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PHOTON COURIER
Saturday, December 31, 2011 HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Lots of people will be singing Auld Lang Syne tonight. A history of the song is here...note that the Burns version was apparently based in part on a much earlier ballad by James Watson. The lyrics of the Watson version (published in 1701) are here.
Thanks for reading Photon Courier...best wishes to all for 2012.
Friday, December 30, 2011 VERY DANGEROUS LEGISLATION MOVING FORWARD
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, writes:
This week, a bill that would create America's first Internet censorship system is going to a full committee for a vote, and is likely to pass.
He is referring to the "Stop Online Piracy" act and the related "Protect IP" act. Links to information and analysis concerning these bills, for which heavy lobbying activities are underway, here.
This is dangerous stuff, and, as Tim notes, people need to be contacting their CongressCreatures now.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
A wonderful 3-D representation of the Iglesia San Luis De Los Franceses. Just click on the link--then you can look around inside the cathedral. Use arrow keys or mouse to move left/right, up/down, and shift to zoom in, ctrl to zoom out.
Thursday, December 22, 2011 BLACKBIRD AMONG THE STARS
Today marks the 47th anniversary of the first flight of the SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance plane. Which reminds me of this well-written article by an SR-71 pilot, especially the following passage.
One moonless night, while flying a routine training mission over the Pacific, I wondered what the sky would look like from 84,000 feet if the cockpit lighting were dark. While heading home on a straight course, I slowly turned down all of the lighting, reducing the glare and revealing the night sky. Within seconds, I turned the lights back up, fearful that the jet would know and somehow punish me. But my desire to see the sky overruled my caution, I dimmed the lighting again. To my amazement, I saw a bright light outside my window. As my eyes adjusted to the view, I realized that the brilliance was the broad expanse of the Milky Way, now a gleaming stripe across the sky. Where dark spaces in the sky had usually existed, there were now dense clusters of sparkling stars Shooting stars flashed across the canvas every few seconds. It was like a fireworks display with no sound. I knew I had to get my eyes back on the instruments, and reluctantly I brought my attention back inside. To my surprise, with the cockpit lighting still off, I could see every gauge, lit by starlight. In the plane's mirrors, I could see the eerie shine of my gold spacesuit incandescently illuminated in a celestial glow. I stole one last glance out the window. Despite our speed, we seemed still before the heavens, humbled in the radiance of a much greater power. For those few moments, I felt a part of something far more significant than anything we were doing in the plane. The sharp sound of Walt's voice on the radio brought me back to the tasks at hand as I prepared for our descent.
Read the whole thing.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
One huge problem we have in America is that the millions of people who are struggling to start or grow businesses, or go solo through self-employment, have no voice. The people who talk and write — the chattering classes — do that for a living. The people who live off the public teat are often talkers and writers, and thus dominate the conversation. The major business guys are in bed with the government or have a lot to lose, so they lie low. The big middle band of actual and potential self-starters and wealth-creators is inarticulate and it needs someone to speak for it, and to learn to speak for itself.
The regulatory state is structured to punish and thwart solo workers, self employment, small businesses, and start ups. The regulatory state has several missions. Expanding its power is one. Moving resources to its clients is another. Insulating its clients from possible threats — incumbent protection — is another. The very thing which will allow us to dig out of this recession is what our government is structured to prevent.
Monday, December 19, 2011 IATROGENY IN MANAGEMENT REPORTING
In medicine, an iatrogenic disease is one that is brought on by a medical treatment itself. An example would be when a physician treating a minor condition fails to properly wash his hands and as a result gives the patient an infection more serious than the original problem.
It strikes me that iatrogeny also occurs in the management reporting and control systems of businesses and other types of organizations. A particularly awful example was reported in Britain a couple of years ago: hospitals were being measured on time from a patient's entry into the emergency room until the time that patient was seen by a physician. It appears that in quite a few cases, the optimization of that measurement for the hospital was achieved by leaving the patient in the ambulance, in some cases for as much as five hours, so that the clock on the measurement would not start until the criterion was certain to be achieved.
So a measurement intended to improve patient service had the opposite effect. It directly caused unnecessary pain and danger to the individual ER patient who was kept in the ambulance while harming the effective utilization of expensive vehicles and skilled personnel, while at the same time providing upper management with a distorted picture of what was really going on.
Smirk not, fellow capitalists. While this particular example of iatrogeny was perpetrated by a government entity, plenty of examples can also be found in the private sector. Indeed, I saw an interesting example in a Target store just the other day.
Sunday, December 18, 2011 BATTLE OF THE BULGE + 67
A commenter at this Neptunus Lex post reminds us that Friday was the 67th anniversary of the desperate German assault in the Ardennes that began the Battle of the Bulge.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011 MORE THAN A LITTLE WORRISOME
Anyone who values American freedom of speech, and anyone who values American economic vitality, should be worried about the so-called "Stop Internet Piracy Act" which is now being considered by Congress. While Internet-based intellectual property theft is indeed a problem, the proposed remedies seem to me, and to many others, to be quite dangerous. If you're not familiar with this issue, please familiarize yourself with it--and if the bill bothers you, contact your Congressman. Apparently, this bill is going into markup tomorrow (Thursday).
Sunday, December 11, 2011 WIND, WATER, ELECTRICITY, AND BUREAUCRACY
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has ruled against the Bonneville Power Administration, which is itself a creature of the Federal Government. The case provides an interesting microcosm of the difficulties encountered in doing any kind of large-scale productive work in the increasingly rule-driven environment of contemporary America.
BPA's mission is to provide electrical generation and transmission services in the Pacific Northwest. In May-July of this year, the agency suffered from an embarrassment of riches: owing to weather conditions, vast amounts of both water power and wind power were available. Storing large amounts of electricity, though, is not a very practical proposition: in most cases, supply and demand needs to be balanced on an instant-by-instant basis. Hence BPA needed to cut either its hydroelectric generation or its wind generation, the latter of which comes in substantial part from independent businesses which sell their output to the BPA. The only alternative was to engage in "negative pricing"--ie, paying various entities--either customers or other power providers--to take its excess electricity.
