetteville AR <http://freegeekarkansas.org/> , Keokuk IA <http://www.tristatesfreegeek.org/> , Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Murfreesboro TN <http://bornagaintechnologies.org/> , Orlando <http://www.freegeekcentralflorida.org/> , South Bend IN <http://www.freegeekmichiana.org/> and Vancouver BC <http://freegeekvancouver.org/> ). Volunteers receive donations of computers and peripherals, and provide a donation receipt; as Freegeek is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit, said donation is tax-deductible. Many, many worthy machines are donated which are so crufted up with viruses, worms, Registry problems and other artifacts of Windows that all they needed was a wipe-and-reload; but, if folks would rather buy new and eliminate the old, well, their choice. Corporations often replace still-viable machines en masse, and they appreciate knowing the machines will be erased completely (no embarrassing data leaks!). Some machines are actually broken, and we fix them. The equipment is inspected, hard drives are removed and scrubbed back down to zeroes using better-than-DOD-spec overwriting protocols, and then the worthy parts are reassembled and loaded with Ubuntu Linux <http://www.ubuntu.com> including Open Office <http://www.openoffice.org> . Failed parts are recycled to recover precious metals, steel, plastics and magnets, and toxics (computers and monitors are laden with them) are kept out of ordinary landfills. What happens to the revived computers? The majority of rehabilitated machines are redistributed to schools near and far and other non-profits (like my local ARES <http://www.arrl.org/FandES/field/pscm/sec1-ch1.html> unit) who apply for them through a grant process. Some are sold in the Thrift Store to keep the lights on and pay the rent; current volunteers with recent service get a discount there of 50% off. Said thrift store also sells reusable parts, and it's a handy place to find a $1 SATA cable which would cost $6 at Fry's. Some are gifted to those volunteers who complete a course of training, so they have a Linux box at home, with which to learn more about Linux. As a Libertarian, I figure if I want recycling to
happen, I'd better make it happen, and am proud to keep mercury and lead out
of folks' environment while learning more about my craft, and saving quite a
few bucks. Win-Win-Win-Win. -- -- 73s and best regards, Not sure that was entirely responsive to the question, but I am in a tearing hurry today. ========== Not even pretending anymore. http://moneyrunner.blogspot.com/2008/11/new-obama-rules.html Exhibit A is the headline that accompanied a recent bombing in Iraq that killed scores of people. Since the US invasion of Iraq, the Obamamedia have used violence as a metric of how badly things were going. But now that Bush is on the way out and Obama is on the way in: (quoted news) Iraq bombings show progress, challenges. It's a measure of progress that today's blasts, which killed at least 31 people in Baghdad and more elsewhere, according to the Associated Press, represented the worst day of violence since June. Mike ========== We didn't survive Carter, nor Johnson Carter set the time bomb called the "Community Re-investment Act" into motion, and Johnson brought us the Great Society that will help bankrupt us. These entitlement programs never. go. away. Obama, together with this nightmare of a Congress, can most certainly kill our economy. Jason Gollies, I thought we got past the Cold War, and became one of the wealthiest nations on Earth. It's true enough that we didn't restore the Old Republic; and probably will not. That's a long way from not surviving. I've had a pretty good life since Kennedy... =========== Contractors vs Soldiers An Army cook, clerk, truck driver, mechanic, etc. is a soldier; he has undergone basic military training, qualifies on his weapon once/twice a year, attends annual Geneva Convention classes, etc. And he is subject to orders. When push comes to shove, I would rather have a Ranger qualified infantryman. But I would prefer an American Army cook to a third country national. If all support functions are contracted out, the total burden for base security falls on the combat troops. If contractors are hired only for a limited (I don’t know how long is limited) time, I will accept that they are cheaper than soldiers. One should remember that efficiency and effectiveness are different things. In my opinion, units should be self-sufficient—ready to go without needing to build up a contractor support organization. When one is in a hurry to build up a contractor organization, is when waste, fraud, and abuse are most likely. John Abshier LTC (Retired) == Contracted "The extensive use of contractors for jobs previously performed by military personnel is a recent phenomena. During the Vietnam War we hired thousands of locals for various kinds of casual labor on our bases. … There was no company like Halliburton raking huge percentages off the top." http://polosbastards.com/pb/private-military-contractors-pmcs-a-short-history/ "THE VIETNAM WAR: A CHANGE OF PHILOSOPHY In Vietnam, there was a significant and basic change in the way the military treated civilian contractors. Business Week, in March 1965, called it a "war by contract." This was largely because standard military equipment was suddenly technologically advanced, while the average