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Wednesday, December 27, 2006 AN ENGLISHMAN IN GERMANY, IN 1934
Patrick Leigh Fermor, then 18 years old, hiked around Germany shortly after the Nazi accession to power. He had many conversations with young Germans, mostly over mugs of beer:
In all these conversations there was one opening I particularly dreaded: I was English? Yes. A student? Yes. At Oxford, no? No. At this point I knew what I was in for.
The summer before, the Oxford Union had voted that “under no circumstances would they fight for King and Country.” The stir it had made in England was nothing, I gathered, to the sensation in Germany. I didn’t know much about it. In my explanation—for I was always pressed for one—I depicted the whole thing as merely another act of defiance against the older generation. The very phrasing of the motion—“fight for King and Country”—was an obsolete cliché from an old recruiting poster: no one, not even the fiercest patriot, would use it now to describe a deeply-felt sentiment. My interlocutors asked: “Why not?” “Für König und Vaterland” sounded different in German ears: it was a bugle-call that had lost none of its resonance. What exactly did I mean? The motion was probably “pour épater les bourgeois,” I floundered. Here someone speaking a little French would try to help. “Um die Bürger zu erstaunen? Ach, so!” A pause would follow. “A kind of joke, really,” I went on. “Ein Scherz?” they would ask. “Ein Spass? Ein Witz?” I was surrounded by glaring eyeballs and teeth. Someone would shrug and let out a staccato laugh like three notches on a watchman’s rattle. I could detect a kindling glint of scornful pity and triumph in the surrounding eyes which declared quite plainly their certainty that, were I right, England was too far gone in degeneracy and frivolity to present a problem. But the distress I could detect on the face of a silent opponent of the régime was still harder to bear: it hinted that the will or the capacity to save civilization was lacking where it might have been hoped for.
Fermor was a Special Operations Executive officer during WWII, and published extensively after the war. Jan Morris called him "the greatest of living travel writers." The whole article at the link is well worth reading.
In my experience, Philo, our Greek guide, got it exactly and frighteningly right. Hidden from sight is an ailing parent, a life-long battle with excess weight, abiding shyness, or whatever/s. This "great battle" colors our mate's or employee's every action.
Be sure and read the comments at Tom's site, especially the second one.
A couple of years ago, I posted the following item:
98 years ago this evening, a few shipboard radio operators--listening through the static for signals in Morse code--heard something that they had never before heard on the radio, and that most had never expected to hear. A human voice.
The first voice radio broadcast was conducted by Reginald Fessenden, originating from his experimental station at Brant Rock, Massachussetts. After introducing the transmission, Fessenden played a recording of Handel's "Largo" and then sang "O Holy Night" while accompanying himself on the violin. Fessenden's wife and a friend were then intended to conduct a Bible reading, but in the first-ever case of mike fright, they were unable to do it, so the reading was conducted by Fessenden as well.
The signals were created by a high-frequency AC generator, an electromechanical device created by Ernst Alexanderson of GE and modified by Fessenden. The transmission took place at around 80KHZ. (Low frequency compared to today's normal radio, where the AM band starts at around 500KHZ; high frequency compared to the 60HZ that rotating machines normally produce.) I believe that the generator was powered by a steam turbine.
The Alexanderson machines were expensive and very large--broadcast radio on a commercial scale was not practical until the introduction of the vacuum tube for both transmitting and receiving, many years later.
More about Reginald Fessenden and his pioneering broadcast here.
This year is the centennial of the event, and commemoration events have been taking place in Brant Rock, culminating in today's re-enactment of Fessenden's pioneering broadcast by local radio station WATD.
In searching around for information to update this post, though, I came across something interesting: the Christmas Eve broadcast may have never actually happened. Critics point out that the only documentary evidence of the broadcast is a letter written by Fessenden in 1932--more than 25 years after the event--and they argue that Fessenden, a major publicity hound, would scarcely have missed the opportunity to hype the broadcast right after it took place.
There's no question, though, that Fessenden made major contributions to the development of radio, and he did conduct a demonstration of voice transmission on Dec 21, 1906--this was a point-to-point transmission for invited guests, though, rather than a broadcast.
It still seems to me quite possible that the original story may be true, and that Fessenden didn't publicize the Christmas Eve broadcast because he was focused on the business potential of point-to-point transmission, which had obvious revenue potential, rather than on the then-nonexistent broadcast market. The controversy is an interesting example of just how difficult it often is to achieve anything like certainty in historical research, even at the relatively close distance of 100 years.
Financial Times reports that the British government has terminated a fraud investigation involving a British company--because of pressure from the Saudi government. The FT article says that Saudi Arabia threatened to withdraw all co-operation on security-- including intelligence sharing on al-Qaeda--and downgrade its embassy in London--unless the investigation was stopped. There are also British arms sales to Saudi Arabia at stake, and it isn't clear to what degree the decision was based on that factor rather than on the security issues.
The decision to terminate the investigation is being challenged by two UK organizations.
A Rutgers student meets President Bush and talks with him about the anti-Israel atmosphere she found on campus and the work she is doing to improve things there.
Chuck Hagel, a United States Senator who calls himself a Republican;
Kofi Annan served as secretary general during 10 of the most difficult, complicated and dangerous years of the U.N.'s history. He did it with grace, humor, determination, and always doing what he felt was in the interests of mankind.
More here on the actual performance of the organization that Kofi Annan has been leading.
I think Annan's tenure as Secretary General was best summarized by Dr Sanity.
This report says that there have recently been large discoveries of natural gas off the coast of India. At present, India suffers from a signficant gas shortage: gas-fired power plants aggregating 12,000 megawatts of capacity are running at only half capacity because of lack of gas. With the new fields, the Ministry of Petroleum expects the supply situation to swing to a surplus over the next two years. Indeed, the ministry expects commercial vehicles to switch over to CNG (compressed natural gas) in place of gasoline.
If the gas finds are as large as claimed, this is pretty significant. In addition to being an energy source, natural gas is a common feedstock for petrochemical plants, and the new sources should make India more competitive in that field. (The production of fertilizer, which is obviously important to India's still-very-agricultural economy, is very natural-gas intensive.)
Speaking of natural gas, work is progressing on an alternative method for transporting gas by sea. At present, gas must be liquified at a temperature of -162 degrees C and maintained at this temperature during the voyage. Special ships (LNG tankers) are required for the purpose, in addition to extensive shore-based equipment. With the projected approach, gas is combined with water and frozen--interestingly, this freezing takes place at only about -20 C. The resulting product--natural gas hydrate, nicknamed "burning ice"--is more stable than LNG and can be transported in less-expensive ships. It would be expecially useful for exploitation of smaller gas fields, without sufficient scale to justify LNG facilities. Indeed, there are now combined oil/gas fields at which the oil is recovered but the gas is merely flared off, because there is at present no economical way to transport it. "Burning ice" may help eliminate this waste.
As always, nothing on this blog should be considered as investment advice.
Some Iranian students are protesting against Ahmadinejad's obscene Holocaust-denial conference.
The conference "has brought to our country Nazis and racists from around the world," said one student activist. Ahmadinejad's picture was burned by protestors at Amir Kabir University.