The agency did not believe it could legally cut the hydropower generation below a certain level: routing excess water over spillways causes it to pick up nitrogen, which is believed to be harmful to salmon, and hence in BPA's interpretation would be in violation of the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act. What BPA did instead was to tell the the wind operators that during this time period it didn't need or want all of their output--100,000 megawatt-hours of potential generation was turned away. The wind operators, unsurprisingly, filed a complain, and FERC sided with the operators. So next time there is an oversupply situation in the Pacific Northwest, BPA will be paying to give its power away--ultimately resulting, of course, in higher electricity bills for its customers.
Various technical fixes for problems of this kind are being discussed, such as the remote control of water-heater thermostats in homes and businesses (which would allow excess electricity to be stored in the form of heat) and the interconnection of power grids across wider geographies. But basically, operating a power grid reliably and economically is already a difficult problem. Adding substantial amounts of relatively-unpredictable capacity such as wind makes it harder still, and each additional regulatory constraint makes it even more so.
The continuing proliferation of rules, many of them adopted without any deep consideration of their implications, makes increasingly difficult the running of productive activities of any kind.
Jonathan worries that the cultural memory of the event is being lost, and notes that once again Google fails to note the anniversary on their search home page, whereas Microsoft Bing has a picture of the USS Arizona memorial.
Shannon Love analyzes how Admiral Yamamoto was able to pull the attack off and concludes that "Pearl Harbor wasn't a surprise of intent, it was a surprise of capability."
Sunday, December 04, 2011 KNOWLEDGE, STABILITY, AND BLACK SWANS
The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it often subsists after such a change in the conditions as might have been expected to suggest alarm. The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent.
--George Eliot in Silas Marner
I was reminded of the above passage by a couple of recent posts:
Claire Berlinski excerpts some thoughts by Hernando De Soto, asking "Is the knowledge system broken?" Some good discussion in the thread at Claire's post; see especially the concept of a "knowledge bubble" in the comment by Late Boomer. Although I'd say that it's more a matter of an assumed-knowledge bubble.
Richard Fernandez suggests that "too big to fail" really means "wait for it," where "it" means a failure on a very large scale. He cites Nassim Taleb:
Complex systems that have artificially suppressed volatility tend to become extremely fragile, while at the same time exhibiting no visible risks. In fact, they tend to be too calm and exhibit minimal variability as silent risks accumulate beneath the surface. Although the stated intention of political leaders and economic policymakers is to stabilize the system by inhibiting fluctuations, the result tends to be the opposite.
Both of the above are very worthwhile reading. See also my related post penny in the fusebox.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
I try not to pat myself too much on the back, but this administration has done more in terms of the security of the state of Israel than any previous administration.
I think that I'm a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I'll tell you right now that I'm gonna think I'm a better political director than my political director.
Tries not to pat himself on the back too much? The man is in serious danger of breaking his arm from patting himself on the back so much.
The second comment is absolutely bizarre, even taken by itself--anyone who thinks that way is seriously dangerous in any management or leadership position, and should probably not even be allowed to operate power machinery. Put the two comments together and you have an individual whose mind functions in very strange ways indeed.
The assertion about Obama's support of the security of Israel is of course so at variance to reality that it's hard to imagine anyone taking it seriously except members of the hard core of Obamian true believers. Of whom there are unfortunately still quite a few.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
...it may be said that at any time when finance is under attack through the political authority, it is an infallible sign that the political authority is already exercising too much authority over the economic life of the nation through manipulation of finance, whether by exorbitant taxation, uncontrolled expenditure, unlimited borrowing, or currency depreciation.
--Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
Wednesday, November 23, 2011 THANKSGIVING AND TEMPORAL BIGOTRY
(Basically a run of an earlier post)
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. Indeed, Thanksgiving is a good time to resist temporal bigotry by reflecting on the contributions of earlier generations and on what we can learn from their experiences.
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?
(Last year I cross-posted the above at Chicago Boyz, where it resulted in an interesting discussion thread)
...from Bill Waddell, who is in fine form. The brickbats are for Whirlpool, specifically their approach to manufacturing:
Inventory doesn't turn at Whirlpool because their flow is a non-issue. Instead, their 'assets' meander from China in slow boats and ooze through their factories like so much primordial sludge.
...and the congressional Gang of Six, especially their lack of private-sector experience.. The roses are for the application of Lean methods to a Thanksgiving food drive by a guy from Toyota.
Sunday, November 20, 2011 DRUCKER ON EDUCATION, 1969
About a week ago Instapundit linked this Wikipedia article about the higher-education bubble, noting especially the point that William Bennett predicted the bubble back in 1987. The post reminded me of some interesting and rather prescient comments that Peter Drucker made about education even earlier, in his 1969 book The Age of Discontinuity. A few excerpts:
Resources and expectations:
Education has become by far the largest community expenditure in the American economy...Teachers of all kinds, now the largest single occupational group in the American labor force, outnumber by a good margin steelworkers, teamsters and salespeople, indeed even farmers...Education has become the key to opportunity and advancement all over the modern world, replacing birth, wealth, and perhaps even talent. Education has become the first value choice of modern man.
This is success such as no schoolmaster through the ages would have dared dream of...Signs abound that all is not well with education. While expenditures have been skyrocketing--and will keep on going up--the taxpayers are getting visibly restless.
Credentials and social mobility:
The most serious impact of the long years of schooling is, however, the "diploma curtain" between those with degrees and those without. It threatens to cut society in two for the first time in American history...By denying opportunity to those without higher education, we are denying access to contribution and performance to a large number of people of superior ability, intelligence, and capacity to achieve...I expect, within ten years or so, to see a proposal before one of our state legislatures or up for referendum to ban, on applications for employment, all questions related to educational status...I, for one, shall vote for this proposal if I can.
