One Hand Clapping

test for new settings

2008-05-26T18:49:00.000-05:00

this should show up in consolidation

Tennessee government guilty of usurpation?

2007-09-28T14:34:00.000-05:00

Last July Tennessee raised the state tax on cigarettes to 62 cents per pack - a 42-cent per pack raise. That made Tennessee�s cigarette tax higher than any of the eight states it borders, in some cases, much higher.

And Tennessee�s ruling class seems surprised - but shouldn�t be - that smokers living within an hour�s drive of the border, which is almost all Tennesseans, are cruising to another state the buy their smokes. Maybe smokers (I am not one) drive more than an hour, I dunno. But drive they do, even though their purchase savings are greatly offset, if not eliminated, by the cost of the fuel they use and the wear and tear on their autos.
Unless, of course, they buy a lot of cigarettes. And therein lies the problem. It is also against the law in Tennessee to bring more than two cartons per person (I think, but it could be per vehicle) of cigarettes into Tennessee.

Under state law, bringing more than two cartons of cigarettes into the state without paying Tennessee taxes is a �Class B� misdemeanor, carrying punishment of up to six months in jail and/or a $500 fine. Bringing 25 or more cartons is a �Class E� felony, with minimum penalty of one year in prison and a maximum of six years plus a fine of up to $3,000. In addition, the specific state statute dealing with untaxed cigarettes provides that vehicles used to transport more than two cartons �are considered contraband and are subject to seizure,� says a Department of Revenue statement.

Farr said that agents have been instructed to seize any vehicle carrying more than 25 cartons of cigarettes without Tennessee tax stamps. In cases where three to 24 cartons are involved, he said vehicle seizure is �at the officer�s discretion.�

As one wag remarked somewhere on the Internet, Tennessee�s increased revenue from the rise in taxes will be used to pay for stopping freelance bootleggers. James Joyner (whence the cite) asks, reasonably enough,

How this can possibly be constitutional is beyond me. First, what gives Tennessee police officers the authority to operate across state lines? Second, surely seizing a vehicle potentially worth upwards of $40,000 for the �crime� of possessing more than two cartons of cigarettes amounts to excessive punishment under the 8th and 14th Amendments?

First, Tennessee revenooers can�t make arrests outside their legal jurisdiction, but they may cross state lines in the otherwise performance of their duties. But the Constitutional questions are compelling, I think. I�d argue against what Tennessee is doing because of the Commerce Clause of the main body of the Contitution:

Article I, Section 8, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution, known as the Commerce Clause, reads as follows:�The Congress shall have Power �To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.�

I think it�s simply beyond arguing that Tennessee is attempting to regulate commerce across state borders, authority for which is reserved by the Constitution to the US Congress, and is thereby usurping a federal power.

Where does personal use end and bootlegging begin? Bootlegging meaning reselling the smokes in Tennessee for profit, not buying a dozen cartons for Aunt Esmerelda, who is too weak to drive because of her emphysema, and who pays back the exact amount of the purchase.

Tennessee does have a legitimate interest in prohibiting bootlegging of cigarettes, and for that the 25-carton limit seems reasonable to me. But conviction for actual bootlegging would require more than possession of some arbitrary number of cartons, would it not? If a legger bought other-state cigs, saving $4.50 per carton (45 cents per pack), then he�d have to charge his illicit customers at least half that to recoup costs and make a profit. So, 25 cartons bought at $4.50 discount = $112.50, call half of it profit at resale, or $66. Do that six days per week and the legger nets almost $400 per week.

But the state has brought all this on itself because it raised the tax and thereby generated the incentive for the majority of Tennessee smokers to buy across state lines. That�s the trouble with vice taxes, they require inordinate resources to enforce and often criminalize what would otherwise be seen as quite reasonable behavior. Tennessee�s standard sales tax is already one of the highest in the nation, why not just tax cigarettes at that rate (9.25 percent where I live) and be done with it?

Oh, I know, I know, don�t bother to try to enlighten me.

The Peroxide Plot

2007-09-05T14:49:00.002-05:00

Three Muslim would-be terrorists, trained in Pakistan's death (to others) camps, have been arrested by German authorities for plotting to attack Ramstein Air Base and Frankfurt International Airport with explosives.

Bombs more powerful than Madrid, London: �Monika Harms, the German federal prosecutor, said the three had trained at camps in Pakistan and obtained some 680kg (1,500lb) of hydrogen peroxide for making explosives.

�This would have enabled them to make bombs with more explosive power than the ones used in the London and Madrid bombings,� Joerg Ziercke, the head of Germany�s federal crime office, said at a joint news conference with Ms Harms.� (Guardian)

Hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) is a bleaching agent with common household uses. I've used it as a wound disinfectant and it's particualrly effective at removing blood stains, though it tends to remove fabric color as well as the blood.

The the stuff you buy in a drug store is only about three percent strength, far too weak to use as an explosive. In more concentrated forms it can be used alone as a rocket fuel or as a rocket fuel component. The famed Bell Rocket Belt, for example, used H2O2 as a monofuel. H2O2 is still used for thrusters in spacecraft.

Used alone, H2O2 needs a catalyst to ignite. But it can be combined with acetone to produce a highly volatile liquid explosive. Acetone is also a commonly available household chemical, used in nail polish for example. Larger and purer quantities are commercially obtainable without much difficulty. Acetone plus H2O2 is called triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, an explosive. It is very easy to ignite (hence dangerous to handle). But obtaining H2O2 in the high concentration required to make a powerful TATP bomb is not easy; even chemical-supply companies rarely offer H2O2 in greater concentration than 30-35 percent, and for a big bang from TATP, 70 percent or higher is needed.

Thirty-percent H2O2 can be distilled into higher concentrations. Since the three men were arrested with 1,500 pounds of the stuff, I'm guessing that is what they wanted to do. That amount would distill down to about 650 pounds of 70-percent strength stuff. CNN reported that German sources said the bomb attack, just days from being carried out, would have produced an explosion equivalent to more than half a ton of TNT.

Der Spiegel reports that the three men had legally obtained 730 kilograms (>1,600 pounds) of chemicals, which raised the attention level of the authorities.

A few days ago, police experts secretly swapped the 35-percent solution of hydrogen peroxide contained in 12 barrels for a diluted liquid that only contained 3 percent of the chemical. ...

[T]he men had all the necessary components ready -- they had even already procured a military ignition mechanism for the explosive device. "An attack was imminent -- it was only a question of time," said one high-ranking security expert. Probably the men wanted to place the bombs in one or more cars and explode them in front of the target.

TATP was said by British authorities to have been used in the London bus bombings and apparently is favored by such attackers because it is free of nitrogen, a common component of explosives. TATP is thus undetectable by nitrogenous-compound sniffing scanners.

Even had an actual high-explosive bomb not been intended, a weaker form of TATP could cause considerable damage if used as an arson agent. It burns very hot and will burn right through aluminum. This was apparently the plan of the 2006 al Qaeda scheme to down 10 airliners over the mid-Atlantic in one day.

Though the planned attacks were intended to take place on airports, authorities said that the actual targets were not aviation facilities or aircraft, but against crowded facilities such as restaurants, bars or clubs at or near the airports. If so, then the 35-percent solution of H2O2 probably would have been sufficient to make a potent flame weapon, basically a low-order explosive (with luck) that spread burning TATP through the targets.

Der Spiegel says that this barely-thwarted attack is a wakeup call for Germany that it is definitely a target of Islamist terrorists. This may be difficult for the German people to accept, since they consider themselves as having good relations with the Middle East. That doesn't matter to Islamists, of course, who mainly despise the Arab governments with whom Germany gets along so well. The Germans are learning what I've said before - you may not be interested in terrorists, but terrorists are definitely interested in you.

Medical care to be denied to people with unhealthy lifestyles

2007-09-04T14:51:00.000-05:00

That's the bright idea of a Tory panel in Britain.

Patients who refuse to change their unhealthy lifestyles should not be treated by the NHS, the Conservatives said today.

In a bid to ease spiralling levels of obesity and other health concerns, a Tory panel said certain treatments should be denied to patients who refuse to co-operate with health professionals and live healthier lifestyles.

And those who do manage to improve their general health by losing weight and quitting smoking, for example, would receive "Health Miles" cards.

Points earned could then be used to pay for health-related products such as gym membership and fresh vegetables.

