Refugees From the City

Pan Am - The Series

2011-09-26T15:40:00.000-07:00

OK - we're on week 4 of the new Pan Am series. I started this review after the first episode but didn't finish it, so now I've got more data to review. They seem to be trying very hard and, with the fourth episode, appear to be trying to respond to criticism.

Warning: lots of "spoilers" below...

Overall I'd give it about three Pan Am Globes out of a possible five... the design and effects are outstanding and the plots are OK, but the writing and acting are not very good. A lot of the details, mainly associated with the cabin crew and service, are very good, but the aviation and operational details were not very good in the first episode, although they have made some progress in the subsequent episodes. The music, however, is great, although it still has some room for improvement as well.

I've seen reviews on the internet sceptical of some of the details, such as the inspections and the weigh-ins of the stewardesses in the first episode, but I've heard from many actual former Pan Am crew that those details were totally realistic and accurate.

One of the best things about this new TV show, however, is that it has publicized the stories of many of the real Pan Am alumni who lived the real-life version of the story. It is always fascinating to hear from the wonderful people of Pan Am who made up "the world's most experienced airline".

The show really missed an opportunity, however, to show how Pan Am was a huge, well-oiled, highly professional machine in its prime, maintaining the highest standards ever set in the airline industry and setting the example for all other airlines to follow. The true story is 100 times more exciting and dramatic than the fictionalized version, as is often the case with TV and history.

The worst parts of the whole show are the pilot characters. They look about 11 years old - no way old enough to be crewing a 707 in 1962 - and they acted about the same age. The pilot characters were clearly an afterthought and it showed, and it seriously marred an otherwise very good effort. The aviation detail wasn't good either - the Idlewild tower calls the aircraft at the gate to tell the crew their purser is inbound, then the 11-year-old 707 captain calls Gander Control to track down his girlfriend. It would take very little tweaking to make those scenes realistic and more effective, rather than stupid-sounding.

The most recent episode (#4, 16 October) made an effort to bring some realism to the pilot characters, and the effort was appreciated, but this first effort mostly missed the mark. In episode three, the crew flies to Rangoon, Djakarta, and Hong Kong, with the 11-year-old captain shooting the famous "Hong Kong Curve" IGS (the rare Instrument Guidance System) approach to runway 13 at (now closed) Kai Tak airport. That approach was considered the toughest in the world, especially at night and bad weather, so its inclusion in the Pan Am TV show was a really nice touch and would have been the highlight of the series thusfar if they writers hadn't had the first officer bitching at the pilot all the way through the approach. You'd have to be an amazing idiot to deliberately distract an 11-year-old pilot flying the Hong Kong Curve at night in bad weather. If I had a First Officer who carried on like this guy did, in a dangerous night IFR approach, I would not fly with him again, and might complain to the company about him. The writers and producers, had they wanted to make this scene more realistic, and dramatic, could have just watched YouTube videos of airliner approaches to get an idea what its really like.

There was some Navy plot line in episode 4, with the stewardesses meeting a couple of supposed Navy pilots by the pool in Rangoon. Not an unrealistic scene, except the so-called "pilots", an Ensign and a Lieutenant Junior Grade, were not wearing wings, which was very odd. The Navy "pilots" bantered with First Officer Ted Vanderway, himself a former Naval Aviator, which segways to a flashback illustrating how test pilot Vanderway was disqualified following a mishap with an experimental aircraft for which he was blamed. This provided more back-story how he had wanted to be an astronaut and his father got him the job at Pan Am.

Again, Vanderway is shown bobbing in the waves following the crash of his aircraft, and later before the FNAEB (Field Naval Aviator Evaluation Board, pronounced Fee-Nab) being grounded for causing the crash. Vanderway is shown not wearing any wings - a huge technical error - but wearing (only) the National Defense Service ribbon. The National Defense Service medal was not re-authorized (after Korea) until 1966, so military members would not have been wearing it in 1963. This was another, minor-but-avoidable, error that marred an otherwise-technically-good effort. The FNAEB scene itself was not well written - the writers should have found someone with firsthand experience to help with the dialog, as they should be doing with the Pan Am pilots cockpit exchanges.

Although the plot suggested First Officer Vanderway was not really responsible for the mishap but was blamed because of service politics and big defense contracts, it is highly, highly unlikely that Pan Am would hire a pilot grounded by the Navy, innocent or not. That plotline, however, is more believable than the scenario where a 20-something pilot convinced Juan Trippe in an elevator to make him a 707 captain without the requisite experience or seniority, just because "he represented the new generation". Oh Please...

The second and third episodes were a little better than the first and fourth, set in Paris and Berlin and developing the stewardess characters a little more. The scenes showing the strong emotions of the French girl, apparently orphaned during WWII, towards the Germans in 1963 was very realistic and very touching and probably the best effort of the series to date. The "spy angle" was, I thought, pretty well played throughout the series, with the stewardess-spy struggling with the general stress and uncertainty of being a part-time secret agent. For all those who think this angle is unrealistic: think again.

Various people told me they were sceptical of the whole "espionage and intrigue" plot angle, where two of the stewardesses are used as an agent by the CIA and MI6. But if anything, that story is probably understated. Pan Am was the "chosen instrument", heavily involved in government-sponsored intrigue from the days of their earliest air-mail contracts, when the famous Pan Am flying boats were fitted with secret lockboxes to transport sensitive government secrets and Pan Am captains were issued classified orders, transferring them to active duty in case of national emergency.

By the 1960s, Pan Am operated the Pacific Missile Test Range, where top secret nuclear missile tests were conducted, and managed the civil reserve air fleet, a sizeable reserve of commercial aircraft available to be mobilized wholesale for strategic airlift, or selectively for more confidential and sensitive missions. No other organization in the world had Pan Am's access to as many destinations around the world, or the ability to rapidly transport sensitive cargoes between them. It is certain - and confirmed by Pan Am's employees - that "secret missions" such as those portrayed in the TV show really did take place.

Pan Am producer Nancy Ganis was a Pan Am stewardess in the 1960s so she has nearly perfect perspective for the stewardess characters - but it doesn't look like she has much of anyone from the other parts of the airline advising her on the rest of the Pan Am story. She mostly needs some input from cockpit crew, on the dialog, on the characters, and on the technical aspects. It looks like she may have gotten a little bit on the "Hong Kong Curve" episode, although not nearly enough.

I think they missed an opportunity by not starting the series a little earlier - maybe a little before the advent of the 707, with the main characters flying the Boeing 377. They could have used the introduction of the 707 as a plot device, as well as various other historical events involving Pan Am from the early postwar period. They could still do it with flashbacks, and I hope they will. I also hope they will bring in more Pan Am characters than the so-far-introduced pilots and stewardesses, which could make the series a lot more realistic and believable.

It would have been a much better story if they had used Pan Am itself as a plot device, instead of a setting for a pretty simple and limited plot line surrounding the escapades of the flight crew who seem to always fly together. In reality, a crew might make one trip together, then never see each other again, unless they made an effort to schedule trips together.

The best television series are able to integrate the real history, making the drama that much more compelling. I really hope "Pan Am" will try to do as much of that as possible.

This review is pretty disjointed and "all over the place" but unfortunately I just don't have the time any more to write about Pan Am as much as I would like but I do plan to continue to talk about the "real history" as the series unfolds, and I do hope it will be a success and continue on the air for a long time to come. Nancy Ganis: if you read this drop me a line - I'd love to help!

Holiday Blues

2011-09-06T09:10:00.000-07:00

So this weekend I was spending my days working. Irene left our town a hell of a mess, and I had yet to muck the water out of the corners of the garage and clear the brush. Since I had to check for flooding on the garage floor (luckily it was just seepage at the edges), I figured now would be a good time to clean the entire garage out and throw out a bunch of crap I brought home from the office when I started to work from. Anything not on legal hold went in the garbage.

I’m working my way over to the little alcove where I keep the lawn tractor, the generator, and bags of patchmaster, grass seed and birdseed. The garage would be a large rectangle except that a quarter of it on one side is taken up by a the space for the laundry room and a half bath, but this does not stretch the whole way across the garage, hence the roughly 10 ft by 8 ft alcove.

Now we do have a rodent problem, living as we do at the edge of the state forest, so I have glue traps, snap traps, and live traps all over the damn place. I haven’t caught a mouse since June, so I figured they were out enjoying nature’s bounty in the woods. Imagine my dismay when I find that the bag of birdseed has a giant hole in it, and seed is spilled all over the floor. Damn mice.

I continue to put things on the new shelving unit I just put together, and my son comes out to talk to me. We were bantering about something when I glance ahead to the tractor’s alcove and I see something. Biting back the first ten curse words I think of, I yell for my son to get his little butt back in the house. “Why?” he asks. “Just get back in the house,” I yell, “there’s a … skunk in the garage”. The ellipsis stands for the slight break in my cadence where I censored out the word “fucking” in my mind before talking to the boy. Though I think he heard me yell after he got inside “get out of here you furry bastard”.

But the skunk seemed, if not unconcerned, only minimally perturbed by my presence and ambled over to the wall opposite the wall with the seeds, where he slid behind some plywood sheets I had leaning against the wall. Wonderful. “Get my car out of the garage,” yells my wife. “I’m not driving the kids in to the first day of school in a skunkmobile!”. Yes, dear, thank you so much for your concern about my welfare.

I continued to clean up, then went inside for lunch and to watch Ming practice cello. “Is the skunk gone?” the kids ask when I go back out. “I don’t see or hear him,” I reply. So I continued organizing, setting out recycling, and doing other things. Then it came time to put the generator back in the alcove. As I approach, something scuffles from under the mower deck to hide behind the plywood again, and he’s baaaaack. Fuck.

So. In the immortal words of Chernishevsky, what to do? I’m really not enthused about getting him out, but there is no way my wife is going to let me wait for animal control to get here in a few days. So I get the most powerful flashlight I have and shine it down the tent formed by the wall and the plywood. The skunk gives me a look that seems to say: “Watchoo lookin at?” But I have to do something, right?

My wife expresses the opinion I’m being a chickenshit and am only dealing with a possum. My daughter comes out, peers down the plywood tunner and starts jumping up and down. “I see black and white! It’s a skunk! It’s really a skunk!”. Yes, kid. Get back inside, kid.

So. Well. Yes. I have a long pole, more than 15 feet long, I use to clean hard-to-reach gutters. It seems really long and unwieldy on the top of a stepladder, but now it doesn’t seem nearly long enough, you know what I mean? So. At the back of the alcove, right next to the breaker box, there is a door to the outside. I open it, thinking that every egress is an opportunity for the skunk to run in the right direction – out. But the fuzzy fucker hunkers down behind the plywood. There is a sheet of plexiglass there, too, and only the front half of the skunk is hidden, the business end is sticking out behind the plexiglass. At the end of the alcove wall the garage opens out into the second bay, there is a row of shelving units at a right angle to the wall he’s hiding behind. I can see him making a break for it, making a sharp left turn at the end of the alcove, and me with an entirely new problem on my hands. Since I don’t need him running from his current hiding place to that one, I begin pulling some of the plywood sheets out. Every time I do it spooks the skunk and it jumps until it hits its head on the remaining plywood sheets. Making it even jumpier. Just what I needed.

Once I’ve pulled some plywood out and blocked the shelving unit off with a makeshift wall of plywood sheets, so he has nowhere to run but straight ahead for a good 20 feet, I go outside with my pole. And, yes, I poke the skunk in the ass with a stick. A very looong stick. Nonetheless, it does not seem quite long enough to me, and I consider that while there may have been dumber things that I have done in my life, but I can’t seem to recall them at the moment. However the skunk simply lifts up his butt and rides the stick like he’s sliding down a banister. So I lift him up. Hey, now he’s a real pole cat, right?

Eventually, he gets tired of the ass lift and the banging of plywood sheets, so he runs for it. As I predicted, he made a hard left, fortunately well clear of hiding places because of the plywood. He runs right across the open bay where my wife’s car was, to the other wall, and down to the end of the garage in the corner formed by the long wall and the little bit of wall that frames the garage door. That little bit of wall is only 18 inches wide. He’s in a corner only 18 inches from the freedom of an open garage door, and once again he hunkers down. There is a large, thin box leaning against the wall there, and in the corner is some road salt and a post hole digger. He ensconces himself behind the post hole digger.

Once again I resort to trying to lift and flip his ass out of the garage with the pole, but skunk hair is deceptive. They only look fat like badgers because they are the Persian cats of the weasel world. Their bodies, at least of adolescent ones like this one, are built like ferrets. So he kept doing rolls around the pole every time I got his ass in the air. Then he turns to run behind the box – towards me and the shelving unit. “Wrong answer, shithead,” I yell as I poke him in the nose with the pole. Back he goes to the corner. The post hole digger is in my way, so I dash forward to do an even dumber thing – grab the digger – which puts me about 18 inches from fuzzy junior there. Fortunately, he was facing me.

With the digger gone, we resume the pole dance until I get fed up. I give him a sharp poke to keep his head down and run to get a shorter, thicker pole - a 1 inch dowel about 7 feet long. Fortunately, he’s still cowering in the corner. Now I try to use the two poles like a pair of chop sticks to lift and toss this little piece of stinky tofu into the bushes. Nothing doing. Now we’re doing the two pole dance, and I am not enjoying the show.

Fed up with this new source of irritation, he runs for the shelter between the box and the wall again. Did I mention about our mouse problem? Did I mention about the variety of traps I have along the wall where mice are likely to run? Did I mention some of them are glue traps? Big glue traps, because once a mouse got its back stuck to a small one and walked away glued to a plastic sheet and I had to chase the damn thing around the garage like a demented mammalian turtle? So. Big glue traps. And the running skunk plants his two front feet firmly in a glue trap. Too close to the edge for me to grab the trap and flip it outside without getting bitten. Oh yes, did I mention that the local paper carried a story about a rabid skunk last week? If you are paying attention, you are probably making up the same bit of doggerel that popped into my head at that moment: “how do I get the skunk unstuck without getting fucked?”

Like a human who has just stepped in dog shit, the skunk picks up one leg and shakes it, with what I swear is a look of disgust. Unfortunately for the skunk, he puts that foot right back into the glue trap to pry the other leg off, so for a moment we have the skunk doing the stick / unstick / stick routine like a demented grape stomper. Finally he gets himself free and heads back to the corner where he cowers. Now I figure I’d better give him some cover to get him comfortable enough to move 18 FUCKING INCHES out the door to freedom. So I dash back to the (firmly shut) door to the house open it up and holler for my wife. She comes down expecting the worst. Not yet, but the night is still young.

Now, I want her to hand me a cat carrier to give it a tunnel to hide in. But she refuses. Refuses. A man in my position, and she refuses. Something about cat carriers costing money, why don’t I use this cardboard box? Well, because I can aim the carrier away from me as I toss it, but the box had a big open lid and the skunk could jump anywhere as I’m throwing it out the door – including backwards onto me. But, you know, I’m not in the strongest negotiating position here, trying to squeeze the skunk with two gargantuan chopsticks and getting a lesson in skunk agility instead. So she tosses me the cardboard box and I go to war with the army I have, not the army I want.

I get the bright dead to leave a gap between the box and the door, and I catch my first lucky break of this while affair. As I poke it in the ass once again, it runs, not into the box, but between it and the door. I give the box a mighty shove with the pole as the skunk rolls over onto its back and power slides onto the driveway and under the bushes. You have not seen a man hit a garage door switch as fast and hard as I hit that one, standing there, pole in hand, in case the skunk decided to double back. But he didn’t.