Dangers of "elite" universities:
One thing it (modern society) cannot afford in education is the "elite institution" which has a monopoly on social standing, on prestige, and on the command positions in society and economy. Oxford and Cambridge are important reasons for the English brain drain. A main reason for the technology gap is the Grande Ecole such as the Ecole Polytechnique or the Ecole Normale. These elite institutions may do a magnificent job of education, but only their graduates normally get into the command positions. Only their faculties "matter." This restricts and impoverishes the whole society...The Harvard Law School might like to be a Grande Ecole and to claim for its graduates a preferential position. But American society has never been willing to accept this claim...
It is almost impossible to explain to a European that the strength of American higher education lies in this absence of schools for leaders and schools for followers. It is almost impossible to explain to a European that the engineer with a degree from North Idaho A. and M. is an engineer and not a draftsman. Yet this is the flexibility Europe needs in order to overcome the brain drain and to close the technology gap.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011 BIG PRESTIGE PROJECTS AND THE OBAMA WAY
Barack Obama:
"It makes no sense for China to have better rail systems than us, and Singapore having better airports than us. And we just learned that China now has the fastest supercomputer on Earth --- that used to be us." (Nov 3, 2010)
"America became an economic superpower because we knew how to build things. We built the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Hoover Dam, and the Interstate Highway System. And now, we're settling for China having the best high-speed rail, and Singapore having better airports? When did that happen? "(Oct 25 2011)
George Savage juxtaposes the latter Obama statement with his decision, only two weeks later, to delay approval for the construction of a Canada-to-Texas oil pipeline, which was estimated to provide about 20,000 jobs, as well as having an obvious beneficial impact on America's energy security. Indeed, it should be obvious at this point that the main inhibitors to the building of any large project whatsoever are regulatory overreach and complexity and the exploitation of the legal and regulatory environment by precisely the kind of activists that Obama the community organizer has spent much of his life encouraging. Obama's complaints about us not building things resemble the plea of the defendant who killed both of his parents and then asked for mercy because he was an orphan. (More thoughts on large projects then versus now at my post like swimming in glue.)
But in addition to the above point, the kinds of projects about which Obama waxes enthusiastic (to the degree that any enthusiasm is contained in his rather flat emotional range) reveal much about the "progressive" economic worldview.
An article by Keith Oatley, in Scientific American/Mind, asserts a connection between exposure to fiction and the development of empathy. It's not a new idea--IIRC, the idea that seeing plays and reading novels has tended to increase empathy throughout entire societies has been asserted by Harold Bloom, among others--but Oatley describes empirical research he's done to test this assertion.
In one experiment, Oatley and colleagues assessed the reading habits of 94 adults, separating fiction from nonfiction. They also tested the subjects on measures of emotion perception (being able to discern a person's emotional state from a photo of only the eyes) and social cognition (being able to draw conclusions about the relationships among people based on video clips.) This study showed a "strong" interconnection between fiction reading and social skills, especially between fiction reading and the emotion-perception factor. This correlation, of course, does not by itself demonstrate the direction of causality.
Another study involved assigning 303 adults to read either a short story or an essay from the New Yorker and following up with tests of analytical and social reasoning. Those who read the story tended to do better on the social reasoning test than those who read the nonfiction essay.
Oatley argues that "Good social skills require having a well-developed theory of mind...the ability to take the perspectives of other people, to make mental models of others, and to understand that someone else might have beliefs and intentions that are different from your own." He says that children start to acquire this ability at about 4 years old, and that "the ability to gauge emotion from pictures of just the eyes correlates with theory-of-mind skills, as does the capacity for empathy."
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.)
Thursday, October 27, 2011
BOOK REVIEW: THE POST-OFFICE GIRL by Stefan Zweig
A remote village in Austria, shortly after the end of the First World War. The 28-year-old protagonist, Christine Hoflehner, is the sole employee at the town's Post Office. Her once solidly-middle-class family has been impoverished by the war, in which her brother was killed, and the subsequent inflation. Christine's days are spent working at her boring Post Office job and caring for her chronically-ill mother. Except for a brief encounter with a crippled soldier when she was 20 ("two, three feeble kisses, more pity than passion") she has never had a boyfriend. Her future looks bleak, but she knows many people are even worse-off than herself.
Here's Christine at the Post Office:
Not much more of her is visible through the wicket than the pleasant profile of an ordinary young woman, somewhat thin-lipped and pale and with a hint of circles under the eyes; late in the day, when she turns on the harsh electric lights, a close observer might notice a few slight lines on her forehead and wrinkles around her eyes. Still, this young woman, along with the hollyhocks in the window and the sprig of elder that she has put in the metal washbasin today for her own pleasure, is easily the freshest thing in the Klein-Reifling post office; she seems good for at least another twenty-five years of service. Her hand with its pale fingers will raise and lower the same rattly wicket thousands upon thosands of times more, will toss hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of letters onto the canceling desk with the same swiveling motion, will slam the blackened brass canceler onto hundreds of thousands or millions of envelopes with the same brief thump.
Of all the commonplace items in the Post Office--the pencils, the stamps, the scales, the ledger books, the official posters on the wall--the only objects that have anything of mystery and romance attached to them are the telephone and the telegraph machine, which via copper wires connect this tiny village to the width and breadth of Austria and the world beyond. And on one hot summer day, as Christine is drowsing at her desk, the latter instrument comes alive. Getting up to start the tape, she observes with amazement--this is something that has never happened before!--that the telegram is addressed to HER.