Saturday, December 09, 2006 WORST COVER LETTERS OF ALL TIME?
Killian Advertising gets lots of resumes, each with a cover letter--and they collect outstandingly bad examples of the genre. You can see some of them here.
Many of the perpetrators of these things are college graduates.
Killian prescribes Strunk & White. I'm afraid, though, that the situation is beyond a one-book cure.
It's almost like a bunch of guys sitting around a table on Saturday night, playing Risk, or Dungeons & Dragons. The panel members imagine a world in which all the players would act rationally if only they talked to each other. With their "New Diplomatic Offensive," they've conjured a mythological universe that sounds nice, but doesn't actually exist.
The Iraq Study Group's major error was their assumption that parties with a strong negotiation position will trade away strength for promises by a weaker adversary. The kind of negotiation that the ISG envisions could only work if the parties shared mutual interests and goals, which is absolutely not the case in Iraq or in the broader Middle East.
Robert Tracinski is reminded of a campus comedy troupe that did a recurring skit about a superhero named Captain Obvious. In each scene, a character would face a mundane problem, only to be "saved" by the banal and utterly unhelpful advice offered by Captain Obvious:
I've locked my keys in my car. What am I going to do?" "Well then," replies Captain Obvious, "all you have to do is open the door to your car, and then you can get your keys." Each scene ended the same way, with Captain Obvious proclaiming, "No, don't thank me. It's all in a day's work for Captain Obvious.
Tracinski sees the Iraq Study Group as following in the footsteps of Captain Obvious:
The problem in Iraq is that Iran and Syria are arming, funding, and encouraging Sunni and Shiite insurgents? Well then, all we have to do is to convince Syria and Iran to stop supporting these insurgents.
The problem in the region is that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict inflames anti-American sentiment? Well then, all we have to do is to convene a conference to negotiate peace in the Middle East.
See how simple that was? It's amazing that no one ever thought of these ideas before the Iraq Study Group came along. But no, don't thank them. It's all in a day's work for Captain Obvious.
and
When you desire a result without enacting the means for achieving it, that's called a "fantasy"which is ironic, considering that James Baker is a dean of the "realist" school of foreign policy.
The whole thing is inexplicable, except for this: A surgeon sees the world as a scalpel. James Baker, talker to the stars, sees negotiation and compromise in all he does.
Based on the historical record, the advocates of U.S. engagement with these regimes (Iran, Syria--ed) are delusional. The record, from Carter to Bush II, strongly suggests that neither regime has any interest in cooperating with us in Iraq, and are more likely than not to view the Carter-Brzezinski-Hagel approach as a demonstration of American weakness.
Delusional is precisely the word for it. Some, apparently prefer to refer to it as "realism".
I see this sort of cognitive process all the time with patients who simply can't figure out why responding in the same dysfunctional manner to events in their life doesn't seem to work any better on the third, fourth, or fifth try. God forbid they examine those thought processes and adjust their behavior to the reality of the situation.
T F Boggs, a 24-year-old Sergeant who has completed two tours in Iraq:
The Iraq Survey Group’s findings or rather, recommendations are a joke and could have only come from a group of old people who have been stuck in Washington for too long. The brainpower of the ISG has come up with a new direction for our country and that includes negotiating with countries whose people chant “Death to America” and whose leaders deny the Holocaust and call for Israel to be wiped from the face of the earth. Baker and Hamilton want us to get terrorists supporting countries involved in fighting terrorism! If I am the only one who finds something wrong with that then please let me know because right now I feel like I am the only person who feels this way.
Not only are the findings of the ISG a joke but the people who led the group (Baker and Hamilton) treat soldiers like they are a joke. One of the main recommendations of the ISG is to send more troops to Iraq in order to train Iraqis so they can secure their own country, but they don’t feel that we are doing a good job of that right now because training Iraqis isn’t an attractive job for soldiers to do because it isn’t a “career advancing” job. As someone who trained Iraqis from time to time I take personal offense to this remark. In my experience soldiers clamored for the chance to train Iraqis. Any soldier who doesn’t think training Iraqis is worth their time because it isn’t a “career advancing” job shouldn’t be part in the war on terror plain and simple.
and
I feel like all of my efforts (30 months of deployment time) and the efforts of all my brothers in arms are all for naught. I thought old people were supposed to be more patient than a 24 year old but apparently I have more patience for our victory to unfold in Iraq than 99.9 percent of Americans. Iraq isn’t fast food-you can’t have what you want and have it now.
...and, just to demonstrate to Sgt Boggs that not all older people share the opinions of the ISG members, here's Victor Davis Hanson.
6:46 PM
The fact that Mr Bolton was not acceptable to the Democratic leadership of the Senate says a great deal about today's Democratic Party.
UPDATE: Following the German anschluss of Austria in 1938, Winston Churchill spoke as follows:
For five years I have talked to the House on these matters--not with any great success. I have watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly, the stairway which leads to a dark gulf. It is a fine broad stairway at the beginning, but after a bit the carpet ends. A little farther on there are only flagstones, and a little farther on these break beneath your feet.
In our own time, the ouster of John Bolton marks a movement of a considerable distance down the stairway. And the further down we go, the greater will be the human costs of retracing our steps.
Lindsay Smith, a screenwriter, was unhappy about the fate of the ficus trees in her neighborhood--city crews were cutting them down in order to keep the roots from destroying adjacent sidewalks. She managed to get a 48-hour reprieve for the surviving trees, and went in search of a new kind of sidewalk material--one that could more easily coexist with trees and their roots.
She's now CEO of Rubbersidewalks Inc, which installs footpaths made of recycled tires. These sidewalks can be placed closer to trees without problems--also, they avoid accidents involving people who trip over broken concrete, and save money by reducing the need for root pruning, concrete repair, and easements. Overall economics will depend on how durable the Rubbersidewalks turn out to be--Smith says they should last at least seven years.
She started the business by combining a grant from a California govenment agency with money borrowed against her credit cards, and then obtained a $100K investment from an angel investor.
The full story is at BusinessWeek (12/11 issue, subscription required)
"Protesters" attempted to disrupt an event at Michigan State University which featured Congressman Tom Tancredo. The chairman of an organization co-sponsoring the event, Kyle Bristow, said he was kicked and spat upon by some of the protesters. This happened outside the MSU College of Law, where the discussion was being held. (more here)
This is not protest--this is thuggery. And this kind of violent interference with the free speech of others is all too common among "progressives." Consider, for example, the events at Columbia University on October 4, and this story from last year's Liberty Film Festival. And this, in Washington DC.
The use of violence to suppress political speech is not limited to the university, but it seems to be most common there--indeed, I suspect that many "progressives" learn this form of political behavior during their college years, and then take it out with them into the wider society.
Writing about an experience at Berkeley, Laurie Zoloth wrote, "This is the Weimar republic with Brownshirts it cannot control."
The American people need to stand up and insist on a respect for law and free speech on the nation's campuses. It's become pretty clear that--in the absence of strong external pressure--most administrators aren't going to make much of an effort in that direction.
