View 436 October 16 - 22, 2006 (original) (raw)
Thursday, October 18, 2006
I don't have much mail on the new National Space Policy, and the few items I do have say in essence "it's not real, this will be business as usual, and NASA will sabotage any actual military space effort."
I also note that North Korea threatens war. US space access assurance, denial of space to enemies, and protection of US space assets is key to US military capability. I would presume that whatever their other deficiencies, the President, Secretary of Defense, and Joint Chiefs of Staff understand this very well.
And the President did sign a National Space Policy that looks a lot like the one we wrote for Reagan in 1988 but which was not adopted by Bush the First.
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http://www.cse.ucsc.edu/programs/gamedesign/
Sign of the times?
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File this under rumors:
I heard a story on the radio about a relative of DiMaggio saying that her mother knew who murdered Marilyn Monroe.
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=1280835
There are all kinds of stories about Marilyn Monroe in June DiMaggio's book.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Marilyn-Monroe
-s-Studio-Sex-Session-s-Nightmares-11928.shtml
This surfaces every now and then. Perhaps it's time I told my own Marilyn Monroe story.
I never met Marilyn Monroe. We didn't come to California until two years after she was dead. After I got to Los Angeles I met and became friends with Stan Progar, who had been a senior editor at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner when it was a Hearst paper. Progar told me that he had investigated Monroe's supposed suicide, and had evidence that Robert Kennedy was in Los Angeles that night, and there was evidence that Robert Kennedy had visited Monroe the night she died. He had sources, and the story was ready to run, when it was spiked by the intervention of Hearst himself. I have no verification of this. I never met Wm Randolph Hearst. I do know Will Hearst, but I have never discussed this with him, and I doubt he knows this story.
About a week after Progar told me that story, I was having coffee with Progar in the Brown Derby in Beverly Hills when Joe DiMaggio came in. Stan called him to our booth, introduced me to him, and told a brief summary of his story (which I am sure he had told DiMaggio before). DiMaggio said he believed all of that; that he was certain Marilyn was murdered to prevent her from talking about her White House visits with John Kennedy and her less well known affair with Robert Kennedy. DiMaggio insisted that Marilyn was going to remarry him, and she would never commit suicide. He claimed the murder investigation was fixed by the Attorney General of the United States.
This would have been about 1969. I don't believe I ever met Dimaggio again.
I find that I am not the only one DiMaggio told this to:
http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=904&id=167402003
I know nothing more than this. I do not know Stan's sources for establishing that Robert Kennedy was in Los Angeles the night Monroe died, and DiMaggio offered no evidence other than his beliefs. The Los Angeles coroner ruled her death a suicide, and I never met any LAPD detectives who thought otherwise although I have heard rumors that some LA cops had their doubts. It's one of those stories that never seems to die, but one would have thought that if there were something substantive there, it would have come out by now. The DiMaggio's have been hinting for decades, but never came forward with anything specific.
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We have a great deal of mail this morning.
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O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
An' foolish notion
Having just read some of the comments about my participation on TWiT last August, I was reminded of Burns.
I seem to have polarized much of the audience...
I do have a problem with some panels: I tend to think in paragraphs, not sentences. There may be important thoughts that can be summarized in a single sentence, but I don't generally have the ability to do that.
Every now and then David Em and I think we ought to do some kind of show, but the technical requirements for producing these get to be overwhelming. I suspect it's back to writing. In any event I tried to take the earlier comments seriously for TWiT 73.
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Hi Jerry.
Orson Scott Card's latest essay, this time on Groupthink:
http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2006-10-08-1.html
Cheers,
Mike Casey
Actually, the first part of Scott's essay, on "Theoretics" and the end of English in Universities, is at least as important as the groupthink section about physics. But the physics is important:
We even have leading String Theorists saying, in effect, "Because String Theory gives us no way to describe why the universe functions as it does, we can only conclude that the universe we live in is a random event. We happen to live in the universe that happened to produce physicists, and so all we're studying is the accidental rules of this universe, when there could just as easily have been any of a million -- or an infinite number of -- different rule sets that were just as valid."
As Smolin points out, that is a declaration that science is over. Because if the rules could be anything, then there's no point in trying to discover what they are; in effect, there are no rules. Calling it "random" is just the atheist's way of saying "The universe is this way because God made it so, only there is no God." There's simply no room for science in that picture.
Do scientists understand what Scott is saying here? Let me repeat:
Calling it "random" is just the atheist's way of saying "The universe is this way because God made it so, only there is no God." There's simply no room for science in that picture.
Is this where rationalism has taken us? Because to most of us, the universe does seem to make sense. It's not easily understood, but we have known that since Biblical times.
"My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways,' says the Lord.
'For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways,
And My thoughts than your thoughts."
But we do understand much of this universe. Now Science is saying that none of it makes any sense at all? We have cast out all of religion, from Aquinas to Kierkegaard, because Science was a better explanation; and now?
I am reminded once more of my Voodoo Sciences essay, which seems more applicable today than when I first wrote it. Alas, the remedy I proposed is less likely now in these days of peer review and groupthink.