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Thursday, May 31, 2018
Univac Document Archive: 1106/1108 Assembler Programmer's Reference Added
I have added the following document to the Software section of the Univac Document Archive. This is a PDF of a scanned paper document in my collection. This document was published in 1969 (two earlier editions date from 1966 and 1967). This describes the “classic” assembler, which was derived from the SLEUTH II assembler for the Univac 1107. As of the publication of this manual, the assembler supported only FIELDATA character code and six bit characters; it would later be extended to support ASCII code and nine bit (quarter word) character representation. In the 1970s, the new Meta-Assembler developed by Derek A. Zave became the standard assembler for 1100 series systems, although the original assembler remained available and many people continued to use it.Posted at
12:31
Tuesday, May 29, 2018
Reading List: A Rambling Wreck
- Schantz, Hans G. A Rambling Wreck. Huntsville, AL: ÆtherCzar, 2017. ISBN 978-1-5482-0142-5.
-
This the second novel in the author's Hidden
Truth series. In the first book (December 2017) we
met high schoolers and best friends Pete Burdell and Amit Patel
who found, in dusty library books, knowledge apparently
discovered by the pioneers of classical electromagnetism (many
of whom died young), but which does not figure in modern works,
even purported republications of the original sources they had
consulted. As they try to sort through the discrepancies, make
sense of what they've found, and scour sources looking for other
apparently suppressed information, they become aware that dark
and powerful forces seem bent on keeping this seemingly obscure
information hidden. People who dig too deeply have a tendency to
turn up dead in suspicious “accidents”, and Amit
coins the monicker “EVIL”: the Electromagnetic
Villains International League, for their adversaries. Events
turn personal and tragic, and Amit and Pete learn tradecraft,
how to deal with cops (real and fake), and navigate the legal
system with the aid of mentors worthy of a Heinlein story.
This novel finds the pair entering the freshman class at Georgia
Tech—they're on their way to becoming “rambling
wrecks”. Unable to pay their way with their own resources,
Pete and Amit compete for and win full-ride scholarships
funded by the Civic Circle, an organisation they suspect may be
in cahoots in some way with EVIL. As a condition of their
scholarship, they must take a course, “Introduction to Social
Justice Studies” (the “Studies” should be tip-off
enough) to become “social justice ambassadors” to
the knuckle-walking Tech community.
Pete's Uncle Ron feared this might be a mistake, but Amit and
Pete saw it as a way to burrow from within, starting their
own “long march through the institutions”, and,
incidentally, having a great deal of fun and, especially
for Amit, an aspiring master of Game, meet radical chicks.
Once at Tech, it becomes clear that the first battles they
must fight relate not to 19th century electrodynamics but
the 21st century social justice wars.
Pete's family name resonates with history and tradition at
Tech. In the 1920s, with a duplicate enrollment form in hand,
enterprising undergraduates signed up the fictitious
“George
P. Burdell” for a full course load, submitted his
homework, took his exams, and saw him graduate in 1930. Burdell
went on to serve in World War II, and was listed on the Board of
Directors of Mad magazine. Whenever Georgia Tech
alumni gather, it is not uncommon to hear George P. Burdell
being paged. Amit and Pete decide the time has come to
enlist the school's most famous alumnus in the battle for its soul,
and before long the merry pranksters of FOG—Friends of
George—were mocking and disrupting the earnest schemes
of the social justice warriors.
Meanwhile, Pete has taken a job as a laboratory assistant
and, examining data that shouldn't be interesting, discovers
a new phenomenon which might just tie in with his and Amit's
earlier discoveries. These investigations, as his professor
warns, can also be perilous, and before long he and Amit find
themselves dealing with three separate secret
conspiracies vying for control over the hidden knowledge,
which may be much greater and rooted deeper in history than
they had imagined. Another enigmatic document by an obscure
missionary named Angus MacGuffin (!), who came to a
mysterious and violent end in 1940, suggests a unification of
the enigmas. And one of the greatest mysteries of twentieth
century physics, involving one of its most brilliant
figures, may be involved.
This series is a bit of Golden Age science fiction which somehow
dropped into the early 21st century. It is a story of mystery,
adventure, heroes, and villains, with interesting ideas and
technical details which are plausible. The characters are
interesting and grow as they are tested and learn from their
experiences. And the story is related with a light touch,
with plenty of smiles and laughs at the expense of those
who richly deserve mockery and scorn. This book is
superbly done and a worthy sequel to the first. I
eagerly await the next, The Brave and the Bold.
I was delighted to see that Pete made the same discovery about
triangles in physics and engineering problems that I made in
my first year of engineering school. One of the first things
any engineer should learn is to see if there's an easier way
to get the answer out.
I'll be adding “proglodytes”—progressive
troglodytes—to my vocabulary.
For a self-published work, there are only a very few copy editing
errors.
The Kindle edition is free for Kindle
Unlimited subscribers.