The Antikythera Mechanism is a 2000-year-old device, somewhat resembling a clock, found in 1902 by sponge divers in the waters off a Greek island. It has long been believed that it was a form of analog computer, used for astronomical calculations, but its precise operating mechanism was not well-understood. I remember seeing this device quite a few years ago in the National Archaelogical Museum of Athens.
Recent research has used 3-D x-ray imaging to reconstruct the workings of the device's mechanism, and surface imaging to recover the inscriptions on the dials. The inscriptions also indicate that the device was built sometime between 150 BC and 100 BC. It can calculate the positions of the sun, Moon, Mercury and Venus for any chosen date, and can apparently also do the same for Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.
The device in its original form contained 37 gears, all made of bronze and cut by hand. Differential gears were used: although these are best known for their application in driving the rear wheels of cars, they can also add and subtract shaft angles, and this is apparently how they were used in the Antikythera Mechanism.
The research team hopes to eventually create a working replica of the device.
Sunday, November 26, 2006 ONLINE GROCERIES: THEN AND NOW
The New York Times has a piece about the success of a NYC-area online grocer, FreshDirect, which contrasts with the failure of a well-publicized and well-funded venture in the same field: Webvan, founded in the late 1990s, managed to destroy about $1.2 billion in investor wealth before disappearing. Also, here is a Forbes article about FreshDirect. (Even for FreshDirect, the term "success" must be qualified--the company has grown to revenues of $20MM/yr, but is not yet turning a profit. Based on these two articles, though, the outlook appears positive.)
The people running Webvan bought into the "get big fast" mantra which was popular at the time, and put a lot of money into huge distribution facilties, equipped with automated materials-handling equipment and located in multiple cities. FreshDirect, in contrast, focused initially on a single geographical market. They focused less on providing their distribution center with lavish equipment and more understanding and optimizing the details of the logistics process.
The Webvan/FreshDirect comparison provides additional evidence for some of the points made by Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor in their book, The Innovator's Solution. From my review of this book:
In a venture dedicated to the introduction of a disruptive technology--whether a start-up business or a division of a larger company--early profitability is more important than early rapid growth. This goes directly against the popular "get-big fast-you-can-worry-about-profitability-later" mantra, but Christenson and Raynor make good arguments for their position. "Competing against nonconsumption and moving disruptively up-market are critical elements of a successful new-growth strategy--and yet by definition, these disruptive markets are going to be small for a time." Venture managements which are on the hook for unreasonable early growth targets are likely to launch doomed frontal attacks on entrenched competitors in existing, large markets, rather than patiently growing new markets in which they have the edge.
(Although FreshDirect is not yet making a profit, it appears to be a lot closer to the break-even point than Webvan ever came.)
A couple of other things I thought were interesting in the FreshDirect stories:
(1)From the NYT article: (FreshDirect) has already become something of a cult in New York, thanks to produce, fish and meats that put most supermarkets to shame, usually at lower prices. A handful of new apartment buildings have installed refrigerators in their lobbies, built to FreshDirect specifications, to lure residents who want their groceries delivered during the day. Real estate agents selling home buyers on up-and-coming neighborhoods like Inwood have taken to emphasizing that FreshDirect delivers there. When a friend of mine saw a delivery man walking on her Brooklyn street, she chased him down to confirm that, indeed, the company had begun delivering to her part of Park Slope.
This points out the extreme importance of geography in businesses like on-line groceries. Areas with a high concentration of apartment buildings may well be more attractive, due to the refrigerator-in-the-lobby option as well as the higher population density.
(2)Also from the NYT article: FreshDirect’s executives will try hard to convince you that their business isn’t really about convenience. Besides selling good food, the business is about helping people shop in ways they never could in an actual store. It’s about the Web as an information sorter.
When you’re looking at, say, crackers, you can sort them by price, by the amount of saturated fat per serving or by any number of other things. In recent months, the company has also loaded hundreds of recipes from some wonderful cookbooks onto its site. You can now click on one of the recipes and quickly order all the ingredients.
It strikes me that as consumer packaged goods companies continue to obsessively break their product lines down into smaller and smaller segments--33 different variants of just about anything you can name--the value of "the Web as an information sorter" will increase. Certainly, the aisle of a supermarket is not an ideal place to figure out what the differences among those 33 variants really are and which one you want.
It will be interesting to see how the FreshDirect story unfolds, particularly when they venture beyond the NY area into new territories.
Friday, November 24, 2006 CHINA IS PUSHING METHANOL
...as a motor fuel. Financial Times (11/24) reports that the Chinese government has established a national standard for methanol fuel, and that local companies are building plants for production of this fuel from coal. Plants now in the pipeline are said to have a capacity equivalent to about 20% of China's present oil consumption, which means that these plants will be able to produce around 10% of the oil used by the time the plants come on-line in 2011-2013. (Chinese oil demand is expected to double over this timeframe.) Shaanxi province, which is a major producer of coal, is making a particular effort to promote methanol as a fuel: if your car runs on pure methanol, then a sticker gets you free passage on the province's toll roads.
China is also producting large amounts of ethanol, but many people there are concerned that production of ethanol from corn will reduce China's ability to achieve "food security."
More about methanol here. Ethanol, methanol, and butanol are all forms of alcohol: see my post The Butanol Alternative for discussion of the latter.
Thursday, November 23, 2006 THANKSGIVING AND TEMPORAL BIGOTRY (rerun--originally posted 11/27/03)
Stuart Buck encountered a teacher who said "Kids learn so much these days. Did you know that today a schoolchild learns more between the freshman and senior years of high school than our grandparents learned in their entire lives?" ("She said this as if she had read it in some authoritative source", Stuart comments.)
She probably had read it in some supposedly-authoritative source, but it's an idiotic statement nevertheless. What, precisely, is this wonderful knowledge that high-school seniors have today and which the 40-year-olds of 1840 or 1900 were lacking?
The example of knowledge that people usually throw out is "computers." But the truth is, to be a casual user of computers (I'm not talking about programming and systems design), you don't need much knowledge. You need "keyboarding skills"--once called "typing." And you need to know some simple conventions as to how the operating system expects you to interact with it. That's about it. Not much informational or conceptual depth there.
Consider the knowledge possessed by by the Captain of a sailing merchant ship, circa 1840. He had to understand celestial navigation: this meant he had to understand trigonometry and logarithms. He had to possess the knowledge--mostly "tacit knowledge," rather than book-learning--of how to handle his ship in various winds and weathers. He might well be responsible for making deals concerning cargo in various ports, and hence had to have a reasonable understanding of business and of trade conditions. He had to have some knowledge of maritime law.
Outside of the strictly professional sphere, his knowedge probably depended on his family background. If he came from a family that was reasonably well-off, he probably knew several of Shakespeare's plays. He probably had a smattering of Latin and even Greek. Of how many high-school (or college) seniors can these statements be made today?
(In his post, Stuart compares knowledge levels using his grandfather--a farmer--as an example.)
Today's "progressives," particularly those in the educational field, seem to have a deep desire to put down previous generations, and to assume we have nothing to learn from them. It's a form of temporal bigotry, and is the direct opposite of the spirit of appreciation upon which we should be focusing particularly at Thanksgiving.
As C S Lewis said: If you want to destroy an infantry unit, you cut it off from its neighboring units. If you want to destroy a generation, you cut it off from previous generations. (Approximate quote.)
