Space is the Place: Come to the High Frontier

The successful launch and docking of the Space-X Dragon (read here) validates the long involvement of private efforts to gain the high frontier. 

We have come to accept government involvement in space exploration and exploitation. We perhaps allow for competition between governments as India, Japan, and China join the USA, the European Space Agency, and Russia in launching satellites and astronauts.

In fact, the private efforts were first of course and were only shunted aside during the decades of collectivism in the 20^th century.  In fact, private enterprise has the long term advantage in exploring and exploiting off-planet resources. 

No one in the 17^th century who knew only the British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company could have foreseen the Cunard Line, the Northern Pacific Railroad, or TransWorld Airlines and the immense profits made by carrying very ordinary people on very personal missions. The goal then was to haul raw materials (especially gold and silver) back to Europe. No one in 1620 or 1720 could have seen the world of 1820 or 1920.  Since then, we have gotten better at imagining the future. We now live somewhere between George Orwell and George Jetson. It is not that science fiction predicted the future, but that we learned to expect a future different from the past.  We call it progress. That can only come from spontaneous human action, not from central planning.  Progress cannot be directed.

Anousheh Ansari at Super Science Friday
U of M Flint, 2009.

Charles Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic in pursuit of a record (and a cash prize) was privately funded.  Lindbergh introduced Robert Goddard to Daniel Guggenheim.  Then the wars intervened and the governments of the USA and USSR turned to former Nazis in their quest to conquer, command, and control the high frontier. 

Meanwhile, private efforts continued.  Robert Truax, OTRAG, Space Services, Inc., and CSTAR, all met with failure.  However, the Amateur Radio Relay League built its Oscar-1 in 1961 and since then 70 satellites constructed by hobbyists  have joined the dense flock of privately-owned birds in orbit.  Among those was the pioneering Telstar built by AT&T and a consortium which paid NASA £3 million (yes, UK pounds) in 1962, after the successful launch of Oscar-1.

With profits from selling their network switching technology, the Ansari family funded the X-Prize to stimulate the development of private launch vehicles.  Anousheh Ansari used her share to pay the Russian Federal Space Agency to take her to the ISS.  Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites won the prize. Despite a horrific setback in 2008, they have renewed their agreement with Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and restarted their association with Microsoft’s Paul G. Allen.  Spaceship Two is currently undergoing tests (here and here).

John Kemeny Knew: We Shall Have Computed

In Man and the Computer John G. Kemeny analyzed some aspects of society and a few institutions with suggested alternatives for them to be improved with the application of computers.  Many of Kemeny’s predictions were largely correct.  Some were very wrong. To be fair, the future of computers moved so fast that even William Gibson gave up cyberpunk for mainstream fiction. 

American Museum
of Natural History
Special Edition

Generally, John Kemeny failed to expect the invention of the microcomputer and the resultant home and office desktops and laptops that today are ubiquitous.  Although he wrote briefly about the advantages to video telephones, nothing he presented applies to the iPod. And much of what the iPod actually does –playing recorded music, taking pictures, giving directions to drivers – was not suggested for the video telephone. 

Throughout the book two complementary ideas frame the thesis: a regional network of mainframes will allow personal terminals for millions; this technology also will empower “social analysts” to attempt solutions to our problems.  Chief among those problems is traffic control in metropolitan centers.  But that only reflects the full range of challenges from overcrowding, over population and over consumption.  In short, John Kemeny was a fascist.  But a nice fascist.  He would never put anyone into a concentration camp for their beliefs, but he did see government authorities and academic experts as the central forces that can and should define and drive social progress.

Writing about business applications for computers, he outlined the power of management information systems.  He did not suggest that entrepreneurs would find computers helpful.  He certainly did not see a role for entrepreneurs in creating new modes of computing.  He did call for private entities to provide time-sharing mainframes and databases, but only to counterbalance the potential threat of government monopoly over information and access to it.  If John Kemeny read any Friedrich Hayek, it could only have appeared as an indecipherable alien language, written in Roman letters.

That aside though, this book was a seminal work and deserves attention for its positive attributes. 

Early on (35-37) he grants validity to the importance of games on the computer.  Gaming builds familiarity with the system, demystifying the computer. 

That describes my experience meeting my wife in 1977 in front of an HP 9830 on which our physics instructor at Lansing Community College, Claude Watson, taught “BASIC for Arts and Science.”