That's the inevitable end of socialized medicine. As a Canadian wrote recently (I'll try to find the link again), the main object of a free-market, insurance-based medical system is curing disease or injury, but the main object of government-run medical system is controlling costs, for which cures are secondary. Hence, said the new head of Canada's medical association, you can get a hip replacement for your dog there is a week, but it will take a year for you to get one for yourself.

So who in Britain will get to say whether you are leading a healthy lifestyle worthy of medical care? Oh, just guess. No doubt the Tories would create a new Department of Lifestyle and Health Benefits Qualification Assessment.

15 answers to Creationist nonsense

2007-08-11T14:54:00.001-05:00

A highly read-worthy article in Scientific American offers, "15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense" (printer version here). Part of the answer to the creationist claim, "Evolution is unscientific, because it is not testable or falsifiable. It makes claims about events that were not observed and can never be re-created," is this:

[E]volution implies that between the earliest-known ancestors of humans (roughly five million years old) and the appearance of anatomically modern humans (about 100,000 years ago), one should find a succession of hominid creatures with features progressively less apelike and more modern, which is indeed what the fossil record shows. But one should not--and does not--find modern human fossils embedded in strata from the Jurassic period (144 million years ago). Evolutionary biology routinely makes predictions far more refined and precise than this, and researchers test them constantly.

But a recent announcement by anthropologist Meave Leakey (the most famous and respected family name in the business) busts a hole in the evolutionary descent of modern humans as presently accepted. Until now, scientists thought that the ancient species Homo habilis ("man with ability"), was the evolutionary ancestor of Homo erectus ("Erect man," and no juvenile snickering, either). Dr. Leakey's research postively disproves that idea.

Two fossils found in Kenya have shaken the human family tree, possibly rearranging major branches thought to be in a straight ancestral line to Homo sapiens.

Scientists who dated and analyzed the specimens � a 1.44-million-year-old Homo habilis and a 1.55-million-year-old Homo erectus found in 2000 � said their findings challenged the conventional view that these species evolved one after the other. Instead, they apparently lived side by side in eastern Africa for almost half a million years.

If this interpretation is correct, the early evolution of the genus Homo is left even more shrouded in mystery than before. It means that both habilis and erectus must have originated from a common ancestor between two million and three million years ago, a time when fossil hunters had drawn a virtual blank. ...

The challenge to the idea of a more linear succession of the three Homo species is being reported today in the journal Nature. The lead author is Fred Spoor, an evolutionary anatomist at University College London. ...

Dr. Spoor, speaking by satellite phone from a field site near Lake Turkana, said the evidence clearly contradicted previous ideas of human evolution �as one strong, single line from early to us.� The new findings, he added, support the revised interpretations of �a lot of bushiness and experimentation in the fossil record.�

I amk not claiming that this discovery invalidates the theory of evolution, far from it. It just caught my eye how immediately SciAm's defense of the existing theory of human evolution was knocked about. Who says? Not me. Here is what Daniel Lieberman, professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University, had to say about the Spoor-Leakey report (same link):

The new findings, Dr. Lieberman said, highlight the need for obtaining more fossils that are more than two million years old. In addition, he said, they show �just how interesting and complex the human genus was and how poorly we understand the transition from being something much more apelike to something more humanlike.�

So it seems that the human family tree is much less clear than SciAm makes it out to be. While the new finding does not affect the present understanding that H. erectus was the ancestor of modern humans, it does knock a huge hole in SciAm's claim that there is a, "succession of hominid creatures with features progressively less apelike and more modern." In fact, the fossil researchers said they were surprised at how much less like modern humans the H. erectus fossil was than they expected it to be (read the article for why). So there seems now to be a big gap in our understanding of our descendancy, for which researchers will doubtless start to intensify their quest for additional finds.

Anyway, the rest of the SciAm piece is worth your time.

Lack of trust, CYA, or fear of the media?

2007-08-10T15:07:00.000-05:00

In the wake of the botched reporting, then coverup, of the circumstances of Cpl. Pat Tillman's death in Afghanistan in 2004, the Army has ordered that "a formal, independent investigation into the death of every American in a hostile area" be conducted.

For those of you who've been living on Mars the past few weeks, Cpl. Tillman was killed by gunfire shot by his own unit's soldiers. His death was properly reported as killed in action (KIA) but erroneously reported as caused by hostile fire. By the time the truth was determined, some weeks had passed and the mistaken report was not corrrected. Instead, officers covered up the truth, finally leading to a formal investigation run by the Inspector General, which recently issued a harsh report.

Retired Col. Jack Jacobs says that the Army's new "formal investigation" policy is stupid, though:

[I]f the regulation had existed in World War II, we would have conducted 400,000 investigations, requiring perhaps as many investigating officers as we now have troops in Iraq.

In theory, the rule sounds commendable. Life is precious, and if one is cut short in combat then we owe the soldier and his family as full a report as possible. Having experienced more than enough combat, I understand this sentiment. Unfortunately, I don�t think it�s the motivating force behind the revised regulation. In my view, the provision is there for one reason and one reason alone: to put in place a protocol to prevent commanders from lying about the cause of their soldiers� deaths.

What�s the problem with that? Well, it�s beyond insidious because it is an admission that the Army has determined it can�t trust anyone in the combat chain of command � that the actions of General Kensinger are the rule, not the exception, and that this kind of malfeasance among soldiers is expected to be so common that it requires regular policing. This is a catastrophic message to be sending our military, in large measure because it is wrong.

I agree that the new regulation is stupid. I agree that it sends a terrible message to staff sergeants and above in units deployed to combat theaters. And I agree that it is a solution in search of a problem. But I think Col. Jacobs misses the boat. He thinks that the Army's high command has decided it can't trust "anyone in the combat chain of command." Sorry, no.

Having served in the five-sided puzzle palace, I am convinced that basis of the order is that the Army's senior leadership - and I'd bet my next paycheck it is specifically the civilian leadership - have been cowed by the intensive media coverage, most of it quite unfriendly, that was turned on the Army because of the Tillman report and its preceding controversy.

Quite simply, this order does two things, and is intended to do only those two things: cover the tails of the Secretary and the Chief of Staff and keep them out of the media's sights.

They issued the order not because they don't trust the lower chain of command, but simply to protect themselves.

"Duty, ~~honor~~, country."

New York subway�s water problem

2007-08-10T14:57:00.000-05:00

Earlier this week, torrential rains in New York City flooded the subway system, causing it to be shut down. Outside one station, 1,000 people were reported to be lined up at the taxi stand. In an otherwise unrelated article, Scientific American gives some interesting background information about Manhattan island:

... "The name �Manhattan� comes from an Indian term referring to hills. It used to be a very hilly island. Of course, the region was eventually flattened to have a grid of streets imposed on it. Around those hills there used to flow about 40 different streams, and there were numerous springs all over Manhattan island. What happened to all that water? There�s still just as much rainfall as ever on Manhattan, but the water has now been suppressed. It�s underground. Some of it runs through the sewage system, but a sewage system is never as efficient as nature in wicking away water. So there is a lot of groundwater rushing around underneath, trying to get out. Even on a clear, sunny day, the people who keep the subway going have to pump 13 million gallons of water away. Otherwise the tunnels will start to flood.

�There are places in Manhattan where they�re constantly fighting rising underground rivers that are corroding the tracks. You stand in these pump rooms, and you see an enormous amount of water gushing in. And down there in a little box are these pumps, pumping it away. ...

Who knew?

Raise the speed limit to fight global warming!

2007-08-05T15:12:00.000-05:00

In Great Britain, reports the Telegraph, "Holidaymakers are facing such severe delays at airports they are being forced to spend more time stuck in queues than on their flights ... ."

Not that things are much better in the US, according to Slate:

For frequent fliers, it is clearly the worst of times. In the first quarter of 2007, only 71.4 percent of flights arrived on time, and 19,260 passengers were involuntarily bumped�up 13 percent from the year before. In July, 16,988 flights were canceled, up 54 percent from July 2006, according to FlightStats.com.

Now consider this news report in USA Today when the science fiction (and I do mean fiction) movie, The Day After Tomorrow, was released. Reported Ben Mutzabaugh,

NASA scientists say condensation trails from jet exhausts create cirrus clouds, likely trapping heat rising from the Earth's surface, according to a Reuters report. In fact, those scientists say that could account for nearly all the warming over the United States between 1975 and 1994.