soldier had little technical training besides basic combat skills. There was suddenly a serious need for civilian contractors with specialized skills to work side by side with the troops. Field maintenance crews with companies like General Electric or Johnson, Drake, and Piper dodged bullets at DaNang and Pleiku to maintain and repair field equipment and infrastructure for troops, who desperately needed them. Instead of being kept safely behind military lines, civilian Contractors were in the same danger as the soldiers they were supporting. This was not the only reason that civilian contractors were active in the Vietnam Theater. Before the war even started, Air America was field-lifting supplies behind enemy lines to covert US Special Forces operatives who were training the CIA formed South Vietnamese’s, Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDG). Food, supplies, weapons, intelligence and transportation would have been impossible to access without Air America pilots and Civilian Contractor ground crews who were maintaining Air America’s airplanes and helicopters. The U.S. was still not yet officially involved in the Vietnam conflict, and to commit American military planes and soldiers would have caused the international incident that the U.S. was trying to avoid at the time." http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0718/p01s02-usmi.htm ""A very large part of the total force is not in uniform," Scott Horton, who teaches the law of armed conflict at Columbia University School of Law, said in congressional testimony last month. In World War II and the Korean War, contractors amounted to 3 to 5 percent of the total force deployed. Through the Vietnam War and the first Gulf War, the percentage grew to roughly 10 percent, he notes. "But in the current conflict, the number appears to be climbing steadily closer to parity" with military personnel. "This represents an extremely radical transformation in the force configuration," he says." http://www.counterpunch.org/carter12112003.html "United States government contractors, such as Michigan State University and the construction firm Johnson, Drake and Piper, went to work on the creation of a national communications, transportation and police network. This "mission" built or rebuilt hundreds of miles of roadways and dozens of bridges, dredged hundreds of miles of canals, built airfields and deep draft ports to receive a continuing and growing volume of economic and military aid. They built roads connecting all parts of Vietnam to Saigon, which they promised would result in greater access for both government officials and peasants to sell their crops to a larger market. They trained and equipped a rapidly expanding military force to keep Diem in power and they began to piece together a para-military security force and a Vietnam Bureau of Investigation (VBI) modeled on the American FBI. They even inaugurated an identity card program to catalog the identity and keep track of every Vietnamese in the interest of maintaining security. Nothing would be left to chance; no rogue force would tip the expensive American apple cart. By 1960, the United States had poured into this project over $1.4 billion." So, we can see that it is indeed modern, since the modern age began with the ascent of Henry Tudor. It turns out that it is normal to have lots of corporate contractors, and the only two unusual things this time are the amounts put into nation-building and the presence of security contractors. Since we aren't going to be able to stop nation-building, that isn't going to change. The amount of contracts set to rebuild infrastructure, place and harden US bases and such was truly staggering. We'll come back to security contractors. There are more logistic contractors than their used to be, and this is very predictable. We burn more fuel, fire more ammo, have more things that break than the leg infantry force of the past. We hire more morale specialists than we used to, with education people brought in from US schools to allow distance learning classes, cooks to do the drudge work (supervised by US personnel, I used to room with the theater level dining facility inspector, who was in the US Army) and even people to run movie rooms and internet cafes on larger bases. It turns out this has demonstrable effect on keeping PTSD cases lower than in the past, even though our troops are racking up as many days in combat in a year long tour as their grandfathers did in all of WWII. "The State Department went to contractors instead of Marines because there were no longer enough Marines to staff embassy security details and maintain unit integrity in the main forces."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/ "The agreement, which has not been published, places a military official for the first time in the tactical operations center of the embassy's security office, according to Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte. The military will receive "prior notification" of all diplomatic convoy movements and will give commanders in the field the option of stopping them, he said. …. The Defense Department "won't hire them, they won't fire them," Negroponte said of contractors under the new agreement. "This is under the purview of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security and the embassy. But it's full coordination.""