In an “About the Author” section at the end, the author
notes:
There's a growing fraternity of independent, self-published authors busy changing the culture one story at a time with their tales of adventure and heroism. Here are a few of my more recent discoveries.
With the social justice crowd doing their worst to wreck science fiction, the works of any of these authors are a great way to remember why you started reading science fiction in the first place.
Posted at
21:54
Sunday, May 27, 2018
Reading List: Into the Cannibal's Pot
- Mercer, Ilana. Into the Cannibal's Pot. Mount Vernon, WA, 2011. ISBN 978-0-9849070-1-4.
- The author was born in South Africa, the daughter of Rabbi Abraham Benzion Isaacson, a leader among the Jewish community in the struggle against apartheid. Due to her father's activism, the family, forced to leave the country, emigrated to Israel, where the author grew up. In the 1980s, she moved back to South Africa, where she married, had a daughter, and completed her university education. In 1995, following the first elections with universal adult suffrage which resulted in the African National Congress (ANC) taking power, she and her family emigrated to Canada with the proceeds of the sale of her apartment hidden in the soles of her shoes. (South Africa had adopted strict controls to prevent capital flight in the aftermath of the election of a black majority government.) After initially settling in British Columbia, her family subsequently emigrated to the United States where they reside today. From the standpoint of a member of a small minority (the Jewish community) of a minority (whites) in a black majority country, Mercer has reason to be dubious of the much-vaunted benefits of “majority rule”. Describing herself as a “paleolibertarian”, her outlook is shaped not by theory but the experience of living in South Africa and the accounts of those who remained after her departure. For many in the West, South Africa scrolled off the screen as soon as a black majority government took power, but that was the beginning of the country's descent into violence, injustice, endemic corruption, expropriation of those who built the country and whose ancestors lived there since before the founding of the United States, and what can only be called a slow-motion genocide against the white farmers who were the backbone of the society. Between 1994 and 2005, the white population of South Africa fell from 5.22 million to 4.37 million. Two of the chief motivations for emigration have been an explosion of violent crime, often racially motivated and directed against whites, a policy of affirmative action which amounts to overt racial discrimination against whites, endemic corruption, and expropriation of businesses in the interest of “fairness”. In the forty-four years of apartheid in South Africa from 1950 to 1993, there were a total of 309,583 murders in the country: an average of 7,036 per year. In the first eight years after the end of apartheid (1994—2001), under one-party black majority rule, 193,649 murders were reported, or 24,206 per year. And the latter figure is according to the statistics of the ANC-controlled South Africa Police Force, which both Interpol and the South African Medical Research Council say may be understated by as much as a factor of two. The United States is considered to be a violent country, with around 4.88 homicides per 100,000 people (by comparison, the rate in the United Kingdom is 0.92 and in Switzerland is 0.69). In South Africa, the figure is 34.27 (all estimates are 2015 figures from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime). And it isn't just murder: in South Africa,where 65 people are murdered every day, around 200 are raped and 300 are victims of assault and violent robbery. White farmers, mostly Afrikaner, have frequently been targets of violence. In the periods 1996–2007 and 2010–2016 (no data were published for the years 2008 and 2009), according to statistics from the South African Police Service (which may be understated), there were 11,424 violent attacks on farms in South Africa, with a total of 1609 homicides, in some cases killing entire farm families and some of their black workers. The motives for these attacks remain a mystery according to the government, whose leaders have been known to sing the stirring anthem “Kill the Boer” at party rallies. Farm attacks follow the pattern in Zimbabwe, where such attacks, condoned by the Mugabe regime, resulted in the emigration of almost all white farmers and the collapse of the country's agricultural sector (only 200 white farmers remain in the country, 5% of the number before black majority rule). In South Africa, white farmers who have not already emigrated find themselves trapped: they cannot sell to other whites who fear they would become targets of attacks and/or eventual expropriation without compensation, nor to blacks who expect they will eventually receive the land for free when it is expropriated. What is called affirmative action in the U.S. is implemented in South Africa under the Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) programme, a set of explicitly racial preferences and requirements which cover most aspects of business operation including ownership, management, employment, training, supplier selection, and internal investment. Mining companies must cede co-ownership to blacks in order to obtain permits for exploration. Not surprisingly, in many cases the front men for these “joint ventures” are senior officials of the ruling ANC and their family members. So corrupt is the entire system that Archbishop Desmond Tutu, one of the most eloquent opponents of apartheid, warned that BEE has created a “powder keg”, where benefits accrue only to a small, politically-connected, black elite, leaving others in “dehumanising poverty”. Writing from the perspective of one who got out of South Africa just at the point where everything started to go wrong (having anticipated in advance the consequences of pure majority rule) and settled in the U.S., Mercer then turns to the disturbing parallels between the two countries. Their histories are very different, and yet there are similarities and trends which are worrying. One fundamental problem