How the Illinois IPass thing works.

Here is an excellet site that explains the Illinois IPass system very well: www.illinois-ipass.com

Why Aren’t There More Smart Americans?

The following post is a response to this article:

https://www.wired.com/2018/01/geeks-guide-david-ignatius/

Our problem is cultural. 

Our culture glorifies fame and leadership not intellectual achievement.

Thought: the life of Howard Hughes follows the trajectory of our culture as it changed with respect to it's image of scientists and technical people.

Hughes early life is described as follows:

"At a young age, Hughes demonstrated interest in science and technology. In particular, he had great engineering aptitude and built Houston's first "wireless" radio transmitter at age 11.[11] He went on to be one of the first licensed ham radio operators in Houston, having the assigned callsign W5CY (originally 5CY).[12] At 12, Hughes was photographed in the local newspaper, identified as being the first boy in Houston to have a "motorized" bicycle, which he had built from parts from his father's steam engine.[13] He was an indifferent student, with a liking for mathematics, flying, and mechanics. He took his first flying lesson at 14, and attended Fessenden School in Massachusetts in 1921."

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Hughes

Here is a picture of the young Howard Hughes:

If you google his name you see a procession of pictures of him with beautiful women and the image of him as a young and middle aged man is very much the swashbuckling hero. Think "the worlds most interesting man". That was the young and middle aged Hughes.

We all know what happened to him in his later life. Obsessive compulsive disorders, living in a hotel room, not cutting his hair or fingernails and so on. 

What is telling is that the image we have today of Howard Hughes is more the latter than the former and my opinion is that this is because we now feel that image is closer to the reality of scientists and engineers.

Watch an episode of "The Big Bang Theory" to see what I mean.

It's not something you would want to be if given a choice.

As of this writing a shockingly high percentage of the 1985 Chicago Bears Super Bowl championship team are either dead or disabled. Average age is only late 50's. Do we feel that their current state represents the "real" them? Obviously not. The "real" them is they way they were in 1985 (or thereabouts) and that is because we glorify athletics today - not scientists or engineers.

Can a reader mention even one top scientist or engineer alive today? 

Being a scientist or engineer is just not culturally "cool" today, and it has not been cool for quite some time.

It was when Howard Hughes was a young man.

This is why we don't have more "smart" people.

Notes on Russiagate

My rule is this: when you see a pattern of new accusations that serve to replace old and unproven ones then you should doubt the whole thing.

Hence, each time I read an article like this, I become more convinced that Russiagate is a nothing.

This particular article is chock full of innuendo and verbal ploys and that is standard fare for Russiagate at present.

My opinion is that Trump is a narcissistic bully and a loose cannon who was "elected" on a fluke but I'm pretty convinced now that Russiagate is a witch hunt. A combination of WMD, McCarthyism and Room Temperature Nuclear Fusion.

Let me dissect that article a bit to show you what I mean.

The first paragraph talks about an email where someone talks about something. That is called hearsay.  But even worse, the "allegation" in that paragraph is a nothing. The allegation is that someone from Russia wanted to make a "first contact" with the Trump campaign at ans NRA meeting in May of 2016. OK..so what. At that time Trump had just emerged as the presumptive GOP nominee and hence making a "first contact" would be an entirely appropriate thing to do. I'm sure nations like Israel, Korea, China, Germany etc. etc. were all starting to "reach out" in various ways  to Trump at about that time. I'm sure this is standard practice in every modern US campaign. As to Hillary she was a known commodity and already had contacts with such places. 

The targeting here of the NRA reminds me of the targeting of labor unions during McCarthyism. Labor unions were big and some had worldwide reach. Some tried very hard to influence elections. It was trivially easy to find some "link" to the Soviet Union from almost any major US labor union - and most of those "links" were innocuous.  

Personally I don't agree with much of what the NRA does or stands for but I will acknowledge it is a big organization, it is powerful politically and has outreach all over the world. The author of this article seems to really want us to believe that maybe "the Russians" have been instrumental in funding/bolstering the NRA - or plan to "use" the NRA in the future. Sounds like McCarthyism. I am also reminded of room temperature nuclear fusion. People so wanted to believe that and it looks like some on the left in the US so want to believe that either a) the NRA was bolstered in the past by "the Russians" or b) they plan on using the NRA in the future and hence the NRA might be guilty of some great crime that would merit it's  shackling (or even dismantlement). Drool to the floor at the prospect of one of the most powerful conservative groups in America being neutered.