How better to conduct such destruction than to tell people that previous generations were ignorant and that we have nothing to learn from them?
10:04 AM
WORTHWHILE VIEWING
The History Channel is running Desperate Crossing: The Untold Story of the Mayflower tonight at 8PM/7c. I saw it when they ran it a couple of days ago, and it's pretty well done.
Sunday, November 19, 2006 EXPORTS--STRONGER THAN YOU MIGHT IMAGINE
Despite all the concern about the balance of trade and the increased dependence on imports, US exports are up 15.8% from a year ago. Real exports of goods grew 1.3% from August to September, and 15.7% from a year ago--the fastest annual growth rate in nine years. This from BusinessWeek. (11/27)
How is it possible for exports to be growing this fast and the trade deficit to simultaneously be worsening? Clearly, imports are growing even faster. A higher proportion of U.S. production is being exported instead of being consumed domestically--18% today as compared with 12% in 1990. The U.S. economy is becoming even less of an autarky than it has traditionally been--and this means not just more imports, but more exports as well. So, when you buy a consumer product that is labelled "Made in China," bear in mind that the airplane on which the product was shipped to the U.S. was likely "Made in the USA"--and the same is likely true of much of the production equipment with which the product was built.
What industries and products are driving the growth in exports? I took a look at this data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and pulled out a few highlights. Year-to-date export growth (versus 2005 year-to-date) by major category is:
Foods, Feeds, and Beverages $5.4B Industrial Supplies and Materials $30.1B Capital Goods, except Automotive $40.1B Automotive Vehicles, Parts, and Engines $8.0B Consumer Goods $9.9B
Some subcategories that stand out within the "Capital Goods" category are:
Civilian Aircraft $8.2B ...parts & engines are another 2.1B, for a total of $10.3B
Industrial Machinery, other $3.8B ...metalworking machine tools are another $1.4B, for a total of $5.2B
Electric Apparatus $3.4B
Semiconductors $5.2B
Within the other categories, some interesting items are:
Corn $1.6B
Plastics $1.9B ...the related category of Chemicals--organic is $2.2B, for a total of $4.1B
Pharmaceutical preparations $2.1B
Again, these amounts are year-to-year changes, not absolute values of exports. (The 2006 Jan-Sep absolute value for "electric apparatus," for example, is $22.2B.)
Who is buying these exports? The BusinessWeek article gives growth rates broken down geographically, as follows:
Canada 9.4% Mexico 9.9% Europe 20.7% Pacific Rim 15.2% Latin America 25.7%
James C Cooper, author of the BW article, thinks that the strength in exports may help to offset the housing recession.
Saturday, November 18, 2006 BOLTON, THE UNITED NATIONS, AND THE DEMOCRATS
On July 15--the same day that Palestinian rockets fired from Northern Gaza killed one Israeli civilian and seriously injured two others--the UN Human Rights Council met in special session today to condemn Israel—the only country the body has censured during its five-month existence. The pretext for slamming Israel this time was the tragic deaths of 19 in the Gaza town of Beit Hanoun, which resulted from errant Israeli artillery fire as the Jewish state sought to defend itself against the Kassam rocket attacks. Bangladesh said Israel was guilty of "crimes against humanity." Cuba, which currently chairs the Non-Aligned Movement, said that Israel is perpetrating a "true genocide" against the Palestinian people. Sudan accused Israel of "monstrous" actions.
Following the condemnation, US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton gave his reactions to a reporter:
Well, you have to ask yourself, looking at the Human Rights Council in Geneva, for example, which meets for the third time today to pass a resolution on Israel, having found itself unable to -- in its busy schedule to deal with Burma or North Korea or the Sudan, how much legitimacy the council or these resolutions have to begin with.
So there's a real problem with the UN human rights machinery. We said there was a problem. It's the reason we opposed the establishment of this Human Rights Council. And nothing has happened since the creation of the council to change our view on it.
Bolton also pointed out that countries that are themselves "gross abusers of human rights" have been allowed to participate as voting members in the Human Rights Council, despite US opposition.
And on September 18, the full General Assembly passed a resolution which was clearly directed against Israel. Israeli Ambassador Dan Gillerman stormed out of the session after telling members, "I caution everyone who will support this resolution. By doing so, you will be an accomplice to terror. The blood of more innocents will be on your hands." Once again, John Bolton said what needed to be said:
Many of the sponsors of that resolution are notorious abusers of human rights themselves, and were seeking to deflect criticism of their own policies...This type of resolution serves only to exacerbate tensions by serving the interests of elements hostile to Israel's inalienable and recognized right to exist...In a larger sense, the United Nations must confront a more significant question, that of its relevance and utility in confronting the challenges of the 21st century. We believe that the United Nations is ill served when its members seek to transform the organization into a forum that is a little more than a self-serving and a polemical attack against Israel or the United States.
The newly-empowered Democrats, of course, want to take John Bolton out of his job. Democrat Joe Biden, the incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, went so far as to say he saw "no point in considering Mr. Bolton's nomination again."
Read here about the guy that many Democrats--and some Republicans--would like to see as Bolton's replacement.
Taking Bolton out of his job at this time would send a terrible message. It would signal lack of resolution in the face of terror and an unwillingness to stand up to the posturing of hypocritical dictatorships. Weakness of this type would certainly result in increased bloodshed throughout the world.
Check out Blogging for Bolton. Call your Senators--phone numbers are at the link--and let them know you support John Bolton's continuation in office. Many lives may depend on it.
An Israeli company has developed a process which they claim can produce oil from shale at $17/barrel. I wouldn't place too much confidence in the precision of production-cost numbers at this early stage in the game; still, even if they're off by 2:1 this would be very significant.
Meanwhile, in the US, three companies have been given the go-ahead for experimental shale projects in western Colorado. I don't know whether any of them have yet had discussions with the Israeli company about its new conversion process.
On CNN Headline News tonight, Glenn Beck has a program called Exposed: The Extremist Agenda. It's particularly focused on the Iranian regime and the vast differences between the way it portrays itself to the outside world--and the messages that it sends to its own people. The 7PM (ET) show is on now; it will rerun at 9PM ET and at midnight.
There's been tremendous discussion (and hype) regarding ethanol as a motor fuel. Significant amounts of this fuel are being produced, and significant government subsidies are in place to encourage such production.
Some experts have argued that butanol, another form of alcohol, would be a better biofuel. DuPont and BP evidently think this argument has merit: they have in place a joint venture for biofuels, and have announced that it will begin butanol production, on a limited scale, in 2007. Advantages of butanol over ethanol include:
(1) Higher energy density, so that a vehicle can go more miles on a single tank of fuel (2) Unlike ethanol, butanol can be transported by pipeline. (Because of its affinity for water, of which small amounts can get into pipelines, ethanol needs to go by barge, rail, or truck.) 3) Butanol improves blend flexibility--it can be mixed with gasoline in higher proportions without requiring major engine modifications
DuPont and BP aren't the only butanol players; here's a another company which is focused on butanol fuels and has a patented production process.