“At Dartmouth we do not consider these recreational uses frivolous. First of all, they are an important resource for recreation in a residential college environment. But, more importantly, for many inexperienced users the opportunity for playing games against a computer is a major factor in removing psychological blocks that frighten the average human being away from free use of machines.  Indeed, we are proud of the fact that one of the places that Dartmouth students take their dates to “show off” is the computation center.  While they are likely to play several games there, they are also quite likely to show off with programs that they themselves have written.” (35)

As a teacher, Kemeny’s insights into the value of computer-aided instruction were accurate.  (Ch. 7; 72-84; but also throughout) First, he acknowledged the importance of drill-and-practice.  Beyond that, he recognized that one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it and we do that when we write a program to carry out a task. The three best uses from an educator’s point of view are rapid calculation, information retrieval, and the creation of algorithms.  (80) 

Kemeny correctly identified the need for a society of autodidacts, people who can teach themselves what they want to know by accessing databanks, journal articles, and lectures. (81-82).  Books will remain important and pleasurable (83), but their content must be supplemented with interactive learning sessions. 

Imagining “The Library of the Future” (Ch. 8; 85-98), Kemeny paints a detailed portrait of the product while totally missing the delivery mechanism. Focused on fiche images stored in card files and indexed by100-word abstracts, he did not expect that I could put “John Leonard Riddell” into Google Scholar and be led directly to a PDF of a lost work, Riddell’s 1836 monograph Memoir on the Nature of Miasm and Contagion. While some PDFs are image-only, this one is word-searchable.  I can quote easily and exactly to show Riddell’s assertion that disease is caused by germs (“animiculae”). 

Thomas Kurtz (Mac)
 and John Kemeny (PC)

For all of the prognostication and soothsaying, Kemeny in 1972 vastly underestimated the length, breadth, depth, and flow of the information revolution he would live to see welling up before he passed away too early in 1992 from heart failure. He calculated limits expressed in transmissions of megabits per second, delivering pages of storage, for dollars of rental time.  Today we throw out computers with more capacity than the network he dreamed of in 1972 for 1980.

Of course, he could not see the limitations and contradictions that would evolve from within a successful informatic revolution.

Kemeny wrote about the need for “computer programmers.” We are all computer programmers, but like oncologists who have their moles removed by dermatologists, we are specialists, too often as limited in our skills with computers as our parents before us.  The other day at work, I saw two young managers scan receipts to JPEG files with their iPods to facilitate the filing of expense reports.  As their technical writer, I know that neither of them knows much about word processing software, or they would not have Arial in their Calibri and they would know what the red squiggly underline is trying to tell them.  I warrant that none of the 40 project managers on my current infrastructure integration project could write a program to translate Roman numerals into Arabic numbers, though many of them are certified for Microsoft Project. (Myself, in 2007, I completed an undergraduate requirement for “computer literacy” by taking a class in Java a kind of Basic done up in Rococo.)

This post comes with some irony.  As I read the book, I made notes in the front, a couple of words and a page number for each.  Then I copied the page numbers and tags into this Word document to start the article.  To get them into order, I highlighted and sorted. Seeing 111 ahead of 87, I went back and prepended zeroes to the two-digit integers. Then I resorted.  Like much else, technology stays the same the more it changes.

Finally, Kemeny outlines a problem in simulation (traffic control) at some depth (130-135). He is correct that the general purpose digital computer allows flexible creation and testing of models.  One promise not addressed was the testing of existing models.

Today’s controversies in anthropogenic global warming only bring this into the front.  A model is based on assumptions.  Data tests those premises.  Real validation or falsification can only come from new data not in the original model; or else from different models employing the original data.  Aside from some curve-fitting with least-squares, we seem not to do much of this, certainly not in the social sciences.  If the essence of John Kemeny’s apology for computing is to be accepted, then modeling – both making and testing – must become a requirement for informatic literacy.

Postscript -- Speaking of literacy, to check the grammatical future in English, I googled "english grammar future tense" and read a Wikipedia article, then paged forward and read more at www.lousywriter.com. John Kemeny knew. 

Also on Necessary Facts
Fortune Cookie in Hex Code
The Code Book
Basic: Turing's Truth
Claude M. Watson
Visualizing Complex Data

Gaudeamus Igitur

Economics professor Michael "wintercow" Rizzo at the University of Rochester posted some thoughts about graduation on The Unbroken Window (read "Godspeed" here).  Since graduating in 2010, I had forgotten about this rite of passage and what it means and what it meant to me at the time.  As I commented there, I really appreciated seeing my professors seated with the faculty at the front of the auditorium.  Too few attend. 

Searching YouTube back in 2010, I found many interesting presentations.  I was impressed with the European audience sitting there chatting and when the orchestra struck up the hymn, they rose and sang.  As it should be. This is the perhaps the best known version of "Gaudeamus Igitur." 

Gaudeamus igitur iuvenesdum sumus.
Gaudeamus igitur iuvenesdum sumus.
Post iucundam iuventutem
Post molestam senectutem
Nos habebit humus.
Nos habebit humus.

Vivat academia! Vivant professores!

Vivat academia! Vivant professores!