Thursday, October 20, 2011 GOVERNMENT OVERREACH AND ETHNIC CONFLICT
The Austrian state suffered from its strength: it had never had its range of activity cut down during a successful period of laissez-faire, and therefore the openings for a national conflict were far greater. There were no private schools or hospitals, no independent universities; and the state, in its infinite paternalism, performed a variety of services from veterinary surgery to the inspecting of buildings. The appointment of every school teacher, of every railway porter, of every hospital doctor, of every tax-collector, was a signal for national struggle. Besides, private industry looked to the state for aid from tariffs and subsidies; these, in every country, produce 'log-rolling,' and nationalism offered an added lever with which to shift the logs. German industries demanded state aid to preserve their privileged position; Czech industries demanded state aid to redress the inequalities of the past. The first generation of national rivals had been the products of universities and fought for appointment at the highest professional level: their disputes concerned only a few hundred state jobs. The generation which followed them was the result of universal elementary education and fought for the trivial state employment which existed in every village; hence the more popular national conflicts at the turn of the century.
--AJP Taylor quoted in Wilson's War, by Jim Powell. Original source: Taylor's book The Habsburg Monarchy
(I think it's fair to say that the term "national," as used here by Taylor, basically means what we would call "ethnic," since all of these various nationalities were subjects of the same empire.)
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
Wednesday, October 19, 2011 ENCOUNTERING THE CAT FOR THE FIRST TIME
A Chicago Boyz discussion about cats reminded me of a passage in Robert Carse's book The River Men...I was going to post it but didn't have the book available. Now I do, so here it is belatedly.
Brother Gabriel Sagard was a French missionary working in what is now Canada. In the winter of 1624, he stayed with the Huron Indians, and in appreciation of their hospitality he invited them to a feast at the nearest convent. For each of his Huron friends he selected an appropriate gift--for one of them, the captain of the canoe which had brought him from the village to the convent, he chose a large house cat. These Hurons had no prior experience with cats.
This good Captain thought the cat had a rational mind, seeing that when he was called, he would come and play with one, and so he conjectured that the cat understood French perfectly. After admiring this animal, he asked us to tell the cat that he should let himself be carried home to his country, and that he would love the cat like his own son. "Oh, Gabriel!" he cried, he will have plenty to live on at home! You say that he is very fond of mice, and we have any amount of them. So let him come freely to us!" So saying, he tried to embrace the cat; but that wicked creature, who did not understand his way of caressing, immediately thrust out all his claws and made him let go quicker than he had clasped him.
"Ho, ho, ho!" said the good man. "So that's the way he treats me! Ongaron ortischat! He's ugly, he's bad! Speak to him!" Finally, having got the cat with a great deal of trouble into a birchbox box, he carried the him off in his arms to the canoe, and fed him through a little hole with bread that he had received at our convent.
But when he tried to give the cat some sagamite, to his despair the cat escaped and flew up on a tree and they could not get him down again. And as far as calling him down, nobody home (personne a la mason); he didn't understand any Huron, and they didn't know how to call a cat in French, and so they were forced to turn their backs on them and leave him in the tree, very unhappy at losing him, and the cat very worried about who was going to feed him in the future.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
Monday, October 17, 2011 WORTHWHILE READING & VIEWING
Quasicrystals--a Nobel-prize-winning discovery that was originally viewed as impossible by many prominent scientists...indeed, the first reaction of the discoverer himself was to say "Eyn chaya kazo", which is Hebrew for "there can be no such creature."
Sunday, October 16, 2011 THE BLAMER VERSUS THE PROBLEM-SOLVER
The poisonous nature of so much of today's political discourse is in large part due to the climate of blame-casting encouraged by Barack Obama. Given any difficult situation whatsoever, it is clear that Obama's primary instinct is to use it as an opportunity to demonize a selected group. The man has remarkably little interest in problem-solving. Despite his faux reputation as an intellectual, there is nothing of the scholar or analyst in him. It's all about speech-making..."the use of his vocal chords is to him inseparable from thinking, as Freud and Bullitt wrote about Woodrow Wilson...and the speeches, especially these days, are usually mainly about an attack on a targeted group.
A strong contrast is offered by presidential candidate Herman Cain..a man who has lived in an environment of problem-solving....ballistics problems for the US Navy, programming problems while getting his CS degree, marketing and production and management problems at the pizza company. You can't solve trajectories or write code or make and sell pizzas by seeking out someone to blame.
This is a contrast that it would be wise for the Cain campaign to emphasize strongly.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
Sigmund Freud and William Bullitt (who worked closely with Woodrow WIlson at the Versailles conference) wrote a book titled Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study. Excerpt:
Throughout his life he took intense interest only in subjects which could somehow be connected with speech...He took no interest in mathematics, science, art or music--except in singing himself, a form of speaking. His method of thinking about a subject seems to have been to imagine himself making a speech about it...He seems to have thought about political or economic problems only when he was preparing to make a speech about them either on paper or from the rostrum. His memory was undoubtedly of the vaso-motor type. The use of his vocal chords was to him inseparable from thinking.
Remind you of anyone we know?
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
Otis Elevator (part of United Technologies) is moving elevator production from Nogales, Mexico to a new plant in Florence, South Carolina. The company expects the move to cut its freight/logistics costs by 17%, and expect additional benefits from the colocation of engineers and toolmakers with the production operations. Otis also expects marketing benefits: it will be easier for US customers to visit the plant. Overall, they expect these advantages--combined with a higher degree of automation than the Nogales plant--to outweigh the higher US labor costs.
The problems created by lengthy supply chains and long travel times are, of course, even more substantial when production is located in China rather than Mexico. (The above link contains an interesting graph showing the estimated cost of sourcing an automotive wiper assembly from China, from Mexico, and from the US.) Bill Waddell, who was the source of the Otis link above, believes that Mexico has a golden opportunity in manufacturing right now, and has written an interesting paper explaining the reasons.
7:21 AM
Wednesday, October 05, 2011 CAIN OR PALIN?
For discussion:
1)Who would be a better President: Herman Cain or Sarah Palin?
2)Which of the two would be a more effective candidate?