It's not totally clear how the energy balance of butanol compares with that of ethanol--here's an Iowa State professor who thinks it will be even worse than ethanol. On this other hand, this guy has spent 6 years working on butanol production processes, and he thinks the butanol production should require significantly less energy than does ethanol. I'm thinking that DuPont/BP would be unlikely to be pursuing this particular fuel unless that they were convinced that the energy balance could be made at least as favorable as ethanol.
One negative of butanol is that its octane number is lower than that of ethanol.
If you haven't already contributed to Project Valour-IT, this would be a good time to consider doing so. It's a project to provide voice-activated laptops for soldiers who, due to hand injuries or other reasons, are unable to use standard keyboards. Information at the above link; you can contribute here.
If you haven't already contributed to Project Valour-IT, this would be a good time to consider doing so. It's a project to provide voice-activated laptops for soldiers who, due to hand injuries or other reasons, are unable to use standard keyboards. Information at the above link; you can contribute here.
Thursday, November 09, 2006 POST-ELECTION THOUGHTS
It will probably be a few days before I get my thoughts together for a substantial post. But for now: what scares me most about the Democratic victory is that the leadership of this party does not seem to understand that the threats we face are existential in nature--that devastating harm to this country, and to civilization itself, are well within the realm of possibility--and still less does the Democratic leadership understand the nature of those who oppose us.
Ralph Peters: One of the most consistently disheartening experiences an adult can have today is to listen to the endless attempts by our intellectuals and intelligence professionals to explain religious terrorism in clinical terms, assigning rational motives to men who have moved irrevocably beyond reason. We suffer under layers of intellectual asymmetries that hinder us from an intuititive recognition of our enemies.
I doubt if anyone has ever called Nancy Pelosi an intellectual, but there is no doubt that she and other Democratic leaders are strongly influenced by the attitudes that Peters describes.
There are, of course, many precedents for failure to comprehend the nature of the enemy. Here's one that I think is relevant:
Paul Reynaud--who became Prime Minister of France just two months before the German invasion of 1940--incisively explained what was at stake at that point in time, and why it was so much greater than what had been at stake in 1914:
People think Hitler is like Kaiser Wilhelm. The old gentleman only wanted to take Alsace-Lorraine from us. But Hitler is Genghis Khan. (approximate quote)
If more Frenchmen (and other Europeans, and Americans) had seen what Reynaud saw--and seen it early enough--the odds of avoiding the full horrors of WWII and of the Holocaust would have been greatly improved. Too many people preferred to believe that the man couldn't be as crazy and evil as he sounded.
Monday, November 06, 2006 IF YOU LIKE YOUR LOCAL DEMOCRATIC CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATE
...then bear this in mind: Even if your local candidate is a moderate and a good guy, a vote for a Democrat still means putting people like Pelosi, Hastings, and Kucinich in positions of power.
Nancy Pelosi: Could become Speaker of the House. Pelosi has opposed ballistic missile defense, a position that isn't very intelligent in the light of the happenings in Iran and North Korea. And she has indicated that she will not name Jane Harmon, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, as its Chairman...which means the position would likely go to the next Democrat in line...
Alcee Hastins: In 1989, after being acquitted in a criminal trial, Hastings was stripped of his position as a federal judge -- impeached by the House in which he now serves, and convicted by the Senate -- for conspiring to extort a $150,000 bribe in a case before him, repeatedly lying about it under oath and manufacturing evidence at his trial. Is it even sane to contemplate someone like this chairing an intelligence committee during time of danger?
Demmis Kucinich: Potentially Chairman of the Subcommittee on national security. Kucinich refused to condemn Hezbollah terrorists, calling instead for us to have a "recognition that connects us to a common humanity and from that draw a flicker of hope to enkindle the warm glow of peace." Right.
There are also plenty of Democrats with dangerous views who, although not slated for Congressional office, would undoubtedly gain in influence given a Democrat-controlled Congress. Formed Democratic Presidential candidate Wesley Clark, for example, called U.S. support for Israel in the recent air campaign against Hezbollah a serious mistake. And Jimmy Carter is coming out with a new book, titled Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, which accuses Israel of conducting an apartheid policy and moreover says that "Because of powerful political, economic, and religious forces in the United States, Israeli government decisions are rarely questioned or condemned."
Dangerous times call for adult leadership. Pelosi, Hastings, Kucinich, Clark, and Carter aren't it. Whatever you may like about your local Democratic candidate, ask yourself if his good points are really worth the risk to our civilization that would flow from giving vastly increased power to such people.
Orson Scott Card, a Democrat, is going to be voting for Republican candidates on Tuesday.
To all intents and purposes, when the Democratic Party jettisoned Joseph Lieberman over the issue of his support of this war, they kicked me out as well.
A thoughtful and fairly long piece, which definitely deserves to be read.
About 6 months ago, I wrote about the situation at Gallaudet University, nation's preeminent college for deaf and hearing-disabled students--many students and faculty members were opposing the selection of Jane Fernandes as President, one of the main reasons being the allegation that she was "not deaf enough." (Although she was born severely hearing-impaired, she is able to speak and didn't learn American Sign Language until she was 23. She also has a husband and children who have no hearing problems.) Things got nasty enough for the chairwoman of the board of trustees to resign, citing "aggressive threats" against her.
Dr Martin Luther King wanted people to be judged by "the content of their characters." It sounds to me like the dominant forces at Gallaudet were less interested in the content of of Fernandes's character than in the mechanics of her auditory facilities.
For decades now, "progressives" have focused on defining people primarily as members of groups, rather than as individuals, and on creating and deepening fault lines across groups. In the way Dr Fernandes was treated, we see the end result of this process.
If you like this kind of thing, be sure and vote for Democratic candidates--that will help ensure lots more of the same.
From the hag and hungry goblin That into rags would rend ye And the spirits that stand By the naked man In the Book of Moons, defend ye!
That of your five sound sense You never be forsaken Nor wander from Yourself with Tom Abroad to beg your bacon
The moon's my constant mistress And the lonely owl my marrow The flaming drake And the night-crow make Me music to my sorrow
I know more than Apollo For oft, when he lies sleeping I see the stars At mortal wars And the rounded welkin weeping
With a host of furious fancies Whereof I am commander With a burning spear And a horse of air To the wilderness I wander
By a knight of ghosts and shadows I summoned am to tourney Ten leagues beyond The wide world's end Methinks it is no journey
(Not specifically a Halloween poem, but it certainly sets the mood, doesn't it? This is Tom O'Bedlam's Song, dating from sometime around 1600. There are lots more verses, and many different versions.)
Sunday, October 29, 2006 INTERESTING ENGINE TECHNOLOGY
Three MIT researchers have developed an approach which they believe could reduce the fuel consumption of gasoline engines by 30%, while simultaneously reducing the size of the engines.
The idea is to aggressively turbocharge the engine and run it at a very high compression ratio, while using carefully-timed ethanol injection to suppress the knock which would otherwise occur under these operating conditions. The ethanol acts in two ways: it has inherent anti-knock properties, and it exercises a cooling effect on the mixture as it vaporizes. Only a relatively small amount of ethanol would be used: about 1 gallon for each 20 gallons of gasoline. The engines would be somewhat more expensive than today's equivalent gasoline engines, but less so than hybrids, and the researchers estimate the payback at only 2 years.
