| Monday
February 16, 2009 Nuke sub collision
Jerry:
Don't know if you've seen this yet, but two nuclear
missile submarines (British and French) collided in the Atlantic earlier
this month. Here is the link.
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/
homepage/news/article2240543.ece
We've had enough nuclear subs sink with a full load of
fission product laden fuel to know that the consequences of a duel sinking
wouldn't have been catastrophic. A more pertinent issue is the loss of two
subs with 100+ nuclear warheads on board. However; a sinking in deep ocean
would probably put the warheads out of reach of anyone who doesn't already
have some of their own. On the gripping hand, the demographic crisis in
Europe which will be reaching a tipping point during the Obama presidency
will probably result in both the entire British and French nuclear submarine
fleets becoming the core of the Caliphates new navy.
Jim Crawford
============
Saturday night, an old friend and
I were catching up and he made the statement that he missed my news emails.
Well, I've been busy and this is no indication that I'll have the time for
more. But, this is one that deserves forwarding..
Happy Mardi Gras, David
New York Post February 14, 2009
Heroes Without Headlines
With things going so well in Iraq, the embed
count is nearing zero.
By Ralph Peters
FT. LEAVENWORTH, KAN.--THE Missouri River
runs brown in the winter. Standing on the western bluff, you look down
past still-visible wagon ruts marking the start of the Santa Fe Trail and
on to the landing that served Lewis and Clark.
Across the river's great bend, bare trees
fringe the floodplain that rises to the low hills of Missouri. Under the
winter sun, the panorama gleams with a heartland beauty. A passenger jet
rises in the distance.
Turn around: You're at the heart of Ft.
Leavenworth, the soul of the US Army, where centuries of ghosts watch over
men and women returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
From here, the Cavalry rode west and the
troop trains rolled east.
Amid the old brick quarters and barracks,
Sherman had second thoughts about his career and a young instructor named
Eisenhower, who longed to be fighting in France, dressed down a carefree
volunteer named F. Scott Fitzgerald.
At dawn, the ghosts congregate so thickly by
the old parade ground that you almost feel their touch as you jog by. They
come out to recall the campfires and campaigns, and to stand watch over
those who've rallied to their traditions, who took up the guidons and
flags.
The spirits who once wore blue then gray,
Cavalry twill or olive drab, are proud these days. As a new class of
officers enters the Army's Command and General Staff College, virtually
every one wears a combat patch on the right sleeve. The ghosts understand.
The wraiths are there by the chapel, standing
to. They once rode west across an unmapped prairie, stormed Mexico City's
gates, faced off at Vicksburg and finally quelled the Apaches. They went
over the top in France, survived the Bataan Death March and rode
helicopters into firefights. They understand.
But the old ghosts don't understand the times
beyond the post's front gate. They can't understand the devious spite the
nation's elite directs toward our troops.
How could these spirits - who saw more
American soldiers die in an afternoon than have fallen in six years in
Iraq - comprehend the privileged Americans who delight in tales of rising
military suicide rates or "vets gone wild," while ignoring the heroes
who've won a war that America's intellectuals declared unwinnable?
Well, Sherman's wraith understands: At one
point in our Civil War, he banished the press from his camps and hankered
to string up a few reporters.
But the other ghosts are befuddled. Grant,
our greatest general, believed that crises would bring out our best.
Earlier this week, I spoke with present-day
officers studying at Ft. Leavenworth. It struck me, yet again, that we
have never had a better Army. (The Navy, Marines and Air Force are
represented, too - by tradition, all the services send contingents to each
others' staff colleges.)
These men and women in US uniforms are
serious and skilled, bold and uncomplaining. What's striking is how little
they expect: Of all Americans, they have the least sense of entitlement
and the greatest sense of duty.
Nor is the officer corps forged by our
current wars a breed of yes-men. They've learned the hard way to ask the
toughest questions. Listen to the majors in the new class and you find
Army officers dubious about our lack of a strategy in Afghanistan, Air
Force pilots appalled at the waste involved in buying the F-22 - and
sailors (far from the sea) thinking beyond the horizon to future threats.