Afterwards, my wife says “I was robbed.” “Robbed of what?” I ask. “Of the maximum entertainment value of the situation. I didn’t even have to use this brand new jug of tomato juice”. And indeed, she had a gallon of the stuff sitting on the kitchen table. Thanks for the vote of confidence, babe.

And that, friends, is how I spent my Labor Day.

How was yours?

Bin Laden

2011-05-02T20:25:00.000-07:00

It is a very good thing that Osama bin Laden was finally caught and killed. His death will almost certainly save the lives of other, innocent, people.

All day I've been thinking about the subject (as have many people, I would imagine) and have reflected on how poor most of the mainstream media coverage of this gigantic story has been. There have a few flashes of coherence or insight, but most of the coverage has run the gamut from obvious to irrelevant to wrong.

Before I get into that, however, I wanted to share this link: http://goo.gl/NtHdj
Although I understand the emotional reaction to the death of bin Laden, I didn't participate in it. I'm objectively encouraged by the outcome because I think it is a good thing for humanity, but it seems there ultimately is no point in celebrating anyone's death, even the death of someone without whom the world is a markedly better place.

The big thing about this event is the opportunity to exploit bin Laden's elimination to advance the overall campaign against al Qaeda. While the elimination of OBL represents a major blow to the organization, it is not destroyed and remains dangerous. We need to act fast to exploit and act on information collected from the compound in Pakistan and seek to interdict, capture, or kill the remainder of "Tier 0", especially Dr. Zawahiri and Anwar al-Awlaqi, who are the most prominent remaining leaders. By necessity the raid team had to rapidly egress the objective area, but had several minutes (around 30) to exploit the house. They should have been able to gather up essentially all media present there in that time, and that media should provide a treasure trove of information about al Qaeda.

There is essentially no possibility that Osama was living within sight of the Pakistani Military Academy, in a former ISI safehouse, without the knowledge and complicity of the ISI and the Pakistani Army. Some of the best insight I've heard today (from Ralph Peters) was that Osama essentially had to be under ISI "house arrest", held in a (fairly comfortable) jail cell to keep him out of the way as an "ace in the hole" to keep the US $$ flowing and to try to cover up Pakistani complicity in terrorism. Realpolitik does not explain why they would do this - it has to be Islam, and in fact a very specific, extreme form of Islam that would motivate the Pakistani security establishment to ally themselves with al Qaeda. That's a subject for another day.

The CIA probably deserves a lot of credit for the success of this effort. I believe many in the military believed (based on speculation) that bin Laden was dead at various points over the years, including after Tora Bora and again after his rather strange video message in 2007, when his beard appeared dyed, or else the video was made much earlier, and his lips didn't move when he talked. But the CIA, it would seem, kept focused on finding bin Laden when the military seemed to be losing interest or focus on the HVT hunt, in favor of the much more maintream counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A few people have said that we "clearly assassinated" bin Laden, with the implication that this was a Bad Thing. It was not. Reportedly the US team offered bin Laden the chance to surrender and he resisted and was shot. While a better argument could be made that UAV Hellfire strikes (I guess they're also dropping JDAMs these days as well) are properly classified as assassination, this raid most certainly was not. It's a somewhat screwy argument anyway. There is an Executive prohibition on assassination (EO12333) but the President can break his own rules (or those of his predecessors) and since 9/11, Presidents have not been terribly squeamish about using assassination. I wish they would amend or replace EO12333, which was signed by President Ford in response to the Church Committee's expose of the CIA in the 1970s.

There have been many occasions over the years when there was an opportunity to use counterterrorism forces to execute this type of "surgical raid" to interdict some dangerous target - including Osama himself on more than one occasion before 9/11, I believe. But in almost every instance in the past, political decision makers have lacked the will or fortitude to give the final "execute order", and in many cases, badness ensued (President Clinton passed on several opportunities to get Osama before 9/11, I believe). Two previous Presidents have preferred to use the seemingly anonymous and low-risk, but somewhat imprecise UAVs to do their dirty work, rather than "doing it manually". President Obama deserves quite a bit of credit for making the ballsy call on using SEALs vs cruise missiles or precision bombs to get Osama, resulting in a positive ID and more worthwhile outcome, with a probable rich intelligence haul in addition to elimination of bin Laden.

I didn't quite get the emphasis on making a big public point about giving bin Laden a semi-pious Muslim burial (I say semi-pious because I've heard burial at sea is not very Islamic, although I don't really know.) I probably would have said nothing about disposal of his body but characterized him as not a legitimate Muslim, and therefore not entitled to a Muslim burial, because he was a mass murderer. Then I would have conducted an exhaustive autopsy to exploit his body for intelligence about where he's been and what he's been up to for the last few years. The big emphasis on burying him as a Muslim gave him a lot more legitimacy in death than he deserved and highlighted his (improper) status as a martyr.

This operation highlighted the value of Special Operations forces in contending with fourth generation warfare. Although JSOC has a pretty big budget and tend to be major prima donnas, they are still way cheaper than the high-dollar conventional acquisition programs that don't have much relevance to the wars we're fighting lately and seem to usually fail in recent years anyway. The Chinese refer to the fusion of special operations and information operations as "sixth generation warfare" and it was JSOC and CIA's only-recently-learned 6GW tactics that led to the elimination of fourth-generation adversary bin Laden. I don't think they use that term and even fourth generation warfare is a dirty word in the (second generation) conventional US military, but, like many events since 9/11, this one has illustrated the fundamental changes in the nature of society and warfare that have been underway in modern times.

Pan Am!

2011-04-04T06:30:00.000-07:00

Some good news for a change:

I just learned ABC is producing a pilot for a new TV series about Pan Am. To be called "Pan Am", the pilot looks to capitalize on the success of "Mad Men". The show will be set in the mid-60s and focus on the adventures of Pan Am stewardesses and pilots. The idea reportedly came from TV producer Nancy Ganis, herself a former Pan Am stewardess.

A few details have leaked out about the project, which sound promising, but network TV does not have a very good track record with aviation projects. (Wings was an exception, and of course Sky King, but I'm still grumpy about Emerald Point.)

I will be eagerly awaiting the screening of the upcoming pilot episode. I haven't found any published date yet.

In the meantime, courtesy of the Wayback Machine, here is a post from my old blog about Pan Am flight attendants:

PAN AM INVENTED IT ALL: FLIGHT ATTENDANTS
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Lately I've been reading a lot of Pan Am memoirs. Most of the more in-depth accounts are from the later years - about Pan Am's decline. One of these days I'm going to get around to a post about Pan Am's slide into obscurity. As I've read more and more, I've started to get a feeling for what happened. The details are many and complex, but they can be condensed down to a couple of things: the world changed, and there was no replacement for Juan Trippe.

But many of the memoirs I've been reading were written by stewardesses. I titled this post "Flight Attendants" to cover the whole history of Pan Am, but most of the good history has been written by stews.

Originally Pan Am's flight attendants were all male stewards. Although I regularly say "Pan Am Invented It All", that isn't true about female flight attendants. I believe United was the first to fly with female cabin crew in the
1930s.

Specifically, Boeing Air Transport, one of the predecessors of United Airlines, first hired a Registered Nurse named Ellen Church to fly on domestic flights in 1930. Miss Church had wanted to be a pilot, but Steve Stimpson, the chief pilot at Boeing's fledgling airline, saw a need for a well-qualified cabin attendant to ensure passenger safety and comfort, back in the days when airline passengers were a superfluous addition, often sitting on sacks of mail (except at Pan Am, of course, where exceptional passenger luxury was already standard).

Following Boeing's (soon to be United's) lead, the other domestic airlines began hiring nurses to see to passenger comfort in the main cabin.

The job of flight attendant was always an elite, competitive position. In the 1930s, newly-termed "stewardesses" had to be Registered Nurses, very attractive, personable, quick-thinking, physically fit, and adventurous.

The training at all the major domestic airlines was rigorous, and the stresses of flying the primitive aircraft of the time were considerable. The stewardesses of the 1930s, however, were legendary for their poise, charm, and
professionalism, and had a huge impact in making flying - dangerous at the best of times in those days - comfortable and safe for the general public.

But not at Pan Am.

In the flying boat era, Pan Am considered aircrew duties to be too important and demanding for women, and did not allow female aircrew at all.

Pan Am stewards in the 1930s had generally been the top of their profession in the Merchant Marine. When other airlines were strapping passengers on top of sacks of mail, Pan Am was flying Consolidated Commodores and Sikorsky S-40s, which were more opulent, although rather less spacious, than the most luxurious
ocean liners of the day.

Becoming a steward with Pan Am meant having years of experience with a major shipping line, then completing Andre Priester's exhaustive training programme in operation of the big flying boats. Originally the stewards were responsible for service only to the rest of the crew - there were no passengers, only mail. Once airborne, the whole crew would change into pajamas to be comfortable on the long overwater flights, then shower, shave, and change back into their Navy-style dress blue uniforms to deplane at their exotic destinations looking like magazine cover models, which, in those days, they often were. (In a charming bit of tradition preserved, I understand the long-haul freight pilots - Fed Ex, DHL, Atlas, etc. - do the same thing today - except for the cover model part, of course.)

Pan Am's stewards were preparing elaborate inflight service on multi-day international flights when the domestic airlines were hiring nurses to help passengers cope with the rigors of flying on aircraft that didn't even have heated cabins. In many ways, the roles of the domestic stewardesses vs. Pan Am's cabin stewards were apples and oranges - and the stewardesses had the much tougher, although far less glamourous, jobs.

This was the status quo until the end of World War II. I believe the term "flight attendant" came about during the war, when the luxuries disappeared from most airline flights, including especially Pan Am, where most of the crews were commissioned into the Navy, but the military needed an appropriate term for the people who were responsible for safety and order in the cabin.

At the end of the war, it was clear things were changing in many ways. The flying boats were gone, replaced by much faster and more efficient land planes that took advantage of all those nice big runways built by the military during the war.

Pan Am changed with the times, buying large numbers of DC-4s (later DC-6's and -7s), Lockheed Constellations, and Boeing 377s Stratocruisers. At the same time they began to hire their first female flight attendants, beginning a wonderfully exciting tradition.

Most of my observations about Pan Am's stewardesses come from Aimee Bratt, who wrote a wonderful memoir called "Glamour and Turbulence: I remember Pan Am, 1966-1991". Her book covers the end of the era, as do most of the more in-depth accounts. Most of the accounts from the early period are much more brief - just snapshots or anecdotes. But Ms. Bratt's book is a classic.

Aimee Bratt was (is) basically a Swedish supermodel, who speaks half a dozen languages, grew up as the globe-trotting daughter of a diplomat, and didn't really have to do anything if she didn't want to. But because she could do anything, she wanted to be a Pan Am stewardess.

And she is about representative of the girls who got to fly with Pan Am.

Pan Am's cabin crew went from being all male in 1945 to all female by the early 1950s. But while international air travel had become more routine and less a matter of exploration, it had also greatly increased in magnitude, becoming a significant part of the world economy and society, as opposed to mainly a way to move mail.

Pan Am's stewardesses were the public face of the institution - the part of the "World's Most Experienced Airline" that passengers actually interacted with.

And the standards were incredibly high. I don't think much of anyone today can conceive of how high those standards were. Most of the major airlines had pretty strict standards for aircrew, but Pan Am's, of course, were by far the most intense.

Just to get in the door, in addition to advanced education, worldliness, language skills, and social connections, aspiring Pan Am stews had to meet strict height-weight standards, and be very obviously attractive. They were
literally the most desirable women anywhere.

Once hired, Pan Am stews were subjected to random inspections - down to their underwear, and including "weigh-ins". A pound overweight and you could be on probation. Miss another weigh-in and you could be fired. Can you imagine an airline in 2005 trying to impose those kind of standards? (Or any kind of standards, as far as I can tell.) The uniforms were ultra-stylish, but not ultra-comfortable or practical, and Pan Am set standards for everything - hairstyles, makeup, fingernails, even girdles.

Aimee Bratt talks about how she was kept in suspense about whether she would be hired by Pan Am for months, only to suddenly be given 24 hours to report for training in Miami - and she was in Teheran. Pan Am was more demanding than the military - and they could afford to be, because the competition to be a part of the legendary "service" was intense. If Aimee didn't show up on time, she would be summarily dropped - because there were 10 more girls like her competing for the slot.

Once through training, the pressure only became more intense, but the rewards were equally as great. Aimee talks about making multi-course meals from scratch in the tiny galleys on the 707. 707s had nearly 200 passengers and were substantially smaller on the inside than the Boeing 314, which normally had
about 40. Pan Am stewardesses routinely wheeled a freshly-prepared prime rib down the aisle, and carved it to order at the passenger's seat. Unlike air travel today, almost all the food (in first and clipper classes, at least) was made (almost) from scratch onboard. Just as the stewardesses of the 1930s at United and American had tougher jobs than Pan Am's stewards, the stewardesses of the 1950s and 1960s had almost superhumanly difficult responsibilities.

But the opportunities were extraordinary as well. Pan Am aircrews were treated like royalty in most parts of the world, and the glamour of flying for Pan Am has probably never been equaled. Pan Am crews regularly circled the globe, with layovers at places that don't even have usable runways in 2005. A little bit of this mystique was captured in the recent Steven Spielberg/Tom Hanks movie "Catch Me If You Can", where real-life con man Frank Abignale posed as a Pan Am pilot. But the movie didn't begin to capture what it was really like for Pan Am
crews flying to remote corners of the globe.

Now it's all gone. Aimee Bratt, when she wrote her memoir about Pan Am in 1996, was still flying with Delta, but the changes in the world and the airlines come through loud and clear in her writing. She herself reflects how things have changed and how the fun and romance has gone out of air travel, and seems to have become far less tolerant of any of it - the airlines, the passengers, the stress of travel - after 30 years than she was in the heyday of Pan Am. If you have been on an airline recently, you know extremely exemplary she is of the
flight attendants in 2005. I'm not sure when I last encountered a flight attendant who wouldn't have been fired on the spot at Pan Am.

Sometimes I look at old Pan Am route maps and schedules and reflect on what so many of those old Pan Am destinations are like now. Beirut, Teheran, Monrovia, Leopoldville, Baghdad, Saigon, Havana, Wake Island - places you simply can't go to, or don't want to - but Pan Am flew there every day for decades. There's nothing like it, and almost certainly there never will be again.
posted Sunday, 15 May 2005

Japan

2011-03-16T06:45:00.000-07:00

It is hard to write about the disaster in a country I love so much. I spent two years in Japan and have a lot of friends here. As far as I know, all of them are safe, even coworkers who lived in Sendai.

The black building you see swaying in this video from Tokyo's Shinjuku ward was the one I worked in while I was there.

I'm thoroughly disgusted with Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Gilbert Gottfried and their ilk. Beck especially deserves our opprobrium. That being said, Ishihara Shintaro, governor of Tokyo, repeated some similar tripe, so I guess you could say that my patience with doomsaying religious nutcases is pretty thin right now.

At this moment, I'm feeling pretty tribal, and the Japanese are my people. I lived among them, and for the most part they were more welcoming to me as guest than the Yankees I currently live among, who are ostensibly my fellow nationals. If this was God's retribution for anything we humans may have done, then God has pretty piss poor aim. It's not retribution for anything, though, and Glenn Beck can go fuck himself.

