We’ve all heard about Dwight D. Eisenhower’s warning to us about the “military industrial complex”. It’s practically iconic. But what I didn’t know was that same farewell speech contained a second warning, one that hints at our current situation with such figures as Dr. James Hansen. This is from the blog “Big Hollywood” It’s worth a read. – Anthony
Ike’s Not So Famous Second Warning
by Dwight Schultz “Big Hollywood blog”
On Saturday January 17, 2009, during the Fox 4 0′clock news hour, Shepard Smith recalled the anniversary of President Eisenhower’s famous 1961 farewell address to the nation, but he only mentioned one of Ike’s threat warnings, the one that reminded us to beware of the “Military Industrial Complex.” This warning came from a military man, so it’s been a turn of phrase that slobbers off the lips of suspicious lefty infants shortly after they’re forced to abandon the nipple and accept Marx.
So I shouted at Shepard, “What’s wrong with threat number two, you big beautiful blue eyed capitalist! What’s wrong with Fox News and your staff? There are only two warnings in that speech for God’s sake, if you’re going to honor a historical document maybe somebody could at least read it, and maybe for once in almost fifty years remind us of Ike’s second warning: “…that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” Does anything come immediately to mind when you read that? Ike goes on, “…Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.” And, “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.”
Do you think Ike was warning us that politicians like Al Gore and Barack Obama could cuddle with the scientific technological elite alike and, oh, I don’t know, maybe get behind Obama’s plan to tax your breath? Do you think that perhaps some time in the near future you might not be considered a person but a carbon footprint … does something like that sound ridiculous?
Have you seen how fast Obama has placed environmental academic hysterics and socialists in positions of real power? Steven Chu, John Holdren, Carol Browner and others are there to see to it that every exhaust in your life is a financial event favorable to the government. So how is it that one of Ike’s warnings became famous and the other a historical ghost note?
Above: Watch Ike’s farewell address in its entirety, 46 minutes
It’s really not hard to grasp. Our educational institutions monitor and control historical information and also educate and train the future guardians of public discourse — the indispensable journalists we read, see, and hear every day. By definition both the media and our nation’s scholars digest information and parcel it out in what should be an honest and thoughtful way. They digested Ike’s warning about the military and saw fit to warn us 10 billion times that the military is bad and needs to be feared and pushed off campus. They digested Ike’s warning about universities, scholars, federal money, science and policy, then gave it to Helen Thomas to scatter on some hot house tomatoes in the Nevada desert. It doesn’t get any simpler.
Think about this: How many times have you heard that the debate over anthropogenic global warming has ended? When and where was this debate? The mere recitation of the words, “the debate has ended” closed the discussion without you having ever heard it because, get it! It’s ended! Get It! Neat trick! Gore says the debate has ended….McCain says the debate has ended…Obama says the debate has ended …Hanson says the debate has ended, and no one in the media wants to ask, “What debate?” When? Where? Was there a scientific or political debate… or, God forbid, both, and who was for and who was against?
Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth,” has by now been proven to be almost a 100% big fat lie, and yet there is no media outcry against it or price for Gore to pay because he is supporting the scientific technological elite who want to hold public policy captive to the carbon tax that Socialists and Democrats have wanted since the 1992 Rio summit.
This is a clear example of years of liberal bias in protective favor of the university media structure. It just takes a lot of repetition and a strong ideological preference for saying: American military bad! American university good! CO2 bad! Tax our breath! Raise the tuition! Kick the Marines off campus! Long live man made global warming and the tax dollars we shall inherit from it. STING shall be our band and “Every Breath You Take” shall be our song … revenue streams for eternity.
Repeat after me this slogan … or, if you would rather stick this on the backside of your transportation vehicle , please do and remember, paying higher taxes is patriotic, so breathe baby, breathe for your country, just don’t breathe behind our back and not let us see you, ‘cause we’re talk’n money now, baby! The debate has ended!
…Hmmm?
Warning number two? What warning? Oh, you mean the military thing? We’ve taken care of that. Here’s Matt Damon’s number, he’ll tell you all about it. He went to Harvard you know. Remember, be upscale, don’t listen to Rush Limbaugh, breathe! And did I tell you to pay your taxes and act patriotic, especially when they’re going up?