with democracy is that people who would otherwise have to work for a living discover that they can vote for a living instead, and are encouraged in this by politicians who realise that a dependent electorate is a reliable electorate as long as the benefits continue to flow. Back in 2008, I wrote about the U.S. approaching a tipping point where nearly half of those who file income tax returns owe no income tax. At that point, among those who participate in the economy, there is a near-majority who pay no price for voting for increased government benefits paid for by others. It's easy to see how this can set off a positive feedback loop where the dependent population burgeons, the productive minority shrinks, the administrative state which extracts the revenue from that minority becomes ever more coercive, and those who channel the money from the producers to the dependent grow in numbers and power. Another way to look at the tipping point is to compare the number of voters to taxpayers (those with income tax liability). In the U.S., this number is around two to one, which is dangerously unstable to the calamity described above. Now consider that in South Africa, this ratio is eleven to one. Is it any wonder that under universal adult suffrage the economy of that country is in a down-spiral? South Africa prior to 1994 was in an essentially intractable position. By encouraging black and later Asian immigration over its long history (most of the ancestors of black South Africans arrived after the first white settlers), it arrived at a situation where a small white population (less than 10%) controlled the overwhelming majority of the land and wealth, and retained almost all of the political power. This situation, and the apartheid system which sustained it (which the author and her family vehemently opposed) was unjust and rightly was denounced and sanctioned by countries around the globe. But what was to replace it? The experience of post-colonial Africa was that democracy almost always leads to “One man, one vote, one time”: a leader of the dominant ethnic group wins the election, consolidates power, and begins to eliminate rival groups, often harking back to the days of tribal warfare which preceded the colonial era, but with modern weapons and a corresponding death toll. At the same time, all sources of wealth are plundered and “redistributed”, not to the general population, but to the generals and cronies of the Great Man. As the country sinks into savagery and destitution, whites and educated blacks outside the ruling clique flee. (Indeed, South Africa has a large black illegal immigrant population made of those who fled the Mugabe tyranny in Zimbabwe.) Many expected this down-spiral to begin in South Africa soon after the ANC took power in 1994. The joke went, “What's the difference between Zimbabwe and South Africa? Ten years.” That it didn't happen immediately and catastrophically is a tribute to Nelson Mandela's respect for the rule of law and for his white partners in ending apartheid. But now he is gone, and a new generation of more radical leaders has replaced him. Increasingly, it seems like the punch line might be revised to be “Twenty-five years.” The immediate priority one takes away from this book is the need to address the humanitarian crisis faced by the Afrikaner farmers who are being brutally murdered and face expropriation of their land without compensation as the regime becomes ever more radical. Civilised countries need to open immigration to this small, highly-productive, population. Due to persecution and denial of property rights, they may arrive penniless, but are certain to quickly become the backbone of the communities they join. In the longer term, the U.S. and the rest of the Anglosphere and civilised world should be cautious and never indulge in the fantasy “it can't happen here”. None of these countries started out with the initial conditions of South Africa, but it seems like, over the last fifty years, much of their ruling class seems to have been bent on importing masses of third world immigrants with no tradition of consensual government, rule of law, or respect for property rights, concentrating them in communities where they can preserve the culture and language of the old country, and ensnaring them in a web of dependency which keeps them from climbing the ladder of assimilation and economic progress by which previous immigrant populations entered the mainstream of their adopted countries. With some politicians bent on throwing the borders open to savage, medieval, inbred “refugees” who breed much more rapidly than the native population, it doesn't take a great deal of imagination to see how the tragedy now occurring in South Africa could foreshadow the history of the latter part of this century in countries foolish enough to lay the groundwork for it now. This book was published in 2011, but the trends it describes have only accelerated in subsequent years. It's an eye-opener to the risks of democracy without constraints or protection of the rights of minorities, and a warning to other nations of the grave risks they face should they allow opportunistic politicians to recreate the dire situation of South Africa in their own lands.
Posted at
20:07
Wednesday, May 23, 2018
Reading List: Origin
- Brown, Dan. Origin. New York: Doubleday, 2017. ISBN 978-0-385-51423-1.
-
Ever since the breakthrough success of
Angels & Demons,
his first mystery/thriller novel featuring Harvard
professor and master of symbology Robert Langdon, Dan
Brown has found a formula which turns arcane and
esoteric knowledge, exotic and picturesque settings,
villains with grandiose ambitions, and plucky
female characters into bestsellers, two of which,
The Da Vinci Code
and
Angels &
Demons,
have been adapted into Hollywood movies.
This is the fifth novel in the Robert Langdon series. After
reading the fourth,
Inferno (May 2013), it
struck me that Brown's novels have become so formulaic they
could probably be generated by an algorithm. Since artificial
intelligence figures in the present work, in lieu of a review,
which would be difficult to write without spoilers, here are
the parameters to the
Marinchip
Turbo Digital™ Thriller Wizard to
generate the story.