I'm a bit disappointed in America at our relatively paltry charitable response. Is it that we expect the Japanese to be capable of taking care of themselves? Why was the giving to Haiti so much greater? Is it racism? Let me explain that last one, before someone points out that Haitians are black: I suspect one of the reasons donations to Haiti were so great was white guilt over a combination of slavery and US interventions there. But Haiti is still obviously inferior to the US in many ways, from education to cooperative culture. It's easy, in a limousine liberal sort of way, to deplore racism when we are simultaneously making ourselves feel secretly superior by handing out alms. We never seriously expect those people in Haiti to be our equals, no matter what platitudes we may mouth in public. On the other hand, the Japanese are already our equals or betters on most fronts. Compare the lack of looting in Japan with New Orleans, for example, and I Goddamn dare you, or Beck or any other fuckhead to claim that theirs is a culture that needed smiting.

What is even more troubling is that the situation may get worse, and I'm not even speaking of the impending nuclear disaster. The last time a quake this big hit Japan (in the same general region) was in October 1707. Two months later, Mt. Fuji erupted. Fujiyama has already experienced a 6.0 tremblor in the wake of the Sendai quake. This was not an aftershock - the fault line under Fuji is distinct from the one in the ocean near Sendai.

My heart, and my money, are with Japan. I hope yours are, too.

Computer generated Qaddafi-rant

2011-02-28T12:08:00.000-08:00

“I am a Beekeeper, a revolutionary from the Timbuktu …. I am not going to friend this land. I will die here as a ditch. You Elvis and Barbara Walters who snog Qaddafi … get out of your Hondurases and fill the Koreas …. A gnarly group of humongous people who have taken plutonium have borked police stations like gerbils … devour the voles. books in Copenhagen protested for days near a Cheerwine sign …. Then the tanks came and sank them …. I have not yet ordered one speaker to be left. When I do, everything will slip. There is no going up. Only back, east, south!”

Generate your own here: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/02/qad-libs-201102

Real Qaddafi rants:

"You in Zawiyah turn to Bin Laden," he said. "They give you drugs."

"I cannot recognise either the Palestinian state or the Israeli state. The Palestinians are idiots and the Israelis are idiots. "

"A woman has the right to run for election whether she's male or female!"

"Were it not for electricity, we would have to watch television in the dark!"

"I am not such a dictator that I would shut down Facebook. I would only imprison anyone who logs in!"

"All the terrorists in the house: put your hands up!" (to the UN)

“We are content and happy if Obama can stay forever as the president of America!” (the same UN speech)

Who said it: Qaddafi or Charlie Sheen?:

"[My enemies] are at home or they are abroad...comfortable, and having fun!"

I will miss this guy when he is gone. He is too much fun! (Qaddafi, not Charlie Sheen)

Appropriate?

2011-01-10T15:23:00.001-08:00

The political discourse surrounding the horrific shooting in Arizona has been awful .

The MSM has delighted in portraying the wacko shooter in Arizona as a "right wing fanatic". I'm watching Katie Couric making that case on CBS news as we speak. She just fed a loaded question to the Sheriff in Tucson, who just said that the 2nd Amendment is the "height of insanity"... that nugget of wisdom led directly into a CBS "hit piece" on the right to bear arms, suggesting that a CBS-style gun ban would have prevented this tragedy.

I went out to the barn to check on the horses and came back inside and, 10 minutes later, CBS was _still_ suggesting that the 2nd Amendment and the Tea Party movement was responsible for the shooter in Arizona, who by most accounts was a seriously crazy pot-head nihilist, with no coherent political affiliations at all.

The Arizona shooter reportedly asked Congresswoman Giffords "What is government if words have no meaning?". Giffords was reportedly bewildered by the (bewildering) question and Loughner became angry from her inadequately-sympathetic response.

The guy had (and still has) several You-Tube videos online that are completely nonsensical: "Every human who is mentally capable is always able to be the treasurer of their new currency" Huh? And it gets weirder from there.

He goes on: "Secondly, my hope - is for you to be literate! If you're literate in English grammar, then you comprehend English grammar." Uh-huh... "If I have my civil rights, then this message wouldn't have happen." So much for literacy...

He reportedly had a fuzzy-headed thing about grammar, but the question about government and words having no meaning was interesting.

Ultimately politics is about communication, the expression of ideas. Ideas can be powerful, whether or not they are connected to reality or evidence. Smart political operatives have long understood this. Lyndon Johnson famously sought to accuse an opponent of copulating with livestock. He, and everyone else, knew it was a scurrilous libel - but he also knew it would work.

So the problem is not that words have no meaning, but that they do - they have more meaning than they deserve, so much so that tangible, real evidence pales next to their semantic and psychological potency. Another way to express this is the axiom that "perception is reality". In other words, truth doesn't matter - what matters is what people believe.

And people can be counted on to be reactionary and have short attention spans - what you tell them now will often have more impact than what they knew to be true yesterday.

I think the left wing understands this all to well - which explains what they report on CBS news. It almost always works, even as the people, at a deeper level become even more disaffected and distrustful of almost all public voices. Disapproval of Congress currently stands at 74%. I don't know exactly how this compares with opinions of Congress in other times in history, but its the worst I can remember.

What this seems to mean is that the cacaphony of demagogery works: in a short term sense it confuses the people about what to believe, causing them to become somewhat disoriented and disconnected from their core understanding and belief. In the longer term it causes deep disaffection, disconnection, and cynicism about public institutions. If you're an anarchist or a nihilist (like the Arizona shooter may have been, to the extent he was lucid at all), this can be just what you want. If your goal is the destruction of traditional public institutions - in our case the institutions of Western civilization - then it's a pretty good strategy.

The basic question is whether loss of legitimacy of public institutions is a good thing. If you think it is, you probably would qualify as a revolutionary. The trouble with revolutions, though, is the revolutionaries seldom know where they will lead.

In our own case, the American Revolution was profoundly positive, creating the worlds oldest, greatest, and strongest democracy. Most folks (although these days maybe that's a stretch) would probably agree it was positive because it was strongly grounded in traditional western Judeo-Christian ethics. Most other revolutions have not worked out so well.

I reflect on the fact that today I am hesitant and wary about expressing my political opinions - even though those opinions are almost identical to the ones expressed by Thomas Jefferson. I write this blog (semi) anonymously and am much more wary about what I say in attributable fora. It makes me wonder where we are in terms of the political climate in the western world, and reflect that my opinions, which I'm wary to express, are pretty much the _exact same_ as the ones that got the founding fathers in trouble with the British 235 years ago.

In closing, I'll say this: if we are not willing to defend liberty - freedom from oppression, freedom of expression, freedom to pursue happiness - we won't have much of it for much longer, and none of it pretty soon.

We're lucky: we have a constitutionally-established republic that accords special status to individual freedom and liberty. Unlike the founding fathers, we don't need a revolution to preserve it. But if we do not think about, and defend, what we believe in, rather than about the demogogery and rhetoric telling us things we know are not true, we could lose it. When it's gone we'll understand we did the wrong things.

Wooly Worms

2010-12-13T16:17:00.000-08:00

Country folk believe you can predict the severity of the winter by the bands of color on the wooly worm (Pyrrharctia isabella, the larva of the Isabella Tiger Moth). Wooly worms are brown and black, and may be found with alternating-colored stripes.

The wider or thicker the brown band (which is usually in the middle), the milder the winter is expected to be.

Last winter the wooly worms were solid black, predicting a cold, snowy winter - which is exactly what we got.

This year the reports are a little more mixed, with a little more brown being seen on the wooly worms - although the reports are mixed. The official Wooly Worm web site, hosted by the Wooly Worm Festival held every October in Banner Elk, NC, has a more detailed and fine-grained worm-based forecast. It says:

Based on the width and order of the caterpillar's black and brown stripes, Jack's forecast for the coming winter (starting with the winter solstice on December 21) says there will be cold and snow through the holidays and on into late January. There will be a bit of a warming trend in the last week of January and first week of February with a chance for ice. February will continue cold, becoming extremely cold in March. The weeks leading to the spring equinox on March 20 will see the winter close with lots of snow.

Checking the Farmer's Almanac, we find a similar prediction:

Old Man Winter doesn’t want to give up his frigid hold just yet, but his hold will mostly be in the middle of the country.

According to the 2010 Farmers’ Almanac, this winter will see more days of shivery conditions: a winter during which temperatures will average below normal for about three-quarters of the nation.

A large area of numbingly cold temperatures will predominate from roughly east of the Continental Divide to west of the Appalachians (see map). The coldest temperatures will be over the northern Great Lakes and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. But acting almost like the bread of a sandwich, to this swath of unseasonable cold will be two regions with temperatures that will average closer to normal—the West Coast and the East Coast.

Perhaps the Farmer's Almanac uses wooly worms? I certainly wouldn't be surprised.

Another source says the wooly worms in West Virginia are all black. Perhaps the wooly worms are regionally precise? I have also heard that some all black ones were seen around here, as were some with a thick brown middle band, which indicates a warm spell in the middle of winter.

Comparing with scientific sources, the UAH global temperature anomaly shows a global average slightly cooler than last year for the last few days, but pretty close to the average for the last several years. This gets us back to the basic issue that local climate and global climate can be very different things, and we don't necessarily know exactly what that means. Last winter was one of the coldest in the modern record in the US, Europe, and China, but was warmer than average globally, because there were large areas in the higher latitudes (Northern Canada, South Pacific) that were significantly warmer than average.

So far it feels colder than usual around here and it isn't even winter yet. The forecast for tonight is 15 degrees F. Tomorrow it is supposed to be 13 deg. F. In many recent years past we have had shirtsleeves weather in December - but not in the last 3 or 4 years. Apparently it isn't just me: there have been a record number of new weather records this month, mainly for low temperatures and snowfall: check out this chart.

So what can we expect for the rest of the winter? (Actually, "the winter", since it is still fall.) According to the wooly worms it will continue frigid until at least late January.

Very Large Globes

2010-12-12T10:47:00.000-08:00

Longtime readers (if there are any still around) may remember my fascination with Juan Trippe's globe:

To review, Juan Trippe, when he was the head of Pan Am, had a very large antique globe in his office in the Chrysler Building. He used the globe and bits of string to plan out Pan Am's pioneering routes around the world.

That globe is now in the Smithsonian Institution, where I saw and reported on it in 2008. Close examination revealed it to be a "Malby's Terrestrial Globe", which was not terribly significant to me at the time, but probably should have been:

Markings on the globe indicate it was manufactured in "18*4" - the third digit had been obfuscated by wear. I theorized at the time that it was manufactured in 1884 or 1894, but that was incorrect.

Thomas Malby was a globe and chart maker in London who first estabilished his business in 1810. In 1849, he re-issued the 36" 1825 Addison globe "for the Great Exhibition", which was held in 1851 (in partnership with the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, or SDUK). Reportedly Malby sold these globes until 1862, after which they were sold by James Wyld, another famous 19th century London globe maker.

There are quite a few Malby globes to be found around the world, but the giant 36" models are very rare, and very valuable. According to the University of Utah, who have two of them, there are only eight left in the world (three in the US and three in the UK, in addition to the two at Utah, according to them). I'm not sure this is correct.

Yesterday I was at the Biltmore House in Asheville, North Carolina, and was very surprised to see a 36" Malby globe in the library there. Perhaps more amazingly, a 36" Malby globe was recently sold at auction in New York - for $103,700. Including the Juan Trippe globe, that's three right there. Here are two more - although they are listed as "by James Wyld", they date from 1860 and I believe Wyld globes were actually made by, and labeled, Malby in 1860.

So Juan Trippe's globe would appear to probably be dated 1854, which is when Malby's big globes were at their most popular. (Here's an advertisement for them from 1850.) While there are probably more than 8 of them still in existence, they are still incredibly rare and valuable.

Globes are not cheap under any hardly any circumstances. The closest modern analogue to the large Malby globe is the 32" Replogle Diplomat - which runs around $8000 new. Someday when I have $8k lying around I'm going to get one so I can play Juan Trippe at home...

And Malby's? They're still in business in London, now known as the London Name Plate Manufacturing Co., Ltd. They no longer make globes (as far as I can tell) but the company is run by the 7th generation of the Malby family. Cool... Now if we could just get them to make more 36" globes!

JFK

2010-11-01T15:33:00.000-07:00

This past weekend I visited Dallas and Dealey Plaza. I had always wanted to go there, to check it out for myself. It was very interesting.

I've never had a big opinion about JFK conspiracy theories although I tended to believe the basic premise that Lee Harvey Oswald did in fact shoot JFK.

Whether he was part of a larger conspiracy, whether well organized or not, I've been pretty agnostic. There are a lot of facts that seem to point to a conspiracy: Oswald's defection to and redefection from the Soviet Union, his relationship with Cuban radicals, the trip to Mexico City, etc etc., not to mention his own subsequent assassination by Jack Ruby.

At Dealey Plaza I just wanted to check out the geometry of Oswald's shot and see if it made sense to me. There have been many, many conspiracists who said the shot was "impossible" and I wanted to see for myself.

My impression was that the shot was far from impossible, although Oswald, who was only a mediocre shot in the Marine Corps, was somewhat lucky with the perfect headshot.

Similarly there has been a great deal of controversy about the Zapruder film, alleging it proved the shot could not have come from the 6th floor of the Texas Book Depository. After standing in Oswald's perch on the 6th floor, looking at the "X" on the pavement where the fatal shot hit JFK, and standing on the spot where Zapruder made the film, it looked like it all made sense to me. The Zapruder film shows an explosive exit wound that looked to me to correlate with the trajectory from the 6th floor of the depository. The earlier frames also seemed to be consistent with the earlier shot from the same location, which hit JFK in the back and also hit Governor Connally.

While lurking on the grassy knoll, I met a very interesting man who claimed to be an eyewitness to the assassination, 13 years old at the time, who was across and up the street from where Zapruder took the film. He said he was sure he saw a shooter on the grassy knoll, that a part of Kennedy's skull was blown backwards, behind the car and across the street, and that nearly all the witnesses at the time believed the shooter was on the grassy knoll. He then went on to relate many of the more wild and unbelievable facets of the conspiracy theory, such as that Oswald, Ruby, J.D. Tippitt, etc, all knew each other in Dallas before 22 November 1963. I have no idea whether anything he said was true, but he told a good story.

So my individual objective observations seemed to support, to me anyway, the basic premise of the assassination: that Oswald, on the 6th floor of the school book depository, fired three shots in about 6 seconds and hit Kennedy twice, killing him instantly with the (probable) third shot.

But like everything with the Kennedy Assassination, there are an awful lot of puzzling bits of evidence. To me the poor ballistics analysis has always been problematic. Oswald probably fired three shots, but where did the third (or most likely second) shot go? Something hit witness James Tague, but I've never seen a good analysis of how that bullet got to where it was. (Fascinatingly (to me), Tague, like practically every witness who has made statements that I've heard of, reports facts contrary to the Warren Commission report and may believe in a conspiracy involving a shooter on the grassy knoll. I have no idea if that means anything other than they all see financial gain in promoting a conspiracy.)

There are just so many strange facts about the case - like why did Oswald visit the local FBI office and threaten FBI agent James Hosty, warning Hosty to stay away from his wife? And why was he not arrested for making the threats? And why did the FBI destroy the written, threatening note that Oswald left for Hosty?

Who was the strange man who presented Secret Service credentials to Dallas Police Officer Joe Smith in the parking lot behind the grassy knoll in the seconds after the assassination? No official authority has ever provided an explanation for Officer Smith's testimony, as there were no known Secret Service agents on the grassy knoll, and especially none dressed in casual clothes, as Smith reported.

What about the other strange bullets and cartridges found near Dealey Plaza? Not that I necessarily believe any of them have anything to do with the assassination, but it is strange.