Not only that, but jet engines exhaust tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and at high altitudes. The paper reported elsewhere,

... On a New York-to-Denver flight, a commercial jet would generate 840 to 1,660 pounds of carbon dioxide per passenger. That's about what an SUV generates in a month.

So it's less polluting to drive than fly, right? And it appears that is is rapidly becoming just as quick to drive as fly on not only short-range flights, but increasingly on medium-range flights as well.

So here's my global-warming-fighting plan: significantly increase the speed limits on the nation's interstate highways. That will make driving rather than flying even more appealing, more financially attractive and less time consuming.

By "significantly increase" the speed limits, I mean to triple-digit speeds. The present limit in Tennessee in 70 mph. So let's reset it to 100, minimum.

Consider two comparisons:

Nashville to Memphis, 200 ground miles, flying Northwest Airlines flt. 457. Depart Nashville (BNA) at 0612, arrive Memphis (MEM) at 0715. Cool, just an hour, right? Of course not. You must arrive at the airport no fewer than 90 minutes earlier than flight departure (they say two hours, but let's assume you check no baggage). And you have to drive to the airport, call that 30 minutes. So you leave home at 0412. Three hours later you arrive at the Memphis airport and have to spend another 30 minutes, minimum, getting to your place of business for the day. Use more time if you checked baggage.

So you spend 3 1/2 hours getting to your destination in Memphis from your Nashville home.

If you drive, Google Maps says it would take 3 1/2 hours just to drive from BNA to MEM. Of course, you wouldn't start from BNA or end at MEM, so shave a half-hour. Still, many business travelers would consider the extra half-hour spent flying to be worth it, especially if they can use the down time to work.

So let's raise the speed limit to 100 mph. Using the same route, BNA - MEM, uses 205 interstate miles. Some of this is too congested to permit high-speed driving, probably about 20 miles. Heck, to make it easy let's say 25 miles. So you cover 180 miles in 1 hour, 48 minutes and the other 25 miles in as many minutes. That leaves 16 miscellaneous miles left, which might take you another 25 minutes. Total time, 2 hours, 38 minutes. You save, basically, an hour.

I would guess that a lot of people would find saving an hour worth driving, especially if it puts them back home that much earlier, also (or a combined two hours earlier).

Second example: my home in Clarksville, Tenn., to my Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC, where my son matriculates.

Clarksville to BNA, one hour. There are no passenger flights to Winston-Salem; you debark at Greensboro�s airport. There are no nonstop flights from BNA to GSO; you have to go through Atlanta, Cincinnati or another city. I�ll use the shortest travel I found on Orbitz. You depart BNA at 1024 and arrive at GSO at 1347, making air-travel time of 3 1/2 hours. Add the hour getting to the airport and another 90 minutes for security before flying, as above. Then add 37 minutes driving your rental from GSO to Wake. The add another 20 minutes at least for putz-around time at the GSO terminal itself, and your trip comes to 417 minutes, or 6 hours, 57 minutes.

Three minutes shy of seven hours - that's only 47 minutes shorter than driving at present speed limits.

Driving straight from Clarksville to WFU at present speed limits, says Google Maps, takes 7 hours, 44 minutes. (Google says the distance is 491 miles, but it's actually 480 miles. I�ve driven it many times, but I�ll let it pass.)

The vast majority of that 491 miles is high-speed worthy, call it 90 percent easily, or 442 miles. So that�s 265 minutes. The other 49 miles will take about an hour since it�s almost all either low-speed-worthy interstate or major thoroughfare. Add another 12 minutes for a refueling stop. Total trip time: 5 hours, 37 minutes. Time saved: one hour, 20 minutes.

So, since even SUVs are many times less polluting than jet liners, especially of carbon dioxide, then would it not make sense for the global warming alarmists to lobby for raising interstate speed limits to make driving more attractive than flying for many trips?

Oh, wait, I forgot.

Update: Don't forget all the other, non-fuel pollution the airline industry produces - thousands of tons of food packaging per day, for example. Also, the average wait with engines running waiting to get to the head of the line to takeoff has been growing rapidly; in fact, some major airports have routine waits of an hour. And the enginines are running the whole time. How cabn airlines get away with this? They either build in the wait time to the schedule or simply ignore it. Here's why - an on-time departure is neither when the liner pulls away from the ramp, nor when it actually takes off.

An on-time departure is accomplished when the captain releases the aircraft's parking brakes within a small +/- window of the scheduled departure time, as signaled by the "Aircraft Communication Addressing and Reporting System (or ACARS)." Link:

This computer transmits the "out", "off", "on" and "in" times for the flight. The "out" time starts when the captain drops the parking brake with the main cabin door closed. The "in" time is recorded as the last time the parking brake was applied. The main cabin door opening sends a signal that transmits the "in" time. Unless the captain reset the brake while waiting for the door to be opened, that time is what is recorded

So, the door may open 20 minutes after scheduled arrival, however the time that is transmitted may very well be D.O.T "on time" if the last application of parking brake was within the time limits. Once the chocks are in, the brakes are then released (they can get hot otherwise), so if it takes 10 minutes to open the door after that, the time that is recorded will still be the last time the parking brake was set. That said, you can have an "on time" departure as well- even if you sit at the gate for half an hour, because as soon as the brake is dropped the flight is "out".

But wait, there's more!

As anyone who has flown recently can probably tell you, delays are getting worse this year. The on-time performance of airlines has reached an all-time low, but even the official numbers do not begin to capture the severity of the problem.

That is because these statistics track how late airplanes are, not how late passengers are. The longest delays � those resulting from missed connections and canceled flights � involve sitting around for hours or even days in airports and hotels and do not officially get counted. Researchers and consumer advocates have taken notice and urged more accurate reporting.

Realistically, I should factor in the high probability (about .25) in my examples that the plane trips will be late, delayed or canceled. Of course, that's possible with auto trips, too, but 25 percent of the time? Nope.

A couple of commenters pointed out that the average airliner is more full, as a percentage of capacity, than the average passenger car. True, but it only worsens the problem for airliners because the highest occupancies are found on routes and times that are already so jammed with planes that adding capacity isn't possible even though passenger loads still increase. The result? More delays and more time planes spend sitting on the ground spewing CO2 into the air while not moving anyone. Example:

Let�s use Los Angeles International as an example. At any given time, the most number of runways dedicated to take-offs is two. But if you look at airline schedules, there are currently more than 35 take-offs scheduled for 8 a.m. each morning. Assuming at least a two- to three-minute minimum time separation between each take-off, you don�t have to be a member of Mensa to figure out that a lot of folks will not be taking off at 8 a.m.

But if the captain releases the parking brake at 8 a.m., the plane is on time for departure, even it takes off at 9:30.

Folks, I never sit in my car idling for an hour waiting for the rest of my family to come out to the car or waiting for my driveway to be clear for driving away.

Obama threatens to invade Pakistan

2007-08-01T15:09:00.000-05:00

Presidential candidate Barack Obama says that he will order combat missions inside Pakistan.

"Let me make this clear," Obama said in a speech prepared for delivery at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. "There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al-Qaida leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will." ...

Obama said that as commander in chief he would remove troops from Iraq and putting them "on the right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan."

Good grief.

Here's a short blogosphere roundup:

Thomas Lifson: "Nothing is more dangerous than a na�ve appeaser, other than a na�ve appeaser who erratically takes rash steps in order to look tougher than he really is."

BCB: "To Heck With Our Enemies, Let�s Invade Our Allies": "[I]n a week or so we have had Obama say that stopping genocide was no reason to stay in Iraq, that he would personally meet with heads of rogue states and that he would invade a nuclear-armed ally."

Michelle Malkin, who has a link roundup of her own.

Population control resurges . . .

2007-07-31T15:34:00.001-05:00

... this time as an environmental responsibility. The mind boggles.

Make your own power grid

2007-07-26T15:32:00.001-05:00

The day is not here yet, but soon will be, when connecting homes to central power grids will be unnecessary. By "soon" I mean within 20 years. Here's why.

"New Solar Photovoltaic Cell Efficiency Record: 42.8%." Once solar-cell efficiency reaches 50 percent, quite a large amount of electricity can be generated from much smaller areas than at present, making rooftop solar cells powerful enough to supply electricity for the whole home. Fifty percent is the efficiency rate set by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) at which solar-cell sets become portable enough to be militarily useful for tactical units.