In large piston engines for aircraft, such as those used in WWII, water injection was used at takeoff to suppress knock and to allow the engines to run at a higher power than they would have otherwise been able to. If I'm not mistaken, ethanol injection is sometimes used in racing cars. I'm guessing that the MIT technology differs principally in the methodology used for control of the injection timing.
The ethanol boost technology can be viewed as a way to improve the energy balance of ethanol: when ethanol is used directly as a fuel, its energy input/output ratio (energy available from the ethanol divided by energy used to produce it) has been estimated at 1.67, whereas ethanol used in an ethanol-boost engine would improve the combustion efficiency of the gasoline, as well as yielding its own energy, for an estimated effective ratio of 7.5. (I should note that the 1.67 ratio is at the optimistic end of the ethanol debate.)
Ethanol Boosting Systems, LLC is the company that the MIT researchers have formed to develop and commercialize this idea. They've also been working with Ford.
If the engine size for a particular output is reduced by half, I wonder what happens to the weight? I doubt if it goes down in the same proportion--parts need to be strengthened for the higher compression ratio--but I'd guess it's still substantially reduced. If this is indeed the case, I'd think that the technology would also hold promise for light-airplane and helicopter engines.
I'd be curious to know the degree to which the numbers on this technology are based on running actual engines on test stands, versus pure computer modelling.
Javier Solana, foreigh policy chief of the European Union, said that Hamas wants to "liberate the Palestinians," not to destroy Israel.
In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, Solana insisted that it was "not impossible" for Hamas to change and "recognize the existence of Israel." History had shown that people and nations "adapt to reality," he said. "I don't want to lose hope." Pressed as to whether he was underestimating the fundamentalist religious imperative at the heart of the Hamas ideology, Solana said, "I cannot imagine that the religious imperative, the real religious imperative, can make anybody destroy another country... Therefore that is an abuse of religion..."I don't think the essence of Hamas is the destruction of Israel. The essence of Hamas is the liberation of the Palestinians," he added. "The liberation of their people, not the destruction of Israel."
Unbelievably, Solana says he considers himself as "a good friend of Israel."
LGF has excerpted the Hamas Charter--see for yourself just how disconnected Solana is from reality.
Is Solana not familiar with the history of the 20th century, especially the 20th century in Europe? Does he really not understand that people have used religion--and nationalism, and economic theory, and just about anything else you can name--as excuses for killing people in large numbers? His position seems to me to be an especially malign form of wilful stupidity: apparently, he's willing to put the lives of Israelis at risk in order to avoid losing his especially naive form of "hope."
When Democrats state that American foreign policy should be more submissive toward "international opinion"--it's the opinions of people like Solana that they have in mind.
Wednesday, October 25, 2006 THE OPPOSITE OF A DIXIE CHICK
...looks and sounds like this:
Beccy Cole is an Australian singer who has been criticized for her support of Australian troops serving in Iraq. This song is a response to her critics.
Tuesday, October 24, 2006 FRANKLY, MY DEAR, I DO NEED A DAM
Roll on, Columbia, roll on Roll on, Columbia, roll on Your power is turning our darkness to dawn So roll on, Columbia, roll on
--Woody Guthrie (1941)
Companies that run large server farms--like Google, Microsoft, and Ask.com--are finding the cost of electricity to be such a significant economic factor that the local price of power is becoming a major factor in decisions about where to put these facilities. Google, for example, is building a 30-acre facility in The Dalles, Oregon--although the site no doubt has many attractions, one of the most important is clearly The Dalles Dam, an 1800 megawatt plant located on the Columbia River. Microsoft and Yahoo are also building data centers to take advantage of the cheap power generated by the Columbia.
George Gilder has an interesting article on power consumption by large server farms; there's also a discussion at Rich Karlgaard's blog. The proposition is that computer power and communications will continue to decline in unit cost, meaning that electricity cost will become ever more important in relative terms. Gilder also has thoughts on "core" versus "edge" computing.
I've noticed that articles on electrical energy sources almost never include hydropower under the "renewables" category, preferring to restrict this term to things like wind and solar. This suggests that the perception of "renewability" is as much a construct of the political fashions of the moment as a matter of science and economics. Certainly, the lefties of Woody Guthrie's time loved hydropower; now, lots of them would like to tear the dams down.
Monday, October 23, 2006 SPEAKING OF THE MISUSE OF LANGUAGE...
At many schools, 6-year-olds don't compare books anymore -- they make "text-to-text connections." Misbehaving students face not detention but the "alternative instruction room," or "reinforcement room," or "reflection room." Children who once read now practice "SSR," or "sustained silent reading."
And in Maryland, high schoolers write "extended constructed responses" -- the essay, in a simpler time.
The above is from a Washington Post article--Talking the Edutalk. Here's more dreariness from the educational-language front:
A second-grade teacher announces "modeling efficient subtraction strategies" as the task of the day, while "selected response" has taken the place of "multiple choice."
and
At Laytonsville Elementary School in Gaithersburg, a bulletin board that might have once announced "Our Students' Work" instead says, "Evidence of Student Learning." One recent morning, first-graders were told after a math exercise, "That was a good warm-up for showing our enduring understanding that a number represents a quantity." A teacher told fifth-graders doing a social studies activity, "You will have a formative assessment when this is over."
This tidal wave of jargon reminds me of a passage in The Jaws of Victory, by Charles Fair, a study of military incompetence through the ages.
The root of their difficulty was not, as in Ye Olden Time, simple ignorance, but the sort of university-trained doctrainaire backwardness which seems to result when men with no natural aptitude for ideas are nevertheless obliged to stuff their heads with them.
He’s talking about World War I generals and why so many of them were so appallingly bad--but I think his analysis also applies to many of today’s “educators” and "educational experts."
(See post immediately below this one for more thoughts on the misuse of language.)
Sunday, October 22, 2006 LIGHTHOUSE TECHNOLOGY FOR SOLAR POWER
Sharp Electronics, a major manufacturer of solar cells, is showing off some new product concepts. One of these uses a Fresnel lens to concentrate light on an underlying solar cell made of an exotic material such as gallium arsenide. (Fresnel lenses were originally developed for use in lighthouses.) The idea is that the lens is relatively large (a few inches across in the prototype) but made of inexpensive materials, while the solar cell itself is made of expensive materials, but kept small (1/4 inch on a side). Light is concentrated "as if 700 suns are pointing at the solar cell," in the words of Ron Kenedi, who runs Sharp's solar group. The overall conversion efficiency of the system is said to be significantly higher than today's silicon-based systems. This particular product is intended for large power plants, not for individual homes. The individual cell assemblies are to be mounted in arrays about 12 by 16 feet, rotating with the sun for maximum efficiency and generating about 2.9 kilowatts per panel.
Sharp is also talking up several other prospective solar products, one of these made of a material which is almost transparent, so that it could potentially be used in windows.
Four young officers of Britain's Household Cavalry regiment returned from Afghanistan and decided to rent a house in a picturesque area and just relax for a while.
Thursday, October 19, 2006 TERRORISTS, ISRAEL, AND DEMOCRATS
In a recent speech, former Democratic Presidential candidate Wesley Clark referred to US support for Israel in the recent air campaign against Hizballah a "serious mistake."