And then there are the Marine officers, ready
for anything.
The closest thing to bitching I encountered
was an observation by a superb public-affairs officer with whom I worked
in Anbar: Now that things are going so well in Iraq, he reports, the press
isn't interested - the embed count is dropping toward zero.
Well, during my latest visit to Ft.
Leavenworth I didn't meet any of the tormented, twisted soldiers the press
and Hollywood adore. Just the men and women who stand between our country
and the darkness.
They're home with their families for a bit,
but the workload at the Staff College is heavy. Officers who grasp the
tenets of counterinsurgency have to master big-war planning, too. We need
to be prepared for any conflict.
And these officers who, for a few months,
have traded their weapons for computer screens, will be ready. These are
the men and women the headlines ignore. Because these are the officers who
won.
The ghosts can stand at ease.
Ralph Peters is a retired Army officer and a
Command and General Staff College grad (barely).
-- David Couvillon Colonel of Marines;
Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of
the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog
Excellance; Collector of Hot Sauce; Avoider of Yard Work
=============
A little perspective please!
Jerry,
You have managed to irritate me with the constant
repetitions of "The Largest Spending Bill in the History of the World". So,
it's awful because it is deficit spending, eh?
Our previous president, the egregious W., ran up $2T
in deficits by cutting taxes and failing---when his own party solidly
controlled both houses of congress---to cut spending to make up for it. He
cut taxes while conducting two wars, which ran up another $1T in deficit
spending.
The tax cuts did not cause revenue to stream into the
treasury, they were just deficits. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars were not
paid for, they were just deficits.
If we are outraged over the $0.8T that Obama has just
run up with the "The Largest Spending Bill in the History of the World" then
we should be 4 times are outraged over the $3T that we are left with from
the egregious W.
Once, the Republicans were the party of fiscal
responsibility, even restraint. Nowadays, it just sounds like hypocrisy.
As Paul Krugman put it,
"And the rhetorical response of conservatives to the
stimulus plan — which will, it’s worth bearing in mind, cost substantially
less than either the Bush administration’s $2 trillion in tax cuts or the
$1 trillion and counting spent in Iraq — has bordered on the deranged.
It’s “generational theft,” said Senator John McCain, just a few days after
voting for tax cuts that would, over the next decade, have cost about four
times as much.
It’s “destroying my daughters’ future. It is like
sitting there watching my house ransacked by a gang of thugs,” said Arnold
Kling of the Cato Institute."
This is partisanship when we can ill afford it. You
asked to hear from people who think the stimulus bill is a good idea. I
don't know, but Krugman, who is a Noble prize winner in economics, thinks
the stimulus package is much too small.
If it is a bad idea, because it increases the deficit,
I guess I need to be educated on why it is the least bit different than the
$3T we inherited from the previous administration.
Chuck
Please do not put me in the position of having to
defend the imbecile actions of the Country Club Republicans who controlled
the Congress after Gingrich resigned. I have never defended those people.
We will have to see whether increasing the
deficit and spending a great deal of money into varous projects, some of
them arguably investments, some of them obviously not, will get us out of
the situation; but surely you can't be arguing that we need even more? One
thing that worries me is that the largest spending bill in history -- it
was that, you know -- will be considered insufficient, and if it fails we
will be told that the only reason for failure is that it was neither large
enough nor quick enough. It seems to me that we are conducting an
experimentum crucis here, and if -- I would say when -- it fails we will
finally have rid ourselves of the notion that the only reason Roosevelt
couldn't get us out of the Depression was that he didn't spend enough.
That's an expensive experiment, but we will survive it, and perhaps we can
claw our way back to a normal economy without so much governmental
interference.
As to the Administration's tax cuts, did they not
in fact increase revenue? That was the problem. The madmen running the
Congress saw the money pouring in, and spent it. I do not think you can
blame the deficits on tax cuts.