Vivat membrum quodlibet;
Vivant membra quaelibet;
Semper sint in flore

Semper sint in flore

Alma Mater floreat, Quae nos educavit;
Alma Mater floreat, Quae nos educavit;
Caros et commilitones,
Dissitas in regiones
Sparsos, congregavit

Sparsos, congregavit

Barack Obama, American

With a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas, President Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961. He was raised with help from his grandfather, who served in Patton's army, and his grandmother, who worked her way up from the secretarial pool to middle management at a bank. The White House

On the sociology and economics blog, OrgTheory, I had the opportunity to misunderstand, Dr. Kieran Healy of Duke, who wrote: "And thus did we start down the road toward the unlikely spectacle of a Black President endorsing gay marriage. Nice—counterintuitive, compelling, and more than a little ironic." (See the entire essay and comments here.) I still take issue with the claim that Pres. Barack Obama is "Black." He is indeed an "African-American" on his father's side, but that ignores the perhaps more important considerations on the distaff side.  His mother claims to be from Kansas; and Kansan-Americans are known to have Ozmian connections.  Maybe that needs to be investigated more closely... or maybe not... 

Stanley Ann Dunham

While completing my master's at Eastern Michigan, I had the opportunity to attend a guest lecture on race by Agustin Fuentes professor of anthropology at Notre Dame University. (See here.)  Dr. Fuentes's thesis is that "race" is ascribed, and only ascribed.  Race has no objective existence.  Moreover, other people define your race: you do not.  He showed a picture of Pres. Obama, and asked, "What is his race?" Some people said "Black" and others "African-American."   But his mother is white.  No one said "Caucasian-American."  That was Prof. Fuentes' point.  Later, he showed pictures of Micronesians.  Again, several people in the audience identified them as African, or Black. (I don't think anyone said "Negro.")  But, Fuentes corrected them all by saying that any genetic metric you can find would place them within the populations of Asians, not Africans.  

(An interesting conjecture, not presented then, is that the people we call Africans inherited their darker skin tones from these Melanesians who emigrated back to Africa in an interglacial period.)

We glide easily over the fact that the elder Barack Obama is from Kenya.  Kenya is in Africa.  But, again, the people among whom the elder Obama grew up were not Negroes or Negroids or whatever. They emigrated into Kenya from the north about 1000 years ago, about the same time that the Magyars (my mother's father's ancestors) were entering Europe from Asia. (I have B-positive blood, like many other people who happen to come from western Siberia in the Ob-Irtysh river basin.)  People move.  We walk. We run. We ride animals; and we ride in carts; and today we still measure internal combustion engines in horsepower.  In Indo-European languages many r-words denote running: Rhine, Rhone. rhino-, rhizo-...  Now we fly, flee, flow...  The first horror of any concentration camp is that you are not allowed to leave.  It is the one thing everyone wants to do.  Even if we settle into cities and onto farms, none survives isolated and self-sufficient. Trade is life.  And so some footloose herders from the Nile followed the flocks to Kenya... and one of them thought that America sounded interesting.

He was not alone.

We too commonly think that so-called "native" Americans came here from Asia by crossing a land bridge during a glacial period.  Maybe they did. Maybe some did while others found other routes.  It is interesting that the iconic totem pole is known among the peoples of the Pacific Northwest and the Maori of New Zealand.   Atlantis is not the place we all came from, but the place we all came to.

Atlantis: the Lost Continent (MGM, 1961)

Criminalistics: Science or Folkway?

Ahead of my May 8 talks to the forensics classes in the science department at Westwood High School in Round Rock, Texas, the teacher, Susan Seale, distributed a questionnaire of my own design.

Three intentions informed the instrument.  I wanted to prepare the classes to think about the science of crime scene investigation.  Second, how well could they correlate knowledge in general and about forensics especially. Also, I was fishing for an answer I did not have about the actual value of forensic psychology.

To take the last first: “In which cases did psychological profiling predict (or narrow the possible range) of the next victim and enable the capture of the criminal?”  The questionnaire (appended here), left this area blank. Any answer would do.  Of the 93 students, only one offered an answer not provided: “John Duffy (profiled by David Carter).” 

That sent me to the Internet. I discovered the case of John Duffy and David Mulcahy, the “Railway Killers” (or “Railway Rapists”), profiled by David Canter. (Dr. Canter’s website is here.)  In fact, Dr. David Canter only profiled Duffy. (“Much was made of the psychological profile constructed by Canter after the trial, as Duffy fitted 13 of the 17 observations made about the attacker's lifestyle and habits. Such profiling became immediately commonplace in policing thereafter.” – Wikipedia here.)   In fact, psychological profiling did nothing to capture George Metesky, John Duffy, or anyone else.  Psychological profiling is folkway masquerading as science. 