Saturday, October 01, 2011 POSSIBLY THE MOST NEGATIVE THEATRE REVIEW EVER
Sometime in the early 1800s, Goethe was walking a secluded, narrow path which led to a mill. There he met an (unnamed) prince, and the two fell into conversation about many subjects, including theatre and particularly Schiller's play "The Robbers." The prince's comment about this work was:
If I had been the Deity on the point of creating the world, and had foreseen, at the moment, that Schiller's ‘Robbers’ would have been written in it, I would have left the world uncreated.
(from Conversations with Eckermann)
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
Friday, September 23, 2011 MEDIA MALFEASANCE, MEDIA CREDIBILITY
Rex Murphy offers a summary of the ways in which the traditional media supported Obama's candidacy:
Much of the Obama coverage was orchestrated sycophancy. They glided past his pretensions — when did a presidential candidate before “address the world” from the Brandenberg Gate in Berlin? They ignored his arrogance — “You’re likable enough, Hillary.” And they averted their eyes from his every gaffe — such as the admission that he didn’t speak “Austrian.”
The media walked right past the decades-long association of Obama with the weird and racist pastor Jeremiah Wright. In the midst of the brief stormlet over the issue, one CNN host — inexplicably — decided that CNN was going to be a “Wright-free zone.” He could have hung out a sign: “No bad news about Obama here.”
If a company filing an Initial Public Offering were to conduct a campaign of misinformation, disinformation, and lying by omission on the level of what the dinosaur media did for Obama, that company and its officers would certainly face legal action, quite probably involving criminal as well as civil charges.
Will the traditional media be taken seriously as a source of information in the upcoming election season? Elizabeth Scalia thinks maybe not:
A while back, I asked my very frustrated mother-in-law why she voted for Barack Obama, and she shrugged, “I could only go by what I heard.”
She meant the nightly network news shows, which she and Pop watch or listen to while they bustle around the kitchen...Information worth listening to was the provenance of the press. For her generation, the press was meant to be listened to and trusted.
and
At a large, multi-generational family gathering this past weekend, inevitable discussions arose about the economy, jobs, and the bleak outlook for the immediate future. The general consensus was that our president is a failure, the congress is a wreck, and there is no authenticity or originality in our leadership, nor in our press. A majority in attendance—both Democrats and Republicans—had voted for Barack Obama (a few grudgingly, as they had supported Clinton) but while everyone expressed disappointment (there was not a single voice raised in support of the president) the senior citizens confided a deep sense of betrayal—of their trust being shattered.
Both links are worth reading in full.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
Sunday, September 18, 2011 THE LOGIC OF FAILURE, REDUX
Dietrich Doerner is a professor (at Otto-Friedrich University, Bamberg) who studies the thought patterns that result in bad decision-making, resulting in outcomes ranging from lack of success to outright disaster. I reviewed his interesting book, The Logic of Failure, here.
Comes now The Social Pathologist, who links my original review and adds thoughts of his own on Doerner's work, particularly the sociological implications thereof. Interesting reading.
Searching on Doerner's name, I ran across this analysis of Doernerism applied to the failure of a downtown mall in Columbus, OH.
Prof Doerner's home page is here; unfortunately it seems that most of his work is available only in German.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
Dan Senor provides a useful summary of Obama's attitudes and policies toward that country. Excerpts:
• February 2008: When running for president, then-Sen. Obama told an audience in Cleveland: "There is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you're anti-Israel."
• July 2009: Mr. Obama hosted American Jewish leaders at the White House, reportedly telling them that he sought to put "daylight" between America and Israel...In the same meeting with Jewish leaders, Mr. Obama told the group that Israel would need "to engage in serious self-reflection." This statement stunned the Americans in attendance: Israeli society is many things, but lacking in self-reflection isn't one of them. It's impossible to envision the president delivering a similar lecture to Muslim leaders.
• March 2010: During Vice President Joe Biden's visit to Israel, a Jerusalem municipal office announced plans for new construction in a part of Jerusalem. The president launched an unprecedented weeks-long offensive against Israel. Mr. Biden very publicly departed Israel...Moments after Mr. Biden concluded his visit to the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority held a ceremony to honor Dalal Mughrabi, who led one of the deadliest Palestinian terror attacks in history: the so-called Coastal Road Massacre that killed 38, including 13 children and an American. The Obama administration was silent. But that same day, on ABC, Mr. Axelrod called Israel's planned construction of apartments in its own capital an "insult" and an "affront" to the United States.
• May 2011: The State Department issued a press release declaring that the department's No. 2 official, James Steinberg, would be visiting "Israel, Jerusalem, and the West Bank." In other words, Jerusalem is not part of Israel.
Read the whole thing; indeed, you might want to bookmark it for future reference.
Israel and the Dutch Republic: an interesting comparison of Israel's situation with that of the country which held off Spain and its allies during the Thirty Years War (1618-1648)
An Apple executive moves to JC Penney: Ron Johnson, who masterminded the Apple Retail Store concept, will become CEO of the venerable retailer; however, the current CEO, Myron Ullman, will stay on as executive chairman and will continue to oversee logistics, corporate communications, finance and jcp.com.
Simply evil: Christopher Hitchens suggests that sometimes the simple and obvious explanation for an event is more accurate than an explanation which relies on an elaborate structure of "nuance"
An attack, not a disaster or a tragedy. George Savage explains why the persistent use of terms like "tragedy" by the media acts to obfuscate the true nature of the 9/11 attacks. Much more on this from Mark Steyn
Marc Sasseville and Heather Penney were F-16 pilots with an Air National Guard squadron. Their order was to bring down Flight 93 before the terrorists in control of it could create another disaster on the scale of the World Trade Center...but their aircraft were configured for training, with no live ammunition and no missiles. A video interview with Major Penney here
Thursday, September 08, 2011
BOOK REVIEW: A FIERY PEACE IN A COLD WAR by Neal Sheehan
The American space program, like its Russian counterpart, was largely an epiphenomenon of the ballistic missile program. A great deal has been written about the space programs; regarding the missile programs theselves, not so much. This book remedies that gap by using the life of General Bernard Schriever, who ran USAF missile development programs, as the centerpiece for a history of the Cold War's defining weapon. Although Schriever is the central character, the book describes the roles played by many other indivduals, including:
--John von Neumann, the Hungarian-American mathematician--an implacable enemy of the Soviet Union who advocated a strong American military posture and perhaps even a nuclear first strike
--The bomber general Curtis LeMay, who to put it mildly was not a Schriever fan. After Schriever received his fourth star, LeMay glared at him and said, "You realize if I had my way, you wouldn't be wearing those."
