| Wednesday,
April 27, 2011 Trump
Triumpent
Dear Jerry:
I had the best time this morning watching Donald Trump
take credit for having forced President Obama to publish his long form birth
certificate. Let's give the Devil his due; it was a dead issue until Trump
revived it and shouted down anyone who had the nerve to disagree with his
lies. And it was The Big Lie, right out of the Nazi playbook used in Germany
in the 1930s by Hitler and Goebbles. Now Trump is asking about college
transcripts, implying that Obama is not smart enough to hold his office and
had some sort of affirmative action free ride to Harvard Law? The man was
Magna Cum Laude and Editor of the Harvard Law Review.
What Trump forgot or ignored is that Obama is a
graduate of another school; Chicago Politics, where they play very rough
indeed and what counts is results that the voters can see. I lived in that
town for eight years and this was more of a reason for me to vote for him
than him being the first African American President. (That's rather
irrelevant in my mind.) Obama played him like a fiddle and while The Donald
can bluster all he wants, his credibility just went in the toliet.
Because President Obama is right about another thing;
we don't have time for this BS. There are serious issues to be resolved and
Trump isn't about those. He's about getting himself more attention and
making money from that. He's a brand.
He's also a danger because this kind of shouting and
rhetoric was used in the Ante-Bellum period in the South to promote the idea
of Secession and Civil War. Trump may not be a racist but he;s playing one
on TV.
By me, its Donald Trump who isn't smart enough to be
President and the Republicans have no hope in 2012 the longer they let him
drive their agenda. He's the Democrat's secret weapon.
Sincerely,
Francis Hamit
Not my reading, but this is a coherent statement
of another view.
By me it all ought to have ended when Clinton
asked for the damn document back in nomination days. I also suspect there
are some adolescents in the White House advisory staff who are having fun
with this. Perhaps so.
As to what we have time for, are you seriously
contending that the time of 'debates' on this would be devoted to more
rational discussion on the major media outlets? I do agree we would be
better off thinking about what the hell we are doing with our Legions than
worrying about a moot point like this, but I have said that for a long
time without much noticeable effect. Apparently there are those who find
this amusing or important or both.
==
Obama's Decision
Dear Jerry,
This is why the President chose to release the birth
certificate now...
"...in the USA TODAY poll, only 38% of Americans say
Obama definitely was born in the USA, and 18% say he probably was. Fifteen
percent say he probably was born in another country, and 9% say he
definitely was born elsewhere...."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/2011-04-25-trump-president-poll.htm
This article was the headline on Drudge yesterday.
Cheers,
Rod Schaffter
-- "I was born in a free country, but now it is a
democracy." --David Warren
======
Re: Obama's Birth Certificate
Jerry,
I have long wondered if the decision to keep Obama's
birth certificate obscure for so long was a purposeful political maneuver
designed to lure some politically significant foe into looking like an ass.
As it happens there were no such fish biting. Instead it came down to
Trumpty-Dumpty having the fall. As for the electronic formatting with
multiple layers, just imagine if some prominent opposition figure makes an
assertion of fraud and then the trap springs shut...
Regards, George
Of course that's one of the first things to come
to mind. Do serious public servants, members of the White House staff,
actually think that way? Perhaps so. It would all be simply resolved: just
allow someone we all trust to have access to the original document, not a
digitized copy. Perhaps that has been done. I don't have a lot of
confidence in the new media any longer.
As to candidates we can spare, I suppose Donald
Trump is well among them; he hasn't been all that conspicuously dedicated
to the public cause in the past.
=========
Oil interest
Jerry,
I recently got an email for a friend that likes to
pursue conspiracy theorists. This was about oil reserves. Once all the
conspiracy stuff and large type was stripped away, one fact claimed in the
text (and supposedly back for US Geological Survey data) was the the US has
larger oil reserves that any other country in the world. The email was
primarily focused on reserves that were in the lower 48 and not off shore.
Here are the links that this focused on:
http://www.usgs.gov/
newsroom/article.asp?ID=1911
http://www.nextenergynews.com/
news1/next-energy-news2.13s.html
I suppose the question really is, how much of this is
true and how much will it matter in the end?
Randy Powell
I would think it obvious that if Obama were to
announce a major effort to increase domestic oil supply, oil future prices
would fall immediately, and that would ripple down to spot market prices.