The students did a good job of identifying George Metesky, James Brussels, Fred Zain, and Joyce Gilchrist.  They also gave good summaries for the Daubert Test.  That said, though, they overwhelmingly believed that fingerprints, ballistics, and other perceptions are scientific.  In truth, only DNA meets the Daubert test.  



Kary Mullis received a Nobel Prize
for inventing PCR:polymerase chain reaction
which makes DNA typing cheap and reliable.
His website here.

It may well be true that a ballistics expert can match a bullet to a weapon. The methodology has never been statistically validated, or subjected to peer review, including the challenge of falsifiability. That holds true for fibers, hair, footprints, tire prints, or other evidence.  (Not only do you have have different kinds of hair all over your body - eyebrows, eyelashes, forearms, legs -  you have different kinds of hair on your head.) It may well be true that a perpetrator’s shoe can be matched to a print left at a crime scene.  But to what degree of matching? And how many other shoes would also match?  The reliability of fingerprinting remains the biggest lie in prosecutorial evidence.

I grant fully that I apply no scientific test to identify my wife. When I come home, I do not mistake her for a cousin of hers. Intuitive evidence is real.  But it is only evidence, not proof. And in a court of law, we demand more than gestalt feelings of lifelong familiarity.   

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Hebrews 11:1 ( Ἔστιν δὲ πίστις ἐλπιζομένων ὑπόστασις, πραγμάτων ἔλεγχος οὐ βλεπομένων.)

Tallies.  These are raw scores. I accepted most close answers. In some cases, the respondents missed the essence, for instance identifying correctly Joyce Gilchrist’s 3000 criminal cases and 20 years of service, but leaving out the charges of misconduct. Three caught my error in listing ”Fiber evidence” twice.

Take Home Survey

Prepared for Forensics classes at Westwood High School

By Michael E. Marotta, BS, MA.

May 8, 2012

Instructions: Do not put your name on this paper. It is an anonymous survey for statistical reporting.

Identify these:

George Metesky	92
James Brussels	91
Fred Zain	89
Joyce Gilchrist	77
Daubert Test	84

In which cases did psychological profiling predict (or narrow the possible range) of the next victim and enable the capture of the criminal?

George Metesky and/or James Brussels 75

Fred Zain 4

Joyce Gilchrist 15

Other Correct (Duffy/Canter; but others also generally correct) 9

Blank no answer 9 (No way to know if blanks indicate that the student believes psychological profiling to fail the Daubert Test. As Ellen Johnson famously noted: "The invisible and the non-existent look a lot alike.")

Other Incorrect 9

Which of these is an example of a scientific crime scene investigation method?

□       Hypnosis          9

□       Fingerprints      87

□       DNA    87

□       Hair Identification         87

□       Fiber Identification        87

□       Graphology 38

□       Fiber Identification        (N/A)

□       Shoe prints       80

□       Tire prints         83

□       Ballistics matching         83

A Forensics Bibliography

Westwood High School in the Round Rock Independent School District outside Austin runs a science class in forensics.  On Tuesday, May 8, 2012, I spoke to four forensics classes joined by two psychology classes on the topic of forensic psychology.  On the one hand, we all do forensic psychology every day.  Beyond that, most of what passes for profiling - especially via the mass mediated hyper reality of crime presented via television and the Internet - is junk science in the courtroom. 

This is the bibliography for those presentations.

Criminology: An Introductory Bibliography

Prepared for Westwood High School Forensics Classes

May 8, 2012

Michael E. Marotta, BS, MA

Cao, Liqun. Major Criminological Theories: Concepts and Measurement. Wadsworth Thompson Learning, 2004. Presents the common array of theories, each tested against one or more metrics.

Lilly, J. Robert, Francis T. Cullen, and Richard A. Ball. Criminological Theory: Context and Consequences. Sage Publications, 2007.  Presents the policy implications of about 30 different theories including classical choice, social control, Marxism, feminism, routine activities, and genetics.

Sutherland, Edwin H., and Donald R. Cressey. Principles of Criminology. J. B. Lippincott, 1924, 1947, and 1955. Sutherland’s paper to the American Sociological Association on white collar crime on December 17, 1939, changed criminology. His theory of “differential association” led to other “differential” theories. This textbook begins with causes and ends with parole.

The National Institute of Justice http://www.nij.gov/

A plethora of resources, including invitations and funding for conferences, studies, reports, statistics, findings, and opportunities for research.

The Innocence Project. http://www.innocenceproject.org/

Since 1989 over 250 innocent people in prison have been released based on DNA evidence. However, DNA evidence does not apply to most cases, and 20,000 to 50,000 innocent people are in prison today.

Westervelt, Saundra D., John A. Humphrey, eds. Wrongly Convicted: Perspectives on Failed Justice. Rutgers University Press, 2002.

Cole, Simon A. Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification. Harvard University Press, 2001.