So I think that the day will soon come when solar-cell technology will reach that 50 percent mark and manufacture of such cells will be cheap enough so that roofs of houses may be covered in them. Central grids won't go away, not soon, anyway, because solar roofs will still be more expensive than shingles, but excess electricity from solar-powered homes will be sold to the grid to help provide juice to conventionally-powered homes. Furthermore, businesses use more electricity than homes and even at 50 percent efficiency, solar cells probably won't be able to power businesses in full.

The question is begged, however: what about nighttime or very cloudy days? How will homes be powered then? Aha:

A new type of a room-size battery, however, may be poised to store energy for the nation's vast electric grid almost as easily as a reservoir stockpiles water, transforming the way power is delivered to homes and businesses. Compared with other utility-scale batteries plagued by limited life spans or unwieldy bulk, the sodium-sulfur battery is compact, long-lasting and efficient. ...

American Electric Power (AEP), one of the largest U.S. utilities, has been using a 1.2 megawatt NaS battery in Charleston, W.Va., the past year and plans to install one twice the size elsewhere in the state next year. Dozens of utilities are considering the battery, says Dan Mears, a consultant for NGK Insulators, the Japanese company that makes the devices.

"If you've got these batteries distributed in the neighborhood, you have, in a sense, lots of little power plants," [analyst Stow] Walker says. "The difference between these and diesel generators is these batteries don't need fuel" and don't pollute.

There is no reason that such battery piles couldn't be built into homes themselves, making a home entirely self sufficient for electrical power. But economies of scale would almost certainly mean that homeowners would find it cheaper to tie into a neighborhood battery pile, which would store the combined excess power from home during the day and provide it back at night or other low-solar times. In fact, it's not hard to envision homeowners associations starting electrical co-ops for that purpose. Battery piles, of course, can store electricity not only from solar cells, but from any other generating means. In some parts of the country that could be a boon to wind generation and can even reduce the amount of coal that coal-fired plants use by storing power from peak-generation times.

A final thought: is 50 percent solar cell efficiency high enough to make pure-electric autos self charging? What about hybrids, which use the gasoline engine to recharge their batteries; could they use highly efficient solar cells instead, thus decreasing their use of gasoline? I don't know, but I'm sure some smart people are working on the answers.

HT: Glenn.

Better double dose your Dramamine

2007-07-25T15:28:00.000-05:00

This is a video of the cruise ship Voyager weathering a cyclone in the Mediterranean Sea in 2005. This'll ruin your shuffleboard game!

World poverty plummets

2007-07-24T15:26:00.000-05:00

I've observed a few times since 2003 that the mantra is false that "the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer." The poor are getting richer, too. In fact, according to UC Berkeley Professor J. Bradford DeLong, "Since 1975 the world has not only become a richer place, but the world's poor have seen their incomes grow faster than the world's rich. ..."

Why, then, does the left side of the political aisle, and some on the far right, continue to rail against globalization? Globalization, for all its drawbacks (as V. D, hanson said, it brought Islamist terrorism to our shores), has been the best thing that ever happened to the poor. Yale University's ironically-named David Dollar has showed that for the first time in the whole history of civilization, the percentage of extreme poor people worldwide is declining, and has been since 1980, the year globalization as we speak of it now began.

Prof. DeLong has also pointed out that most of the improvement has taken place among the 2.5 billion people who live in only two countries, India and China, which have both freed their economies substantially from statist suffocation since 1975.

And the good news is getting better.

As Surjit Bhalla, an economist affiliated with the Institute for International Economics, recently wrote: "World poverty fell from 44% of the global population in 1980 to 13% in 2000, its fastest decline in history. Global income inequality has dropped over this period and is at its lowest level since 1910."

Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson, Jr., recently observed that thre global economy is the strongest he's ever seen. In terms of global productivity and the raising of standards of living, it surely is the best it has ever been in history. Paulson warned, though, that "We haven�t had a global financial shock since 1998" and that a global financial downturn is inevitable. I won't argue otherwise; what goes up must come down in economics as well as gravity. But to return to the world poverty levels of a generation ago would require a truly massive collapse, and that simply is not on the horizon.

Who speaks for the people?

2007-07-13T15:22:00.001-05:00

Captain's Quarters provides a snippet of a debate between Sen. Dick Durbin and Sen. Norm Coleman on the so-called "fairness doctrine," which was once law and empowered the federal government to regulate media broadcasts regarding political coverage to ensure (it was claimed) "dalance" and "fairness." There are member os the Congress of both parties who want the "fairness doctrine" reestablished in law. So over to Dick Durbin:

Since the people who are seeking the licenses are using America's airwaves, does the government, speaking for the people of this country, have any interest at that point to step in and make sure there is a despair balanced approach to the --a fair and balanced approach to the information given to the American people?

Get that? "... does the government, speaking for the people of this country... ."

Senator, here's a clue. You do not speak for the people of this country. Nor do your 99 colleagues, nor do the 435 members of the House.

The people of America speak for themselves. That's why the states required the guarantees that the government would stay away from speech regulation to be amended to the Constitution before they would ratify it. Hence the First Amendment.

Why does Durbin think he speaks for the people? Because of Den Beste's Law: "The job of bureaucrats is to regulate, and left themselves they will regulate everything they can." But not everyone is infected with regulatory disease. Sen. Coleman responded,

We're at a time where we've got 20,000, you know, opportunities for stations and satellite, where you have cable, you have blogs, you have a whole range of information. I think it would be -- I -- I can't even conceive -- I can't even conceive that the market could not provide opportunities for differing positions because it does. And in the end -- in the end, consumers also have a right based on the market to make choices.

Now, Norm's close but still doesn't the cigar. The "market" has nothing to do with this. Consumers making choices, right or wrong, have nothing to do with this. This is not a mercantile issue. This is about a fundamental human right that strikes to very heart of democracy: the unhindered right of the people to speak, publish, post or broadcast without government constraint about matters relating to their government. If the First Amendment is intended to protect anything, it's intended to protect political speech. But as Radley Balko wrote, "This is all thinly-disguised posturing for what's really bothering the senators: They don't like that people are allowed to criticize them on public airwaves." Yep.

So Durbin and allies want to regulate the people's speech because they incredibly believe that they speak for us and therefore must protect us from our own speech.

(Linked at OTB's Traffic Jam.)

If you're an airline pilot...

2007-07-07T15:19:00.000-05:00

.. and haven't at least thought about doing this, then I don't believe you.

Reminds me of the four-panel Far Side cartoon in which the pilot announces to the pax that there is turbulence ahead, then wrenches the yoke violently to the right. After a good laugh the copilot announces, "Uh, oh, looks like more turbulence!"

Global cooling ain't so great, either

2007-02-13T15:46:00.000-06:00

Early this month I asked the contrarian question, "What if global warming is a good thing?"

I�ve always kind of suspected that underlying much of environmentalism is a desire for the impossible: stasis. For the earth will either get warmer or cooler, but it definitely won�t stay the same. Even if everyone were to agree that the globe really is warming, can we please see some scientifically-sound documentation that it is worse than the alternative? ...

Answering that question might give some balance to the political debates on the issue.

Still waiting. But via Don Sequiturs I followed a link to a chapter from Brian Fagan's 1999 book, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Ni�o and the Fate of Civilizations. Chapter 10 is "The Little Ice Age:"

Only 150 years ago, Europe came to the end of a 500 year cold snap so severe that thousands of peasants starved. The Little Ice Age changed the course of European history. Dutch canals froze over for months, shipping could not leave port, and glaciers in the Swiss Alps overwhelmed mountain villages. Five hundred years of much colder weather changed European agriculture, helped tip the balance of political power from the Mediterranean states to the north, and con�tributed to the social unrest that culminated in the French Revolu�tion. The poor suffered most. They were least able to adjust to changing circumstances and most susceptible to disease and increased mortality. These five centuries of periodic economic and so�cial crisis in a much less densely populated Europe are a haunting reminder of the drastic consequences of even a modest cooling of global temperatures. ...