Next point. The first sentence of the second paragraph:

"This is one of those episodes that is easy to lose track of amid the avalanche of evidence connecting the Trump administration and Russia. "

We don't have an avalanche of evidence at all, we have an avalanche of accusations. With each subsequent accusation not holding up under scrutiny it becomes more likely that this whole thing is a nothing. 

The heart of the Russiagate story is a) the "Trump Dossier", b) the hacking of the DNC c) the "Podesta" hack. None of those held up under scrutiny! The "Trump Dossier" has been exposed as political opposition research paid for by Hillary Clinton, the majority view in  the computer security field is that the DNC hack was the result of an insider who was upset about the shafting of Sanders, and that the data was delivered via a USB drive. Julian Assange of Wikileaks has denied from the beginning that it came from Russia. More on this in a bit but first, the Podesta hack. The Podesta hack was the result of  "phishing." An email was sent to him that said "Your email account has been compromised, click here to change your password" and a staffer reading it clicked on the link and changed the password. It does not take the Russians to do that kind of hacking. We all get those kinds of emails.

I became convinced that this whole thing was a witch hunt when the "Intelligence Community Assessment" was released in Jan 2017. Problem was they gave no technical evidence but instead said essentially "because we say so".  I think the verbiage they used was "the hacks bear the signature of a state sponsored actor" and then made a case that Russia was the only plausible state that could have done it. They pretty much parroted what the Clinton campaign was saying, and what the "Never Trump" people were saying (Mitt Romney et. al)

The Intelligence Community Assessment of January 2017 was fundamentally a political document. 

Common sense tells you that it does not take a "state sponsor" to do a phishing hack. Many in the computer security business have noted this - the most vocal being McAfee. Not a scintilla of real technical evidence has ever been presented to support the notion that this phishing thing was done by the Russians.

The computer security industry also has a dubious view of the allegation that the DNC hack was necessarily perpetrated by the Russians. Time stamps on files indicate that the key transfer must have been from a USB drive and could not have been accomplished via a remote hack. This bolsters the notion that the hack was done by a DNC insider - which is exactly what Julian Assange alleges.

The only supposed technical details were provided by the DNC's private in house security company "Crowdstrike" and it is they who claim to have found hacking tools and it is they who "linked" those tools to "the Russians".

Most damning of all is the fact that the DNC refused to hand over their servers to the FBI so that means all we have to go on is what their own in house security people (Crowdstrike) tell us. 

What would the DNC rather the public believe a) one or more insiders who were disgruntled about the treatment of Bernie Sanders leaked data on that subject to the media (Wikileaks, ect.) or b) "the Russians" hacked the DNC and leaked information designed to help Donald J. Trump and undermine democracy in the US.

Obviously b) is the preferred narrative for the DNC! 

Also consider that NSA hacking tools which include include a facility to spoof "Russian hacking"  have been released -to the public. 

One piece of "evidence" that Crowdstrike released was something with Cyrillic text. Several top American computer security guys (including McAffee)  quickly replied that a real state sponsor would not leave behind such obvious footprints and  that this smacked of a frame-up. There was even the name of a notorious Soviet spy in the Cyrillic writing released by Crowdstrike as evidence.. McAffee and others observed that only someone not actually familiar with Russian history and language would put such a name in there.

Here is an excellent artice from over a year ago on the subject:

https://theintercept.com/2016/12/14/heres-the-public-evidence-russia-hacked-the-dnc-its-not-enough/

Note: this article was written prior to the  "Intelligence Community Assessment" of Jan 2017 which shed nothing new on the subject but just essentially parroted what Crowdstrike said and ignored the subsequent contrary evidence.

The Intelligence Community Assessment of January 2017 was fundamentally a political document. 

Subsequent to that time the focus has moved off of the the original hacking allegations/dossier and onto new and unrelated allegations of Russian meddling. This is the pattern we saw in the Weapons of Mass Destruction saga. When the Yellowcake story broke down they moved onto "Bio weapons trailers", and when that proved nothing but speculation they released "damning intercepted messages" which supposedly revealed Saddam's aides were talking about the subject. We know what happened in that case.