Gregg Barak http://www.greggbarak.com/

One of the leading criminologists of our time blogs about his many textbooks and his work on mass media, including “The CSI Effect.”

Workers Paradise Promised an End to Money

From ancient times in western Europe the 1st of May has been a traditional holiday, often the first warm day of the year. In the 19th century international labor organizers turned it into “Labor Day.” In the old USSR, May Day parades were big events, as they had been with socialists all over the world. Since the publication of Das Kapital in 1867, radical communists, leftwing anarchists, and pale pink liberals all expected capitalism to be gone by May Day 2000.

While communism seems to have withered away, Marxist ideas still drive a lot of common assumptions about money, even in America.

Numismatic writers have hyped the 1804 dollar and other famous rarities to the point where millions of people believe that anyone can find a rare coin worth thousands if not millions of dollars just by checking their pocket change. Numismatic writers have nutured a myth that anyone can buy a coin today and hold on to it for 20 years and sell it at a huge profit. These errors in the philosophy of wealth stem from communist ideas about money.

In the popular science fiction series, Star Trek, only the Ferengi seem to enjoy money. Star Fleet and the Federation live without it. In fact, in one episode, Capt. Jean-Luc Picard tells a man from our time that in the future, people are more concerned with improving themselves than they are with the accumulation of things. This attitude, from a man in a uniform who commands some people and obeys the orders of others, begs a few questions.

In the absence of money, how does the Federation know whether to open a mining colony or build ships? This question has a moral dimension.  If it is more profitable to harvest subatomic particles, but the Federation in its non-monetary wisdom chooses to build a hospital, the seeming good deed actually must of necessity lower the quality of life within the Federation. That is what money tells us: how much something costs in the only terms that matter, human life.  

Money is a repository of human action. Action requires work, which is energy spent over time. Robinson Crusoe alone on his island needed money. He needed to know what actions would maximize his life. Whether and what to plant, whether and what to hunt are economic questions. Enter another person into the equation and money becomes more complicated. You now need money which is an accounting tool for someone else’s bookkeeping. Robinson Crusoe did not need complicated money even when Friday showed up because Friday had made himself Crusoe’s slave. That is the essence of communism.

It is a dichotomy that in our world slave nations have beautiful paper money while Americans put up with boring bank notes. Another way to look at it is that American money really is worth something, so it does not need three-dimensional see-through holograms. Even more, Americans design their own money. We are numismatists, applying theory to practice, when we choose the designs of our checks, or pick a charge card with a nice logo.

Silver Rouble: Proletarian shows Farmer the Dawn of a New Age

The core of American numismatic collectibles are the 19th and early 20th century coins that remind us of an earlier time. Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto called for the establishment of public schools, an income tax, and centralized banking. U.S. gold, silver, and bronze coins with images of Liberties, eagles, and Indians on them remind us of an earlier time when education, the funding of national defense, and the operations of demand deposit savings accounts were all done differently.

Collectors labor under the burden of a secret guilt: we are greedy. Numismatists such as the curators at the British Museum or the Hermitage are supposed to be above these feelings. They enjoy a purity that comes from studying material they do not own. And that may be fine for them. For most collectors ownership rests on pride.

Those who work hard for their money have every right to enjoy the products and services their money can buy.

Yet, even in America, we harbor a suspicion that capitalists do not earn their money. Asset management seems more like gambling than it does like driving a truck. That is a communist attitude. Investment banking seems like gambling mostly to people who do not know how to drive a truck.

The attitude that wealth comes from lucky gambling is the root of the fallacy that you can buy the right coin today and sell it tomorrow for more without doing any work.The essence of such sloppy thinking is the quick slide over the word “right.” What is the “right” coin?

Knowing the right coin from all the other tens of trillions of coins in the world today requires a mental effort. It is an effort that the communists have not successfully made. Perhaps in the future they will.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
"Big Bang Theory" versus Post-Modern Philosophy
Karl Marx and the Dustbin of History
Mortality by Christopher Hitchens
Knowledge Maps

Forgery and Fraud in Numismatics

“How the West was Faked” is the title of a series of websites (none active) created by John Kleeberg and Theodore V. Buttrey Jr. Broadly, they condemn the forgeries and frauds committed by John J. Ford (1924-2005) and Paul G. Franklin (1919-2000) in the 1950s and 1960s, and extended into our time. Kleeberg and Buttrey are careful; and the narrative is compelling. What follows here is my own summary based on my own experiences touching on that story.