When Edmond Kirsch is assassinated moments before playing his presentation which will answer the Big Questions, Langdon and Vidal launch into a quest to discover the password required to release the presentation to the world. The murder of two religious leaders to whom Kirsch revealed his discoveries in advance of their public disclosure stokes the media frenzy surrounding Kirsch and his presentation, and spawns conspiracy theories about dark plots to suppress Kirsch's revelations which may involve religious figures and the Spanish monarchy. After perils, adventures, conflict, and clues hidden in plain sight, Startling Revelations leave Langdon Stunned and Shaken but Cautiously Hopeful for the Future. When the next Dan Brown novel comes along, see how well it fits the template. This novel will appeal to people who like this kind of thing: if you enjoyed the last four, this one won't disappoint. If you're looking for plausible speculation on the science behind the big questions or the technological future of humanity, it probably will. Now that I know how to crank them out, I doubt I'll buy the next one when it appears.Villain: Edmond Kirsch, billionaire computer scientist and former student of Robert Langdon. Made his fortune from breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and robotics.
Megalomaniac scheme: “end the age of religion and usher in an age of science”.
Buzzword technologies: artificial general intelligence, quantum computing.
Big Questions: “Where did we come from?”, “Where are we going?”.
Religious adversary: The Palmarian Catholic Church.
Plucky female companion: Ambra Vidal, curator of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (Spain) and fiancée of the crown prince of Spain.
Hero or villain? Details would be a spoiler but, as always, there is one.
Contemporary culture tie-in: social media, an InfoWars-like site called ConspiracyNet.com.
MacGuffins: the 47-character password from Kirsch's favourite poem (but which?), the mysterious “Winston”, “The Regent”.
Exotic and picturesque locales: The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Casa Milà and the Sagrada Família in Barcelona, Valle de los Caídos near Madrid.
Enigmatic symbol: a typographical mark one must treat carefully in HTML.
Posted at
14:32
Tuesday, May 22, 2018
Reading List: The Second World Wars
- Hanson, Victor Davis. The Second World Wars. New York: Basic Books, 2017. ISBN 978-0-465-06698-8.
-
This may be the best single-volume history of World War II
ever written. While it does not get into the low-level
details of the war or its individual battles (don't
expect to see maps with boxes, front lines, and arrows),
it provides an encyclopedic view of the first truly
global conflict with a novel and stunning insight
every few pages.
Nothing like World War II had ever happened before and,
thankfully, has not happened since. While earlier wars
may have seemed to those involved in them as involving
all of the powers known to them, they were at most
regional conflicts. By contrast, in 1945, there were only
eleven countries in the entire world which were neutral—not
engaged on one side or the other. (There were, of course,
far fewer countries then than now—most of Africa
and South Asia were involved as colonies of belligerent
powers in Europe.) And while war had traditionally been
a matter for kings, generals, and soldiers, in this
total war the casualties were overwhelmingly (70–80%)
civilian. Far from being confined to battlefields, many
of the world's great cities, from Amsterdam to Yokohama,
were bombed, shelled, or besieged, often with disastrous
consequences for their inhabitants.
“Wars” in the title refers to Hanson's
observation that what we call World War II was, in reality,
a collection of often unrelated conflicts which happened
to occur at the same time. The settling of ethnic and
territorial scores across borders in Europe had
nothing to do with Japan's imperial ambitions in
China, or Italy's in Africa and Greece. It was sometimes
difficult even to draw a line dividing the two sides in the
war. Japan occupied colonies in Indochina under the
administration of Vichy France, notwithstanding Japan and
Vichy both being nominal allies of Germany. The
Soviet Union, while making a massive effort to defeat
Nazi Germany on the land, maintained a non-aggression
pact with Axis power Japan until days before its surrender
and denied use of air bases in Siberia to Allied air forces
for bombing campaigns against the home islands.
Combatants in different theatres might have well have been
fighting in entirely different wars, and sometimes in
different centuries. Air crews on long-range bombing
missions above Germany and Japan had nothing in common
with Japanese and British forces slugging it out in the
jungles of Burma, nor with attackers and defenders
fighting building to building in the streets of Stalingrad,
or armoured combat in North Africa, or the duel of submarines
and convoys to keep the Atlantic lifeline between the U.S. and
Britain open, or naval battles in the Pacific, or the
amphibious landings on islands they supported.
World War II did not start as a global war, and did not become
one until the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the
Japanese attack on U.S., British, and Dutch territories in
the Pacific. Prior to those events, it was a collection of
border wars, launched by surprise by Axis powers against
weaker neighbours which were, for the most part, successful.
Once what Churchill called the Grand Alliance (Britain, the Soviet
Union, and the United States) was forged, the outcome was
inevitable, yet the road to victory was long and costly,
and its length impossible to foresee at the outset.