--Simon Ramo, who as a high school student withdrew all his savings to buy a violin in the hopes of winning a college scholarship in a music contest...he did win, and as a young engineer was chosen by GE over another job candidate because the Schenectady orchestra needed a good violinist! Ramo went on to co-found the Ramo-Wooldridge Company (later TRW) which basically created the discipline of systems engineering and was used by Schriever to address some of the most difficult technical challenges facing the missile program.
--Colonel Ed Hall--a brilliant designer of missile engines, a hard-driving project manager, and in the opinion of many associates a complete jackass to work with. To call Hall "assertive" would be putting it mildly--when his wife was giving birth (in England during WWII) and the obstetrician was in Hall's opinion acting indecisively, Hall pulled out his revolver and gave the doctor highly specific orders as to exactly what to do.
Schriever himself was a boy from a not-very-well-off family of German immigrants in the Texas hill country, who joined the air force after first considering a career as a professional golfer. He became a protege of Hap Arnold, and after Pacific-theater service during WWII focused on the leadership of R&D efforts rather than operational command. Throughout his career, Schriever demonstrated an unwillingness to fit his views on important issues to the opinions of those in higher authority--even when higher authority was represented by someone as intimidating as LeMay, with whom Schriever clashed soon after the war on the issue of high-level versus low-level attack tactics for bombers, or Secretary of the Air Force Harold Talbott, whose order to relocate certain missile facilities (from the west coat to the midwest) Schreiver flatly refused, citing his "prior and overriding orders" to get the program done in the shortest feasible time. By then a general, Schriever stuck by his position on this even when Talbott threatened him that "Before this meeting is over, General, there's going to be one more colonel in the Air Force!"
Monday, September 05, 2011 THE DECLINE OF AMERICAN PROSPERITY: CAUSES AND CURES
For many decades, Labor Day was a holiday on which Americans celebrated (and maybe even felt a bit smug about) our nation's economic prowess. This year, not so much. In our current economy, many people are suffering grievously. Moreover, an increasing number believe that the problems are permanent. Surveys show a significant proportion of the population believes that their own living standards will continue to decline, and that their children's generation will live less-well than their own. In other words, the feeling is growing that what we face in not a normal cyclical downturn, but a sea change for the worse.
The proximate cause of the current situation was the housing bubble and bust, and more generally the excessive and irresponsible use/deployment of credit in both the public and private sectors. However, there is every reason to believe that there are structural problems with the economy that go well beyond the sort of things that are usually portrayed on graphs in economic discussion.
Politicians, economists, analysts, and bloggers have asserted numerous and sometimes conflicting factors as primary causes for our economic problems. This post will summarize some of the explanations most commonly proposed plus a few more. I don't necessarily agree with all of these, and today I'm focusing on simply stating the proposed causal factors, leaving detailed analysis/assessment for a future post.
The possible causes of the economic decline:
1)The low-hanging fruit has already been eaten. Economist Tyler Cowen, for example, argues that America's historical prosperity has been driven largely by: (i)the availability of free land, (ii)a sequence of key technological breakthroughs, and (iii)the high return on investment offered by providing schooling to motivated but uneducated immigrants. He further argues that the free land is gone, that today's technological improvements are not comparable to those introduced in the period 1880-1940 (electricity, automobiles, airplanes, radio, mass production, pharmaceuticals, etc), and that the high % of the population already attending college makes additional improvements from this source difficult. (Tyler's recent book includes a graph attempting to measure the "rate of global innovation" since medieval times; it shows innovation peaking over the period 1850-1905, and having now returned to the level where it was in the early 1700s.)
2)Technological unemployment. The argument here is that the advances in technology that have already occurred, and those that are likely in the near future, reduce the need for labor so radically that full employment will never again be possible. This assertion is basically the opposite of the low-hanging-fruit argument, at least the technological aspect thereof.
Thursday, September 01, 2011 HE REALLY DOESN'T LIKE US VERY MUCH
In my last post, I suggested that the phrase decline by design could be used in the upcoming presidential campaign to describe Obama's economic policies. Another useful phrase for repeated emphasis could be:
He Really Doesn't Like Us Very Much
...backed up by clips/quotes of Jeremiah Wright's "God damn America" line, Obama's crack about "bitter clingers," Obama's repeated assertions of his own superior brilliance, etc etc.
I also posted this and the previous post at Richochet (members section--not publicly available unless it gets promoted to the main page) and someone suggested an alternate phrasing might be he's just not that into us.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
Peter Morici, a professor of International Business at the University of Maryland, used the phrase decline by design to describe the economic policies that are now crippling this country. (Googling, I see that the phrase has also been independently used by a few others.) It seems to me that "decline by design" could be used as a centerpiece for a very effective advertising campaign by whoever the Republican nominee turns out to be, as in stop Obama's decline by design.
Numerous facts and soundbites could be used to clearly make the point about just how designed (or at least predictable to anyone with any sense) the current economic situation actually is...Obama's comment about how electricity prices would "necessarily skyrocket" under his energy plan, the stated desire of his Energy secretary to raise our gasoline prices to "European levels" and many, many more.
This will be a very critical campaign in our country's history, and we need to produce and heavily promote a series of hard-hitting and clearly substantiated memes that will ensure the end of the Obama era. I think this could be one of them.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
Sunday, August 28, 2011 SEX, MARKETING, AND ELECTRIC CARS, 1897-1913
A fascinating look at the electric car industry of the early 20th century and specifically the attempt to position these vehicles as particularly appropriate for women: Femininity and the Electric Car.