John J. Ford
from BiddlesBank.com

John J. Ford was respected within the numismatic community by just about everyone -- except Eric P. Newman.  Ford started at New York City coin shops as a youngster. After World War II and through the 1960s, Ford worked at New Netherlands and is cited as a founding member of the Numismatic Bibliomania Society at the ANA convention at Cincinnati in 1980.  Eric P. Newman served as president of the American Numismatic Society. He is the author and co-author of several important books and many significant papers, including of Early Paper Money of America, the standard reference on fiat currency of the American Revolution. Newman earned a BS at MIT in 1932 and a JD at Washington University in 1935. John J. Ford was self-educated. Newman is a scholar. Ford was a salesman. Newman long suspected Ford of dishonesty and is widely accepted as the engine behind occasional unsuccessful efforts to unmask and defrock Ford.

The Ford-Newman controversy carried over into the 21^st century. Their seconds were Michael J. Hodder for Ford and Ted Buttrey for Newman.  (Hodder is an expert in U.S. Colonial numismatics. His degrees include masters from both the City College of New York and New York University and a Candidate in Philosophy from Berkeley.  Buttrey's doctorate is from Princeton; he was chair of the Classics department at the University of Michigan.)  Hodder and Buttrey engaged in a “Great Debate” over Fake Western Assay Bars at the 1999 ANA convention in Chicago. Nothing was settled there; and Ford launched a $6 million lawsuit against Buttrey for libel.  (I filed an amicus brief with the court which was not accepted.) Meanwhile, difficult and troubled finances at the American Numismatic Society forced the release of several curators, Kleeberg among them. He was then free to join Buttrey in pursuit of Ford. Their work caused the Smithsonian to close its exhibit of American numismatics because some of their artifacts were questioned and ultimately condemned as fakes.

For twenty years, Paul Franklin made fake western assay bars which John J. Ford sold to collectors.  The pair researched old newspapers, found the names of assayers, and created punches and logotypes to match the art of the advertisements. Franklin made the bars; Ford invented the stories behind them. Then, Henry Clifford decided that he wanted to own them all and began buying them from other collectors as well as from Ford. When Clifford’s estate went on the market, all these bars (and some private coins) came together in one place at one time. The Henry H. Clifford Collection: Coins of the West was the sylloge for a public auction by Bowers and Ruddy Galleries, Inc., March 18-20, 1982. (Known as the Dean of American Numismatics, Q. David Bowers is the author of very many books and has served as president of the ANA.)  When the Clifford Catalog was published the glaring inconsistencies were impossible to ignore – except by those who never see the elephant in the room.  And American numismatics is house full of elephants.

Eagle Mining Co.

Lot 215 Henry Clifford Sale

To celebrate the Centennial of Independence in 1876, numismatist Montroville W. Dickeson created replicas of colonial coins. His fantasies remain hot items today. In 1836, President Andrew Jackson sent a Navy diplomatic mission around the world to secure ports of convenience for American ships. Among the many gifts for kings and sultans were proof sets of American coins. To complete the sets, the Mint struck a few silver dollars with unused dies from 1804, creating the eight 1804 Dollars of 1834-35. Beginning in 1859, numismatists with friends at the Mint had their own 1804 Dollars made. All of these fantasies are highly prized today. Over the holidays 1912-1913, a clerk at the Mint, Samuel W. Brown, struck off five 1913 Liberty Nickels. A few years later, he advertised that he would buy any 1913 Liberty Nickels. Since no one knew that any  existed, this drew interest. Then, he offered his for sale. These fakes attract record-setting prices at any auction. Today, despite legendary (or perhaps mythical) security instant rarities still leave the US Mint, including Sacagawea dollars “muled” with Washington quarters. (See Coin World July 18, 2011 here.) This is an historical problem. In the 1890s, the U.S. Secret Service attempted to confiscate many pattern strikes that had disappeared from the Mint, but numismatists have friends and money and the Secret Service backed off. On the other side of the ledger, Franklin D Roosevelt's first Secretary of the Treasury was numismatist Howland D. Wood. Roosevelt's Presidential Order requiring banks and citizens to deposit their gold with the Treasury explicitly did not apply to coin collectors (see here).

“The Red Book” (A Guide Book of United States Coins by R. S. Yeoman), has been issued annually since 1947. It is arguably the single basic book on US numismatics owned by any and every serious hobbyist or collector. Material later condemned was catalogued in The Red Book for many years. In 1965 under “Private and Territorial Gold” the Red Book inventoried a “Blake and Agnell” bar and coin.  The bar was perhaps the easiest of all to question as the assayer’s name was really Agrell.  But the 1913 catalog by Edgar H. Adams, Private Gold Coinage of California, (New York: American Numismatic Society) carried the typographical error, the r for n, (an easy blunder in the days of lead and ink) and the forgers repeated it.  As late as 1981, the Red Book carried bars by F. D. Kohler, some of which also have been condemned (though most proved genuine).