The entire war was unnecessary, and its horrific cost can be
attributed to a failure of deterrence. From the outset, there
was no way the Axis could have won. If, as seemed inevitable,
the U.S. were to become involved, none of the Axis powers
possessed the naval or air resources to strike the U.S.
mainland, no less contemplate invading and occupying it. While
all of Germany and Japan's industrial base and population were,
as the war progressed, open to bombardment day and night by
long-range, four engine, heavy bombers escorted by long-range
fighters, the Axis possessed no aircraft which could reach the
cities of the U.S. east coast, the oil fields of Texas and
Oklahoma, or the industrial base of the midwest. While the U.S.
and Britain fielded aircraft carriers which allowed them to
project power worldwide, Germany and Italy had no effective
carrier forces and Japan's were reduced by constant attacks by
U.S. aviation.
This correlation of forces was known before the outbreak of the
war. Why did Japan and then Germany launch wars which were
almost certain to result in forces ranged against them which
they could not possibly defeat? Hanson attributes it to a
mistaken belief that, to use Hitler's terminology, the will
would prevail. The West had shown itself unwilling to
effectively respond to aggression by Japan in China,
Italy in Ethiopia, and Germany in Czechoslovakia, and Axis
leaders concluded from this, catastrophically for their
populations, that despite their industrial, demographic,
and strategic military weakness, there would be no
serious military response to further aggression (the
“bore war” which followed the German invasion
of Poland and the declarations of war on Germany by
France and Britain had to reinforce this conclusion).
Hanson observes, writing of Hitler, “Not even Napoleon
had declared war in succession on so many great powers
without any idea how to destroy their ability to make
war, or, worse yet, in delusion that tactical victories
would depress stronger enemies into submission.”
Of the Japanese, who attacked the U.S. with no credible
capability or plan for invading and occupying the U.S.
homeland, he writes, “Tojo was apparently unaware or
did not care that there was no historical record of any American
administration either losing or quitting a war—not the
War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish
American War, or World War I—much less one
that Americans had not started.” (Maybe they should
have waited a few decades….)
Compounding the problems of the Axis was that it was essentially
an alliance in name only. There was little or no co-ordination
among its parties. Hitler provided Mussolini no advance notice of
the attack on the Soviet Union. Mussolini did not warn Hitler of
his attacks on Albania and Greece. The Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor was as much a surprise to Germany as to the
United States. Japanese naval and air assets played no part
in the conflict in Europe, nor did German technology and
manpower contribute to Japan's war in the Pacific. By contrast,
the Allies rapidly settled on a division of labour: the
Soviet Union would concentrate on infantry and armoured
warfare (indeed, four out of five German soldiers who died
in the war were killed by the Red Army), while Britain and
the U.S. would deploy their naval assets to blockade
the Axis, keep the supply lines open, and deliver supplies
to the far-flung theatres of the war. U.S. and British bomber fleets attacked strategic targets and cities in Germany day and night. The U.S. became the
untouchable armoury of the alliance, delivering weapons,
ammunition, vehicles, ships, aircraft, and fuel in quantities
which eventually surpassed those all other combatants on
both sides combined. Britain and the U.S. shared technology
and cooperated in its development in areas such as radar,
antisubmarine warfare, aircraft engines (including jet
propulsion), and nuclear weapons, and shared intelligence
gleaned from British codebreaking efforts.
As a classicist, Hanson examines the war in its incarnations
in each of the elements of antiquity: Earth (infantry), Air
(strategic and tactical air power), Water (naval and amphibious
warfare), and Fire (artillery and armour), and adds People
(supreme commanders, generals, workers, and the dead).
He concludes by analysing why the Allies won and what they
ended up winning—and losing. Britain lost its empire
and position as a great power (although due to internal and
external trends, that might have happened anyway). The
Soviet Union ended up keeping almost everything it had hoped
to obtain through its initial partnership with Hitler. The
United States emerged as the supreme economic, industrial,
technological, and military power in the world and promptly
entangled itself in a web of alliances which would cause it
to underwrite the defence of countries around the world and
involve it in foreign conflicts far from its shores.
Hanson concludes,
The tragedy of World War II—a preventable conflict—was that sixty million people had perished to confirm that the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain were far stronger than the fascist powers of Germany, Japan, and Italy after all—a fact that should have been self-evident and in no need of such a bloody laboratory, if not for prior British appeasement, American isolationism, and Russian collaboration.
At 720 pages, this is not a short book (the main text is 590 pages; the rest are sources and end notes), but there is so much wisdom and startling insights among those pages that you will be amply rewarded for the time you spend reading them.
Posted at
16:23
Sunday, May 20, 2018
Reading List: Use of Force
- Thor, Brad. Use of Force. New York: Atria Books, 2017. ISBN 978-1-4767-8939-2.