Saturday, August 27, 2011 HURRICANES: IN LITERATURE, FILM, AND MUSIC
I thought it might be fun this weekend, especially for those on the east coast, to talk about books/movies/songs in which hurricanes and similar events play a prominent role. For starters:
Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies, C S Forester. Features not only a hurricane, but a Marine bandsman who faces execution on charges of willfully playing the wrong note.
The Caine Mutiny, Herman Wouk. The troubled and inadequate captain of a WWII destroyer-minesweeper panics during a typhoon.
Big Water Rising, Tom Russell and Iris DeMent. A Mississippi River flood.
Lost and Found, The Kinks. Hurricane hits NYC.
More?
comment at Chicago Boyz, where this is cross-posted
On LinkedIn, there is a frequently-appearing ad that says “Learn Ivy League management at eCornell.” I finally clicked on it and got this page. Note especially the headline:
“Add an Ivy League credential to your résumé” (right under the “save 15% this August” line)
and, under “topics you will master”
How to Strategize for Success
Scenario Analysis
Executive Decision Making
Leading Through Creativity
Unlocking Your Leadership Potential
Motivating Members of Your Team
I’d suggest that anyone who seriously believes they can “master” a single one of these topics, let alone all 6 of them, in an 8-week class requiring “just 3-6 hrs per week” of your time” shouldn’t be allowed near the management of anything or anybody. And I'd also suggest that a university which encourages this kind of thinking is not exactly doing itself proud.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
Janet Daley on the UK riots: "What real people know – and have known for quite a long time – is that the great tacit agreement which once held civic life together has been deliberately blown apart."
Sunday, August 21, 2011 ABOUT THOSE 15% CAPITAL GAINS RATES
Warren Buffett has been talking virtually nonstop about how tax rates on "the wealthy" need to be increased, and of course the dinosaur media has been praising and amplifying this viewpoint. People who think this way are especially fond of citing the 15% capital tax gains rate and contrasting it with the considerably higher rates on ordinary income.
This simplistic comparison, though, ignores the effect of inflation, which acts to increase the effective tax rate--especially on assets which are held for a long period of time. Consider a simple example: let's say you bought a stock in 2003 and sold it in 2011, with a 30% price increase. To make the numbers easy, you bought $10000 worth and sold it for $13000. But according to BLS data, the consumer price index has risen by 22% over the years 2003-2011. Thus, your $13000 is really only worth $10655 in 2003 dollars.
It gets worse. The IRS is going to tax you on the full $3000 of "gain," even though it is largely illusory. At 15%, you will pay $450, which is a very big chunk of your true, inflation-adjusted gains. If you work through the calculations, you'll find that your real capital gains tax rate for this example is not 15%, but more than 50%. (I'll post the calculations if anyone wants to see them.) Indeed, if you buy and sell an asset whose value just keeps pace with inflation--ie, if you don't make any money at all in real terms--you will still be paying capital gains taxes on wholly imaginary profits. If we get Jimmy-Carter-style inflation...say, 40% over the next decade...and you have an investment which just keeps pace with inflation, then federal taxes will take 6% of the value of your investment (15% times 40%) when you sell it. And that's assuming that the current capital gains rate does not increase, and ignoring any state-level taxes on capital gains.
Warren Buffett is surely aware of the preceding considerations, and anyone who writes about finance and economic policy should be aware of them.
Here's a good video by Christina Sochacki, for the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, about the problems with the capital gains tax.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
A civilization is built on what is required of men, not on that which is provided for them
and
If you would have them be brothers, have them build a tower. But if you would have them hate each other, throw them corn
Most liberals would probably argue that the British rioters did what they did because not enough had been done for them. Conservatives, on the other hand, would tend to say that it was because not enough had been expected of them.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
The British secret agent Odette Hallowes was awarded both the George Cross and the French Legion of Honor in recognition of her heroism during WWII. Some years after the war, a burglar broke into her mother's home, and among the items he stole was Odette's George Cross. A public appeal for the medal's return was made, and the burglar sent it back with the following note:
You, Madame, appear to be a dear old lady. God bless you and your children. I thank you for having faith in me. I am not all that bad - it's just circumstances. Your little dog really loves me. I gave him a nice pat and left him a piece of meat - out of fridge. Sincerely yours, A Bad Egg.
Even this criminal had enough identification with his country and its history and accomplishments to recognized that Odette's GC was something that really ought to be returned to its owner.
Does anyone think there are many among the current UK rioters who would do the same?
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
Saturday, August 13, 2011 CAREER CHOICE, POPULAR CULTURE, DESIGN, AND MANUFACTURING
Kathleen Fasanella, who runs the interesting blog Fashion Incubator, observes that the tv program "Project Runway" has led many people to pursue careers as designers--and that this is not the first time that such a phenomenon has occurred:
I’m troubled by the consequences of the fashion school bubble -350 designers at NY Fashion Week being but one sign of it- the blame for which we mostly attribute to Project Runway. A similar thing happened with the TV show LA Law, law schools were inundated with applicants and our legal system is burgeoning with excessive lawsuits as the logical consequence of lawyers needing to make their student loan payments. Simplistically speaking, these are trend careers.
Indeed, for young people who are making career choices there is a shortage of solid information about what various careers are really like and what they require in the way of preparation. Television tends to focus on a few specific fields--lawyers, doctors, nurses, cops, criminals--with occasional excursions into other areas like fashion design--but rarely provides any realistic sense of what day-to-day life in these jobs ight be like. This is understandable--screenwriter Robert Avrech oberved that movies are like real life, except that the boring parts are deleted--but means that these shows aren't exactly reliable guides to career choice. High school guidance counselors rarely have any broad exposure to the world of actual work. College professors, even with the best will in the world, will tend to sell and perhaps oversell their own fields to talented students. Parents may or may not be useful sources of career information, depending on their own backgrounds and current situations; many will also have strong prejudices for or against certain fields.