I believe that cause of this apparent waffling - an unwillingness to condemn the entire body of putative offerings - is the close working relationship between Kenneth Bressett and Eric P. Newman.  Newman was president of the ANS; and Bressett served as an ANA president.  The two co-authored, The Fantastic 1804 Dollar (Whitman, 1962). Long wary of Ford, Newman would have helped Bressett clean the spurious material from Yeoman’s venerable handbook when Whitman turned to Bressett to continue the annual book. I have never met Eric P. Newman, but I have met Ken Bressett and I trust him implicitly to hold to the highest ethical standards.  

Be all that as it may, the fakes in the Clifford Collection survived for 20 years after publication of the catalogue. 

In April 1999 I joined Coin World as a senior staff writer and their international editor just at the Great Debate was developing. The co-worker I was closest to was Stuart Segan, their “Trends” (pricing) editor. Stuart’s degree is in physics from Berkeley. He encouraged me to approach the problem like a scientist. We examined the Clifford Catalog, and argued out between ourselves the internal inconsistencies in the artifacts. To be fair, I only spoke to John J. Ford on the telephone while working for Coin World. He told me that if I could not tell 19th century die work from 18th, I did not deserve my chair as an editor.  I took his advice to heart and improved my knowledge.  But clearly, Ford was a bully which is corroborated by common knowledge that he called collectors "boobs."

Then the Brother Jonathan and the .S.S. Central America were salvaged. Those ships carried gold coins and bars from the California gold rush. The Central America was called “the ship of gold;” and its loss is cited as a contributing factor in the Panic of 1857.  Generally, none of the recovered remains from those wrecks match the work of Paul Franklin sold by John J. Ford. (See Treasures from the S.S. Central America: Glories of the California Gold Rush, June 20-21, 2000, by Sotheby’s.)

When John J. Ford sold his lifetime numismatic collection through Stack’s numismatic auction firm of New York City the catalogs ran 21 volumes. He did know a bargain; and he pursued items which others passed over, such as Indian Peace Medals. He owned a world class library. The final sale and volume of the sylloge covers Western Assay Bars.  Many pieces that were anticipated did not appear.  (See Kleeberg in The E-sylum October 14, 2007 here. The E-sylum is the weekly email news from the Numismatic Bibliomania Society, whose journal is The Asylum.) Among the historical remains not offered was a bar allegedly made for Wells Fargo by Wass Molitor in 1854 and overstruck in 1864 with a U.S. Revenue stamp. The bar is illustrated in Private Gold Coins and Patterns of the United States by Donald H. Kagin, Ph.D. (Kagin’s doctorate is in numismatics. His website is here.)  The Holabird-Kagin website of Americana is here. 

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS:
William Sheldon: Psychologist, Numismatist, Thief
Murray Rothbard: Fraud or Faker?
Numismatics: History as Market
Industrial Medals as the Currency of Fame

Active Defense and Passive Aggression, Part 2.

“Handguns are instruments for killing people - they are not carried for hunting animals - and you have no right to kill people.” Ayn Rand at Ford Hall Forum, October 21, 1973.

It is not so much that legislation solves problems, but rather that the formal expression of social norms elevates them above being mere folkways. Homicide was not against the law in archaic Athens until the reforms of Drakon (c. 650 BCE). Even today, blood feud is the time-honored method of rebalancing injustice; and it continues in traditional societies. (See Vengeance is Mine: Justice Albanian Style by Fatos Tarifa; Chapel Hill: Globic Press, 2008.) In “Politics as a Profession” (1918) Max Weber enunciated the principle we accept today that the state has a monopoly on physical force.  That monopoly includes the right to assign proxy to others.  Thus, even in a state that forbids capital punishment, the police on the street can take a life. We give to the patrol officer the power of prosecutor, jury, judge, and executioner. I question that.

The Baker Batshield has your back

            Faced with the unequivocal weaponry of the state, criminals also arm themselves. For 150 years, the London Metropolitan Police were unarmed, as were the criminals. The conflict with the IRA and the rise of foreign gangs unsocialized to British folkways changed that. Now, when they knock to enter before bashing down the door, the bobbies announce themselves “Armed police!”  That only begs the question.  It is also true that those who would commit violence need no special excuse. Murder will not go away if the police are disarmed.

Moreover, the unarmed police will face armed perpetrators. As violence only begets violence, better solutions must be found to minimizing, ameliorating, and negating armed conflict.

            We organize our police as military.  Far deeper and far beyond the uniforms – though there is that – is the institutional structure, which reinforces the perception among the police themselves that they are an occupying army. 

A deployable net

            Waiting for a former instructor at my community college alma mater, I sat in on a class in “Police and the Community.” It was being taught by a police sergeant.  She said that there are good people and perpetrators; and the job of the police is to protect the community from the bad guys. . It was not my class, so I did not point out that the so-called perpetrators are in and of the community. As Newt Gingrich once reminded a Republican dinner, most Americans see the posted speed limit as a benchmark of opportunity. In that context, we segregate people in special clothing to commit acts, which if carried out by others, would be crimes. So, when a police officer accidentally kills the wrong fleeing felon, there is no restoration. The officer does not apologize; and the state which empowered the homicide admits no harm and pays no compensation.