My rule is this: when you see a pattern of new accusations that serve to replace old and unproven ones (IE change the subject), then you should doubt the whole thing.

The Russian hacking story is a fraud

The allegation that Russian government sponsored hacking influenced the last election is baseless and is a fraud.

The fraud is being propagated for political purposes with the aim being to delegitimize the presidency of Donald Trump.

I will give you the basics of how we can know this is a fraud and expand on it  in the coming days/weeks/months as the story falls apart.

The basic points are these:
1) There is a lack of specific evidence pointing to the Russian government. No IP addresses, no physical names or physical addresses. The technology supposedly used is not limited to Russia much less the Russian government. Some of the programs/methods that were (supposedly) used were originally created by Russian programmers. That means nothing. I'm running Kaspersky security on my computer as I write this, does that mean I'm in kahoots with the Russians?

2) The case is overwhelmingly "social". Everybody Knows. Today it was reported that all the major US intelligence agencies are united in their assessment that the Russian government was behind the hacking during the election and that their aim was to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump.

When the "social truth" starts to coalesce around something and physical facts are missing that is a red flag. Generally the "social truth" turns out to be wrong. As it will in this case. Remember WMD in 2002?

Think of this: will any of these senior intelligence officials suffer reputational or professional harm if they are wrong about their allegation of Russian government hacking? History shows they probably won't. They will be able to say "everybody thought so". But if any one of them crossed up the others and said "I don't think Russia was involved" and he turned out to be wrong, his career and reputation would likely be destroyed. Each and every one of these senior intelligence officials are in fact human beings and they are all likely ambitions and probably care a lot about their reputations. "Herding behavior" is very common in such situations.

Not only am I not swayed by the unanimity of US intel (at the present time as presented by top politically appointed officials), it makes me doubt the case even more because there is pretty much zero physical evidence to back it up.

Let me repeat: there is zero physical evidence of Russian government involvement.

The point that was stressed today by US intelligence agencies was that the activity observed had the "unique signature" of Russian government hacking. It was a "pattern of behavior" thing. That is essentially the logic used at the Salem Witch trials. It's "we know because we are the experts and we are telling you so."

I will end here by presenting the exact moment when I came to the conclusion that this is a fraud. Last night a story ran on CNN with the headline "US identifies go-betweens who gave emails to WikiLeaks" and needless to say I read it. No "go-betweens" were discussed in the story at all, what was discussed was "intercepted conversations of Russian officials expressing happiness at Trump's win." And "another official described some of the messages as congratulatory."

At that point the case was sealed to me.

This thing is politically motivated fraud.

Russian officials being happy about Trump winning does not mean the Russian government hacked the DNC. Russian officials "congratulating each other" does not mean the Russian government hacked Podesta. Anyone who knows a foreign language will understand how easy it is for a non native speaker to take something out of context in a foreign language. Russian officials "congratulating themselves" means absolutely nothing. The fact that this was presented is ironically evidence of social hacking on the part of the US news media. Social hacking is what you try to do when you don't have the facts on your side. This story indicated to me that they don't have facts but are desperate to make their case.

I have more reasons for knowing this is a fraud but it will take time to present them. I will enjoy presenting my analysis as this story is debunked.

Hopefully it will serve as a guide to critical thinking in such matters.

Maybe we need another great depression

Every day it seems something jumps out at me that indicates we have misplaced priorities. 

I trust that you have heard about this "deflategate" scandal with the Patriots?

Brady is alleged to have benefited from footballs that were slightly deflated prior to the AFC championship game last January. The allegation came from a rival team.

The NFL commissioned a "study" to determine if the offense even occurred and paid 5 million dollars on the study. The study found Brady guilty. Very guilty. Outrageously guilty. On the basis of that "study" he has been suspended for 1/4 of the next season and hit with a huge fine. 

The study has been dissected by several independent groups (one at MIT) and found to be junk. Really really junk. Results cannot be reproduced, statistics faulty and initial conditions either ignored or misconstrued. Brady has hired a power lawyer and is appealing. Some observers are saying that over 30 million dollars could be spent on this before it's over. Even if 100% guilty the offense is akin to the batter rubbing out that back line of the batters box and standing an inch or two back. Happens all the time.  