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/10/04 As for the security contractors, blame the death of Imperialism. It is utterly normal in many parts of the world for NGOs to hire security contractors for safety when the local governments aren't functional. It is utterly normal for the US State Dept to do the same, and no, they aren't trying to use the USMC. Do you honestly think State isn't offered military forces to keep them safe when they are running around in Iraq or Afghanistan? They are supposed to be working for the US people, just like us knuckledraggers, after all. When offered military forces, they don't want them. State claims this would reduce their level of freedom to operate and do their jobs to unacceptable levels. Whether it is true or not, the only place they want the USMC is at the Embassy. The military worked closely with our contractors. For instance, I saw the KBR guy doing for that company the same job I was doing for CFLCC a couple of times a week. State, however, didn't like to broadcast through military channels when they were going somewhere and where they were going. We didn't have efficient relationships with the Blackwater guards they hired, and it wasn't because we didn't speak the same language as the Blackwater personnel. Most of them are ex-US forces anyway. So, where might the disconnect be? I've done a number of short missions over the years, and in many of them it was decided to have a temporary PX set up. In perhaps two of every three of these, there were actual AAFES personnel running the operation. The rest of the time we'd have a soldier take a couple of days of training and take over. Otherwise we'd simply do without the PX. It turns out that many of the tasks we expect to worry about in peacetime don't matter much once the shooting starts. The contractors who supported Graf in peacetime would be out of a job once WWIII started and we were slugging it out with 3rd Shock Army. We expected combat rations and what haircuts would happen would be buzzcuts by whoever had a razor handy. Now there are people who are simply vital, who aren't in the Armed Forces, and oddly, you'll tend to find those are Dept of the Army or DoD civilian employees. The best way to get a new draft through Congress, the opposite of Progress, would be to convince the peaceniks of the essential truth that it would reduce US combat readiness. On the other hand, it would mean those who don't want to protect the US would have to do more of it, and thus I'm not holding my breath over the matter. While I believe many of those hate us military types, I don't believe it is so much that they'll sacrifice their own in order to hurt us. Their party can't afford to throw the children of those who give them so much money under the bus. I'd suggest that it is worth considering whether contractors are the Auxiliary forces of this era. They have a number of advantages, including being less expensive when killed or injured than Legionnaires. Since many are from other countries, they are also less expensive in terms of public confidence, which may be why the media developed such a dislike for them in Iraq, while totally ignoring them in Afghanistan and earlier in Bosnia and Kosovo. I'd suspect you'd need to develop a path to citizenship for long service contractors, but that remains to be seen. G =========== Jerry, George Will (speaking coherently, for a change) on the evolution of presidential selection since the Founders: http://www.newsweek.com/id/167572 J =========== Financial Crisis: Nobelist Harry Markowitz's recommended solution Subj: Financial Crisis: Nobelist Harry Markowitz's recommended solution This is the guy who got a Nobel Prize for inventing Portfolio Theory:
http://www.ifa.com/pdf/Financial_Crisis Looks like he pretty much agrees with Dr. Pournelle. I especially like his distinction between "portfolio theory" and "financial engineering". But I don't think he gives enough credit, for causing the current mess, to high leverage. He mentions it, but only in passing. Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com ========== Fallen Angels In case you haven't seen this yet - computer models are now predicting the Fallen Angels scenario
http://www.physorg.com/news145725882.html Chuck Wingo When someone gets a model that will take the initial conditions of 20 years ago and comes out with what happened, I'll pay more attention... But it's clearly the case that warming of the magnitude they predict now beats holy whack out of being under a hundred yards of ice...