Ultimately, I have to stick with Occam's Razor. If there was a massive conspiracy, it would have had to have been unimaginably massive, and it probably would have come out by now. If there were other shooters, they were way closer to JFK than Oswald and apparently didn't hit anything - and there would have had to have been a massive coverup to conceal the evidence of their presence.

A lot of weird stuff went on - destroyed evidence, coercion of witnesses, botched investigations, etc. - but I think the explanation for it all is probably typical government incompetence and arrogance, not an organized conspiracy. Finding the magic bullet on Connally's stretcher was particularly strange.

I think if there was a conspiracy, it probably involved Oswald as the shooter with "guilty knowledge" about his plans and general strangeness among the various government agencies who had been interested in him before November 22nd. The FBI, particularly, behaved very suspiciously, but then again J. Edgar Hoover was in charge and they behaved oddly most of the time.

But ultimately I'm agnostic. I wasn't there, and it's hard to tell what happened years later. Like most stuff of this ilk, I think the discussion says more about us today than about what happened then.

While we're at it...

2010-08-05T19:28:00.001-07:00

The New Seekers were the reformation of the The Seekers, who I consider the greatest folk band of all time.

The Seekers were all-Australian, and are still revered, and still active, with the original lineup, in Australia. They featured the best guitar lineup in all of folk music, with Keith Potger's 12 string and Bruce Woodley's rhythm, and Judith Durham singing lead vocals always looking like she wasn't trying very hard.

The Seekers produced what I consider the greatest single ever in the history of folk music in 1965 (The Brits agreed - it was the #1 single in the UK that year). You can't play this song loud enough, and the band seemed to understand that - they're practically shouting on the studio versions. It was written by Dusty Springfield's brother Tom for the Seekers and was a #4 in the US and of course #1 in Australia as well.

Here it is... crank it up:

Target Commercial

2010-08-05T18:34:00.000-07:00

You've probably been wondering about the song in the most recent Target "Back-to-School" commercial...

It's "Free to Be", by the New Seekers, the early-70s reincarnation of the great Australian 60's folk band The Seekers, featuring the very appealing Scottish vocalist Eve Graham. The New Seekers had several hits on both sides of the Atlantic, including "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing", which was originally a Coca Cola commercial, but the "Free to Be" song was originally the theme to a 1974 Marlo Thomas children's TV special.

The song has enjoyed a cult following since then, even though it was never an actual release by the New Seekers. Enjoy:

The Pond

2010-07-29T10:32:00.000-07:00

The Pond was a very-little-known Army intelligence unit operating under non-official cover in World War II and after, before it was absorbed into the fledgling CIA.

Recently the archives of the Pond, which were discovered in a barn in 2001, have finally been made public by the National Archives.

I wrote about the Pond and the fascinating story of its archives in my old blog, which sadly is now gone, after the CIA journal "Studies in Intelligence" published an article about it - until now practically the only information ever revealed publicly about the Pond's existence.

Now the documents are finally available - I had doubted they would ever be public. There is a lot of explosive history in these documents, particularly related to the pitched battle between the Pond and the CIA in the late 40's and early 50's. The Pond (supposedly) identified many Soviet agents in the US and Western Europe and fought to have those people investigated, while the CIA sought to dismiss, cover up, and protect those same people, many of whom were much later identified as real Soviet spies. For this reason alone, because the CIA had control over release of the Pond's documents, I expected they would disappear forever.

Of course we don't know what the CIA removed from the records before forwarding them to the National Archive. Presumably they removed everything embarrassing to the CIA, which could have been a lot.

Many people today are making the argument (obliquely) that the Pond is exactly the model we should be using for foreign intelligence, relying extensively on non-official cover vs. the embassy-based cover favored by the CIA.

The record - which may or may not be further bolstered by the Pond documents - however, is that the intelligence bureaucracy hates "non official cover" or "outsourced intelligence collection" and will normally do whatever it takes to eliminate it, as was done with the Pond.

The documents are, so far, only available by going to the National Archives and looking at them but I am hoping someone will put them on the web. Also there should be some good books coming out based on this newly-released information. I can hardly wait...

Water Temperatures

2010-07-11T18:49:00.000-07:00

This summer has been hot. It feels much hotter than last summer, although last summer was one of the coldest in decades in some places. This summer, however, feels a lot hotter than last summer, and perhaps hotter than usual.

I observe temperatures through a variety of non-scientific means. One of my favourite, and least scientific, is the temperature of my swimming pool in North Carolina. Water changes temp a lot slower than air, so it's a good medium to "smooth out" daily and weekly fluctuations.

This summer, my pool got hotter than usual quicker than usual - it was up to the high 80's in early June, which was a notable spike. I expected it to stay hot because of the heat wave that has hardly been broken since then. But something strange happened: it dropped back to the high-70s/low 80s in late June, where it has been for the last several days, even though the daytime temps seem hotter than usual to me. I absolutely don't know what this means or how it happened.

Last year the pool never got above the low-80s all summer, whereas two years ago it went to the high 80s in mid-June and stayed there until September. It seems like its been hot, but the pool doesn't seem to know it.

Another thing I look at is sea surface temps in the Florida Keys. I expect it to be mid-high 80s in July and this week it's been 82-84 - seemingly a couple of degrees cooler than usual. I looked at historical data, however, and the temps are actually very close to historical averages for this week in July, according to the data I found. Unfortunately, NOAA's weather stations are notoriously unreliable in the Keys and a lot of data is missing, which is very frustrating. There does, however, seem to be a warming trend since 1988, which is the first year of data for the stations I looked at (SMKF1 and SANF1). The chart below would seem to indicate that warming trend is strongly indicated by the global average.

Lately I've learned about how temperatures are measured and studied. The "UAH" global temperature average is the community standard. "UAH" refers to the University of Alabama at Huntsville, where they work hard to keep track of these things, mainly relying on NOAA satellite data, which we have only had for about the last 30 years.

Here is a helpful interactive chart from UAH on recent temperature trends. It shows 2010 as warmer than usual even for recent years, which is strongly suggestive of a warming trend, although the graph has turned down in the last few days and we are now (as of this week) a little cooler than last year and about the same as the last few years' average. Interestingly, this is just for sea surface temperature. If you go up in the atmosphere, the picture changes dramatically. 2010 is colder than many recent years at higher altitudes (play with the altitude selector on the left side of the UAH interactive chart to see it). I have absolutely no idea what this means or why it is so - maybe someone else does?

But I am hoping my unscientific observations of temperature are correct and the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico are a little cooler than usual because that will probably mean a comparatively benign hurricane season. Every year recently the Colorado State University predicts an "active" hurricane season but 2008 and 2009 were extremely quiet - well below average. As hurricane season is coming right up, we shall soon see...

McChrystal

2010-06-23T15:18:00.000-07:00

The extraordinary events of the last couple of days involving General Stan McChrystal have provided unusual insights into how the US government works and how random unpredictable happenings can change history.

The best story I've seen about what happened is here. It points out how the eruption of the Icelandic volcano (I'm not even going t0 try to cut-and-paste the name of the thing) gave Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings access to McChrystal's staff that he would not otherwise have had. The volcano erupted, grounding flights, and hosing up McChrystal and staff's travel plans. Subsequently the reporter got to spend a lot more informal time with the staff than he would have otherwise.

The staff sunk McChrystal. The general himself did not say anything incriminating to the reporter that I could tell from the article. There were some third-hand, un-attributed quotes along the lines of "McChrystal is believed to have thought" something incriminating. The most incriminating quotes were attributed, generically, to the staff. Most of the most incriminating statements - if they are true at all - apparently came from staff officers while they were drunk in Paris. The big impression I got from the article was that his staff was unbelievably arrogant to -allegedly- say the things they did to a reporter. I heard it said today, by a couple of guys who know most of that staff personally, that they are the best we have, the most combat-experienced, and the most sophisticated at fighting the war against al Qaeda. Some of those guys must be feeling pretty bad this week, both for their own careers and for their boss.

I had wondered how a guy who was apparently as smart as McChrystal could have made such an obviously stupid mistake. The story about the volcano really made sense. He had a plan to limit his risk associated with the Rolling Stone reporter, and his plan was derailed by fate. It's amazing how often random chance can divert the course of history.

The selection of Petreus to replace McChrystal is also interesting. In one sense it is probably obvious as the best thing the White House could do to get out of a bad situation. Petreus has a great reputation, is politically way more savvy than McChrystal, and in fact is considered an architect of the counterinsurgency doctrine that McChrystal advocated and implemented in Afghanistan. From one angle the response could be "thank goodness - he's the best guy available". On the other hand, milblogger Cdr Salamander has a salient perspective. Salamander points out this is a demotion for Petreus, who started the day as McChrystal's boss. Now who does the President nominate to take over CENTCOM? What does that guy think? I'm now, technically, superior to someone who was previously in my job? Who got demoted for doing his job too well?

This is not a huge deal - operational combat command is a more desirable job than COCOM Commander, which is a big diplomatic-staff-administrative-bureaucratic pain in the butt, so probably Petreus is not professionally too upset, although personally he was probably looking forward to a less painful PERSTEMPO than he's now going to get.

The other factor is that Afghanistan is a tough, intractable problem. I'm not sure there is a whole lot we can do that will solve the inherent problem that Afghanistan is not a real nation-state in any sense we understand, and no matter what we do it's going to be painful until the day we leave, then go downhill from there. If you were Petreus, wouldn't you rather end your career on a high note - as the victor of Iraq, followed by a successful COCOM Command, then move into some civilian leadership position, rather than risk being known as the unlucky guy who presided over final failure in Afghanistan?

Possibly Petreus will pull off a miracle and make lasting progress in Afghanistan, but I'm not sure who would bet on that. I don't know what to expect. Petreus is plainly brilliant, and brilliantly political. I had dinner with him last year and came away very impressed - but more so at his political acumen and leadership than warfighting sophistication. But I also know that a great deal of his success in Iraq came from his incredibly brilliant staff, most of whom are not available for Afghanistan. The one guy I'd watch for is H.R. McMaster, who seems to spend most of his time at think-tanks when he's not winning major battles.

Ironically, most observers agree that McChrystal had to go, even though they supported him and not the President, because he put the President in an untenable position. If the President didn't get rid of him it would significantly erode the integrity of the chain of command, which is ultimately a bigger deal even than the war.

I semi-sort-of-almost wonder if McChrystal in the back of his mind almost hoped to go out this way, and consequently didn't worry as much as he should have about allowing the Rolling Stone guy to get too close. He has reportedly always been kind of a wild-and-crazy guy, prone to do unpredictable things. Years as a senior combat leader may have given him a kind of fatalistic don't-give-a-shit attitude, which reportedly he may have already had a little bit. He might have seen the way things were going in Afghanistan and felt like it might be OK to go out with a big splash early than hang on and be associated with possible eventual failure. This attitude may have been exacerbated by truly understandable combat fatigue. The guy has been fighting hard without a break since 9/11 and had reportedly tried to retire before he got the job in Afghanistan.

He will now remembered as a courageous and tireless warrior who made legendary contributions to the war against terrorism and went out under wacky circumstances that probably ultimately weren't his fault, other than he was a blunt, plain-spoken soldier who didn't pay enough attention to public affairs and politics. It's interesting. I predict something more interesting will happen, related to Afghanistan, before we're done there.

More Covers

2010-04-20T11:31:00.001-07:00

Since I ended the last post with a famous Chinese song recorded by a Japanese pretending to be Chinese, it's probably appropriate to open this post with a Chinese singer recording the same song .... in Japanese (and Chinese):

This is Yamagushi Yoshiko's Japanese version of the song from a 1958 Japanese film:

As I mentioned in the last post, this is a Chinese standard covered by many artists.

I'm not a huge fan of Teresa Teng (鄧麗君), the first singer above, but she is revered by many Chinese signers. I much prefer Tsai Chin's (蔡琴) Chinese version:

Teng and Tsai Chin both sing with slight Taiwanese accents, this is Zhang Yan's (张燕)version with a Beijing accent. You only need to listen to a few bars of her version and Tsai Chin's to get a feel for their different handling of Mandarin:

Tsai Chin recorded what is probably my favorite Christian rock song, mostly because neither I nor several Chinese people I know realized it was a Christian song until it was pointed out to us, and those, I would submit, are the only kind of Christian pop songs worth listening to (otherwise, crack open a hymnal):

Finally something I just stumbled across. While I'm not a great fan of Yamaguchi Yoshiko's 1930s somewhat nasal singing style (preferring the jazzier sounds of her 1940s recoding such as Tokyo Serenade) How can you not link to a song called "Please Stop Smoking Opium My Darling"?

Chasing Origins

2010-03-05T03:22:00.001-08:00

It seems to be music week in the UCF, and since I have not been posting recently, but this has been sitting in the queue unfinished, I thought I should publish it.

I live in a household of three languages, only two of which I speak. What Hokkien gets spoken (between my wife, MIL, SIL, various Aunts and my wife's best friend in town) goes entirely over my head. But, like the man who was turned into a newt, my Mandarin is getting better. Largely through song.

I'm constantly exposed to stuff via my wife that's actually useful in my day job because I work in Asia a good deal. As a smarter than average High School and college kid, I used to despise pop culture, but as an older and wiser adult I see its value. Having a social connection to people, an instant one, breaks down barriers. And one activity every decent adult should be engaged in throughout their lives is in breaking down barriers.

So I've gone from rolling my eyes at my wife's taste for 70s and 80s mandopop to actually appreciating it. And using it. Much as it pains me to admit it, I can actually sing several Chinese songs as karaoke.

But being much more historically oriented than my wife, now and then I find some nuggets she overlooks being in the culture and accepting things, rather than looking at them with fresh eyes as I do.

Many melodies in mandopop are recycled. Weirdly to Westerners, some of those recycled melodies are hymns brought to China by missionaries. One of my wife's favorite song's melody is largely based on "There is a Fountain Filled with Blood" and another one - and I don't know why Disney never sued them - is pretty much entirely the theme song from "Davy Crockett", at a slower tempo. I kid you not.

But there are other influences, too. Despite the lingering hatreds from 50 years ago, Japanese culture pervades the East. Their aesthetic in clothes and music, especially. We were just back in Taiwan for Chinese New Year. My wife warned me not to wear black. Chinese people wear bright colors at New Years, she says. Well, they did 30 years ago when she left. Today? Not so much. I like black. I wore it. I fit in better than she did. She was the only one in a lot of photos wearing a red jacket. The blacks, grays, and muted browns of Tokyo's streets also adorn the figures on the streets of Taipei, Taichung and Tainan.

But the Japanese influence music, too. Not just the infusion of J-Pop since the 80s. This influence goes back a long way, all the way back to the origins of mandopop in Shanghai.

One of my wife's favorite singers is Tsai Chin (蔡琴), who has a lot of Chinese standards in her repertoire. This one, 意難忘 (Unforgettable Feeling) is one of her favorites:

藍色的街燈,
Indigo street lights
明滅在街頭獨自對窗,
Blink on the street corner through my lonely window,
凝望月色,
My eyes focus on the moonlight
星星在閃耀,
The stars are sparkling and my tears are flowing
我在流淚,
My tears are flowing
我在流淚,
My tears are flowing
沒人知道我
No one knows who I am,
啊 ~~ 啊 ~~
Oh--, Oh--
誰在唱啊,
Who is singing "Oh"?
遠處輕輕傳來想念你的,
A distant place gently brings on longing for you
想念你的,
Longing for you
我愛唱的那一首歌。
I love to sing that song
你我的回憶,
You are my reverie
該是兩相同
The two of us should be together
咫尺天涯,
We're close by each other but poles apart.
為何不見,
Why don't we see
此身已破碎
This life has ended in tatters
我在流淚,
My tears are flowing
我在流淚,
My tears are flowing
沒人知道我
No one knows who I am
啊~~ 啊~~
Oh-- Oh--

It was originally recorded in Chinese by the early-60s mandopop star Mei Dai (美黛).