The US has large oil reserves both on shore and off shore. If the word
went out that the US policy is Drill Here, Drill Now, gasoline prices
would stabilize fast as futures prices began to fall.
Of course that isn't likely to happen.
Here's what is more likely:
Paper Industry Receiving Billions in Tax Subsidies -
BioFuels
The paper industry has burned something called "black
liquor" to generate energy for 80 years. This is a byproduct of the
wood-pulping process. Somehow it qualifies as a biofuel under a 2005 law.
Hence, billions of dollars are flowing through several channels from the
Federal government to paper makers. The Democratic-controlled Congress tried
to stop this several times, but failed to close the loop holes in the law.
Incompetence reigns in Washington. Good for the industry for showing how
silly our government can be.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
business/economy/paper-industry-
pushed-further-into-the-black-by-
black-liquor-tax-credits/2011/04/19/
AFdkrMtE_story.html
-- Dwayne Phillips - - -
=============
The joke continues
Obama is a (space) alien!
Dr. Pournelle,
As they say, the truth is out there. Now it is out in
the open. Barrack Obama has revealed himself as not only not born in
America, but not born of this world.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/
news/nilegardiner/100085078/
barack-obama%E2%80%99s
-leading-from-behind-foreign-policy-
no-wonder-the-us-president-looks-
weak-and-confused/
No serious person on earth would claim to be "leading
from behind". This is an alien concept. Surely your collaborator Larry Niven
must have noticed that Obama is obviously a bioengineered Pierson's
Puppeteer! For those unfamiliar with the Ringworld books, Puppeteers are
both very intelligent and very risk-averse. It has been awhile since I have
read the books, but I believe the title of the Puppeteer leader roughly
translates as "the one who leads from the rear" or "Hindmost", the one
farthest away from danger.
It all makes sense now.
Steve Chu
But I guess it really isn't so funny. We bomb
civilian installations in Tripoli in aid of saving the civilian population
of Libya from the government in Tripoli. I am still trying to make sense
of that, and how bombing the Tripoli TV station is an act of defense when
NATO does it, but would be an act of terrorism if Libyan agents did the
same to NPR or VOA headquarters,
=============
Safety culture
I'd not be inclined to dismiss criticisms of
"safety culture" out
of hand.
Was not safety culture one of Admiral Rickover's
contributions to nuclear safety, though not under that name?
According to this document
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/acrs/tr/subcommittee/1999/hf991119.html
>>The term safety culture was actually introduced by
the International Nuclear Safety Analysis Group in their report on the
Chernobyl accident in 1986. A couple of years later, they actually devoted a
publication to safety culture, and in that publication, they define it as
shown here: safety culture is that assembly of characteristics and attitudes
in organizations and individuals which establishes that as an overriding
priority, nuclear plant safety issues receive the attention warranted by
their significance.<<
You can't just play whack-a-mole on individual
problems as they pop up. You need to look for patterns of institutional
behavior that lead to whole classes of problems being overlooked and to
hazards being either ignored or covered up until, eventually, one of them
hatches a catastrophe.
The Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disaster
investigations included voluminous criticisms of, in effect, the absence of
a safety culture at NASA. The NASA managers' attitude of "prove to me it's
*not* safe to fly", that led them to dismiss engineers' misgivings about how
the O-rings had been eroding during previous launches in cold weather, was
one indication of a profound lack of a safety culture. Contrast that with
Teller's insisting that it be written into the rules that no
positive-void-coefficient nuclear reactor ever be licensed. The Coast Guard
co-chairman of the Deepwater Horizon accident investigation, Captain Hung
Nguyen, probed the lack of safety culture on the rig -- a rig that was
getting awards for its excellent safety _record_ right up until the day it
exploded and sank.
None of what I've just said is an argument one way or
another about the validity, or not, of Meshkati's criticisms of the safety
culture at San Onofre. To judge those, I'd want to dig into the NRC
inspection reports themselves, rather than rely on second- or third-hand
hearsay from Meshkati, who apparently has an axe to grind.
http://www.nrc.gov/info-finder/reactor/sano2.html
http://www.nrc.gov/info-finder/reactor/sano3.html
Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com
The notion of a safety culture is fine, but what
I see in this "report" is charges without specifications, and I am always
suspicious of charges without specifications.
============
: Military adventure
Dr Pournelle,
I have noted your references to things done during the
Cold War that are not appropriate for the U.S. today. I have always paid
attention to your comments about the Cold War as I was at Hoenfels Training
area the day the wall came down and so have a vested interest.