Greenland ice sheets tell us there was a burst of warmer weather [in] the far north between A.D. 600 and 650, followed by a more pr longed warm period that began about 800 and climaxed between 1150 and 1300. Norwegian farmers grew wheat north of Trondheim at an unprecedented sixty-four degrees north. English vintners planted grapes as far north as Herefordshire in western England at altitude of 200 meters above sea level. Landowners in the Lammermuir Hills of southeastern Scotland grew crops at 425 meters above sea level, during a golden age of Scottish history when interclan war�fare was virtually unheard of. A burst of cathedral building spread across Medieval Europe in the twelfth century. Chartres Cathedral, built in a mere quarter-century after 1195, is a miracle in glass and stone, where ten thousand worshipers from the surrounding country�side once gathered on festival days to pour out their love for God. Chartres and its contemporaries, were celebrations of the bounty of the soil, of generations of prosperity. ...

But the climate became more erratic during the thirteenth century. Alpine glaciers began to advance, and seasonal temperature changes became more extreme. As Arctic regions cooled, the thermal con�trast between the Greenland?Iceland region and middle Atlantic lati�tudes steepened, causing greater storminess. Great westerly gales conspired with the prevailing high sea levels to cause vast destruc�tion. Powerful wind storms and surging sea floods inundated low-�lying North Sea coasts, drowning hundreds of thousands of people in some of the worst weather disasters ever recorded. The floods of 1240 and 1362 saw over sixty parishes in southern Denmark's dio�cese of Slesvig "swallowed by the salt sea." To add to the difficulties, tidal ranges increased after 1300, reaching a peak in 1400.

The Little Ice Age had begun.

On a related but different note, Michael Crichton and J.R. Dunn have written highly insightful essays about how environmentalism is a religion in its own right. See "Environmentalism as Religion" by Crichton and Dunn's piece, "A Necessary Apocalypse," in which he shows how gobal-warming environmentalism is not merely a religion, it is an apocalyptic religion. Its deity is Mother Earth (aka Gaia), for whom human beings are mortal enemies. NBC's Matt Lauer inadvertantly gave away Gaiaism's central article of faith thus:

Earth�s intricate web of ecosystems thrived for millions of years as natural paradises, until we came along, paved paradise, and put up a parking lot. Our assault on nature is killing off the very things we depend on for our own lives ...The stark reality is that there are simply too many of us, and we consume way too much, especially here at home.

My second son was required to take ecology his junior year in high school; he related to me that the curriculum basically said there was nothing wrong with earth that the disappearance of humanity wouldn't cure. More about this later.

What if global warming is a good thing?

2007-02-02T15:44:00.000-06:00

A couple of years I was conversing with a man whom I've known for some decades. The talk turned briefly to global warming (who knows why) and I still remember the pithy point he made: "No one has ever explained why it's supposed to be a bad thing."

And, really, I have never heard that explanation, either. Oh, I know all about the presumption of rising sea levels, but those estimates are all over the place; I've read over time that the average sea level will rise from a couple of inches to many feet. The latter, of course, could be true only if there is total melting of both polar caps, but you have to wade through the fine print to see that. The only downside I have ever read about rising sea levels is that a large percentage of the earth's population lives near the sea and could be flooded out. Which might be true if the ocean rose by many feet, not a few inches, and if it rose very suddenly, not over a period of many decades. Even so, I will not dispute that significantly rising sea levels could turn out to be a bad thing, bearing in mind, always, that the key is "how much." The IPCC's latest estimate is 7-23 inches, which frankly does not seem an unmanageable amount to adjust to over the next 100 years.

Anyway, I commend to you J. R. Dunn's essay,"Resisting Global Warming Panic," expecially his exposition of the "medieval warm period, more commonly known as the Little Climatic Optimum (LCO), a period stretching roughly from the 10th to the 13th centuries, in which the average temperature was anything from 1 to 3 degrees centigrade higher than it is today."

* How warm was it during the LCO? Areas in the Midlands and Scotland that cannot grow crops today were regularly farmed. England was known for its wine exports.

* The average height of Britons around A.D. 1000 was close to six feet, thanks to good nutrition. The small stature of the British lower classes (and the Irish) later in the millennium is an artifact of lower temperatures. People of the 20th century were the first Europeans in centuries to grow to their "true" stature - and most had to grow up in the USA to do it.

* In fact, famine - and its partner, plague -- appears to have taken a hike for several centuries. We have records of only a handful of famines during the LCO, and few mass outbreaks of disease. The bubonic plague itself appears to have retreated to its heartland of Central Asia.

* The LCO was the first age of transatlantic exploration. When not slaughtering their neighbors, the Vikings were charting new lands across the North Atlantic, one of the stormiest seas on earth (only the Southern Ocean - the Roaring 40s - is worse). If you tried the same thing today, traveling their routes in open boats of the size they used, you would drown. They discovered Iceland, and Greenland, and a new world even beyond, where they found grape vines, the same as in England.

* The Agricultural Revolution is not widely known except among historians. Mild temperatures eased land clearing and lengthened growing seasons. More certain harvests encouraged experimentation among farmers involving field rotation, novel implements, and new crops such as legumes. While the thought of peas and beans may not thrill the foodies among us, they expanded an almost unbelievably bland ancient diet as well as providing new sources of nutrition. The result was a near-tripling of European population from 27 million at the end of the 7th century to 70 million in 1300.

* The First Industrial Revolution is not widely known even among historians. Opening the northern German plains allowed access to easily mined iron deposits in the Ruhr and the Saarland. As a result smithies and mills became common sights throughout Europe. Then came the basic inventions without which nothing more complex can be made - the compound crank, the connecting rod, the flywheel, followed by the turbine, the compass, the mechanical clock, and eyeglasses. Our entire technical civilization, all the way down to Al Gore's hydrogenmobile, has its roots in the LCO.

But temperatures started crashing in the late 13th century, after which came the Great Plague, killing a third to half the population of Europe.

Folks my age and maybe a little younger can remember when the Environmental Apocaplypse was not global warming but global cooling. So let us suppose two things: first that global warming really is occurring and human attention to it can reverse it, and second, that we do reverse it. Are we then to agree that a cooler earth really is in our best interests? Why?

I've always kind of suspected that underlying much of environmentalism is a desire for the impossible: stasis. For the earth will either get warmer or cooler, but it definitely won't stay the same. Even if everyone were to agree that the globe really is warming, can we please see some scientifically-sound documentation that it is worse than the alternative?

Update: Okay, nothing can be done to reverse global warming, according to the IPCC's latest report.

The report said no matter how much civilization slows or reduces its greenhouse gas emissions, global warming and sea-level rise will continue for centuries.

"This is just not something you can stop. We're just going to have to live with it," Trenberth said in an interview. "We're creating a different planet. If you were to come back in 100 years' time, we'll have a different climate."

Scientists worry that world leaders will take that message in the wrong way and throw up their hands, Trenberth said. That would be wrong, he said. Instead, the scientists urged leaders to reduce emissions and also adapt to a warmer world with wilder weather.

There's no arguing with the proposition that we should prepare for the effects of warming if we know it's coming. But I would submit that the models are still way too much inexact to know exactly what to prepare for. There's a 300 percent difference across the range of sea level increases the IPCC predicts. Also, the IPCC "predicted temperature rises of 2-11.5 F by the year 2100." Again, a very large variation.

And yes (before you leave a rancid comment!) , I have read articles explaining the prospects of increased desertification and other warming-related effects, but the thrust of my question, might it turn out to be a good thing, is oriented not in microclimes here and there, but on the net overall effect worldwide. For every hectare turned to new desert, would there be a hectare turned to verdancy, especially land newly useful for agriculture when it wasn't before? Is there really a downside to the extension of the growing season is more northern and southern latitudes? After all, certain commercial grains can now be grown in Iceland, which couldn't be done only 20 years ago. In the literature I've read on warming, potential positive effects seem to either be ignored or glossed over. If you know of essays that engage both sides of the question, please do post links.

Again, the issue cannot be maintaining a climatic status quo, since that wasn't the case even before humanity's earliest known ancestor, Ardipithecus ramidus kadabba, walked around more than six million years ago. The earth "rests" only briefly between periods of cooling then warming. So it's warming now. Is that worse than cooling? Answering that question might give some balance to the political debates on the issue.

Gimme that ole-time insurgency

2005-04-29T14:19:00.002-05:00

Are the insurgents in Iraq playing from a Cuban playbook?

George Will compares the insurgency in Iraq today with that of Algerian insurgents in the 1950s.