Kathleen also observes that in her industry there is a real gap between the numbers of people who want to design the product and the numbers of people who want to have something to do with turning it into physical reality:
Many observers consider Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) to be the dumbest person in the Senate, perhaps in the entire United States Congress. Consider, for example, this 2002 Murrayism regarding Osama bin Laden:
We've got to ask, why is this man so popular around the world? Why are people so supportive of him in many countries that are riddled with poverty? He's been out in these countries for decades, building schools, building roads, building infrastructure, building day care facilities, building health care facilities, and the people are extremely grateful.
Yeah, women in Taliban-controlled areas like the convenience of dropping the kids of at the day care center before they check themselves in for the whipping or the stoning.
Murray's brand of politics has plenty to do with the financial situation in which the U.S. now finds itself. See, for example, her threats of retaliation against any Senators who might vote for an anti-pork bill. Just the sort of person one would want to put on a committee to address the deficit.
Michelle Malkin remembers interviewing Murray several years ago:
We were talking about federal entitlement spending. I asked her about FICA taxes. She didn’t know what I was talking about; when I said “payroll taxes,” she still had a frozen blank look on her face.
The Democratic Party is destroying America.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
An Atlantic article by Jim Tankersley, on the subject of job creation, illustrates the way in which bad economic ideas drive bad policy choices. I have in mind specifically Tankersley's item #5, "Unleash energy companies' spending power," in which he proposes
...a "Clean-Energy Standard"--a mandate that a certain percentage of each utility's power generation come from low-carbon-emission sources. The percentage would ramp up over time. Under current technology, clean energy is often more expensive than, say, coal-fired electricity, but a phased-in standard would allow utilities time to increase electric prices incrementally; a well-designed standard with flexibility (for regions most dependent on fossil fuels today) could blunt much of the long-term impact on consumers. Meanwhile, the new construction could start right away. Such a federal mandate, says Joshua Freed, vice president for clean energy at the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way, "would provide a clear signal, without costing any money, to the private sector to invest in wind, solar, or any of the other technologies that are coming on line today." Several large utilities say that the resulting certainty would spur billions of dollars of investment and drive job growth.
Note that assertion that this policy could be implemented without costing any money. Perhaps it wouldn't cost the government any money, in the short term, but it would certainly cost American consumers and businesses plenty of money...after all, if these generation technologies were more economical than the current ones, they would have been implemented without the need for government force. In addition to directly increasing electricity bills, it would represent yet another blow against American manufacturing companies, many of which are highly energy-intensive. Indeed, there are also plenty of non-manufacturing companies, such as operators of large data centers, which would be harmed by government-mandated increases in the price of electricity.. And the resulting decreases in business activity, and reduced ability of consumers to spend money on things other tha electricity, would certainly cost the government money in the future, in the form of reduced tax collections. Not to mention the costs of unemployment among coal miners.
More than 150 years ago, the French economist Frederic Bastiat wrote about the broken-window fallacy, and explained why the breakage of windows does not really provide a net economic gain, despite the fact that such breakage provides jobs for glaziers and glass-manufacturing workers. Apparently, after all this time Bastiat's insight is still not well-understood. Democrats, in particular, continue to believe that they can push an endless number of "cost-free" mandates on the producers of goods and services, even in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster that has been largely caused by exactly that kind of thinking. And despite all the talk about "conserving resources," they generally seem to have no compunction about writing off and destroying human-created resources (such as coal-burning power plants) which represent vast amounts of human labor and intelligence.
Atlantic link via Instapundit
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
Thursday, August 04, 2011 STRESSES OF GLOBALIZATION (rerun)
Unfortunately in the year XXXX the whole world was one large international workshop. A strike in the Argentine was apt to cause suffering in Berlin. A raise in the price of certain raw materials in London might spell disaster to tens of thousands of long-suffering Chinese coolies who had never even heard of the existence of the big city on the Thames. The invention of some obscure Privat-Dozent in a third-rate German university would often force dozens of Chilean banks to close their doors, while bad management on the part of an old commercial house in Gothenburg might deprive hundreds of little boys and girls in Australia of a chance to go to college.
It's been reported that Joe Biden referred to Republican opponents on the debt issue in the following terms:
They have acted like terrorists.
Biden now denies that he used that phrasing. But there's no question that Democratic representative Mike Doyle, who was in the same meeting, said:
We have negotiated with terrorists. This small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money.
Numerous other Democrats and Democrat-leaning media types have used the T-word or close synonyms of same in referring to their American political opponents, for example NYT columnist Joe Nocera, who refers to the Tea Party Republicans as having "waged jihad on the American people" and Maureen Dowd, who approvingly quoted "some Democrats" as having described the Tea Party as "the Republican Taliban wing."
Note that this vitriol is coming from a party which rejects the idea of calling actual terrorists "terrorists." They prefer to call terrorist attacks man-caused disasters, and to refer to wars as overseas contingency operations.
I'm reminded, as I often am, of something Neptunux Lex wrote in 2008:
The innate character flaw of the political right, with its thrumming appeals to the logic of blood and soil, is its lamentable tendency to go in search of enemies abroad. The left, on the other hand, with its own appeals to the politics of envy and class warfare, is content to find mortal enemies closer to hand.
Today's American leftists view American citizens who strongly differ with them politically as enemies to a much greater extent than Islamic terrorists or any hostile nation-state.
Regarding Mike Doyle's complaint about it having been made "impossible to spend any money"...the Democratic politicians are like teenagers who have been unwisely been given a credit card and who, now that consideration is being given to not raising the credit limit yet again, whine that "you won't let me spend any money at all"...indeed, they also follow the typical teenage pattern of whining "but all my friends get to spend more"...in this case their friends from Europe...while ignoring the little problem that their friends' parents are being driven into bankruptcy even more rapidly than their own are.