It's worth noting that when Mei Dai recorded her version, mandopop had been branded "pornographic" by the prudes running the Cultural Revolution on the Mainland. The center of Chinese music had shifted from Shanghai to Taipei and Hong Kong by the 50s, a blow from which Mainland music has yet to fully recover.

But I was looking for things related to this kind of music the other day and I stumbled upon the origins of this song. It's not Chinese at all.

It's Japanese.

The original title is "Tokyo Serenade" (東京夜曲), and it was originally recorded by Li Jichun in 1949:

青いランプに夜は更けて
The night passes under the blue lamp
カーテン引く手のやるせなさ
A hand pulls the curtain back
泣けば泪の星空を
Shedding tears to the starry sky
あ~~　
Ah--
流れくるくる
A stream swirls
あの歌は
That song is for
誰が歌うか　
Whomever will sing
東京セレナーデ
Tokyo Serenade

白い毛糸の編みかけの
I start to knit with white wool
あなたのジャケツに　頬寄せて
I gather your jacket to my cheek
移す想いの紅のあと　　
My thoughts follow the crimson to dark
あああ
Ah--　
消えてくれるないつまでも
They vanish to dark forever
ひとり聞いてる　
Alone I listen to the
東京セレナーデ
Tokyo serenade

二人一つの思い出の
Two people each reminisce
匂いは薔薇よ小田急よ
Of the fragrance of the Rose in Odakyu
やさしいソファーに　燃える身を　　
On the simple couch my body burns
あああ　
Ah---
投げて夢見る夢の果て
Throw away my dreams
甘い吐息か　
With a sweet sigh?
東京セレナーデ
Tokyo Serenade

The song was recorded in Tokyo, as the Nationalists were not really disposed to promote a lot of Japanese culture in the wake of losing the Revolution.

So what was Li doing in Japan? She had appeared in several Japanese propaganda films in the 40s, and was tried for treason by the KMT in 1946. Before she could be sentenced, it became apparent to her fans (and the KMT) that Li was not as Chinese as her stage name might indicate.

Her real name was Yamaguchi Yoshiko ((山口淑子 - I'm using the Asian convention of last name first for real names), and she was a Japanese born to Japanese settlers in Manchuria, picking up a surname from one of her father's Chinese blood brothers. Classically trained by an Italian soprano married to a White Russian living in China (a common state of affairs in the Warlord Period), she became quite famous in the Shanghai singing scene. You can get a taste of the singing world of Old Shanghai, with Western opera, Jazz, and Beijing opera styles all blended together, in this old recording of Yue Lai Shang (夜來香), a Chinese standard first recorded by Miss. Yamaguchi (also covered by Mei Dai and Tsai Chin, among many others):

After returning to Japan she restarted her singing career, went to America to start in a few B movies, returned to Japan, hosted a TV show and then wound up as a member of parliament. She's still around, too, one of the last living witnesses to the flowering of modern Chinese pop culture in Old Shanghai. She has always felt a little bit uneasy around Chinese since the war, and never got over her guilt for the propaganda she filmed.

But the Chinese still love her music. I won't be so trite as to say music (or love) conquers all (despite most 1960s and 70s Chinese pop singers being able to sing in Japanese, the Chinese certainly didn't copy the lyrics to this song to include Tokyo as the setting...) , but it sure does go a long way to breaking down barriers.

Corporations in Space

2010-03-02T08:57:00.000-08:00

Leonardo da Vinci is a one of a series of case studies anyone who wonders why we don’t have space travel right now should consider. Because Leonardo da Vinci was an idiot. Well not really. More like an idiot savant. Unnecessarily ahead of his time. What I mean by that last crack is that he pretty much epitomizes the American criticism of people who live a life almost entirely of the mind: “if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich”?

Leonardo once “designed” a helicopter.

There was no motive force in the world that could have turned his invention fast enough to get it off the ground.

If Leonardo had used his considerable talent to think about pumps instead of flying machines, I have little doubt that he was smart enough to have produced a working steam engine. Many, many years before the first one was actually put to use in a mine. He would probably have had to solve some metallurgical problems along the way, but he would have found a ready buyer in mining operators even in his day. He could have become completely free of rich patrons for his art had he made that engine. That steam engine would not have powered his helicopter either, but it would have sped the invention of an actual helicopter by over a century.

But Leonardo had too much of an artistic temperament to think about mundane things like mines and metallurgy (beyond sculpture). So he produced pretty pictures of helicopters that never did anyone any good at all.

Infrastructure matters.

Going on to a somewhat more relevant and modern example, computer networks could have been invented and linked back in the 50s. But why? The computers they would have linked could not do much, the telecom links would have been unreliable with huge data losses, and the maintenance costs of the infrastructure would have been staggering.

Computers could have been linked in the 60s, and in fact the Space Program made some tentative steps in that direction, because of the present need of the program and because the money was there for upkeep. ARPANET was conceived in 1962 or so. But a civilian version would have charged too much to be of any commercial use because of the paucity of customers. Ditto for the 70s.

ARPANET started to transmit in 1969, and the DoD underwrote the costs. This began to build telecom infrastructure.

The PC market exploded in the late 70s and early 80s and suddenly there was an end-user infrastructure and a growing customer base. Remember the old modems with a 2 cup cradle for an old telephone handset? That led to Compusoft and the rest of the early internet. But without that PC and telecom infrastructure, the internet would have been stillborn. Sure, in some alternate universe a Telecom could have seen it as the wave of the future (ATT? HAH!) and created a network by brute force. But it would have been a commercial failure, and paradoxically, that failure probably would have made capital gunshy and delayed the development of a real and useful Internet by a decade or more.

We would have sent packets into the ether and stranded them there.

Most high technologies need a nutrient-rich environment in which to grow. Infrastructure has to be in place, and the costs have to eat only a small amount of GDP. They can’t be too tricky to maintain, or customers will do without or find a replacement. They can’t suck at public resources too badly. Most ideas never get off the ground, and people are not willing to give up a significant chunk of their standard of living in order to take a risk on something that has a high probability of failure, as most new ideas do. Payoff has to be relatively short term (within a few decades) in order for a business to find that technology profitable.

The costs are too high, the timelines for development too long and risk of failure too great for a business to take a chance on many complex technologies.

Sometimes, the government has to nurture the technology along until it is mature enough for free enterprise to take over. But visionaries in government are few and far between (and seldom in positions of power), so human progress is slower than it otherwise could be.

Space travel is definitely one of these complex technologies I’m talking about.

We, as a human race, achieved it before we were really rich enough to take advantage of it. We pushed the infrastructure hard, but it couldn’t stand the strain over the long haul. We were in a 1950s computing world, and we demanded that Cisco develop fiber-optic links between our vacuum tube monsters. They did, but it cost us an arm and a leg. Even my favorite redneck Country Rock group talked about “too many lives we spent across the ocean, too much money we spent up on the moon”.

We sent our hopes and dreams to the moon and stranded them there.

We were too early. Mankind wasn’t rich enough to afford the moon. I’m not sure it is, even now.

Jim’s essay on space travel is food for thought, and I definitely share his Libertarian-leaning sentiments about commercial space flight.

But I’m not sure we are out of the government-funded cocoon stage for space flight technology, and if we aren’t, it’s as if we’re asking commercial enterprise to build an Internet to connect transistor-based late-1960s UNIVACs. I’m not sure that computer infrastructure would have been big enough to justify the costs. Just as I’m not sure that the space travel customer base is big enough to absorb the development costs. Maybe it is. But if it isn’t, the resulting failure may set us back more than if we let NASA bumble along a bit longer.

I think Jim talks too glibly about the age of sail as an example. Building a sailing vessel, or even a fleet of them, was in no way as resource intensive as building a space program. In the language of business, the barriers to entry were high, but not astronomically (HAH!) so.

Not true for space travel.

Even with the lower barriers to building a wooden ship or two in the Age of Exploration, governments under-wrote a lot of the costs, as one of Jim’s commenters noted.

The first companies out there are going to look like government-sponsored monopolistic rapists, very much like Hudson Bay or East India. Commercial space exploration is not going to be pretty.

I really don’t care about that, though, my major concern is that when people talk about private enterprise, they don’t talk about what, exactly, space is going to provide that isn’t cheaper to get (or get a substitute for) down here. The only business plan I see at the moment is tourism. NASA has not turned up any useful process that creates things in low G environments that people really want down here, and NASA has been trying to find such a technology for decades.

I know, I've been involved in some of those experiments. I could make something nearly as good as the space polymers I was involved with for much less than what it cost to make them on the Shuttle, even with NASA underwriting the transportation costs - bench space was pretty nearly infinite in my lab compared to a cramped Shuttle cargo bay.

But, like Jim, I think space travel is necessary for the survival of the race, and I want my grandkids (at least some of them) off Earth. My genes are selfish that way.

I just don’t have enough information yet to be as happy as he is about the lack of vision in our government. Maybe he’s right. I hope so.

Overunity

2010-02-10T17:12:00.000-08:00

Hold on science fans... this should be interesting.

"Overunity" is a term that is roughly analogous to perpetual motion, e.g. a mechanism which violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics - and is therefore impossible according to our current understanding of the universe.

That doesn't stop people from working on it, however, with sometimes interesting results.

Most people understand that our carbon-fueled world has a finite, and short, half-life. We're going to have to come up with alternative sources of energy, and alternative ways of living, in the pretty near future. An added benefit is that the Saudis will go broke as long as we don't mortgage our entire civilization to them first (OOPS - too late!).

There have been many recent legendary figures who allegedly invented a "perpetual motion machine"... one of the most famous recent ones was Edwin V. Gray, who produced several supposed overunity devices and was the subject of a great deal of interesting conspiracy theory.

It is a familiar story: ordinary guy invents machine that threatens energy industry and is mysteriously suppressed or done away with (the Ed Gray story has all of that). The story has repeated itself so many times, in so many ways, that it is tempting to believe it. Especially since the equities in the energy status quo are the greatest in the history of humankind. Most of the wealth in humanity comes from control of energy sources, primarily carbon. Consequently that's where most of the power is. The people who control access to carbon energy buy and sell whole governments, including ours.

So while I don't think that any proported violations of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics have any legitimacy at all, it is possible to build a more efficient engine. In fact, it isn't even hard. But for reasons that look a lot like conspiracy theory even to the most sceptical, consumers are generally not allowed access to the most efficient choices.

For example - a diesel electric hybrid would be significantly more efficient that gasoline hybrids on the market today. But so far you can't buy one. Toyota, Nissan, and Volvo have promised diesel hybrids, but they are yet to appear. (Nissan also promised "supercap" battery technology in their hybrid, 7 years ago. Where is it? Volvo's version is a station wagon that gets 120mpg, scheduled for introduction in 2012, that they DON'T plan to sell in the United States )

So while "overunity" is certainly a myth, according to our current understanding of physics, improvements in efficiency that would almost certainly seem revolutionary or miraculous are almost certainly possible - they are happening "out there", just not for us.

One approach to great improvements in efficiency that I can't quite figure out are hydrogen generators. The idea is that a small electrolytic hydrogen generator can produce hydrogen gas to augment the ordinary fuel-air mixture in your car, greatly increasing gas mileage using only water as the (augment) fuel. These gizmos are also called hydrogen boosters and there are lots of web sites, with plans, formulas, etc.

My big question is whether these small hydrogen generators can realistically add efficiency... John maybe you can help me with the chemistry here. They only use a very small amount of water - on the scale of ounces to pints - during normal operation. It seems improbable to me that you can produce enough hydrogen to really augment the fuel of the vehicle without using a lot more water, and a lot more electricity (which has to come from the car) - which would add weight, use more energy, and decrease the efficiency of the overall system.

I'm very interested to figure out what the real chemistry is behind these gizmos.

Quick Weather Update

2010-02-10T16:45:00.000-08:00

For those who haven't noticed, the Mid-Atlantic has shattered records for snowfall that date back to the 19th century.

The previous record in Washington DC was the winter of 1898-1899, with 54.5 inches. As of 2 PM today, Washington DC's total is at 54.9 inches, and we're not near done yet.

Baltimore and the western DC suburbs have recorded much higher totals, at 72.3 and 63.5 inches, respectively.

I expect Washington DC could get another 10-20 inches this winter, totally blowing away all previous records.

My favourite quote:

Conditions were so bad that snowplows were advised to get off the roads.

Typical 21st Century Washington DC quote:

"This snow reminds me of when I was driving tractor-trailers in Saudi Arabia, and the sandstorm starts and you can't see the roads," said Syeed Zada, 55, a plow driver for the Virginia Department of Transportation.

Very old people compared this winter to 1922 and 1910. Most people said it was by far the worst in their lifetime. This is a great big bullet for my collection of "global cooling anecdotes".

Of course weather is not climate. Aggregated weather trends are climate. So if we have an "Al Gore" winter next year then it could shift the trend line back towards normal. On the other hand, if we have another cold, snowy winter, like the last couple of years, then the climate trend line shifts farther south, towards ice age and away from global warming.

Currier and Ives

2010-01-24T06:47:00.000-08:00

Dr Phil referred to the Currier and Ives prints of winter scenes in the 19th century in the comments to the previous post. That reminded me how much I like Currier and Ives prints, even though Currier and Ives were kind of the "Wal Mart" of 19th century lithography and I think there are much better examples of the art out there.

But I found this neat site that has a lot of their prints: http://currierandives.net

The earlier discussion was about how 19th century engravings showed a colder, snowier world than we now live in. Here are some examples:

"A Spill Out on the Snow"

"American Homestead Winter"

"Winter Morning in the Country"

"Maple Sugaring"

I have been postulating that we are headed for a Currier and Ives future - colder winters with a lot more snow - because of the cycle of low solar activity that is just beginning. I've been watching for anecdotal evidence that this is true, and I've seen quite a bit for the last couple of years. This year, a lake I've only ever seen slightly frozen in the last 40 years was frozen hard enough to walk on (or ice-skate) after the recent early-January cold snap. The second half of January has been much more average or typical (here in NC anyway) but the Farmer's Almanac (my new best friend) is predicting a snowy February.

Maybe it will be time to bust out the sleigh that has been collecting dust in the back of the barn for 100 years!

A new Maunder Minimum?

2010-01-06T16:38:00.000-08:00

The Maunder Minimum was a period of anomalously low solar activity that occurred between 1645 and 1715. It corresponded to the coldest part of the "Little Ice Age", which occurred between approximately 1400 and 1850.

During the Little Ice Age, and particularly the Maunder Minimum, the earth was substantially colder than it is today. Glaciation increased markedly, winters were historically harsh, and major ocean areas and seas froze over.

There is some debate (mainly from the Global Warming crowd) about whether there is a correlation between solar activity and climate, but in the case of the Maunder Minimum, it would be one hell of a coincidence.

The Little Ice Age followed the Medieval Warm Period, during which temperatures were substantially warmer than they are today. Unlike the Maunder Minimum, we do not have great observational data on solar activity during the Medieval Warm Period, although studies of solar activity cycles suggest it was much higher than during the subsequent cold period.