Gotta run, I’m meeting Tom Daschle, Laurie David, Tyrano-Soros and secretary Geithner for lunch.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Ric,
I have been thinking more about the analogy between the RISC phenomenon and AGW. In both cases, scientists chose to ignore inconvenient facts in order to pursue funding and prestige.
In the case of RISC, the driving mantra was “memory is cheap.” This is a half truth. Slow memory is cheap, but cache memory is very expensive. Thus the dirty little secret about why CISC runs fast. You can pack a lot more CISC instructions in a small instruction cache, and thus get better performance than RISC at the same price.
This fairly obvious detail was buried for decades, because computer scientists wanted to feel important and be funded. They convinced many large companies to waste huge amounts of money on a doomed technology.
Rod Canion started up the most profitable company in the world (Compaq) and left in disgrace because he bought off on the RISC nonsense being spewed by the consensus of computer scientists. Obama beware.
You’re touching on areas that are outside of my expertise, so let me just add a few observations that don’t tie together all that well. Tallbloke’s comment about compatibility being important is a key point. DEC’s jumps from architecture to architecture (PDP-11, VAX, MIPS, and Alpha – and that just for Unix). Trying to get third party vendors to follow took a lot of time and was expensive. HP-UX did well because it ran on the same architecture for so long but eventually became an impediment to porting modern codes. Windows ran on Alpha – that failed in part because vendors didn’t want to port to it, in part because Windows was not designed with 64 bit CPUs in mind.
One reason x86 speeds increased so much is that the volume of sales provided the income to compete with the RISC competition. CPU development is a tremendously expensive undertaking and Intel could afford that and the new fab lines. Your cache size point is somewhat valid, but the code size differential was not all that great. The 64 bit nature of Alpha added noticably to the instruction stream and memory fetches, the many general purpose registers helped reduce some of the x86 overhead.
The DEC/Compaq “merge” offered DEC to get involved with a PC line that made money, and offered Compaq a high-end line where there was a sizable profit margin. The Compaq/HP merger had a lot more overlap (both had PCs, PDAs, Unixes, printers) and hence was more political. I don’t know much about Rod Canion, he was long gone by the time Compaq and Eckard Pfeiffer bought DEC.
One thing I forgot to mention is in addition to AMD using Alpha’s memory interface, the demise of Alpha led to many top Alpha designers going to AMD where they implemented the 64 bit extensions in Opteron. That forced Intel to follow suit, and doomed Itanium to its current status of niche processor instead of the new design that was to finally retire x86.
Ric,
A few counterpoints. x86 code density is about 2.5X greater than a typical RISC density, and each instruction does a lot more work than each RISC instruction. As a result, the cache utilization on x86 is much higher than any RISC processor – perhaps 4-5X. CPU performance is limited largely by cache miss rate, thus (in an idealized environment) a 96% hit rate runs only about half as fast as a 98% hit rate, and a 99% hit rate doubles performance again.
Itanium server sales last year were in the $10 billion range. The volumes may be low, but the cost is very high. Hardly a “niche processor.” Redundancy and stability (RAS) is the selling point for Itanium.
Steven and Ric,
I hate to throw cold water on a good debate, but the real reason that RISC was never able to beat out x86 was that NexGen and later AMD and Intel figured out that they could adopt RISC design principles into x86 designs. Basically, they used decoder stages to convert CISC instructions into RISC-like micro-ops, which can run on a RISC-like x86 core. Such a design may take a small performance hit relative to native RISC (eg. 5-10%), but otherwise provides RISC-like scalability. The small performance hit is in the noise when you consider variations in process capabilities (eg. raw transistor performance) and advantages of CISC for certain applications. Add in the backward compatibility of x86 for a large installed base and there was no way RISC could displace x86.
Having said that, don’t count RISC as dead just because it’s not competitive on the desktop. ARM processors pretty much dominate the low-cost, high-performance market for embedded processors (think iPod’s and SmartPhones). Freescale’s PowerPC chips drive most Cisco routers and thus form the backbone of the internet. And finally, IBM’s Cell architecture drives all three leading game controllers (Wii, Xbox, PlayStation3) and it’s POWER Architecture fuels four of the world’s ten fastest supercomputers.