As to the war in Iraq, you may recall that well
before we invaded I pleaded for domestic energy investments instead of an
overseas adventure. Please don't blame that one on me. If I'd had my way,
we would now have over 100 nuclear power plants, each producing more than
1000 megawatts of electricity, and the automobile industry would be
busting its chops trying to make electric cars and otherwise find ways to
use cheap electricity for transportation. But, I was told, it would cost
$300 billion, and we didn't have it, while the war in Iraq wouldn't cost
much more than that.
But we did invade, and once you commit the
Legions you cannot abandon them even though it was clear from the
beginning that the war would cost a lot more than anyone was saying. And
we did not invest in energy production, and I do not see that the Big Bill
does that, nor are the investment provisions obvious; but then I haven't
read the bill. Nor, I dare say, has anyone else.
You ask for perspective. I try to provide just
that; but I will not claim omniscience, and I do find those who do claim
to know what's coming a bit less than trustworthy.
We will muddle through this, and we may even come
out with come better habits: a bit more saving. less tendency to spend
money we don't have on goods we don't need (i.e. to confine spending of
borrowed money on investments, not on consumption). If we learn that an
economy based on opening containers of goods and borrowing the money to
pay for them is not stable, I won't say the lesson was worth the price,
but we may have got something out of this.
Perspective: think of ways to make something
useful, rather than ways to move money around. Create stuff. Borrow for
real investment. And think hard about the proposition that someone else is
a better judge of your interest than you are.
And see below
===========
Harry Erwin's Letter From
England
The Government decided to drop foreign language study
as part of an anti-truancy drive <http://tinyurl.com/c5mkyo>
Criticism of Labour education policies by top expert <http://tinyurl.com/dhlg9w
>
The bishop who was arrested for the roof incident is
suing for false imprisonment and personal injury--the police apparently
roughed him up. <http://tinyurl.com/cvelw6>
One of those stealth laws to create a police state is
currently sneaking through Parliament. See <http://tinyurl.com/ajht2v>
Confidentiality of medical records is threatened by
government plans to relax laws on data protection. The proposed legislation
will allow the Department of Health to share patient-identifiable
information on NHS databases with other ministries and private companies. <http://tinyurl.com/ccu3lu
>
Bank nationalisation in the cards? <http://tinyurl.com/afojdr>
<http://tinyurl.com/cdvlzd >
I wouldn't mind being poached. <http://tinyurl.com/de3rzy>
-- Harry Erwin, PhD, Program Leader, MSc Information
Systems Security, University of Sunderland. <http://scat-he-g4.sunderland.ac.uk/~harryerw>
Weblog at: <http://scat-he-g4.sunderland.ac.uk/~harryerw/blog/index.php>
==============
You're on the list! -
Jerry,
Here’s a list of the
10-great-post-apocalyptic-science-fiction-novels and Lucifer’s Hammer is
number ten.
http://listverse.com/literature/
10-great-post-apocalyptic
-science-fiction-novels/
E.C. "Stan" Field
============
Re: Why e-books are not taking off -
In my case I read over 800 words per minute and
sometimes (ten-twelve times a year) read two books in a day. It's rare when
I don't read three books a week. I read sci-fi, historical novels,
mysteries, history, technical (computer, automotive, engineering and
military), biographies and do-it-your-self books. I watch very little TV.
I have over 250 hardbacks and over 2300 paperbacks in
my personal library. My stack(s) of books to be read is usually twenty to
thirty or so.
I often buy a book as a gift and read it first. If I
like it, I put it on my "buy list" and look for a used copy for my library.
My wife, children and I loan books to each other; most
of them are purchased by one of us at a used book store.
Our book budgets can not afford individual copies of
each book for several e-book readers. This is the deal breaker.
We buy few hardbacks so the Kindle book price is way
too high. And you can not loan an e-book on to someone else.
The bottom line is I could afford the Kindle but I
can't afford the e-books.
Read your site everyday. Don't change it; it works
just fine as it is.
Bob Sprowl
==
"Members of Congress should be compelled to wear
uniforms like NASCAR drivers, so we can identify their corporate sponsors."
Many of them, however, would need outlandishly large
uniforms to carry all the patches.