The Algerian insurgency was fueled by the most potent "ism" of a century of isms -- nationalism. In contrast, one of the strange, almost surreal, aspects of the Iraqi insurgency is its lack of ideological content. Most of the insurgents are "FREs" -- former regime elements -- who simply want to return to power. [See here - DS]

Unlike most of the violent cadres of the 20th century, the insurgency does not have a fighting faith; it does not bother to have an ideology to justify its claim to power. ...

By promiscuously dispensing death ... the insurgents hope to delegitimize the Iraqi government for its failure to provide the primary social good: freedom from fear of violent death.

I have to wonder whether the FREs are playing from a Cuban guidebook called, Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, by Carlos Marighella. Originally published on paper (natch) in 1969, it was summarized thus by Claire Sterling in her 1981 book, The Terror Network:

In forty-eight densely packed pages, the Mini-Manual says it all. It explains whjy cities are better than rural areas for guerrilla operations, and how to behave there: no "foreign air" and "normal" occupations when possible. It suggests how to drill in urban courtyards; blow up bridges and railroad tracks,; raise money by kidnap ransoms and bank "expropriations" attacking the "nervous system of capitalism"; plan the "physical liquidation of ranking army officers and policemen,; deal with spies and informers, to be summarily executed ... .

It goes into careful detail about choices of weapons, and the need to "shoot first" at pointblank range if possible; "shooting and aiming are to the urban guerrilla what air and water are to human beings."

All this sounds almost identical to what the FRE and al Qaeda insurgents are doing in Iraq. It is well known in counter-terror agencies in Europe and the Americas that the Mini-Manual became the Bible of Western and Latin terrorist organizations; the Uruguayan Tupamaros were Marighella's first international students. The MM teachings quickly crossed the Atlantic to find a home in the German Red Army Fraction and the Italian Red Brigades. In America the Symbionese Liberation Army (of Patty Hearst fame) tried to adopt the MM's techniques. The MM was known to have been studied by some Middle Eastern terrorist groups as well.

All these movements failed, however. In Europe, the terrorists organizations were materially and financially supported by the old Soviet Union. When it disappeared, so did the USSR's support. In America, ordinary law-enforcement measures broke the SLA, the Weathermen and other self-styled urban insurgencies; their members were never very skilled at long-term covert operations and information security. In Uruguay, the government finally awoke to the threat posed by the Tupamaros and crushed them, but in so doing the country became a military dictatorship in 1972. It had formerly been the most free and wealthiest country in South America.

All these failures lie squarely at the feet of Carlos Marighella himself, who fell victim to his own romantic notions of "freedom fighting." The crackdown by the Uruguayan government and its increasing repression was not only anticipated by Marighella, it was actually an intermediate objective of the his urban guerrilla concept. But he badly missed the boat in two key areas. Marighella wrote that the insurgents use their violence in order to identify with popular causes, which wins them a base of support among the people. (Remember, the people are to the guerrillas as water is to fish.) Once that was done, he declared that,

... the government has no alternative but to intensify repression. Tbe police roundups, house searches, arrests of innocent people, make life in the city unbearable. The general sentiment is that the government in unjust, incapable of solving problems, and resorts purely to and simply to the physical liquidation of its opponents. The political situation is transformed [and so] the urban guerrilla must become more aggressive and violent, resorting without letup to sabotage, terrorism, expropriations, assaults, kidnapings and executions, heightening the disastrous situation in which the guerrilla must act.

All these steps are intended to lead to what Marighella called, "the uncontrollable expansion of urban rebellion."

Except that they don't lead there. There are two fundamental errors of the theory that it cannot overcome and that play to Iraq's long-term favor. The first error is the belief that in Iraq the increasing level of terrorist violence by either al Qaeda in Iraq or FREs will merge the terrorists with "popular causes," that is, make them one with the people. In Iraq, except for the minority of Sunnis aligned with the old Baathist party or Saddam's clan, the people's cause is freedom and democracy. Violence by Saddam's regime is what terrorized the people for more than 20 years; it will not lead them to submit to Baathist rule again. Quite the contrary, terrorist violence is unifying the Iraqi people with the new, sovereign government. As for al Qaeda's terrorism, the Iraqi people certainly have no desire to live under Islamism (see here) and al Qaeda's gruesome murders only convince the people evermore to shun it.

Al Qaeda is more guilty of this delusion than the FREs. Baathism in Iraq was never anything but simple, nepotist despotism to begin with; the ruling elite never were deluded that the Iraqi people were anything but subjects to be ruled with an iron hand. But one of Osama bin Laden's (and hence al Qaeda's generally) basic premises is that the Muslim ummah, the masses, are thirsting to live in a strict sharia society. But their powerlessness in the face of the apostate, repressive Arab governments keeps the ummah from their Islamic fulfillment. Since 9/11, though, events have proven that the Muslim masses are thirsting not for Islamism but for its opposite.

The second basic error in Marighella's theory is that increasing government countermeasures inevitably become so repressive of the ordinary people that the masses are driven thereby into embracing the revolutionary cause. Uprising results, the government is overthrown and the revolutionaries gain power. This is of course pure European Marxism-Leninism (by way of classically communist Cuba) so I don't want to claim it translates directly into Arab Iraq, but that's the concept, if not the source, that George Will sees, which is what got me going on this tear anyway.

But again, history shows that harsh reactionary repression is not inevitable. The European countries never did it, the United States never did it and Israel hasn't done it either, although Israel's security measures are very strict. The first test case was Uruguay, where the Tupamaros succeeded in goading the government into the crackdown. However, the crackdown utterly crushed the Tupamaros and there the revolution ended, though the government dictatorship remained. But the worldwide communist underground didn't learn the lesson.

I'll leave the last word to Claire Sterling. She was referring to Marxist urban guerrillas using the Marighella playbook, but her words fit to a tee the FRE and al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq:

[They become] corrupted - by the power they discover in the mouth of a gun, or by outsiders with something less selfless in mind, or by the growing estrangement from the society they want to improve. Often they are rejected by an overwhelming majority of their countrymen, reduced to a minority so absurdly small that tragedy almost becomes black comedy. Their response is to kill with increasing ferocity - to punish the profane, and because nothing elese is left for them to do. From killing for a cause, they slip into killing for their vested interests. Nobody's freedom but their own inspires them.

And they are losing, though there are miles to go before we sleep.

"A poverty of moral imagination"

2005-04-28T14:44:00.000-05:00

Prof. Norm Geras, an old-line English Marxist, identifies the two main failures of the Western Left post 9/11.

First is the sin of Marxist reductionism. In his own generation's Marxist development, Geras says that,

[I]t labored in its literary output, in dense and prolific works of argumentation, theory, historiography, social and political analysis-to separate itself from the earlier simplifications and reductions of the tradition it came from and that it sought to enrich. This was a generation for whom anti-reductionism was a constant watchword. A reductionist Marxist was something that, even at the height of Marxist intellectual fashion, no one wanted to be. Whether by way of the cultural themes of the Frankfurt School, of Gramscian "hegemony," Althusserian "relative autonomy," or the more empirically grounded methods of Anglophone socialist research, an enormous effort was made to establish a complex and multilayered theoretical sensibility, so that henceforth we might be in a position more effectively to grasp the multiple determinations of both the present and the past. It was a generation claiming to know that such determinations, in their range and variety, were intractable to being unified within one simple, all-encompassing story.

But all this theoretical work seems to have been for nought:

In affecting the general alignment of most of the socialist left in the conflicts that have preceded and followed the events of September 11, 2001, all this effort that I have tried briefly to characterize might just as well not have taken place. For even if more advanced models of theoretical explanation are now available to the left, it nonetheless seems to suffice in any given international conflict to know that on one side is the United States, and that the United States is a capitalist power that always has designs on the natural and human resources of the rest of the world. If you know this, everything else falls instantly into place; all other levels of analysis, all other considerations, are superfluous. They can either be ignored altogether, or they can be conceded in passing, but as merely secondary and hence ignorable in practice. ...

Knowing what the United States is-hegemon of global capitalism-and knowing what it must be up to, you have no need to allow any explanatory or strategic weight to other social, political, legal, or ideological realities. No need to give any decision-making, choice-determining weight to mass murder, or torture, or the fundamental rights of human beings; to the laws of war, the effects of specific political structures and belief systems, or the effects of the operational and moral choices made by movements cast by part of the left in an anti-imperialist role; to the character of the regimes opposed to the United States and its allies, however brutal those regimes might be; to the illegalities and oppressions for which they are responsible, whether at home or beyond their own borders; to genocidal processes actually ongoing and about which something cries out to be done; to the threats posed to democratic societies by movements that have already shown their deadly intent.