Semi,
Your argument about “design principles” is correct, which is exactly the point – the nearly unanimous “consensus” of academics were wrong. There was never any need to change instruction set architectures for personal computers. IBM threw $5 billion down the drain because of out of control academics, who took one piece of correct information and blew it up into a nonexistent problem and solution. Sound familiar?
The PC marketplace in the future will be dominated by x86 + Larrabee, Nvidia or AMD GPUs. ARM will be used a coprocessor for lightweight tasks.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10162275-92.html
Steven,
I don’t think you can argue that IBM threw $5 billion “down the drain” chasing after RISC, when they have made many billions selling these same chips for Macs (now defunct), Video game consoles, and High-end Servers. In fact their domination of the high-end computing market (210 of the top 500 supercomputers are IBM machines) is a major reason why IBM is currently one of the most successful IT companies on the planet.
RISC was the right direction for IBM, not a pipe-dream lead by starry-eyed academics. Sure they over-hyped the doom-and-gloom scenario for CISC in their bid to wrestle the PC away from the dominant market player. But that was just good old fashioned FUD marketing, not bad business. Unfortunately, their efforts put them squarely in the cross-hairs of Microsoft, the grand masters of FUD and the rest is history.
Semi,
Game consoles are sold as loss-leaders. I bought a PS3 when it first came out for less than the cost of a standalone Blu-Ray player.
IBM’s Power was around long before PowerPC. That is a separate business and is not part of the $5 billion. The server numbers you quoted are Power, not PowerPC. Since PowerPC appeared in 1991, x86 sales have been measured in the 100s of billions of dollars.
If IBM wanted Mac business, they could have much more cheaply collaborated with Motorola to build a faster 68K. It took Apple years to get their entire OS ported to PowerPC, and then they switched to x86.
I remember Motorola long-term sales projections for PowerPC from around 1992, and they overestimated by several orders of magnitude.
You have said everything I wanted to say. Superscalar superpipelined architectures have significant performance advantages that are very hard to achieve in a variable cycle count instruction-set architecture. However, microengines can take advantage of such architectures.
And, although Intel now has an SOC chip based around the Pentium M core, I believe, ARM and the 604 architectures still get most of the embedded design wins, and MIPS is still around in things like the Cavium processors and so forth.
I’ve been reading this blog for a while and enjoying it but I’m done, I;m not going to read this anymore.
This post is entirely too much.
The hate and irrationality that is expressed by so many of the commenters is shocking.
while the following is only one quote, it catches the feel of all the comments..
“…seriously incomplete. When the “scientists” give us the debunked “hockey stick” and talk of “coal trains of death”, and when the policy makers…”
a couple of scientists do shoddy work, it catches on politically…now all scientiest are worthless??
use your head
The fact is, anon, that real scientists ARE being dragged through the mud over AGW. The shocking thing is, that too few scientists have the courage to speak up, counter the political hype and stop the madness…
anon,
I think you’re misreading those comments. “Scientists” has quotation marks, indicating that a particular person who uses inflammatory language like ‘coal trains of death’ is abusing their status as a scientist.
All real scientists are skeptics. But they are also human, and some of them are bought by money, status or ideology. That’s what President Eisenhower was warning us against in his farewell speech.
The two examples above refer to Michael Mann and James Hansen. They have sold out for personal gain and status. But they are not the typical scientist, who cringes at their perversion of the scientific method.
Rather than getting upset at someone who refers to others making outlandish statements like ‘coal trains of death,’ or to someone who uses a known false algorithm to promote their “hockey stick” conclusion, your proper target of scorn should be those corrupt scientists who make the great preponderance of honest scientists look devious and corrupt.
The public tends to generalize, and Mann and Hansen are the prime contributors to the public’s view of scientists. They are always in the news. Those two, more than anyone else, have contributed to the false impression that all scientists are corrupt and political.