- This is the seventeenth novel in the author's Scot Harvath series, which began with The Lions of Lucerne (October 2010). As this book begins, Scot Harvath, operative for the Carlton Group, a private outfit that does “the jobs the CIA won't do” is under cover at the Burning Man festival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. He and his team are tracking a terrorist thought to be conducting advance surveillance for attacks within the U.S. Only as the operation unfolds does he realise he's walked into the middle of a mass casualty attack already in progress. He manages to disable his target, but another suicide bomber detonates in a crowded area, with many dead and injured. Meanwhile, following the capsizing of a boat smuggling “migrants” into Sicily, the body of a much-wanted and long-sought terrorist chemist, known to be researching chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, is fished out of the Mediterranean. Why would he, after flying under the radar for years in the Near East and Maghreb, be heading to Europe? The CIA reports, “Over the last several months, we've been picking up chatter about an impending series of attacks, culminating in something very big, somewhere in Europe” … “We think that whatever he was planning, it's ready to go operational.” With no leads other than knowledge from a few survivors of the sinking that the boat sailed from Libya and the name of the migrant smuggler who arranged their passage, Harvath sets off under cover to that country to try to find who arranged the chemist's passage and his intended destination in Europe. Accompanied by his pick-up team from Burning Man (given the urgency, there wasn't time to recruit one more familiar with the region), Harvath begins, in his unsubtle way, to locate the smuggler and find out what he knows. Unfortunately, as is so often the case in such operations, there is somebody else with the team who doesn't figure in its official roster—a fellow named Murphy. Libya is chaotic and dangerous enough under any circumstances, but when you whack the hornets' nest, things can get very exciting in short order, and not in a good way. Harvath and his team find themselves in a mad chase and shoot-out, and having to summon assets which aren't supposed to be there, in order to survive. Meanwhile, another savage terrorist attack in Europe has confirmed the urgency of the threat and that more are likely to come. And back in the imperial capital, intrigue within the CIA seems aimed at targeting Harvath's boss and the head of the operation. Is it connected somehow? It's time to deploy the diminutive super-hacker Nicholas and one of the CIA's most secret and dangerous computer security exploits in a honeypot operation to track down the source of the compromise. If it weren't bad enough being chased by Libyan militias while trying to unravel an ISIS terror plot, Harvath soon finds himself in the lair of the Calabrian Mafia, and being thwarted at every turn by civil servants insisting he play by the rules when confronting those who make their own rules. Finally, multiple clues begin to limn the outline of the final attack, and it is dire indeed. Harvath must make an improbable and uneasy alliance to confront it. The pacing of the book is somewhat odd. There is a tremendous amount of shoot-’em-up action in the middle, but as the conclusion approaches and the ultimate threat must be dealt with, it's as if the author felt himself running out of typewriter ribbon (anybody remember what that was?) and having to wind things up in just a few pages. Were I his editor, I'd have suggested trimming some of the detail in the middle and making the finale more suspenseful. But then, what do I know? Brad Thor has sold nearly fifteen million books, and I haven't. This is a perfectly workable thriller which will keep you turning the pages, but I didn't find it as compelling as some of his earlier novels. The attention to detail and accuracy are, as one has come to expect, superb. You don't need to have read any of the earlier books in the series to enjoy this one; what few details you need to know are artfully mentioned in passing. The next installment in the Scot Harvath saga, Spymaster, will be published in July, 2018.
Posted at
16:36
Thursday, May 17, 2018
Reading List: The Naked Communist
- Skousen, W. Cleon. The Naked Communist. Salt Lake City: Izzard Ink, [1958, 1964, 1966, 1979, 1986, 2007, 2014] 2017. ISBN 978-1-5454-0215-3.
-
In 1935 the author joined the FBI in a clerical position while
attending law school at night. In 1940, after receiving his law
degree, he was promoted to Special Agent and continued in that
capacity for the rest of his 16 year career at the Bureau.
During the postwar years, one of the FBI's top priorities was
investigating and responding to communist infiltration and
subversion of the United States, a high priority of the Soviet
Union. During his time at the FBI Skousen made the acquaintance
of several of the FBI's experts on communist espionage and
subversion, but he perceived a lack of information, especially
available to the general public, which explained communism: where
did it come from, what are its philosophical underpinnings,
what do communists believe, what are their goals, and how do
they intend to achieve them?
In 1951, Skousen left the FBI to take a teaching position at
Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. In 1957, he accepted
an offer to become Chief of Police in Salt Lake City, a job he
held for the next three and a half years before being fired
after raiding an illegal poker game in which newly-elected mayor
J. Bracken Lee was a participant. During these years, Skousen
continued his research on communism, mostly consulting original
sources. By 1958, his book was ready for publication. After
struggling to find a title, he settled on “The Naked
Communist”, suggested by film producer and ardent
anti-communist Cecil B. DeMille.