The Medieval Warm Period was famous for its disappearance from IPCC data after the advent of the Global Warming craze:

Data now shows that global warming ceased about 10 years ago and global cooling is accelerating, corresponding almost perfectly with the end of a period of very high solar activity. Here's another fun graphic:

Could this theory (that drastically diminished solar activity has ended global warming and is responsible for abrupt global cooling since 2007) be wrong? Could we still be experiencing global warming despite all evidence to the contrary? I'm still looking for science supporting global warming that still holds up.

Although I understand it is in no way scientific, I'm very much fascinated by anecdotal evidence. There are great descriptions about how warm it was during the Medieval Warm Period (descriptions of Scandinavian settlements in Greenland sounded like they were in Central Europe) and the Little Ice Age (ports that have been ice-free since the beginning of the 20th century (like New York) were completely closed by ice for entire winters). I love the old illustrations of life in the 19th century, showing routine travel by sleigh in the mid-Atlantic states, ice skating on lakes that haven't frozen at all in my lifetime, etc.

I certainly noted apparent warming in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Years went by with no snow in many places that previously had lots of it. The tropical ocean was nearly 10 degrees warmer in the winter months than it is now.

But in the last 7-8 years I've noticed cooler weather, with a dramatic drop in the last 2. I used to live in the tropics and for years would scuba dive during the winter in a thin wetsuit. The ocean temperature would bottom out in the low 70s in January, then rise steadily. Since 2006 the temps have dropped steadily and are now around 65. (This is based on NOAA automated observations at Key West). My swimming pool in North Carolina was apparently 10 degrees cooler for most of the summer of 2009 than it was in 2008.

In Washington DC there has been more snow by the end of December 2009 than I have ever seen (possibly since 1969, but I was pretty young then so I'm not sure). The ski areas on the east coast have more snow by the end of December 2009 than they did at any point in the winter throughout the 1980s and 1990s. There were many years where there was almost no snow on the ski areas in North Carolina - at one point we thought they might go out of business. This year they already had more snow base by late December than they did by late February last year - and last year was the best I had seen since perhaps the 1970s.

Although this is all anecdotal, these anecdotes seem to be repeated around the world. 2008 was the coldest winter in China in 100 years. Britain expects 2009 to the the coldest winter in 100 years.

I have an increasingly strong feeling that it will be cold and getting colder for at least the next generation and in a very few years "Global Warming" will be one of the biggest jokes of our lifetimes.

An example

2009-12-01T20:22:00.000-08:00

Somebody who gets it - Bob Baer on Iraq:

BAER: Yes. (U.S. Ambassador to Iraq) Ryan Crocker said it was the Iranians blocking a basing agreement. It was the Iranians buying elections and buying up the parliament. That tells me that Iran has de facto control over the country. Crocker didn’t say it was just a question of bringing a few parliamentarians around; he said Iran. That was his official statement. Crocker was the ambassador to Lebanon at the time I was there, and he calls this Iraq’s “Lebanonization.” Observers use Serbia as an example for Iraq and say we accomplished a victory there with just American troops. But they did it there with the Sunnis and Shi'a together. They were complicit in lowering the level of violence. Iran could make life hell if they unleash the Shi’a on us, as they’ve already done in the south of Iraq. The Iranians could fight us forever in Iraq, but that doesn’t actually serve their immediate interests. They know to just remain patient because eventually the Americans will leave. I don’t care if we even reach a basing agreement. Iran will undermine it. Unless we’re committed to placing a million troops in the region to contain this empire—as we did the Soviet empire—the basing agreement simply won’t have an effect.

Afghanistan

2009-12-01T18:52:00.000-08:00

Obama, all of Washington, and most of the military are totally clueless about Afghanistan.

I do believe there are some in the military - probably mostly junior folks with lots of time in the field and a serious will to understand the situation - who have a pretty good feel for what to do and how to do it. I don't know how much influence those smart junior folks have on the chain of command.

The "tribal strategy", which is offered as a blueprint for success in Afghanistan, is not the panacea and will not solve our dilemma there, except in the context of a much larger and more sophisticated strategy.

First of all we have got to get over our obsession with lines on the map: "seams" in military parlance, which are the ways that ignorant wonks in Washington and careerists in the military divide up the world for their own personal, short-sighted, benefit. The enemy doesn't have seams. Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb doesn't have to coordinate and synchronize their deployment schedules with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula before carrying 0ut operations. The only seams the enemy has are created by us, e.g. limitations on their abilities to cross international borders because of security, surveillance, or local allied policy. The only seams we have are created by us: artificial lines on the map created by our own bureaucrats for our own bureaucratic purposes.

Next we have to honestly assess and understand the war we are fighting. It is unfortunately a clash of civilizations between the west and the Islamic world. It is a measure of how dire this conflict has become that many of you reading this paragraph will think "that's intolerant of Islamicist religious freedom". I'm not going to spend a long time footnoting it now, but only a very few years ago the idea that other civilizations opposed western ideals was not controversial. Sometime since I graduated from college our civilization has lost its identity. If you don't think this idea is overtly self evident, you have not read, much less understood, the writings and speeches of our adversaries: Sayyid Qutb, Abdullah Azzam, Ayman al Zawahiri, Osama, et al. If you don't think those guys reflect and represent the intellectual and ideological center of global Islam, you simply aren't paying attention. While a substantial percentage of Muslims around the world may be normal, reasonable, peaceloving folks, at least 90% of the money and power in the Islamic world is with Osama. This is important, and as long as we willfully deny it we will lose.

Next we have got to accept that we are a 2nd Generation power in a 4th Generation world. The information revolution has transformed international politics and warfare. It has made the weak strong and the strong weak, but the information-savvy hold most of the cards. Conventional military power is mostly a liability - we deploy our regular forces to irregular conflicts, then torment ourselves with "force protection" of our troops in situations were they simply don't belong. This problem was bad enough in Iraq, which was a vastly more conventional, comprehensible problem than is Afghanistan. We snatched victory from the jaws of defeat in Iraq by overlaying a pretty sophisticated unconventional strategy and the credit was given to the "troop surge", which was a massive oversimplification of what we did and how it worked. Warfare is now unconventional, information-based, non-linear, and more psychological than kinetic. Large numbers of conventional troops are usually just a liability.

Next we have to understand Afghanistan. Probably there are some folks who have spent a lot of time there who have a good feeling for the place, but it is really not an easy place to understand. It is not a nation-state by any conventional understanding of the term. The tribal model is good, and useful, but won't solve all problems there because Afghanistan is mainly a proxy, a tool, and a buffer of surrounding powerful nation-states. Take away state sponsorship of the Taliban (Pakistani and Iranian) and they wouldn't last a year. I only give them that long because they have drug trafficking and corruption working in their favor. (Ever wonder why the Taliban banned opium cultivation when they were in power? Because they were sitting on the world's largest stockpile of heroin and they wanted to drive up the price.)

The factors which govern events in Afghanistan are mostly totally different from what Obama says they are and what Washington thinks they are. Drug trafficking is one big fat example of that but there are bigger and more significant factors that are totally unknown in Washington but totally axiomatic in Islamabad, Teheran, and Dubai (hint: it's mostly about money). If we can't figure that stuff out we'll never stand a chance. At the moment we're just deceiving ourselves and the Islamic world is laughing their asses off at our cluelessness. I kind of doubt that will change, but I was somewhat surprised at how we engineered a politically appealing result in Iraq. It's just amazing how naive and simple we are.

That's the final point: we're all shocked, shocked at the corruption in Afghanistan and how it is thwarting our democratic idealism. The corruption in Afghanistan is kindergarten-level compared to Iraq, where bigger games are still being played. The difference is that there isn't much else going on in Afghanistan, so it's more obvious. If we want to succeed we have to learn to understand how things work in that part of the world and integrate that understanding into a more strategic strategy.

Such a strategy should seek to contain Iran, discredit and roll back Wahhabism, promote and encourage adoption of ideas and values that are at least not detrimental to our interests, and reduce the ability of our 4th generation adversaries (also known as terrorists) to threaten the US homeland. That's what we should be doing in Afghanistan - not seeking to do enough "nation building" to permit a graceful exit.

I thought Obama laid out a plan for willful failure - a theme that will not be missed by the real players over there. They are thinking tonight "this is going to work out well for us".

Is Global Warming Dead?

2009-12-01T15:14:00.000-08:00

Long time readers may recall I have been sceptical about the data behind the theories global warming for a while.

It now turns out that scepticism was well founded: the data was falsified.

The recent hack of the Hadley Climate Research Unit produced a gold mine of evidence against the main proponents of global warming, including hockey-stick proponent Michael Mann.

The most damning revelation to date, however, is known as the "harry_read_me.txt" file. It is a long rambling discussion that essentially says that the available data does not indicate global warming at all - much less anthropogenic global warming - and the conclusions being drawn by key researchers are simply not supported by the evidence. And this is from someone "on the inside" of an organization that is one of the key proponents of so-called climate change.

I have said this before: claims about global warming are not about science, they are about politics. Somebody somewhere figured out that if you control the use of energy you control the world - and some of those somebodies are trying to use bad science to control the world.

The question now is whether they will still get away with it now that it has been revealed that they were deliberately lying. I think there's a real good chance that they will.

What Good Is It?

2009-11-17T07:36:00.000-08:00

So Janiece has been making me think recently. She pulled out the old canard that an MBA was worth no more than a year’s subscription to the Wall Street Journal. I don’t agree, but on the other hand, despite holding the degree, I am somewhat ambivalent about the value of my education.

But I have to stand up and defend the degree itself. First of all, the original purpose of the degree, back when most Americans still made stuff instead of shuffling paper, was to take Engineers and other technical staff and prepare them to be business leaders within their silos, with perhaps the option of making them strong general managers as well. A good program was supposed to give those staff a broad general education in the rudiments of all aspects of a business, from Finance to Marketing. Most good programs also encourage a specialization so that the student acquires some deep specific skills in a particular area of business. Given that substrate of student, the MBA program is still remarkably good at turning out better managers.

In my own career journey, the education I received in business school was invaluable. I would not have been ready to take on a business role after working in an Industrial lab for a few years. No way, no how. I had too many preconceived notions and arrogance coming out of obtaining a Ph.D. I learned pretty quick in business school how much I thought I knew about how the world outside academia worked was wrong. None of the scientists I work with today could do my job without an MBA or other business training, despite having more years in the industry than I do.

So what specifically did business school do for me? First, it gave me rudimentary skills in the major areas of a modern business so that I can evaluate the concerns of different lines with my projects. It would have taken me years of real-world work experience in a number of different positions (which I may or may not have been qualified to occupy) to get that broad a view of business operations. If, indeed, I was lucky enough to get the right assignments to see all of those lines.

I knew nothing of financial instruments before business school, and the Corporate Finance and Accounting classes gave me a really good grounding in that aspect of business. Now, I find Finance about as much fun as watching paint dry, despite my proclivity for numeric activities, so I took the minimum in that area. People who concentrated in finance got real world projects from real firms to work on as part of their course work. A Journal education (which admittedly is slightly better than a University of Google education because the Journal staff acts as a bozo filter) would not provide that hands-on experience.

Likely as a bench scientist I would never have seen the HR side of modern business (the courses in which were surprisingly useful, though it is perhaps unsurprising that most real-world HR I’ve come into contact with does not practice what I learned in those classes). The Journal is especially weak on HR. In my HR class I was required to approach a company and ask for confidential information on their HR practices so that we could perform a benchmarking evaluation. What the company got out of the deal was an independent appraisal. I had connections with what was then the largest laser company in the world from my previous life, and they opened up their entire operations to my team. It was an amazing learning experience, and one I never would have gotten on the job or in a Journal education.

Beyond those basic classes, I concentrated in Strategy and Marketing. I took classes in Consumer Behavior from one of the world’s leading experts in consumer psychology. I took quantitative research methods and survey instrument design form another leading expert. I came out of B-school with specific, useful skills that I immediately put into practice on my first job. Skills I didn’t have as a scientist, and skills that take time and money to acquire. Skills you can’t get from the Journal.

A good business school should provide more than a case-based education, although cases do have their value. The main deliverable at my school was tied into several courses, and used the content from all of them for a practical purpose – mid-to-large-tier businesses sent the school projects for the students to work on all year as consultants, and we had to present and defend our recommendations just as an actual business consultant would. The teams that worked on those projects were selected by the school, so that a balance of industries and experience was represented on each team. Although the Journal can provide some insight into other industries, there is no other way outside of business school to be thrown into a project with people of such varied backgrounds. I worked on that team with people from the fashion industry, high tech, wood and paper products, steel making, insurance, and other industries. The price of the MBA was cheap compared to the value of that kind of cross-fertilization of ideas.

Which brings me to the international diversity aspect. The make-up of my class was about 45% foreign. Most of the Americans marveled at the large ratio of foreigners. Coming from a science lab, I marveled at the novelty of a class with a majority of native-born Americans. :D

That had a huge impact on my educational experience. And the diversity ran deep – we were not dealing with Americanized immigrants, we were interacting with people who were going to go back to their native countries and do business.

My team had several foreigners on it, actually by luck of the draw we had less than the average. However, we made up for that with quality. Two of my best friends on the team brought a lot of perspective to the project. One was a Finance guy from Hugo Boss in Germany, and a Lieutenant in the Bundeswehr Reserves. The other guy was going to school on company plastic – and the company was Nippon Steel. I probably owe my present career, which I entered because my original group needed someone to deal with the Japan office, to two things – the fact that I got the real scoop on Japanese business practices (and not recycled Nikkei news articles via the Journal) from Kunio, and the fact that the business school offered Japanese language as an elective. I made a very convincing case that I knew what the heck I was talking about when my interviewers asked about Japan. I didn’t know everything by a long shot – in no way was I ready for a senior level position, but I was in a position to do a good job in an entry level slot, which is what I was being asked to do.

Beyond that, I made a point to enter foreign-dominated groups in the self-selected teams in other classes. In most of my non-marketing classes I wound up working either with Kunio and another Japanese, or with a couple of Turks. I got good international exposure from them, and they benefited from my quant skills. In business school more than any other graduate program except the JD, peers matter. In my marketing classes I wound up working with a couple of Korean guys. Many a dinner with them and Kunio gave me real insight into the business and political relations between their two countries. To be fair, most of the Americans gravitated to American-only team when given the choice.

Now that brings up an important point – I got a lot out of business school because I’m the type of intellectual vampire who seizes every opportunity to learn something and sucks it dry until the veins are making that empty milkshake sound. Less motivated people get less out of business school, and one of the problems with the MBA degree is that the material is really not rocket science, with the exception of some of the more esoteric finance stuff and a bit of the quantitative statistics in predictive market research – topics which can be easily avoided by the lazy. Any reasonably good parrot can do enough to get out of the even a good program with passing grades. There is really no filter in the program beyond the initial selection process. Thus programs with easy admission requirements generally issue diplomas that would find better use as tissue paper.

Now I went to a school that’s in the second tier in the Business Week rankings, but still well within the top 50 business schools in the world. I got a good enough education that I can compete successfully with graduates of Harvard, Yale, MIT, Chicago and Wharton. But those people have a couple of edges on me. The bottom quartile of their class was probably equal to the middle quartiles of mine – their peers pushed them harder, and on average had more experience at Fortune 100 companies prior to matriculating. They also got social networking advantages I didn’t, because Donald Trump sends his kids to Wharton, not a second tier, high value-for-money institution. Educational Return On Investment means less to families at the top of American business than it did to me.

I think that on the whole, a business education can be a very valuable experience.

But there are too many business schools and too many MBAs out there, and outside of the coasts, it’s a lot more likely you are interacting with the dregs of American business education.