The second main fault of the Western Left is related to the first. Geras terms it "a poverty of moral imagination," which he defines as,

... a seeming lack of ability, of the imagination, to digest the meaning of the great moral and political evils of the world and to look at them unflinchingly. ...

They come to be treated, generically, as the product of class societies and, today, as the product of capitalism. The affinity between this overall intellectual tendency within Marxist and other left thinking, and the practical reductionism I have just described-in which America is identified as the source of all worldly wrongs-should be transparent. ...

The Taliban in Afghanistan; Saddam's Iraq; the reduction of a human being by torture; the use of terror randomly to kill innocents and to smite all those by whom they are cherished; mass murder; ethnic cleansing; all the manifold practices of human evil-to look upon these and at once see "capitalism," "imperialism," "America," is not only to show a poverty of moral imagination, it is to reveal a diminished understanding of the human world. A social or political science, or a practical politics, that cannot rise to the level of what has been understood, in their own mode, by the great religions-and I say this as a resolute and lifelong atheist-and what has also been understood, in their own mode, by all the great literatures of the world, is a science and a politics that can no longer be taken seriously. It should not be taken seriously by anyone attached to the democratic and egalitarian values that have always been at the heart of the broad socialist tradition.

My politics certainly aren't Marxist like Norm's, but I always enjoy reading his material. Read the whole piece, it's quite worthwhile. See also his blog. And see as well Ron Rosenbaum's October 2002 essay, Goodbye, All That: How Left Idiocies Drove Me to Flee.

Is this what America wants?

2005-04-28T14:32:00.001-05:00

Army military police 1st. Lt. Dawn Halfaker paid dearly for a Purple Heart

USA Today reports,

On June 19, Lt. Dawn Halfaker and soldiers from her military police platoon were on a reconnaissance patrol in Baqouba, Iraq, when a rocket-propelled grenade exploded inside their armored Humvee, grievously wounding two of the soldiers inside.

Dazed and covered in blood, Halfaker mustered the energy to give an order to her driver. "Get out of the kill zone!" she shouted. Halfaker's right arm was loosely connected to her torso.

Doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Center could not save her arm. She will leave the Army after completing physical rehabilitation.

Charmaine Yoest asks, "Is this what America Wants?" A member of the Center for Military Readiness, Charmaine observes,

This is a perfect example of "the boiled frog strategy": the Army wants the American public to gradually "get used to" seeing women in combat. They know if they put it to a vote in Congress -- which they are legally required to do -- they would lose. So the strategy is to just gradually change the regulations, so that more and more women are put in harms way; then, when women like Dawn get hurt, no one can say anything.

The "boiled frog" part refers to the old saw that if you throw a frog into hot water, it'll immediately jump out, but if you place it in cool water and gradually turn up the heat, it will remain until it boils to death.

I criticized Charmaine's post about Army chief of staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker. I agree that Congress needs to take a closer look at the employment of women in post-9/11 combat zones. The existing laws and regulations date from the Cold War era when there were still thought to be front lines and rear areas. The kinds of missions that Halfaker's MP unit is carrying out in Iraq were never envisioned for MPs in the old days. As I said before, I oppose increasing combat roles for women and I think such roles should actually be pared back.

But Charmaine seems to assign nefarious motives to the Army's senior leaders; they are apparently scurrilous minions of the feminist left who have a master plan eventually to infiltrate women into every combat job. In the meantime they have to desensitize moms and dads and other Americans to the idea of women killed, wounded and maimed in battle. At least, that's the way I read her post.

However, the real culprits, if culprits there are, are not the generals but America's young men. The engine of increasing womanpower is decreasing manpower. The generals are stretching women into roles and jobs they didn't have before because they don't have men to put there.

The Army disestablished the Women's Army Corps in 1978, when women comprised less than 10 percent of the Army. By then, more than 90 percent of all military occupation specialties (MOSs) were open to women. In 1983, the Army adopted a coding system for assigning women that purported to measure the likelihood of direct combat for every job in the Army. It was called the Direct Combat Probability Coding System (DCPCS). Infantry, armor, special forces, some aviation, low-altitude air defense, cannon artillery and combat engineers were the broad categories of jobs that were off limits to women. Additionally, women could not be assigned to battalions or smaller units of those kinds of specialties. By 1985, the number of specialties open to women actually declined to 86 percent while the proportion of the Army made up of women increased to more than 10 percent. Today more than 16 percent of the Army is made up of women.

Any move to scale back the employment of women in combat zones needs to explain where the warm male bodies are going to come from to replace them. The notion that the Army can recruit a significant percentage more of men than it is recruiting now is not very credible. More than anything, I think that what is impelling the Army toward bending the policy.

And bending it is. On April 11, Gen. Schoomaker took part in a panel discussion on The Future of the United States Army at the American Enterprise Institute. During a Q&A session, Bob Miller of Hope for America asked Schoomaker about the gradual increase of women in combatant categories and the unprecedented numbers of women casualties. The verbatim question is long, so I'll summarize some.

First, Miller said the issue raises the moral question that begs to be reconciled with what's happening in Iraq.

[D]o you and the Army see ... that men have a moral responsibility to be protective of women? ...

And if we do not hold that there is such a moral responsibility, then does the all volunteer force stand unable to recruit and commission men who do commit themselves to such a sense of moral obligation to be protectors of women rather than employing them in hostile and dangerous circumstances to be killed and to kill.

Gen. Schoomaker's answer was also long but I paste it here unedited.

GENERAL SCHOOMAKER: I think we have a moral responsibility to protect the weak regardless of gender, and I do not see this as a gender issue. First of all, we have a policy, and OSD policy, that says that we will not assign females to the infantry armor and Special Forces organizations that are trained, organized, and equipped to routinely close with and destroy the enemy. And we have an Army policy that adds to that, not an OSD policy, but an Army that adds to that says we will not co-locate these women at the time that those units are undergoing those operations.

The realities of the battlefield are such that this is not an issue of whether or not women will become injured and maimed anymore than anybody else will, anymore than children will or elderly or males. The fact is that I think we have a moral responsibility to prepare those women that are serving in our armed forces to number one have the very best chance of surviving by providing them with the warrior skills and tasks that are required and number two make sure that as we operate that we operate in such a way that reduces the probability that any soldier will be placed in a position to be injured or killed. So that's kind of the way that I approach that.

I don't know if I understood your total question, but I don't happen to share a feeling that somehow that women do not have either the capability or the responsibility to share and service the country, and I think that that's--we've now had a volunteer force for over 20 years, and the women play such an extraordinary important part in what we do that I think we're good to go so far.

MR. MILLER: The other part was whether men who do hold that moral commitment are unsuitable then for a role in the Army.

GENERAL SCHOOMAKER: Well, that's an interesting question I would never have thought about. I would say no. But, you know, I think that we all have different little things that--but, you know, that may differ from one another on some things, but I mean I think you're going in the direction of conscientious objectors kind of status. I mean something that would be similar to that, and I don't see that as--I mean, you know, there are some people that would say, you know, men and women can't even share the same tornado shelter in Oklahoma. I mean there are. I mean there's quite a wide spectrum here on what all this means. I think that maybe since we're killing 40,000 people a year on the highways, they shouldn't drive. Okay. That's very dangerous, too.

[Laughter.]

GENERAL SCHOOMAKER: I mean I'm not trying to make fun of it. I'm telling you that I think that, you know, you can expand this argument to an incredible deal. I think that we are paying fair--we are paying attention to the realities, you know, of where we are now. If you were to ask me a different question which I don't want to go into here today, you know, do I agree with all of that, that's another issue. When I'm out of uniform, I'll share that with you.

This is pretty much a dodge answer. Schoomaker never got to what I think was the real meat of Miller's question, whether the Army is able to recruit enough men to make unnecessary the expansion of women's roles in combat areas. All this begs for Congressional oversight. But that's not the end of it, because an internal Army report conducted last year revealed that more and more civilian women are staying away from the Army precisely because of the threat of death or wounds. The report also said that black Americans of both sexes are turning away from Army service for the same reason.