Bob Sprowl
==============
Stimulus
Dear Jerry,
>>but every discussion of the bill that I have heard
from people who have tried to do so concludes that most of the money will
not be spent this year even if the bill were passed today. <<
Steve Chu is right. I haven't read the New Improved
version. I read last weekend's Washington Post graphic and analysis for the
House version. Pelosi's larger House bill only spent $109 billion for the
rest of 2009. This compares to $150 billion in last year's tax rebate
program. Since the final bill is smaller, the 2009 total is unlikely to be
much larger than the House's original proposal for 2009.
Most of the fiscal stimulus announced in the last six
months by the US, the EU and China has been Second Life grade stimulus with
only tenuous connections to the real world. It's either backloaded years
from now or it consisted of unfunded central government decrees to lower
government echelons to spend money they don't have and can't obtain.
M
Since I have not met anyone who has read the
Bill, I can't say what it will or won't do.
===========
Trying Obama's Plan???
Dear Dr. Pournelle,
I am having a great deal of trouble understand those
who are now counseling "trying" President Obama's plan to fix our debt by
spending more money we don't have. Aren't the same people willing to "try"
that the same one's who were complaining that President Bush was spending
too much money we didn't have?
Regards
Tom Kunich
============
Latest on Children on Roof Story
The bishop who was arrested is suing for false
imprisonment and personal injury--the police apparently roughed him up. <http://tinyurl.com/cvelw6
>
-- Harry Erwin, PhD "Those who would give up
essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither
Liberty nor Safety." (Benjamin Franklin, 1755)
==========
Warren's Iron Law of Governance
Dear Jerry,
David Warren doesn't bill this statement, which is the
introduction on an essay on the pitfalls of socialized medicine in Canada,
as "Warren's Iron Law of Governance", but someone should:
"One of the key functions of modern government is to
reduce, by law, the options people have, especially when they are facing
challenges to survival."
http://davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=972
It certainly is the cobblestone on the road from
Republic to Empire.
On an unrelated note, regarding Mr. Hamit's discussion
of text to speech technology in the new Kindle, I'm afraid I'm a
criminal-I've been reading to my children for years, completely unaware that
I've been treading on Authors' rights. Hopefully the courts will have mercy.
Cheers,
Rod Schaffter
-- "I loathe populism. But if there ever has been a
moment when reasonable men's hands itch for the pitchfork, this must surely
be it." --Jonah Goldberg
============
"There is a case to be made that dark, dormant comets
are a significant but largely unseen hazard."
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
scienceandtechnology/science/
space/4592130/Unseen-dark-comets
-could-pose-deadly-threat-to-earth.html >
--- Roland Dobbins
============
One supposes he'd prefer a bust of Eric Hobsbawm.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/
worldnews/northamerica/usa/
barackobama/4623148/
Barack-Obama-sends-bust-of-
Winston-Churchill-on-its-way-
back-to-Britain.html
---- Roland Dobbins
===========
The early history of TEMPEST A Signal Problem
A story of the discovery of various compromising
radiations from communications and Comsec equipment.
http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_
files/cryptologic_spectrum/tempest.pdf
John
===========
Jack Schmitt: "They’ve seen too many of their
colleagues lose grant funding when they haven’t gone along with the
so-called political consensus that we’re in a human-caused global warming."
http://news.bostonherald.com/news/
national/general/view/2009_02_15_
Former_astronaut_speaks_out_on_
global_warming/srvc=home&position
=recent
-- Roland Dobbins
============
"The stellar orbits in the galactic centre show that
the central mass concentration of four million solar masses must be a black
hole, beyond any reasonable doubt."
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7774287.stm>
--- Roland Dobbins
===========
Surely this is a test
"But surely this is a test of the Spend It Now and get
things moving hypothesis."
If only that were true. Fixing the world economy might
be worth a trillion dollars, especially if it proved Keynesian economics
right and persuaded everyone to agree to faster action in the future. On the
other hand, wasting a trillion dollars just once might be worth it, if that
proved Keynesian economics wrong and persuaded everyone to agree to avoid
such waste in the future.