To me this is just a symptom of "to much time on the hands" and "money burning a hole in pockets."

The NFL is known to be one of the most subsidized businesses in America, 50% of it's infrastructure costs are paid by state and localtaxpayers. The NFL is tax exempt.  When businesses entertain clients by buying Patriot tickets it's a tax deductible expense.

Methinks some of these privileges and tax advantages should be taken away. Firstly on principle and second this episode shows a maturity level of 7th grade but with adult wallets connected to public money. The lead author of the study, Ted Wells is reported to have made a cool million on it. One months work. The sports talk shows in Boston are raking in advertising money by keeping this scandal gravy train rolling. No one is apparently looking for the truth, everyone is peddling an agenda and looking to make money. And the issue is miniscule to begin with.

I drove to Michigan last weekend for a camping trip. Construction everywhere. Traffic jammed. Rust on bridges in downtown Chicago. Signs of shoddiness everywhere on the roads. Billboards advertising personal injury lawyers, casinos, drug rehab centers and strip joints line the shoddy roads.

I just read a devastating critique of the Boston olympic bid in Harvard Magazine. In it they mentioned that the city of Chicago had spent over 100 million dollars on their failed bid several years ago. 100 million dollars. How was this 100 million spent? Basically making a bunch of nice looking power point presentations, renting nice hotel conference rooms and on public relations (propaganda). Reportedly the private sector also spent about 100 million (collectively) on pushing the failed Chicago olympic bid. That's 200 million total.

Currently there is a big reconstruction project going on on the CTA. The biggest and most important aspect is total reconstruction of the Wilson stop on the Red Line. Cost? You guessed it: $200 million:

"The $203 million Wilson Station Reconstruction Project will be one of the largest CTA 'L' station projects in the agency's history. The planned reconstruction of the Wilson Red Line station is slated to begin in 2014, and will replace the badly deteriorated facility that was built in 1923"

http://www.transitchicago.com/wilson/

The image below shows another red line platform (Wilson ave stop). As you can see it's made from wood. Yes WOOD. Often rotting at the edges and wavy/inconsistent when you walk on it as you can see in the picture.

This is 2015 and the majority of the platforms of mass transit stations in America's third largest city are still made of wood.

These are not isolated things. It's all over the place. Ignoring the basics while spending large amounts of money on non-serious (sometimes even trivial) things.

Another great depression would certainly cause people to get more serious with their priorities. 

Are we headed towards a minor energy crisis?

Funny how this sentence is buried towards the end of an article on the current natural gas situation:
"Gas is up 32 percent this year, heading for the biggest annual gain since 2005."

That just does not fit the current narrative of energy cornucopia - and is dismissed as the result of unusually cold weather.

But reality is starting to show potential trouble on the near term horizon.

The current level of natural gas supply is the lowest it's been in years for this time of year and is dropping at a very fast rate compared with historical averages.

The other main heating fuels - propane and distillates (heating oil) are also running very low.

Stock levels of natural gas, propane and distillates are all so low that they are ALL below the lowest point in their 5 year range - IE this is the lowest stock level we have seen in over 5 years for this time of year.

And the media continues their cornucopia talk. Articles ask if  the U.S. be destabilizing energy rich nations when we start to export natural gas in a big way. I think this is absurdly premature.

If the rate of stock draws of Natural Gas continues at it's current pace (last three weeks) it will reach 718 Billion Cubic feet by the middle of March. The lowest stock levels recorded in recent history was 642 Billion Cubic feet at the end of winter 2003. Last years minimum was about 1700 BCF and the year before that the minimum was well over 2000 BCF.

Propane and Distillates are also on a path towards very low stock levels by the end of winter.

I do not think that Natural Gas inventories will drop to 718 Billion Cubic Feet by the middle of March because the price will move up in a big way long before it gets that low. Likewise propane and distillates will see strong increases in price if the current stock level draws continue at even close to the current pace.

The last two winters have been mild. 2011-2012 was one of the warmest in history and 2012-2013 was somewhat above average. So far 2013-2014 is running somewhat below average.