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November 14, 2008 Contractless I agree with LTC Abshier. I'd rather have soldiers doing every job around me while I'm in a basecamp. It adds greatly to redundancy, and ability to take losses while remaining functional. I remember a time when we found something suspicious on the base and the soldiers in the area rapidly set up a cordon and called for investigation, a task made easier if all concerned are soldiers instead of foreign workers mixed in. It is challenging to build contractor efforts rapidly. Now, how long does it take to build an ordnance, transportation or medical brigades? Those contract truckers, if they were military, would require us to either pull the bodies out of hide, or get Congress to increase the limits on manpower. Since we don't have redundant facilities courtesy of BRAC, this means everything from programming more drill instructor classes to hiring contractors to build more barracks, and accepting that we have three transportation brigades, with three brigade sets of gear, in order to keep one on the mission. This will have to be done on a permenant basis, and we'll have to keep paying those boys whether they are in the theater or not, and we'll have to pay pensions for those who get their 20. The Kenyan truckdrivers will have one set of gear, replaced as needed, and when their contracts are up, they are replaced. We won't be paying them when they aren't doing the mission for us. They won't be tying up three brigades worth of manpower on the manpower limits Congress sets each year as part of the budget. We won't be paying any pensions. We'll also pay the Kenyans less than we'll pay US soldiers, and the experts who are managing them will make a bundle, while still being cheaper overall. Now if we can't magically wish away those Congressional limits, how do we optimize our manpower? Every unit on base had additional responsibilities. Some manned guard towers. Some guarded workers. Some even pulled people out to pick up trash. That's with the contract labor working. If we had to pull that labor out of hide as well, I lost a very noticable percentage of my manpower every week to those tasks, as is. Every soldier who is peeling potatoes is one less soldier doing something that actually requires real military ability. Sometimes it is more efficient to have the contractors. I tried having soldiers manning the entry points into my secure facility. Since I was the guy on the other end of the break glass in case of emergency, I spent much time dealing with the same issues, explaining as tactfully as I could that just because the soldier wanting in was a Field Grade, didn't mean he was automatically authorized an unaccompanied access badge on his own say-so. Once I got contract security doing that, who didn't switch out periodically, a lot of the routine bothers in the day ceased. They didn't get replaced when I got them trained, so they could explain routine issues without me, and because they were contracters instead of soldiers, they weren't as likely to break rules because they were dealing with someone of high rank who was in the wrong. That meant I could actually devote more time to the issues I was supposed to be handling as part of my specified duties. The soldiers who had been pulling duty on my entry points were instead fixing broken vehicles, guarding convoys, driving trucks, and yes, manning guard towers. As for waste, fraud and abuse, here is a radical thought. We hire an increasing percentage of locals, and the worst excesses you've heard about from contractors, real and mediavision, are as nothing compared to the fraud and waste produced in the region without us. Exposure to Americans and what we expect has begun to impress upon some of the locals the value of trustworthiness, as opposed to the traditional graft, corruption and nepotism. It can only be for the better for five percent of the locals to understand the value of Rule of Law instead of the previous one percent. I'll also point out that I saw contracts cancelled for failure to perform or cost-overruns, and I quickly learned that I'd rather eat in the KBR DFAC than the Army DFAC, given the two specific dining facilities within walking distance of where I was. In real life, as we added contractors, the percentage of our actual troops pulling security increased. The percentage of our troops doing actual mission instead of police call also increased. I wasn't at a policy making level, but I saw this and thought it good. If my choice is having ten soldiers, three in theater and seven in CONUS and having years to do the mission, or having ten soldiers, five in theater and five in CONUS and having months to do the mission, or having ten soldiers, three in theater and seven in CONUS as well as having three contractors in theater and years to do the mission, or having ten soldiers now, and five more in years to come to do a mission right now, it seems relatively simple. We can all say it would be better to have another quarter of a million US troops, well trained, well supported and with a good training budget. Anyone believing we'll get that in the next decade though... Having to deal with reality instead of dreams, I figure it is worth some time trying to figure out how to get optimum use from contracted workers, US and foreign. Of course I'm ex-infantry, weak mind, strong back, etc. ========== Traitors all. <http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/ -- Roland Dobbins And Roland notes that social security numbers are not supposed to be for ID anyway. But traitors indeed. =========== Kismet Moon. <http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/ -- Roland Dobbins ===========
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Did anyone seriously believe that ethnic studies, women's studies, and so forth would ever lead to lucrative jobs (other than for favored few who went on to teach the subject)? And of course as saturation took place and the fad wore off it's a bit like $50kamonth,com and other such schemes, in which what you sell is the right to sell the program (there may or may not be an actual product, but sales are always minimal to non-existent) and the only ones who make any money are the founders of the business. Just who hires people with degrees in ethnic studies or women's studies? Just what services do they sell? ==========
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