But do you really think we'll get any proof either
way? The graphs of economic improvement during the New Deal are impressive,
but you can't convince conservatives and libertarians that things wouldn't
have just gotten better even faster without government meddling. Japan's
economic stimulus attempts didn't stop a "lost decade" of economic failure,
but you can't convince liberals that the government didn't at least save
things from getting even worse.
Given what's at stake, figuring out just whose
economic theories are correct could be more important than any individual
economic crisis. But nobody's proposed an experiment up to the challenge,
and even if a real test were possible I suspect that most partisans *still*
wouldn't be convinced.
Giving up some of my feigned impartiality: how many
times during the last century did a war or a political negotiation end up
with an arbitrary line drawn on the ground, with central planning in control
on one side of the line and capitalism on the other? And how did each of
those experiments turn out on each side of the line? Did those tests
convince the losers of anything? The only effect seems to be subconscious:
one philosophy in the US insists on carrying out their experiments at the
federal level, with no inconvenient control groups to compare against.
--- Roy
If I had seen this before I answered
the perspective mail, I could have used this as
an answer.
===========
Thermageddon, the BBC and a giant snake.
<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/15/thermageddon_snake_bbc/>
-- Roland Dobbins
===========
"If you can't gain acceptance into a top tier
university, you might as well die and I won't shed a tear at your funeral."
<http://en.chinaelections.org/
NewsInfo.asp?NewsID=19911>
- Roland Dobbins
The problem remains: half the children are below
average. This means that no matter what you do, and no matter what you
think about the possibilities of IQ improvements, there will be many who
cannot profit from a four year university education. They can't. It won't
work. They can study their eyes out and they still won't become
professionals.
A republic that wants to survive must have ways
to let everyone including those below average lead productive lives and to
feel and be valuable citizens.
There are ways to do this. We do not seem to be
looking for them.
===========
Will: Dark-Green Doomsayers.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/
content/article/2009/02/13/AR2009021302514.html
-- Roland Dobbins
Well said, as usual.
============
Well, you asked.
"The smartest people in the world have given us the
Biggest Spending Bill in the History of the World. I would be pleased to
hear from those who think something this drastic was needed."
The best argument I've heard why something this big
<or bigger> was needed is:
This is not supposed to "cure" the economy. It's
supposed to be a big enough jolt/impulse to scramble the positive feedback
that's fueling the spiral into deflation. It had to be done fast before too
much momentum got going. That would then let other forces work in the
economy.
<shrug>
No idea if it was enough or fast enough. Or if it will
work. And by "work" the best I can see is if we plateau/churn for a while
til other forces get going.
But that's the best argument I've heard.
Robert Hickey
============
Digital Medical Records are a Bad Idea
Hi Jerry,
I'm completely against the mandatory digitization of
medical records by anyone - the government, insurance companies, or
businesses. Fundamentally the issue is who owns data about me, who decides
how (and to whom) that data can be transferred, and what future uses it may
be put to. In my mind, medical records are no different than mandatory gun
registration - both are the first step towards a fundamental loss of
freedom.
Consider: A patient discloses to his doctor that he
does illegal drugs. That data is digitized and transmitted as a diagnostic
code to an insurance company. The new 'quality of care government czar'
reviews that record for appropriateness of care, and determines that you
should not be covered because the activity was illegal. Instead the record
is transmitted to law enforcement.
Think that can't happen here because of doctor/patient
privilege? That privilege is not constitutional - it's statutory, which
means it can be changed. Or perhaps you disclose that you eat McDonald's Big
Mac's twice a day, and have to be treated for high-cholesterol. There's
already movements towards a 'junk food tax' in California, and the next
logical step is that the government will deny you a prescription for
medication to lower cholesterol. I'm sure that Obama's new office will
actively ration care for such 'avoidable conditions'.