A deployable net

           
The denial of responsibility is the first of five “Techniques of Neutralization” by which criminals excuse and justify their acts. (See “Techniques of Neutralization: a theory of delinquency,” Sykes, Gresham M. and David Matza, American Sociological Review, 22, 664-673.) These statements also apply to the state, and therefore to the police. (And, they also were heard from the civil rights movement and the anti-war protesters of the 50s and 60s, just as they come from the Occupiers today, all of whom engage in civil disobedience.)

1. Denial of responsibility (The state responds to crime caused by perpetrators. You brought this on yourself.)
2. Denial of injury (You deserve the consequences. Prison will be good for you.)
3. Denial of the victim (Perps are not good people. If he was not guilty, he would not have fled.)
4. Condemnation of the condemners (Do-gooders are soft on crime. Courts are too lenient.)
5. Appeal to higher loyalties (Thin blue line and new centurions. In God we trust. E pluribus unum.)

Ayn Rand famously said that no political change can come without a shift in the dominant philosophical foundations of our culture and society. Gun control laws can be no more effect than drug control laws, and for the same reasons. The deeper needs for guns and drugs are found within individuals with unworkable, irrational personal philosophies – and often a complete lack of any formally defined credo.

            It is not necessary that everyone change. The golden age of Greece, the Islamic Golden Age, the European Renaissance, the Three Kingdoms and later the Southern Sung of China, in each case, most people changed nothing of themselves, though they accepted the new social contexts around them.

           In our time, perhaps the greatest potential for a better future comes not from any single philosophy, but from the plethora of them. Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies was a plea for tolerance based on the admission of ignorance. No one has a monopoly on truth. Ironically, the large number of competing owners of absolute truth has created for us a complex matrix of beliefs, assertions, claims, philosophies, and religions. As long as none can dominate, all can flourish.

Bulletproof fashions from Miguel Caballero

Survival of the Fitted

The rise of bulletproof couture.

by David Owen The New Yorker, September 26, 2011

Fashionable bullet-proof wear finds growth abroad

by Jim Wyss The Miami Herald

Q: What is your opinion of gun control laws?

A: I do not know enough about it to have an opinion, except to say that it is not of primary importance. Forbidding guns or registering them is not going to stop criminals from having them; nor is it a great threat to the private, non-criminal citizen if he has to register the fact that he has a gun. It is not an important issue, unless you're ready to begin a private uprising right now, which isn't very practical. [Ford Hall Forum, 1971]

Q: What's your attitude toward gun control?
A: It is a complex, technical issue in the philosophy of law. Handguns are instruments for killing people -- they are not carried for hunting animals -- and you have no right to kill people. You do have the right to self-defense, however. I don't know how the issue is going to be resolved to protect you without giving you the privilege to kill people at whim. [Ford Hall Forum, 1973]

From Ayn Rand Answers: the Best of Her Q&A, edited by Robert Mayhew © 2005 by The Estate of Ayn Rand.

“FBI agents alerted police about their interest in late October, shortly after the Travis County medical examiner's office released a report saying that 20-year-old Byron Carter Jr. had been shot four times, including once in the head.

            A teenager who drove a car toward two police officers on East Eighth Street.in late May, leading to the fatal shooting of his passenger by one of the officers, will not face criminal charges, the Travis County District Attorney's office said Thursday.  A grand jury completed its review of the incident and declined to indict the teen, officials said. The teen was not named in court documents because he is a juvenile. Police have said he is 16 years old.”

Holding back tears, San Angelo police Sgt. Matt Baldwin recounted stories about the kind of police officer his friend Jaime Padron was. 

The time Padron ran into a burning house with his partner to save two children trapped inside. The time Padron entered a business when a gunman was inside. The time he and Padron were outnumbered in a fight with several suspects, but persevered and made the arrest. 

"That was Jaime the cop," Baldwin said Friday at Padron's funeral Mass at St. Joseph's Catholic Church — a service bursting at the seams with Padron's fellow officers from Austin and San Angelo and with family, friends and well-wishers. "He loved being a cop. He was good at it." ... much has been written and said about "Jaime the cop" in the week since he was fatally shot at a North Austin Wal-Mart ... Padron was shot after confronting a shoplifting suspect about 2:30 a.m. April 6. The suspect in the shooting, Brandon Montgomery Daniel, remains jailed on a charge of capital murder.”
ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Active Defense and Passive Aggression, Part 1.
Redshirts
Shifting the Paradigm of Private Security
Private Security in the 21st Century
Physical Security for Data Centers (Slideshare View and Download)