As Charles says, the real mistake would have been if Clark had been elected President.
It's increasingly obvious that the Democratic Party, taken as a whole, is very much an anti-Israel institution. Anyone who values Israel's continued existence, but votes for Democratic candidates, is letting themselves be played for a sucker.
Tuesday, October 17, 2006 CARNIVAL TIME: BEST BUSINESS POSTS
In honor of the third anniversary of the Carnival of the Capitalists, Rob and Jay asked participants to submit their best posts from prior carnivals, to be rerun for today's edition. Here is is. Here are the results. In choosing my own submission, I went through a lot of my old business posts and thought I might as well organize them a bit. Here are some of the ones I thought were most worthwhile, grouped by subject.
Monday, October 16, 2006 MISSILES, BOMBS, AND DEMOCRATS, CTD
John Kerry, speaking at a fund raiser, rejected the idea that North Korea's nuclear capability might have something to do with Clinton administration policy:
That is a lie. North Korea's nuclear program was frozen under Bill Clinton. When George W. Bush turned his back on diplomacy, Kim Jong Il turned back to making bombs, and the world is less safe because a madman has the Bush bomb."
Strong as An Ox looks at Kerry's claim through the lens of history.
"The Bush bomb?" That makes about as much sense as referring to the V-2 rockets that struck London during WWII as "the Roosevelt rockets." This is politics by catch-phrase rather than by coherent thought.
It seems impossible for leading Democrats to understand that bad things can happen in the world that weren't caused by Americans (or Israelis). We can't afford this kind of "leadership" at this dangerous point in history.
Saturday, October 14, 2006 GOON SQUAD: THE DAWNING AGE OF THE THUG?
At Columbia University, on Oct 4, left-wing students distrupted a speech hosted by the College Republicans. Angry students stormed the stage, shouting and knocking over chairs and tables and succeeding in their intent to prevent Jim Gilchrist (founder of the anti-illegal-immigration group known as the Minuteman) from delivering his talk. Columbia Public Safety did nothing to prevent the disruption. (Story and video here, see also this) Afterwards:
Christopher Kulawik, the College Republican president, told The New York Sun he was berated afterward by Columbia University administrators for allowing the speakers to say anything that would infuriate the crowd. If this is correct, it is a pretty clear sign that Columbia administrators have caved in to the "thug's veto."
A week later, Columbia administrators interfered with another event planned by the College Republicans. The scheduled speaker was Walid Shoebat, a former PLO terrorist who saw the error of his ways and is now a supporter of Israel and the U.S. Just 3 hours before the event was to take place, a Columbia administrator sent an e-mail uninviting many of those who had already RSVP'd for the event--some of whom were already in transit. Apparently, Columbia was afraid of a repetition of the earlier disruption, and preferred to deny legitimate attendees their right to hear Mr Shoebat speak, rather than to take effective action against thuggishness by beefing up security and expelling disrupters.
Thuggish behavior, and the toleration thereof, is of course nothing new at American universities. For example, here's a report from 2002 about an incident at San Francisco State University:
Yesterday's Peace In The Middle East Rally was completely organized by the Hillel students, mostly 18 and 19 years old. They spoke about their lives at SFSU and of their support for Israel, and they sang of peace...As soon as the community supporters left, the 50 students who remained praying in a minyan for the traditional afternoon prayers, or chatting, or cleaning up after the rally, talking — were surrounded by a large, angry crowd of Palestinians and their supporters.
But they were not calling for peace. They screamed at us to "go back to Russia" and they screamed that they would kill us all, and other terrible things. They surrounded the praying students, and the elderly women who are our elder college participants, who survived the Shoah, who helped shape the Bay Area peace movement, only to watch as a threatening crowd shoved the Hillel students against the wall of the plaza...
As the counter demonstrators poured into the plaza, screaming at the Jews to "Get out or we will kill you" and "Hitler did not finish the job," I turned to the police and to every administrator I could find and asked them to remove the counter demonstrators from the Plaza, to maintain the separation of 100 feet that we had been promised.
The police told me that they had been told not to arrest anyone, and that if they did, "it would start a riot." I told them that it already was a riot.
See more examples in intimidation at American and Canadian universities here. Laurie Zoloth, a Jewish leader at Berkeley, summed up the campus situation in these words: This is the Weimar republic with Brownshirts it cannot control.
The growing climate of intimidation is not restricted to universities and their environs. Already in the U.S., we have seen media organizations--magazines, newspapers, a TV network and a major bookstore chain--cave in to intimidation, real or imagined, by Islamic Fascists. How long until people of other political and religious persuasions learn the lesson--"intimidation works"--and begin using smilar tactics? In Europe, of course, some people have already been murdered for their political opinions, and others have had to go into hiding to protect their lives. In several locales in Europe, Jews have been advised to hide their religious identities in public in order to avoid attacks.
One growing source of intimidation is "animal rights activists." Both in Britain and in the United States, scientists and companies involved in medical research have been the targets of violence and threats of violence--sometimes, the intimidation has gone beyond the individuals and companies concerned and has targeted secondary parties, such as banks doing business with a biotech company.
Not all intimidation attempts are politically, religiously, or philosophically motivated. Some Wall Street investment analysts have been the targets of death threats by investors enraged by negative opinions expresssed about particular companies.
Mainstream liberals are always very concerned about threats to free speech on the part of government, and we should of course always be alert to such threats. Too many liberals, though, fail to understand that free speech can also be destroyed by violent intimidation exercised by private parties. The climate of intimidation brought about by Hitler's Brownshirts during the time of the Weimar Republic was effective in suppressing effective action by people of other political persuasions and paving the way for the Nazi takeover of Germany.
Here's an interesting video on a possible path for automotive propulsion and fuel supply. The speaker, Reed Benet, is a graduate student at UC Davis who has previously worked in venture capital. He is advocating a biomass-to-liquid process to produce diesel fuel, along with plug-in hybrids which would combine a diesel engine with batteries and electric motors. He doesn't much like either hydrogen or ethanol. The talk is to a group of Google employees, and questions and answers are included.
I'm dubious about a some of the political/environmental stuff at the beginning, but the overall video, which is about an hour long, is well worth watching.
The United States does not need a multi-billion-dollar national missile defense against the possibility of a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile.
Sounds pretty irresponsible, doesn't it, now that we are facing a not-too-distant future in which North Korea will likely have missiles with nuclear warheads?
Nancy Pelosi is, of course, the individual who stands to become House Majority Leader if the Democrats should take control of Congress. Failure to comprehend the threat from regimes like that in North Korea is common among the Democratic leadership, past and present. In 1994, Jimmy Carter referred to Kim Jong Il as "an intelligent and vigorous man," and of North Korea itself: "I don't see that they are an outlaw nation." (quoted in IBD, 10/10)
THAAD--the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system--is now deployed in Hawaii and is ready for use in shooting down a North Korean missile. The system isn't slated to complete development until 2009, and certainly isn't perfect in its current form, but if you live on the West Coast--and if the madman in Pyongnang gives the launch order, then THAAD has a fighting chance of protecting you, your familiy, and your friends from incineration. If Democrats like Pelosi had their way, THAAD wouldn't exist at all, and there would be no antimissile technology base on which to build.