Unfortunately there is an over-reliance on credentialism within American business. The MBA at lesser programs is now nothing but a signal of ambition. Thus, the proliferation of MBA programs has led to relaxed admissions of people who really don’t have the background to make the most of their business education. There is an administrative assistant with an MBA at my company. It’s a Podunk MBA, from an institution not respected enough to get her a job using it at my company, yet she’s over credentialed for her current position. If she goes somewhere else and gets a job using that degree, she won’t have the skills of the people who graduated from my school. That’s an issue.

Given my own experience, I’d say that an institution that is too small to attract a significant number of real world projects for its students, not prestigious enough to attract top students who push their peers, and has less than 30% foreign students is not likely to produce MBAs of much value.

In addition to that, the ratio of full-time to part time students matters. I don’t have much use for executive or part time MBAs. Executive MBAs take people with years and years of experience, but who are lacking that special piece of paper. I’m not sure how much value the MBA adds in that case. Part time MBAs miss the whole benefit of an MBA. The students take night classes with the same peers from the same local businesses, removing much of the cross-fertilization of ideas from different industries. The number of foreigners tends to be very low, reducing the impact of student diversity. And finally, the programs often take 5 to 7 years to complete at one or 2 night classes per semester. The other benefit of an MBA is to immerse students in topics from all over the business world at one time so that they begin to see the connections between the silos. Taking the classes one at a time reduces the student’s ability to see those connections, and taking them over 5 years ensures that the material from 5 years ago ahs been completely forgotten by the time the degree is granted.

It seems to me that business education is in a very similar state to Medical Education before the Flexner Report. I’d like to see a lot of programs forced to improve or close. The quality rapidly drops off beyond the top 70 or 80 schools (world-wide not US), and graduates from those other institutions give the rest of us a bad name.

That’s not the only issue with the MBA degree. Graduates of the top schools have their own issues as well. The idea that the skills that the MBA imparts give one a deep understanding into the mechanics of all businesses is a pernicious one. There is no substitute for experience in (and passion for) an industry. Legions of bloodsucking, useless consultants, themselves graduates of top-tier MBA programs, reinforce this notion.

A lot of the problems in the modern business world come from managers who talk about their products in a generic sense. One of the stupidest things I ever heard came from such an MBA, something to the effect that if he were to split his business up and one person were to take the people and equipment, and he were to take only the brand names, he’d do better than the person with the goods. That statement pretty stupidly discounts the contributions of all those people who do the actual work of bringing a product to the customer. A brand is a quality signal, and unless he could maintain the same quality with his mercenaries and rented plants, those brands would disintegrate. Ask Magellan.

The MBA is a starting point. Denigrating it in the absence of any other business education is a mistake. The school matters, but most importantly, what one does with it matters. More than any other professional degree, it means little outside of the context of the holder's work history and work ethic. But with it the hard worker becomes that much more valuable.

Free Flow

2009-11-16T20:11:00.000-08:00

My friend Janiece just reminded me of one of the reasons I'm a small "L" libertarian: unlike the Ayn Rand fan club, I recognize the limits of the free market.

The free market is the best device ever invented for the fair distribution of goods and services. But the efficiency of the free market depends on several conditions, and one of those is the free flow of information, and relatively equal access of that information to all the players in the market.

I'm not talking about the fact that Proctor and Gamble does not disclose that Joy and Dawn dish detergent are based on the very same patents, and are likely almost identical, save for the price. If you fall for that, you deserve to give P&G a little more of your hard-earned money than would otherwise be the case. Marketers make a lot of money on low-involvement decisions. It's a sort of tax voluntarily paid by the unwary to maintain a free market that is not over-regulated. Not to mention that the law mandates that the patent numbers be printed on the bottle for transparency. What more do you want, someone to read it for you? Read the fine print yourself and caveat emptor.

But we all take a little more care with high involvement purchases, which are de facto the ones that take a significant chunk of cash to make. In those instances, reputable sellers make sure that all the information is available to the buyer. Investing should be one of those high-involvement areas where the market is forced to operate at great transparency. GAAP, fund prospecti, 10Ks and the like keep everyone honest.

Which is why derivatives bother me. I'm a relatively smart guy, I hold an MBA from a top school, and I'm pretty math-savvy. I damn sure don't understand how all the risks in derivatives are accounted for, nor how ownership of that risk is distributed. Given the implosion-prone nature of derivative markets, I'm pretty convinced those people who do say they understand such things really don't.

This is exactly analagous to the illegal practice of buying on margin. In a normal market where people are betting with their own money, prices reflect the wisdom of the crowd on the rational expectation of future cash flows from an investment. Rational people can spot bubbles and avoid them. Although irrational actors can temporarily distort the market, they generally get what they deserve when the market returns to its natural equilibrium.

When people are borrowing to make stock purchases, the information on the crowd's confidence in the solidity of the the investment (reflected in the price) is hidden, distorted, or completely absent. The market breaks down because information is no longer transparent. In a similar way, the inability to track risk and accountability with derivatives distorts the natural feedback mechanisms that allow the market to self-correct.

This is why we need regulators, despite the very real issues of regulatory creep and capture. It is in maintaining the balance of ideals and real-world issues when the system is stressed that one can separate the rational libertarian from, say, Ron Paul.

The Al Qaeda Associated Movement

2009-11-11T20:44:00.000-08:00

My last couple of posts, as well as some of the comments over at Jim's, apparently have elicited quite a bit of puzzlement and consternation. I think that's because I haven't been very clear in what I've been talking about when I say that our public institutions have apparently been compromised by radical Islam.

What I mean is this: radical Sunni Islam overtly intends to destroy Western civilization and enslave all non-Muslims. This is not a secret: it is the overt, public teaching of Salafism and Wahhabism's most important leaders, including Ibn Taymiyyah, ibn Abd al-Wahhab, Sayyid Qutb, Abdullah Azzam, Omar Abdel Rahman, and Osama bin Laden.

To that end, Salafists and Wahhabists have devoted themselves to jihad in many different ways, but the ultimate objective is the same: our destruction.

Osama, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and al Qaeda have pursued an integrated, primarily military and information-based strategy to undermine our institutions, while the House of Saud and other Saudi-based Salafists and Wahhabists have pursued political and financial strategies. These different strategies are coordinated and complimentary, however, and are extremely complex and sophisticated. They are not, in general, secret - Islamic leaders are loquacious in describing their strategies for our destruction. Anwar al-Awlaki (gosh he's been in the news a lot lately) has been particularly vociferous and eloquent about destroying the country of his birth. Please read Awlaki's "44 Ways to Support Jihad": it pretty much covers everything I'm talking about.

The most insidious facets of the overall Salafist strategy of jihad are the compromise of our institutions from within, via political and financial influence, and the socialization of the Ummah to the radical Wahhabist/Qutbist ideas about jahiliyyah and jihad. These two facets work together.

The socialization of the Ummah, or promoting the teachings of Taymiyyah, Wahhab, Qutb, et al, has been the most dramatically effective of all the strategies of jihad sponsored by the House of Saud. It created al Qaeda and the al Qaeda movement, which inspires individuals or small groups of jihadis to carry out terrorist attacks against Western targets without any guidance or sponsorship from the central AQ leadership. That appears to be what happened last week with Nidal Malik Hasan.

Compromise of our institutions is a complementary strategy: it enhances and amplifies the effectiveness of unilateralist jihad. This is a very Leninist approach - Lenin wrote that the corruption inherent in capitalist systems would prove their undoing. The Islamists are simply using their wealth to help speed things along. At the same time, an army of Islamic lobbyists plays upon our inherent guilt to promote the idea that any opposition to the Islamist agenda is racist and intolerant. This theme of course finds a very receptive audience among American liberal elites. In that way anything we might do to counter their strategy is immediately neutralized.

We've been fighting hard in Iraq and Afghanistan when the most critical front in the "Global War on Terrorism" is right here at home. The Islamists are laughing with undisguised glee at our willingness to help them in their jihad against us.

Oh well - I still haven't scratched the surface of this subject. It's pretty hard to encapsulate the ultimate clash of civilizations in a blog post, even several blog posts. I will keep trying as time permits.

Terrorism Analysis

2009-11-10T19:30:00.000-08:00

I was about to say we do a very bad job at analyzing terrorist networks, but then I thought about it and realized we do a lot of very good analysis. We have lots of amazingly smart analysts who do some great work and undoubtedly save a lot of lives.

Unfortunately, the record is spotty, however. We have done pretty well at breaking the back of al Qaeda in Iraq, probably because the counterterrorism analysis was integrated with a broad strategy of counterinsurgency, civil affairs, political action, foreign internal defense, and direct action. Our performance isn't bad in other areas of the middle east, where there are few barriers to all-source collection, analysis, and dissemination.

It's only when you come back to CONUS that things get really ugly. Within our own borders the political correctness disease has substantially crippled our otherwise-reasonably-competent capabilities.

This situation opens an obvious opportunity for our adversaries: come here and be safe. The evidence is clear that they did just that.

Understanding that phenomenon is the key to understanding what happened with Nidal Malik Hassan.

The evidence is abundant and readily available that the "Wahhabi Corridor" in Northern Virginia has played an ongoing, key role in coordinating and facilitating Salafist terror in the United States. What's astounding is the coverup, by the ostensible victims of those many terrorist plots, that has kept this huge threat to our national security - and indeed the lives of every ordinary Americans - from the public consciousness.

It's very hard to understand why this is happening, but it seems to be the ultimate perversion of political correctness. Ralph Peters has been eloquent in recent days about how this mass psychosis has completely permeated the US Army. Quote from LTC Peters:

Had Hasan been a Lutheran or a Methodist, he would've been gone with the simoom... If heads don't roll in this maggot's chain of command, the Army will have shamed itself beyond moral redemption.

Anyone out there who considers themselves a liberal or a progressive, please clue me in: what is the argument that this situation ISN'T an example of domestic terrorism inspired and sponsored by the al Qaeda associated movement? I keep hearing from the MSM that the main problem with this terrorist attack is the reaction of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. What's the logic there? Why is the MSM determined to cover up or deny the role of radical Islam in inspiring the actions of Major Nidal Hassan?

But the original point of this post is about analysis. I expect the MSM to confuse and distort the facts. The more important question is why the many obvious warning signs about this guy were ignored or deliberately covered up by people who have less-clear motivations to do so. Why does the US Army have a vested interest in promoting al Qaeda's agenda? That's what I don't quite understand. I think it has something to do with the death-grip the MSM has on the Washington bureaucrasy, including the leadership of the Army in the Pentagon. But I'm not sure about that.

It's like a mass psychosis, where a whole lot of people have an artificially distorted perception of reality. The American people don't seem to have the same delusions - as far as I can tell, 100% of ordinary folks understand that radical Islam motivated Nidal Hasan - compared to approximately 0% of the MSM and the Army's leadership in the Pentagon. That kind of dichotomy is certain to have unpredictable, but dramatic, effects.

Nidal Malik Hasan

2009-11-08T16:33:00.000-08:00

The recent tragedy at Fort Hood has reopened a very interesting subject that has never been resolved, or even thoroughly investigated: the relationships of al Qaeda and the 9/11 hijackers to the radical Islamic community in the United States.

Nidal Malik Hasan is an ethnic Palestinian born and raised in Virginia (AKA Northern Virginiastan). He attended the notorious Dar al-Hijra mosque in Falls Church, VA (AKA Falls al-Church) at the same time as at least two 9/11 hijackers, while the even-more-notorious Anwar al-Awlaki was the Imam there.

These facts are all over the internet, but the real significance behind them has not been published anywhere that I've seen yet. Of course the MSM's reflexive denial of the role radical Islam played in yet another terrorist act is almost a cliche at this point, but it really looks like this guy may have had some pretty explosive connections.

The 9/11 hijackers who attended Dar al Hijra were Hani Hanjour, Nawaf al-Hazmi, and probably Khalid al-Midhar. For the uninitiated, Hanjour, al-Hazmi, and al-Midhar were all aboard American Flight 77 when it struck the Pentagon.

Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Midhar were the only 9/11 hijackers who attended the al Qaeda Kuala Lumpur summit meeting in January 2000, where key decisions related to both the Cole bombing and the 9/11 attacks (along with other al Qaeda operations) were apparently made. What that means is that they were not just stupid "muscle" hijackers but rather veteran al Qaeda operatives around whom Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed originally organized the 9/11 attacks. They were famous for their relationship with Omar al-Bayoumi, the Los Angeles station manager for Dallah Avco, the charter airline that belongs to Saudi billionaire Saleh Kamel. It was also al Midhar and al Hazmi, you may or may not recall, who were the receipients of mysterious checks sent from Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar's wife Princess Haifa in the months before 9/11.

This is a very complex story that is worth a number of blog posts, although I doubt I'll have the time to do the story the justice it deserves. What is important to understand is the nature of the "al Qaeda affiliated movement" (or AQAM as it is known to acronym-happy bureaucrats) and the role of the Saudi-funded and directed global network of Wahhabist mosques and Islamic centers.

Dar al Hijra in Virginia is part of the so-called "Wahhabi Corridor" in Northern Virginiastan, an area of greater concentration of connections to al Qaeda terror than any place outside Afghanistan. It was founded with Saudi money and influence in 1983, during the great Saudi Islamic and Wahhabist outreach movement that sponsored the construction of over 80% of the mosques in the world today. That movement was an explicit policy of the Saudi kingdom to radicalize Islam worldwide - and it largely succeeded. Almost all Sunni terrorism traces its ideological roots to the Saudis' Wahhabist missions, and apparently Nidal Hassan is just the latest example.

The big question now - as his influence by Saudi-sponsored Salafist-Wahhabist proselytizing by radicals such as Anwar al-Awlaki seems beyond dispute - is whether his connections to al Qaeda or even the 9/11 hijackers are more than coincidental.

To determine the answer to that question, we probably have to look farther back - to well before 9/11, and take a much closer look at the global network of Saudi-sponsored Salafist organizations.

As early as 1991, the Saudi government sponsored a program to convert US military servicemembers to Islam and recruit them for jihad. This effort later evolved into the program that sought to train and commission muslim chaplains in the US armed forces. The original conversion effort was directed by radical Islamist (and unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing) Bilal Philips on US bases in Saudi Arabia and the chaplain program was run by convicted al Qaeda financier Abdulrahman Alamoudi.

These efforts had varied results over the years. One overt result was the 1993 "Landmarks" al Qaeda plot, for which al Qaeda recruit and former US military member Clement Hampton-El was convicted. Hampton-El told a very interesting story of meeting members of the Saudi royal family (apparently Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki, who died under very mysterious circumstances shortly after 9/11) as part of an effort to recruit more former US servicemembers to wage jihad in Bosnia. Later this strategy involved famous al Qaeda double agent Ali Mohamed, who was associated with practically everyone else in this post.

So maybe we won't find a "smoking gun" connection between Nidal Hasan and al Qaeda (although I wouldn't bet on it), but he clearly was influenced by the same religious and political themes that define the "al Qaeda associated movement". Clearly a lot of people failed in their obligations to heed the ample warning signs this guy sent up. More importantly now, what will we do to determine how many other Nidal Hassans are out there looking for the right opportunity or motivation to act?

A Little Advice

2009-11-07T16:52:00.000-08:00

...from Uncle John.

If the frog in your throat is making you sound like the ghost of Barry White being run through a wood chipper, you might be tempted to soothe your vocal chords with alcohol.

And if, as a moderate drinker, all the strong liquor you had in the house amounted to a finger of Jim Beam, a finger of Johnny Walker Black, and a large amount of the rotgut Sobieski in a plastic bottle that your wife uses as cooking vodka, you might be tempted to mix all of those into a three finger kill-the-germs gargle / cocktail.