I began wondering... In 1956 Khrushchev said in a
speech "We will bury you." I wonder if he was not being an Oracle at Moscow
(as opposed to Delphi). Remember how the oracles were seldom obvious until
long after they had been found true.
So we need to oppose Communism. To do so we need
certain strategies. To get implemented requires (temporary) compromises of
traditional American policies to gain a majority which includes liberals. In
the process, over a period of more than 2 generations, America changes so
that the compromises are now traditional norm and when our enemy suddenly
(almost overnight it seemed at the time) goes away, we are left looking for
a way to continue our "traditional" policies and end up burying ourselves.
Maybe Nikita is laughing mournfully in his Communist
afterworld at his (unintended I'm sure) foresight.
Patrick
=========
NY case underscores Wi-Fi privacy dangers,
Jerry
This kind of case really gets me mad:
http://www.pennlive.com/newsflash/
index.ssf/story/ny-case-underscores-
wi-fi-privacy-dangers/e0b4d53e1dca44
1c8542608bc6c2c7ce
“That new wireless router. He'd gotten fed up trying
to set a password. Someone must have used his Internet connection . . .” to
download child pornography. OK. Point taken. But here’s what our Federal
employees did:
“Lying on his family room floor with assault weapons
trained on him, shouts of "pedophile!" and "pornographer!" stinging like his
fresh cuts and bruises, the Buffalo homeowner didn't need long to figure out
the reason for the early morning wake-up call from a swarm of federal
agents.
That new wireless router. He'd gotten fed up trying to
set a password. Someone must have used his Internet connection, he thought.
"We know who you are! You downloaded thousands of
images at 11:30 last night," the man's lawyer, Barry Covert, recounted the
agents saying. They referred to a screen name, "Doldrum."
"No, I didn't," he insisted. "Somebody else could have
but I didn't do anything like that."
"You're a creep ... just admit it," they said. <snip>
“It was 6:20 a.m. March 7 when he and his wife were
awakened by the sound of someone breaking down their rear door. He threw a
robe on and walked to the top of the stairs, looking down to see seven armed
people with jackets bearing the initials I-C-E, which he didn't immediately
know stood for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
"They are screaming at him, 'Get down! Get down on the
ground!' He's saying, 'Who are you? Who are you?'" Covert said.
"One of the agents runs up and basically throws him
down the stairs, and he's got the cuts and bruises to show for it," said
Covert, who said the homeowner plans no lawsuit. When he was allowed to get
up, agents escorted him and watched as he used the bathroom and dressed.
“The homeowner later got an apology from U.S. Attorney
William Hochul and Immigration and Customs Enforcement Special Agent in
Charge Lev Kubiak.” <snip>
No comments on how badly the Feds treated this man,
who had not been proven guilty of anything. Guilty until proven innocent.
Deserving of abuse until explicitly absolved. That’s us, subjects of a
police state, though not it seems run from the top down . . . yet.
In any case, it tells us that if the software
accompanying a router is too complex to use, it’s grounds to return that
equipment and get a different brand.
Ed
I presume that these government agents have
decided there are insufficient numbers of free people who hate them, and
are trying to recruit more terrorists. I can't imagine any other
reason for acting like that.
An apology from the attorney general. Thrilling.
One moral of the story is to make sure you use
full encryption and security when setting up wireless routers, and make
certain that the password is good. Otherwise dn't turn the darned thing
on.
In order for a man to love his country, his
country ought to be lovely. The US deserves a President who understands
this.
The story continues:
After a search of his devices proved the
homeowner's innocence, investigators went back to the peer-to-peer
software and looked at logs that showed what other IP addresses Doldrum
had connected from. Two were associated with the State University of New
York at Buffalo and accessed using a secure token that UB said was
assigned to a student living in an apartment adjacent to the homeowner.
Agents arrested John Luchetti March 17. He has pleaded not guilty to
distribution of child pornography.
Luchetti is not charged with using his neighbor's
Wi-Fi without permission. Whether it was illegal is up for debate.
The government agents have not been charged with
anything, and probably will get merit promotions in due time. After all,
they are patriots working for the Department of Homeland Security. Just
how kiddie porn falls under the Patriot Act is not so clear, but surely it
is. (See
Thursday's VIEW for more 0n this subject.)
=============
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