UPDATE: Bizarrely but not surprisingly, Jimmy Carter apparently thinks he did all the right things with regard to North Korea--and that everything would have been just fine if GWB hadn't said such mean things about the North Korean regime. Sister Toldjah takes his position apart.
Tuesday, October 10, 2006 NORTH KOREA'S BOMB: NUCLEAR OR NOT?
Seismic data indicates that North Korea's test was of a fairly small weapon, equivalent to about 800 tons of TNT. (For comparison, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were in the 15000-20000 ton range.) This has led to some speculation that the NK bomb may have not actually been nuclear, but rather conventional explosives detonated for purposes of deception.
Don Sensing, who was trained as a nuclear target analyst in the U.S. Army, advises against feeling too comfortable with any such conclusion. He thinks the bomb may have been either a fizzle of a large weapon, or a bomb deliberately designed to be small for tactical reasons.
The "UTLA Human Rights Committee" is hosting a meeting for purposes of "launching a local boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign in support of the Palestinian people." The announcement goes on to talk about "Israeli aggression, dispossession and oppression."
UTLA stands for United Teachers of Los Angeles, which is the largest union representing teachers in the LA public schools.
Right on the Left Coast has more information. The UTLA website links to the UTLA Human Rights Committee website, which has a link called Upcoming Events. When I clicked the link, I was directed to something called cafe intifada, which contained the text of the meeting announcement.
I would think Jewish parents in LA would be very uncomfortable in sending their children to a public school system in which teachers have allowed their professional affiliations to be used for in this way. Indeed, I would think that patriotic and rational parents of whatever religious affiliation or non-affiliation would be very concerned about sending their kids to the LA public schools if they were aware of the above activity.
Michelle Malkin has additional information related to the UTLA and the politicization of the public schools.
Sunday, October 01, 2006 MORAL IDIOCY WAS NOT INVENTED YESTERDAY
In a letter to The New York Times Book Review, Laurel Leff says:
In fact, American journalists reporting from Germany in the 1930s worried about providing balance in news stories about German Jews. A 1935 journalism textbook actually used "the Jewish persecution by the German Nazi government" to illustrate the need for "both sides in a controversial matter" to be "given a chance to have their position stated." Balance was necessary, the text explained, because the story is about a struggle "between rival groups, each of which is strong in its own right, and each of which is anxious to get as much propaganda across to newspaper readers as is possible."
Clearly, mindless forms of relativism are much more prevalent in journalism now than they were in the 1930s and 1940s--but it sounds like some of the roots were present in the profession even then.
(Laurel Leff is the author of Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper.}
Friday, September 29, 2006 COLLEGE AND KNOWLEDGE: Is There Any Connection?
According to a recent study, American college students demonstrate a dismal lack of knowledge concerning American history and government, not to mention current affairs.
*28 percent of seniors thought that the American Revolution was ended by the Battle of Gettysburg
*More than 75 percent of college seniors failed to properly identify the purpose of the Monroe Doctrine.
*Fewer than half of all seniors could identify the Baath party as the main source of Saddam Hussein's political support. In fact, 12.2 percent believed that Saddam Hussein found his most reliable supporters in the Communist Party. Bizarrely, more than 5 percent chose Israel!
College administrators will probably defend themselves by pointing out that much of the knowledge covered by the survey has traditionally been taught at the K-12 level. Indeed, the survey should probably be thought as a measurement of the combined effectiveness of K-12 and college education, rather than the effectiveness of college education alone.
Which doesn't let the colleges off the hook. After all, K-12 teachers are trained in colleges. If American university administrators were serious about the importance of learning, they would attempt to do something about the usually-ridiculous schools of "education" within their domains.
UPDATE: See also this interesting article at about "cosmopolitanism," anti-Semitism, globalization, and many other things--at The Brussels Journal. Related: these thoughts from Ralph Peters.
Sunday, September 24, 2006 A WHOLE LOT OF SPINNING: 50 YEARS OF THE MAGNETIC DISK
In September 1956, IBM began customer shipments of the first computer to incorporate a magnetic disk, the IBM 305 RAMAC. The disk/computer combination was about the size of two refrigerators, and weighed around a ton. Total storage capacity of the disk was 5 million characters, or about 3.8 megabytes in modern terms. The active electronic components were vacuum tubes.
IBM's sales pitch for RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control) is that it would allow business transactions to be processed as they occurred, updating multiple files as necessary, rather than be accumulated in large batches with resultant inflexibility and processing delays.
Could anyone have imagined, looking at a RAMAC in 1956, that there would one day be something called a "laptop computer"--and that magnetic disks would become so small and so dense that a laptop could store Social Security information for everyone in the United States (with resultant information-privacy issues)?
Nancy Pelosi: And if [bin Laden] is caught tomorrow, it is five years too late. He has done more damage the longer he has been out there,” she told reporters. “But, in fact, the damage that he has done is done. And even to capture him now I don’t think makes us any safer.
Nancy Pelosi: "I have five children," she said. "Five grandchildren, going on six. And I consider myself the ultimate security mom." By way of clarification, she felt compelled to add: "Democrats are committed to hunting down Osama bin Laden."
Even standing by itself, the first statement makes no sense--why would it have been important to capture bin Laden earlier, but not now? And the combination of the two statements represents an obvious contradiction.
I have to wonder--is there anything at all in Pelosi's head other than catch-phrases and "talking points"?
It is terrifying to consider that, if the Democrats do well in Novemember, this individual might become Speaker of the House.
A large rally was held outside the UN today in support of Israel, the United States, and free people everywhere, and in opposition to the madness represented by Iranian leader Ahmadinejad. Pamela has pictures and commentary.
UPDATE: Meryl observes that there has been very little coverage of this rally by the legacy media, even though the speakers included people such as U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Bolton, Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, New York Gov. George Pataki, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz.
A New York Times article about Cuba (8/6) contains the following paragraph:
With his bushy beard and his booming anti-American rhetoric, Mr. Castro, who turns 80 next Sunday, will linger in the Cuban imagination far into the future as a double image — one, the romantic revolutionary of 1958, promising Cuba equality, prosperity and independence; the other, the prisoner of a half-century of confrontation with the United States that kept Cuba from evolving in a way that could deliver on the promises.
Uh...maybe the factors that "kept Cuba from evolving" might have something to do with the tight central control of the economy, combined with the complete absence of political freedom? Just maybe?
The article also has this sentence: "But the American embargo that followed the rebels' triumph froze Cuba out of any hope of building a future based on trade with the biggest economy in the Americas."
Why, exactly, would Cuba's future have needed to be based on trade with the United States? Cuba is an island--it has no road or rail connections to the U.S. Everything that Cuba exports or imports has to go by ship or airplane, in any event. Had the Cuban society and economy been freer and more rationally-managed, then Cuba could have done fine economically, even given the U.S. embargo, with other trading partners. China, for example, has developed a very large trade with the U.S.--and China is a lot further from the U.S. than Cuba is from Europe and from other Latin American countries.
Decade after decade of Marxist economic failures in all parts of the world, and it's still difficult for some people to look at reality.