Spurned by the major publishers, Skousen paid for printing the
first edition of 5000 copies out of his own pocket. Sales were
initially slow, but quickly took off. Within two years of
the book's launch, press runs were 10,000 to 20,000 copies
with one run of 50,000. In 1962, the book passed the milestone
of one million copies in print. As the 1960s progressed
and it became increasingly unfashionable to oppose
communist tyranny and enslavement, sales tapered off, but
picked up again after the publication of a 50th anniversary
edition in 2008 (a particularly appropriate year for such
a book).
This 60th anniversary edition, edited and with additional material
by the author's son, Paul B. Skousen, contains most of the
original text with a description of the history of the work
and additions bringing events up to date. It is sometimes
jarring when you transition from text written in 1958 to that
from the standpoint of more than a half century hence, but for
the most part it works. One of the most valuable parts of the
book is its examination of the intellectual foundations of
communism in the work of Marx and Engels. Like the dogma of
many other cults, these ideas don't stand up well to critical
scrutiny, especially in light of what we've learned about
the universe since they were proclaimed. Did you know that
Engels proposed a specific theory of the origin of life based
upon his concepts of Dialectical Materialism? It was nonsense
then and it's nonsense now, but it's still in there. What's more,
this poppycock is at the centre of the communist theories of
economics, politics, and social movements, where it makes no
more sense than in the realm of biology and has been disastrous
every time some society was foolish enough to try it.
All of this would be a historical curiosity were it not for the
fact that communists, notwithstanding their running up a body
count of around a hundred million in the countries where they
managed to come to power, and having impoverished people around
the world, have managed to burrow deep into the institutions of
the West: academia, media, politics, judiciary, and the administrative
state. They may not call themselves communists (it's “social
democrats”, “progressives”, “liberals”,
and other terms, moving on after each one becomes discredited
due to the results of its policies and the borderline insanity of
those who so identify), but they have been patiently putting
the communist agenda into practice year after year, decade after
decade. What is that agenda? Let's see.
In the 8th edition of this book, published in 1961, the
following “forty-five goals of Communism”
were included. Derived by the author from the writings
of current and former communists and testimony before
Congress, many seemed absurd or fantastically
overblown to readers at the time. The complete list,
as follows, was read into the Congressional Record
in 1963, placing it in the public domain. Here is the
list.
Goals of Communism
- U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
- U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
- Develop the illusion that total disarmament by the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
- Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
- Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
- Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
- Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
- Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
- Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
- Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
- Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)
- Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
- Do away with all loyalty oaths.
- Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
- Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
- Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
- Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
- Gain control of all student newspapers.
- Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
- Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
- Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
- Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to “eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms.”
- Control art critics and directors of art museums. “Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art.”
- Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them “censorship” and a violation of free speech and free press.
- Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
- Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy.”
- Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with “social” religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a “religious crutch.”
- Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of “separation of church and state.”
- Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
- Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the “common man.”
- Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the “big picture.” Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
- Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture—education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
- Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
- Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
- Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
- Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
- Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
- Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand or treat.
- Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
- Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
- Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
- Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use “united force” to solve economic, political or social problems.
- Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
- Internationalize the Panama Canal.
- Repeal the Connally Reservation so the US can not prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over domestic problems. Give the World Court jurisdiction over domestic problems. Give the World Court jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.
Posted at
20:19
Wednesday, May 16, 2018
Reading List: Schrödinger's Gat
- Kroese, Robert. Schrödinger's Gat. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2012. ISBN 978-1-4903-1821-9.
- It was pure coincidence (or was it?) that caused me to pick up this book immediately after finishing Dean Radin's Real Magic (May 2018), but it is a perfect fictional companion to that work. Robert Kroese, whose Starship Grifters (February 2018) is the funniest science fiction novel I've read in the last several years, here delivers a tour de force grounded in quantum theory, multiple worlds, free will, the nature of consciousness, determinism versus uncertainty, the nature of genius, and the madness which can result from thinking too long and deeply about these enigmatic matters. This is a novel, not a work of philosophy or physics, and the story moves along smartly with interesting characters including a full-on villain and an off-stage…well, we're not really sure. In a postscript, the author explicitly lists the “cheats” he used to make the plot work but notes, “The remarkable thing about writing this book was how few liberties I actually had to take.” The story is narrated by Paul Bayes (whose name should be a clue we're about to ponder what we can know in an uncertain world), who we meet as he is ready to take his life by jumping under a BART train at a Bay Area station. Paul considers himself a failure: failed crime writer, failed father whose wife divorced him and took the kids, and undistinguished high school English teacher with little hope of advancement. Perhaps contributing to his career problems, Paul is indecisive. Kill himself or just walk away—why not flip a coin? Paul's life is spared through the intervention of a mysterious woman who he impulsively follows on a madcap adventure which ends up averting a potential mass murder on San Francisco's Embarcadero. Only after, does he learn her name, Tali. She agrees to meet him for dinner the next day and explain everything. Paul shows up at the restaurant, but Tali doesn't. Has he been stood up? He knows next to nothing about Tali—not even her last name, but after some time on the Internet following leads from their brief conversation the day before he discovers a curious book by a recently-retired Stanford physics professor titled Fate and Consciousness—hardly the topics you'd expect one with his background to expound upon. After reading some of the odd text, he decides to go to the source. This launches Paul into an series of adventures which cause him to question the foundations of reality: to what extent do we really have free will, and how much is the mindless gears of determinism turning toward the inevitable? Why does the universe seem to “fight back” when we try to impose our will upon it? Is there a “force”, and can we detect disturbances in it and act upon them? (The technology described in the story is remarkably similar to the one to which I have contributed to developing and deploying off and on for the last twenty years.) If such a thing could be done, who might be willing to kill to obtain the power it would confer? Is the universe a passive player in the unfolding of the future, or an active and potentially ruthless agent? All of these questions are explored in a compelling story with plenty of action as Paul grapples with the mysteries confronting him, incorporating prior discoveries into the emerging picture. This is an entertaining, rewarding, and thought-provoking read which, although entirely fiction, may not be any more weird than the universe we inhabit. The Kindle edition is free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
Posted at
16:26
Tuesday, May 15, 2018
Reading List: Real Magic
- Radin, Dean. Real Magic. New York: Harmony Books, 2018. ISBN 978-1-5247-5882-0.