The number of blacks in the Army's recruiting classes has dropped 41 percent over the past five years, from 23.9 percent in 2000 to 14 percent last year. The number of women has dropped 13 percent. AP reports that the possibility of being sent to Iraq is the "biggest turn off" for both groups.

These numbers bode ill for the Army, which is having the hardest time meeting recruiting goals. For many, many years black Americans have been greatly over-represented in the Army, compared to their proportion of the general population. The data mean that 41 percent fewer blacks are joining the Army now than before, of whom the vast majority are men - a hit to replacing women in combat-related units that the Army isn't going to make up with white guys.

So it seems that the answer to Charmaine's question, "Is this what America Wants?" is yes, it is what America wants. And shame on us. I am reminded of Robert Heinlein's observation that "women and children first" is the only real basis on which a civilization can endure over the long term. When it gives up that principle, he said, it is doomed. Of course, by the time we find out he was right it will be too late.

See the other fine posts listed at James Joyner's linkfest.

Soviets tried to kill Pope

2005-03-30T15:33:00.000-06:00

Agence France Presse is reporting that the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II in 1981 - which almost did kill him - was ordered by the old Soviet KGB, the "Committee for State Security." Comments Civil Commotion,

This has been rumored for a long while, of course, and it is totally believable. It was John Paul II who went to Poland during Lech Walesa?s Solidarity uprising, defying the old Soviet Union to stop him, and kicked-off the disintegration of the USSR.

In fact, the Vatican and President Ronald Reagan's administration closely coordinated subverting the Communist government of Poland, the Pope's home country. That came after the assassination attempt, of course, since Reagan entered office only in 1981.

However, the man who took the name John Paul II when elected Pope had been a staunch anti-communist resister in Poland for years. In the early 1970s,

... Karol Cardinal Wojtyla emerged as a strong advocate of human rights and promoted an independent intellectual life. In 1974 Communist Party ideologue Andrej Werbian called the Cardinal "the only real ideological threat in Poland."

Wojtyla is, of course, John Paul's Polish name. Wojtyla was elected Pope in 1978, just before the Solidarity workers' movement was gaining its steam, led by electrician Lech Walesa.

In August 1980 [Walesa] led the Gdansk shipyard strike which gave rise to a wave of strikes over much of the country with Walesa seen as the leader. The primary demands were for workers' rights. The authorities were forced to capitulate and to negotiate with Walesa the Gdansk Agreement of August 31, 1980, which gave the workers the right to strike and to organise their own independent union.

If any one event had helped to create the psychological climate in which Solidarity trades union emerged, it was the visit of Pope John Paul II to his homeland in June 1979. From the moment that the Pope knelt in Warsaw's airport to kiss the ground, he was cheered wildly by millions of Poles. John Paul never criticized the Communist regime directly, nor did he have to: his meaning was plain enough. "The exclusion of Christ from the history of man is an act against man," he told an enormous outdoor congregation in Warsaw. With that hardly veiled allusion to Communism, a deafening roar of approval filled the great city square. Says a Polish bishop of that day: "The Polish people broke the barrier of fear. They were hurling a challenge at their Marxist rulers."

During the August 1980 defiance of the communist authorities, the Lenin shipyard functioned as the emotional center of an extraordinary national movement. Festooned with flowers, white and red Polish flags and portraits of Pope John Paul II, the plant's iron gates came to symbolize that heady mixture of hope, faith and patriotism that sustained the workers through their vigil. ...

Then in January 1981 Pope John Paul received Walesa at the Vatican and met with him privately for thirty minutes, an unusual honor for a layman of the Church.

In May of that year, Mehmet Ali Agca, an escaped Turkish killer, shot John Paul twice while the Pope was riding in his "Popemobile," a convertible he used to wave to crowds while standing as the vehicle moved along. According to AFP's wire report,

New documents found in the files of the former East German intelligence services confirm the 1981 assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II was ordered by the Soviet KGB and assigned to Bulgarian agents, an Italian daily said on Wednesday. ...

Bulgaria then handed the execution of the plot to Turkish extremists, including Mehmet Ali Agca, who pulled the trigger.

It's doubtful that Agca ever knew who actually was paying him. In December 1983, John Paul met with Agca in prison.

"We talked for a long time. Ali Agca is, as everyone says, a professional assassin. Which means that the assassination was not his initiative, that someone else thought of it, someone else gave the order," he wrote.

"During the entire conversation, it was clear that Ali Agca was burdened by the question: How did it happen that the assassination was unsuccessful? He did everything that was necessary, he took care of the tiniest detail of his plan. But still the victim avoided death. How could this have happened?"

Agca had shot John Paul in the arm and the abdomen. John Paul himself said that divine intervention had steered the latter bullet away from his vital organs. He has never said whom he thought was behind the plot to kill him, but did attribute the attempt to convulsions of "the 20th century ideologies of force." In 2002, however, John Paul said that he did not believe there was a Bulgarian connection to his assailant.

Linkagery for 3-30-05

2005-03-30T07:16:00.000-06:00

A few links for this morning.

The Truth About Living Wills - Michelle Malkin posts results of some university research that shows even a properly-executed living will is not all it's cracked up to be.

Medical futility - Who has the power to decide?, by Anne Federwisch in the July 2, 1998, edition of Nurseweek.

Triumph, Betrayal, Acceptance, Hope, by Robin Burk on Winds of Change. I know Holy Week has ended, but this is a Holy Thursday post worth reading. Sorry I didn't put it up earlier.

Brave Men and Women Winning the War on Terror - Chuck Simmins recounts some true stories of, well, American heroes of the war on terrorsm.

BlogNashville is coming May 6

2005-03-29T20:24:00.000-06:00

If you haven't registered for BlogNashville, there are still slots open.

Now that I have registered, I am sure there will be a stampede!

Here's the schedule. Here's a running list of registrants so far. Heavy blogging names there folks - I mean, besides mine. . . .

Theocracy in action?

2005-03-29T19:08:00.000-06:00

Glenn Reynolds comments on the argument between Jeff Jarvis and High Hewitt on whether federal intervention into the Terri Schiavo case amounts to "theocracy in action." Jeff says yes, Hugh says no. Glenn agrees with Hugh:

Hugh's right that it's hard to ascribe the Congressional legislation to "theocrats" when it was supported by Tom Harkin (and Ralph Nader!). There's much more going on than that; this is a matter on which all sorts of people, of all sorts of persuasions, can be found on both sides.

On the other hand, here's some advice, very similar to advice I gave to the antiwar movement: If you don't want to be confused with a movement led by theocrats, don't let actual theocrats be seen as your spokesmen. It may be impossible to shut Randall Terry up -- though if I were Karl Rove, I would have tried really hard -- but he needs to be loudly and regularly denounced as a nut. Otherwise you're in the same boat as lefties who don't want to be identified with Ward Churchill, but happily use him when they want to draw a crowd.

Which is a good point. But consider also:

More than two-thirds of Americans who identify themselves as evangelical Christians oppose the action by the Congress and the president in interjecting the federal courts into the Schiavo tragedy. The cited poll is six days old, so the numbers may have shifted some, but I doubt they've dropped below the 50 percent level.

I would think this mitigates against a "theocratic" foundation for the Congress' action.

Over at Camp Lejeune

2005-03-29T05:41:00.000-06:00

Just after Sunday's final Easter service, my mom and dad drove me to the Nashville airport where I hopped a jet to Raleigh-Durham airport. Raleigh is the capital of North Carolina; Durham is about 20 miles northwest. The airport is named after both cities, but there is no municipality called, "Raleigh-Durham," as I have heard sports announcers say.

My wife and two at-home children had driven there last Tuesday. Durham is my wife's hometown and they stayed with her dad. Friday they drove to Camp Lejeune to pick up our Marine son, Pfc. Stephen Sensing, who was getting the weekend off for Easter.

Stephen had set up a tour of the AAV ramp (for us Army types, the motor pool) for them. My son Thomas took some video with my new JVC GR-D72 digital video camera. (Here is what an AAV is and what it's for.)

Here are some grabs off the video of a pretty sharp looking Marine!

A former Marine left a comment in another post that driving one of these things is like "driving a house." Here are two shots of the inside.

This is the interior compartment where the infantrymen ride.

This is the driver's compartment, viewed from the rear.
Stephen's uncle drove him back to Lejeune Monday. We drove home all day and arrived back after suppertime.