Once the information is digitized and transmitted, any
initial restrictions on use can easily be waived - witness the expansion of
the social security number. I'm old enough that my card carries the words
'NOT FOR IDENTIFICATION USE' in prominent red letters. That promise was
broken badly, and efforts to restore it are routinely defeated. That's the
reason that the NRA is against Gun Registration to begin with - if there's
no records, there can be no creeping towards confiscation. It's a line in
the sand - and this is one as well. There WILL be data breaches, with
confidential health information being stolen by hackers. Blackmail and
extortion will inevitably occur, and it wouldn't surprise me to see a
black-market clearing house for medical data to be used in pre-employment
background checks.
Regards,
Doug
============
Why the British Stopped Studying Foreign Languages
As part of an anti-truancy drive <http://tinyurl.com/c5mkyo>
-- Harry Erwin, PhD, Program Leader, MSc Information
Systems Security,
University of Sunderland. <http://scat-he-g4.sunderland.ac.uk/~harryerw>
Weblog at: <http://scat-he-g4.sunderland.ac.uk/~harryerw/blog/index.php>
============
Europe
Our problems here are diverting the little attention
Americans pay to foreign affairs. The Europeans have the opposite problem;
they've been fixated on American problems as a method of ignoring their own,
and also blaming someone else for homegrown insanity.
Things were done there that manage to make our own
debauched financial system look like a model of 19th Century New England
Yankee prudence.
1. The banking system within the euro and European
Central Bank created its own sub-prime loan problem, completely independent
of Washington, the Federal Reserve and Wall Street. During the 90s and early
00s Europe's banks lent out several times their capital to Brazil, Russia,
India and other busted emerging market stories.
They would have to occupy these countries to foreclose
now. They at least have certainty about the book value of bad loans in that
sector. Zero (0.0) recovery. 100% loss. This is a simpler problem than
deciding whether an American subprime portfolio is worth 30% or 60% of face
value. The solution is simpler, too. Hide everything like Bernie Madoff did
for many years.
2. Many parts of Europe sponsored even bigger real
estate bubbles than did Washington. We were actually pretty late to the
party. For some reason the local banking regulators in many European states
decided to encourage residential mortgages denominated in foreign
currencies. Yen mortgages became common in eastern Europe, as did euro
mortgages in Russia. Swiss franc mortgages spread everywhere. This added
exchange rate risk to interest rate and economic risk.
And since then anywhere exchange rates could move
against the debtor, they did. The Swiss franc and Japanese yen have soared
against the euro. And the euro itself has soared against the Russian ruble
and all the developing countries to whom Europe loaned multiples of its
banking capital.
M
=============
What is stimulus?
Dr. Pournelle,
I don't want to pick on Mr. Hamit, who seems to be an
intelligent and thoughtful man, but his statement that
> Characterizing a stimulus bill as a spending bill,
as if that were a bad
> thing, is to fall prey to a failed ideology.
is empty rhetoric. It is a well-crafted statement that
I could easily imagine the President himself might use, but it is by itself
completely devoid of substance.
Mr. Hamit does not attempt to explain how to
differentiate a stimulus bill from a normal appropriations bill. All
appropriations are spending, but I doubt that most reasonable people would
consider all federal spending to be stimulus.
My understanding of the term "stimulus" in the current
context is that a lot of money is somehow dumped into the economy. The
theoretical justification for this action is that the additional money will
be used to buy goods and services, thus stimulating economic activity.
The fundamental operating principal is that a lot of
money is quickly put in circulation. The current bill that Congress is
frantically cobbling together will not do that. One term that keeps coming
up over and over in relation to this bill is "infrastructure". Just about
everyone seems to agree that we need to spend money on maintaining
infrastructure. I agree that there needs to be money spent on maintaining
infrastructure. The problem in this context is that it has nothing to do
with stimulus. One cannot quickly repair roads, bridges, or buildings on a
large scale. Computerizing medical records has nothing to do with economic
stimulus. Although I (like almost everyone else) have not seen the final
bill, I am quite confident that there are a great many items in it that will
cause little or no money to be spent before summer of this year.
I am not an economist, but it appears to me that the
term "stimulus" is being used as cover to ram through an enormous
appropriations bill with as little debate as possible.
Steve Chu
==============d
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