-
From its beginnings in the 19th century as “psychical
research”, there has always been something dodgy and
disreputable about parapsychology: the scientific study of
phenomena, frequently reported across all human cultures
and history, such as clairvoyance, precognition, telepathy,
communication with the dead or non-material beings, and
psychokinesis (mental influence on physical processes). All
of these disparate phenomena have in common that there is no
known physical theory which can explain how they might
work. In the 19th century, science was much more willing to
proceed from observations and evidence, then try to study them
under controlled conditions, and finally propose and test
theories about how they might work. Today, many scientists
are inclined to put theory first, rejecting any evidence
of phenomena for which no theory exists to explain it.
In such an intellectual environment, those who study such things,
now called parapsychologists, have been, for the most part,
very modest in their claims, careful to distinguish their
laboratory investigations, mostly involving ordinary subjects,
from extravagant reports of shamans and psychics, whether
contemporary or historical, and scrupulous in the design and
statistical analysis of their experiments. One leader in
the field is
Dean Radin,
author of the present book, and four times president of the
Parapsychological Association, a professional society which is
an affiliate of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science. Dr. Radin is chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic
Sciences in Petaluma, California, where he pursues laboratory
research in parapsychology. In his previous books, including
Entangled Minds (August 2007),
he presents the evidence for various forms of human
perception which seem to defy conventional explanation.
He refrains from suggesting mechanisms or concluding whether
what is measured is causation or correlation. Rather,
he argues that the body of accumulated evidence from his
work and that of others, in recent experiments conducted under
the strictest protocols to eliminate possible fraud, post-selection
of data, and with blinding and statistical rigour which
often exceed those of clinical trials of pharmaceuticals, provides
evidence that “something is going on” which
we don't understand that would be considered discovery of a
new phenomenon if it originated in a “hard science”
field such as particle physics.
Here, Radin argues that the accumulated evidence for the phenomena
parapsychologists have been studying in the laboratory for
decades is so persuasive to all except sceptics who no
amount of evidence would suffice to persuade, that it is
time for parapsychologists and those interested in their
work to admit that what they're really studying is magic.
“Not the fictional magic of Harry Potter, the feigned
magic of Harry Houdini, or the fraudulent magic of con
artists. Not blue lightning bolts springing from the
fingertips, aerial combat on broomsticks, sleight-of-hand tricks,
or any of the other elaborations of artistic license and
special effects.” Instead, real magic, as
understood for millennia, which he divides into three
main categories:
- Force of will: mental influence on the physical world, traditionally associated with spell-casting and other forms of “mind over matter”.
- Divination: perceiving objects or events distant in time and space, traditionally involving such practices as reading the Tarot or projecting consciousness to other places.
- Theurgy: communicating with non-material consciousness: mediums channelling spirits or communicating with the dead, summoning demons.
Posted at
16:11
Saturday, May 5, 2018
Earth and Moon Viewer: Named Features on Solar System Bodies
With release 3.0 on April 17, 2018, Earth and Moon Viewer was extended to become Solar System Explorer, adding imagery of Mercury, Venus, Mars and its moons, Pluto and its moon Charon, and the asteroids Ceres and Vesta. I have now added a database of Named Features on Solar System Bodies, using official nomenclature adopted by the International Astronomical Union's Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature. Features are listed by category (craters, ridges, plains, valleys, etc.) with their latitude, longitude, and diameter (where applicable). Each is a clickable link which displays the feature at the centre of a view 1000 km above the body on which it appears. For example, here is the large Occator crater on asteroid 1 Ceres containing the puzzling bright feature Cerealia Facula. From this initial view, you can pan or zoom using the usual features of Earth and Moon Viewer and, where available, select alternative imagery.Posted at
13:55