This site points out the truth of the matter. You can see that a lot of serious thought goes into most of these posts. And if you think about it, you will see that the sooner that the false prophets of doom are marginalized, the better it will be for mainstream science and the taxpaying public.
anon,
The lack of self-criticism in the world of climate science is a primary reason why sites like WUWT and CA exist. Academics can’t bludgeon the energy basis of the world economy and expect that all 7 billion people on earth will go quietly – no matter how clueless the politicians may be.
Another good example happened today. NASA’s $270 million CO2 satellite failed to reach orbit today because of a computational error, even worse than the Hubble mirror math error. The whole justification for this project was flawed at many levels. You can predict future CO2 levels simply by extrapolating the Mauna Loa graphs. Does the US have $270 million to waste on more NASA theatre?
Some more NASA highlights:
It was a science fiction fantasy come true: Ten years ago this summer, NASA announced the discovery of life on Mars.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/08/05/ap/tech/mainD8JAGIEG0.shtml
New evidence of life on Mars spotted by NASA
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/01/15/MNV715B3HE.DTL
RE:
Michael D Smith (04:06:27) :
The fact is, anon, that real scientists ARE being dragged through the mud over AGW. The shocking thing is, that too few scientists have the courage to speak up, counter the political hype and stop the madness…
Go back read all the posts. Scientists (Im one) who may disagree have 2 choices, 1) do nothing/say nothing, 2) get wrapped into the lump with the lot who wrote these posts.
guess what someone who doesnt want to attempt carear suicide is going to do.
Steven,
You’re right, game consoles are loss-leaders, sold by game companies in anticipation of licensing revenues from game sales. However, the various components (chips, controllers, etc…) are not loss-leaders, but revenue centers for the various companies that make them. If it weren’t so, they wouldn’t bother as they are not entitled to licensing revenues. In some cases these profits are subsidized by the game console vendors, but they are profitable nonetheless. The same is true for Cell phones, which are also loss-leaders, subsidized by the various phone companies, nevertheless, TI and Qualcomm have done quite well selling chips for phones.
As for Power vs. PowerPC, the original discussion was RISC vs. CISC and my point has always been that RISC was technologically superior and thus has been very successful, which is true. I said nothing about PowerPC. My point was that CISC did not beat out RISC, rather it morphed itself into pseudo-RISC.
Finally, as for building a faster 68K, Motorola already did that. The 88K line was a flop! In 1991, x86 was deeply entrenched as the defacto standard of the PC market. Only a revolutionary change like the PowerPC had any hope of overcoming the x86/intel/microsoft juggernaut. In fact, the PowerPC did succeed in gaining some market share for the Mac. Ultimately, it failed to displace x86, but the reasons for that were mostly non-technological (eg. Apple pulling the rug out from under the Mac Clone business, especially Motorola’s Clone business, Motorola’s other business troubles siphoning away resources, cut-throat competition between IBM and Motorola for the small Mac business and Apple’s manipulation of both sides, FUD from Microsoft and Intel, etc…)
Having said all of that, it should also be recognized that Motorola and later Freescale leveraged PowerPC into a very profitable and successful embedded business. I don’t know if IBM lost money on PowerPC, but it should be recognized that their highly profitable POWER business is relatively low-volume, but requires them to operate a state-of-the-art High-Volume semiconductor Fab. Keeping such a fab loaded, even with only marginally profitable parts, such as PowerPC or Cell (for Video Games) is enough to make the overall operation profitable.
Semi,
The features of Power and Itanium (which are currently about equal in revenues) that make them attractive as servers are RAS (redundancy and stability.) Many of those features are being moved into x86, which is why x86 server sales continue to grow while the RISC server sales have peaked.
As far as PowerPC goes, there were many people at IBM, Apple and Motorola expecting it to be 2-3X faster than x86. In fact, the performance difference was a wash – which killed it on the desktop. Modern x86 chips offers a RISC like core with the cache efficiency of CISC. The orthogonal RISC instruction sets are inherently memory inefficient by design.
No one took the bait on the RAS comment, so I will have to fill in the blanks.
The purpose of RAS is so that people like Anthony don’t have to waste their weekends fixing broken servers. ;^)