The Energy Cornucopias are warning that if prices rise this will result in the market being flooded with new supply. But stock levels are currently dropping like a stone so if this glut of low cost supply really exists it should hit the market any time. If this glut of low cost supply really exists the stock levels will quickly stabilize - in this case it means they will drop at a substantially lower rate while the price stays somewhat stable. Readers of this blog know that I am quite skeptical of the this "energy cornucopia" and am therefore guessing that we will see a big increases in the price of Natural Gas, Propane and perhaps even diesel over the next couple of months unless we have a big warning trend and fast.

It could get bad enough to be labeled as a minor energy crisis.

I do not think it will be a major energy crisis because solar and wind are waiting in the wings with prices not much higher than fossil fuels right now and could ramp up in a big way pretty fast. There was no such infrastructure for solar and wind in the 1970's.

How would this affect heating? Short run: space heaters running on electricity that stays cheap even as natural gas and propane skyrocket. Longer term: electric baseboard heat - or many other options.

Global Cooling?

- The amount of ice in the arctic for this time of year is the highest it's been in years. See: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/ (click on the graph on the right. The green line was last year and the blue line is this year. Notice that the blue line is way above the green line.

- The amount of ice in the antarctic set a all time record high this summer (winter for them). See http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/. Go down the page to "Another record high in the Antarctic" Note: 2012 was the old record year.

- Hurricane activity has been very low this fall.

These are all signs of cooling of course.

What is causing this?

- From what I read the high ice level in the antarctic is believed to be due to leftover effects from the ozone hole.

- The current sunspot cycle is weak and weak sunspot activity is correlated with cooler temperatures. More sunspots indicate a more energetic sun.

And now the story starts to get interesting.

The current sunspot cycle is actually the weakest in over 100 years and it appears that we may be headed for another "Maunder Minimum" or something close to that. That's what caused the "little ice age" between 1680 and 1725. 

Regardless of whether we hit (or surpass) the Maunder Minimum, it looks like we are headed for a period of very few or no sunspots for an extended period of time. See: http://phys.org/news203746768.html and http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.shtml 

and this is strongly correlated with cool temperatures.

But you hear nothing about this in our media. Nothing. And it's pretty interesting!

Why?

- Liberals don't want to talk about it for obvious reasons: it might undercut their dire warnings on Global Warming.

- Conservatives don't want to talk about it either. It might come across as defending polluters: "gee we might be headed for an ice age without all those coal fired power plants?". That's not a winning message. It also might come across as "admitting" to global warming in a back door way - and some want to deny global warming.

- The mainstream media (both liberal and conservative) likes sensationalism and likes to hew to a story line. The story line is Global Warming. 

- No one wants to hear that some things are out of our control. That makes people feel powerless. Sunspots are 100% out of our control. They don't even have to sign up for Obamacare :)

- Once "truths" are established, the powers that be do not like to admit they were wrong. Think the new economy of 1999 and "housing prices cannot go down on a nationwide basis for an extended time" crapola of 2003-2007.

One other interesting tidbit: on Sept 12, 2001 a noticeable increase of global temperatures was seen: something like .3 degrees. The reason is hypothesized to be the lack of contrails from jet airplanes that were not flying that day. Those contrails apparently cool things a bit. Take them away and the temp goes up. But before that contrails were thought to be another cause of warming. 

Takeaways from all this:

- Climate is influenced by things other than human activity

- Some things that humans do tend to increase the temperature and some things humans do tend to decrease the temperature. 

- It's complex and not at all straightforward.

- If climatologists got the contrail thing wrong (they did) then what else are they mistaken about.

The rise in CO2 is well documented and not controversial. The rise in CO2 is due to human activity. I asked my cousin Bradley about this last time we got together (he is a professor at Northwestern and a global warming expert!). He assured me that the rise in CO2 is attributable to fossil fuel and not volcanic activity and they can know that via isotopes and other very rigorous methods.

But the temp has not gone up nearly as much as the models predicted given the rise in CO2, and for the moment we have a noticeable cooling trend.

I think the reasons are a) the sunspot cycle and b) some human activity is having a cooling effect.

I think the biggest bias in our media is sensationalism and hewing to established story lines (herd behavior) and that's why you hear pretty much nothing about what I talked about above: a dramatic rise in ice in the arctic, very few hurricanes, all time max ice extent in antarctic, early cold in North America, a foot of snow in Kiev the other day but nothing about the trend. Important information is not getting through.