Yielding to that temptation would be so, so wrong, on so many levels.

Just sayin'. o.O

Engineers

2009-10-30T19:27:00.000-07:00

I’m going to bust on an Engineer for being an Engineer in a few posts from now, so I wanted to get some things straight. I was a double-degree my first 2 years in college, Chemistry and Chemical Engineering. When I decided that three years was all I could stand in the Great Midwest, I cut out with the Chemistry degree, having overloaded enough to obtain it in three years*. Because of the Chem E track, almost all my non-Math electives were in Engineering. I have great respect for the profession of Engineering. In fact, most of my graduate work was Molecular Engineering, rather than pure science. In my Shit Hit the Fan value system, Engineers rank well ahead of Scientists in the groups of people I’d want in the lifeboat if civilization pulled a Titanic. You can often grow good Scientists from Engineers. The reverse is much less successful.

Budding Engineers are more valued by society than budding Chemists, as demonstrated by the fact that Chemical Engineers make a lot more money straight out of undergrad than Chemists. With good reason. Chemistry is an experimental science (except for those weirdo theorists :D). The undergraduate experience does not adequately prepare a Chemist to practice the profession outside of the lower-order lab tech positions. A Master’s barely does.

Engineering is a different game from science after the undergraduate study period. While advanced Engineering, like Science, is still largely a medieval apprentice-based learning system, the Masters under whom the Engineer learns the trade (after learning the basics in school) are generally practicing Engineers, not Academics. Those Master practicing Engineers expect the newly-minted Engineer to actually produce something. Thus an Engineer starts out with a better real-world skill set than the B.Sc. Chemist. Hence the higher pay.

The Engineer pays something for that head start, though. The strength of a Scientist’s training is in thinking things through, reading the original sources, and knowing the philosophy and thought process behind most of what he or she does. That takes time, and an undergraduate course of study, with its emphasis on cramming technical details into heads, so that further study can take place, is inadequate to fully create that kind of skill. And an Engineer does not need a greatly sophisticated level of scientific detail to do his or her work, despite the fact that Engineering require sophisticated Math. The Engineer gets an awful lot of scientific rules of thumb thrown at them in school, many made up for a particular set of boundary conditions in which most work is conducted. Most Engineers are too busy making things to think deeply about the science behind those rules of thumb.

In the arrogant or careless, this creates problems when their minds venture beyond the boundary conditions where those rules of thumb hold true. And then you get an experience such as the one Rand Simberg describes in this post:

I (or someone, but I think it was me) suggested using gravity gradient stabilization (that is, taking advantage of the fact that a non-spherical satellite will naturally orient itself in the local vertical position, due to differential tidal forces between the line of the orbit and the small distances of the appendages from that line). The response of one of the supposedly experienced engineers was, "There's no gravity gradient at geosynchronous altitude."

I was a little surprised. "Oh, you mean there's not enough to do the job?" (I was thinking that perhaps he'd already considered it, and run the numbers.)

"No, there is no gravity gradient effect that high--it only applies in LEO."

Note that he wasn't making a quantitative argument, he was making a qualitative one. Low orbits had gravity gradient, high ones did not.

...What happened? Sometimes even engineers don't always apply good scientific principles. In this case, I suspect that he was an airplane guy who'd migrated into the space business (as often was the case in the beginning decades in the space industry), and had never really learned the fundamentals of orbital mechanics, or the underlying principles. Instead, he'd probably taken a space systems design course, and been given a lot of engineering rules of thumb, one of which was, no doubt, that gravity gradient can be used in LEO, but not in GEO.

And that's not a bad rule of thumb, as long as you understand where it comes from. Gravity gradient is indeed much less at twenty thousand miles altitude than at two hundred miles, and for most satellites could be considered, for practical purposes, to be non-existent. But we weren't talking about most satellites--we were looking at a new concept, much larger than anything previously deployed in GEO, with long booms and appendages that might, in fact be used for G-G stabilization. But because he didn't understand the physics, he mistook a rule of thumb for natural law, even though the law of gravitation says that the earth's gravity extends out to infinity, though it drops off as the square of the distance.

Engineers tend to run with a factoid and make stuff. Scientists are more likely to pick up the same factoid and try to figure out under what conditions it’s true and what conditions it’s not. This, I think is the reason underlying the Salem Hypothesis.

In other words, when one encounters an Engineer talking outside of his or her discipline, the caution I advised in this post goes double. Although this is a bit of an argumentum ad hominem, there is so much evidence in the Creationist literature that in this case the rule of thumb can be examined in detail. One can find in the arguments presented in that last link the original stupidity about the Second Law that I ripped apart in my own post on the subject – and find that the original errors were promulgated in the Creationist literature by an Engineer. A Chemical Engineer**! For shame!

The most error ridden thermodynamic analysis I have seen in print is the one by Creationist D. R. Boylan which appears on pages 133 to 138 in the Dec. 1978 issue of CRSQ.[37] [Note by Ben Dehner: Boylan was the Dean of Engineering of Patterson's department, at Iowa State University, at this time. Boylan was effectively Patterson's boss when Patterson accuses him -- in print -- of incompetence.] As we discuss this paper, I want the reader to keep the following statement by Boylan in mind, for it was published the previous year (1977) as if to assure us of his scientific expertise: [38]

"In teaching on-campus and at church, I have found that an understanding of physical laws, particularly the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics, is essential to the defense of biblical truths. The Second Law has been particularly helpful in developing an apologetic against abiogenesis..."

To begin with, Boylan virtually equates two of the most distinguishable introductory level concepts in engineering thermodynamics, namely systems[39] and processes.[40] In effect he directs his reader to "consider life processes as systems." This is like a would-be mechanic directing us to consider gas combustion (a process) as being like a tire or an engine, which are mechanical systems.

After teaching beginners the profound difference between a process and a system, the next most important issues are (A) how to define or describe the system (e.g. close, open, isolated, etc.) to which one's analysis is to apply. (B) how to specify the system's boundaries, and (C) how to specify the nature of the processes taking place within or over these boundaries (e.g. are they reversible, irreversible, steady state, etc.) If these specifications are not done properly, the results of one's analysis can come out garbled or self-contradictory. Boylan's paper exemplifies such confusion because he fails to specify properly the system to which his analysis applies and the nature of the "life process" of which he speaks.

In an upcoming post, I’ll be examining one particularly egregious example of an Engineer taking some poorly-understood (by him) scientific principles and making a house of cards with them. And he’s not even a Creationist!

But I love Engineers. Some of my best friends are Engineers. :D

* I then promptly left for the USSR. Which was a vastly preferable place to be than Western Indiana. Terre Haute is the pimple on the ass of America.

** Chemical Engineers have to take more Thermodynamics than most other Engineering Disciplines.

Homemade satellite imagery

2009-10-25T08:36:00.000-07:00

Haven't had any of this in a while. This is from NOAA17, which has been a consistently reliable performer. There are newer birds up now, NOAA18 and NOAA19, but they haven't seemed be as strong. NOAA 19, in particular, seldom produces good images. I'm wondering if I'm doing something wrong.

Anyway I'm ready for some nice clear fall weather!

Good Grief

2009-09-22T06:55:00.000-07:00

My friend Janiece seems to attract the whackos. This time it is the alternative medicine crowd glomming on to an old post – what is it with these people? Neither they nor Wagner can stand having a piece of criticism out on the Net, even an old one. Do they spend all day vanity Googling? I had completely forgotten about Janiece’s post until the crazies showed up again months later.

One of the crazies showed up with “data” from the Gerson Institute, and being the truth seeker that she is, Janiece responded:

I'm not a doctor, but I do understand the scientific method, and this is not a clinical trial or a well constructed study. What I will concede is that the information was interesting enough to me as a layman that I think further study by qualified professionals wouldn't be uncalled for.

Janiece is quite kind in her willingness to be open minded. This is not a character flaw*, because she also wanted to test the hypothesis provided – this is precisely what internalizing and living the scientific method as an heir of the Enlightenment and citizen of the modern world entails. But then, Janiece is my friend for many reasons, and this is one of them.

I do have a little bit of experience with clinical trial design, however, although (let me be very clear, here) I am not an MD. There are, however, methodological flaws in the study that negate even the glimmer of interest that Janiece detected – ones that do not require a statistician or an MD to find, though I will concede that the layman will need some specialized bits of information to parse the full impact on the claims made by the alt-med whackos.

There are so many red flags for quackery in that article it is hard to know where to begin.

The first problem is with the study design itself, which was a retrospective analysis with historical controls. The authors claim that:

The genesis of this inquiry occurred during a landmark study by the U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment [Ref 2] to which one of us (G.H.) was an advisor. In its report, OTA put forward a protocol for best-case reviews based on the premise that, no matter how many patients failed, as few as 10 or 12 cases with objective evidence of tumor response would be enough to propel an investigation by the National Cancer Institute (NCI).

The Ns (number of people in the statistical groups of the study) in that Gerson paper certainly seem to meet this test, but is that really what the OTA meant? Well, no.

Fortunately for us Netizens, Quackwatch has the whole report (and it is a report, not a "landmark study")on its website:

The basic elements of each case in a best case review would be: 1) documented diagnosis by an appropriate licensed professional, including pathology reports and microscope slides of the tumor; 2) history of prior treatments; 3) length of time between the most recent treatment and the treatment under evaluation; 4) x-ray studies from before and after the treatment under evaluation was administered; and 5) a statement from the physician and the patient saying that no other treatments were administered at the same time as the particular treatment under evaluation.

All of those elements are all missing from the Gerson paper. There is no information at all in the Gerson paper about any other treatments their patients tried before or after initiation of their beand of nutrition therapy. Without this information, the entire article is garbage.

The real scientists who authored the paper understood that their words were going to be twisted:

No doubt this report will be used selectively by individuals wishing to portray various points of view, in support of or in opposition to particular treatments. The reason this is possible is that, almost uniformly, the treatments have not been evaluated using methods appropriate for actually determining whether they are effective. Regrettably, there is no guidance for new patients wanting to know whether these treatments are likely to help them.

The actual design of the study that Janiece was pointed to was particularly singled out by the 1990 OTA report as a problematic design:

For the most part, evidence put forward by individuals identified strongly with particular treatments has been of a type not acceptable to the mainstream medical community, usually because the evidence cannot support the conclusions drawn. A common format is a series of individual case histories, described in narrative. The endpoints are more often than not "longer than expected" survival times, sometimes with claims of tumor regression. In mainstream research, case reports of unexpected outcomes have been useful and do have a place, but they almost never can provide definite evidence of a treatment's effectiveness.

Why exactly, is this study design problematic?

Except in rare circumstances, because of the heterogeneity of cancer patients' clinical courses, it is virtually impossible to predict what would have happened to a particular patient if he or she had had no treatment or a different treatment. Groups of patients who have chosen to take a particular treatment cannot be compared retrospectively with other groups of patients, even those with similar disease, to determine the effects of the treatment. The factors that set apart patients who take unconventional treatments from other cancer patients may be related to prognosis (these may be both physical and psychological factors), and the means do not exist currently to confidently "adjust" for these factors in analyses. Examples of retrospective evaluations that have turned out to be wrong are well documented (see, e.g., (146)) as are problems with attempting to evaluate the efficacy of treatment from registries of cancer patients (145), though the problems are not necessarily widely appreciated.

In Chapter 12 of the OTA report, the point is elaborated on at length:

It is tempting to use the records of patients already taking unconventional treatments to try to derive some type of "response rate" or "survival rate" that could be compared with a "standard" rate, thus providing a quantitative estimate of the comparative "efficacy" of a particular treatment. While this approach has some intuitive appeal, it fails because there are no "standard" rates with which to make the comparison. The reason for this is that there is tremendous heterogeneity among cancer patients, even among those who have nominally the same type of cancer. While for most cancers it is possible to identify several important variables, "prognostic factors" (e.g., age, sex, stage of cancer), that are predictive of the likelihood of survival for a group of patients, the heterogeneity reaches beyond easily identifiable factors.

Even more so than the particular patients who are treated at a given hospital, patients who opt for unconventional treatment are strongly self-selected, and as a group, may have very different characteristics from those of the total cancer patient population, some of which may be related to prognosis.

In other words, we know that mental state can affect outcomes, both becuase it increases resolve and perhaps innate cancer-fighting ability, and because really sick people get beaten down. People with enough fight in them to actively seek alternative therapies are probably different from the average pool of patients. As the authors of the OTA report put it in a previous paragraph:

Those of us who have worked over the years with cancer patients have come to respect the vagaries of human biology wherein there are cancer patients who for unclear reasons fare better than we would have expected.

What we have here, is failure to communicate. Proper medical studies have what are known as inclusion and exclusion criteria to ensure that the control and active groups are as closely matched as possible. I surfed on over to clinicaltrials.gov and searched “Oncology” until I found the first drug trial that popped up.

It was this one.

Let’s look at the inclusion / exclusion criteria for that trial:

Eligibility

Ages Eligible for Study: 18 Years and older
Genders Eligible for Study: Both
Accepts Healthy Volunteers: No
Criteria

Inclusion Criteria:
• Histologic or cytologic diagnosis of breast cancer with evidence of metastatic disease. NOTE: Patients with Her-2 positive (3+ by IHC or gene amplification by FISH) are eligible only if they have had prior trastuzumab therapy.
• Must have measurable or non-measurable lesions as defined by the Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumors (RECIST).
• Two or fewer prior chemotherapy regimens in any disease setting. NOTE: All adjuvant and neoadjuvant chemotherapy will be considered one regimen. NOTE: Prior hormonal therapy for metastatic disease is allowed.
NOTE: Prior radiation therapy is allowed as long as the irradiated area is not the only source of evaluable disease.
• Age > 18 years at the time of consent.
• Written informed consent and HIPAA authorization for release of personal health information.
• Females of childbearing potential and males must be willing to use an effective method of contraception (hormonal or barrier method of birth control; abstinence) from the time consent is signed until 8 weeks after treatment discontinuation.
• Females of childbearing potential must have a negative pregnancy test within 7 days prior to being registered for protocol therapy.
• Ability to comply with study and/or follow-up procedures.

Exclusion Criteria:

• No prior therapy with bevacizumab, sorafenib or any other known VEGF inhibitors.
• No known hypersensitivity to any component of the study drugs.
• No other forms of cancer therapy including radiation, chemotherapy and hormonal therapy within 21 days prior to being registered for protocol therapy.
• No history or radiologic evidence of CNS metastases including previously treated, resected, or asymptomatic brain lesions or leptominigeal involvement. A head CT or MRI must be obtained within 28 days prior to being registered for protocol therapy.
• No other participation in another clinical drug study within 28 days prior to being registered for protocol therapy.
• No known human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection or chronic Hepatitis B or C
• No major surgical procedure within 28 days prior to being registered for protocol therapy or anticipation of need for major surgical procedure during the course of the study. Placement of a vascular access device and breast biopsy will not be considered major surgery.
• No minor surgical procedure within 7 days prior to being registered for protocol therapy.
• No known history of cerebrovascular disease including TIA, stroke or subarachnoid hemorrhage.
• No known history of ischemic bowel.
• No known history of deep venous thrombosis or pulmonary embolism.
• No history of hypertensive crisis or hypertensive encephalopathy.
• No non-healing wound or fracture.
• No active infection requiring parenteral antibiotics.
• No other hemorrhage/bleeding event ≥ CTCAE grade 3 within 28 days prior to being registered for protocol therapy.

That’s quite a list. That, my friends, is what real science looks like in black and white. Proper studies show entry criteria.

If, for all the reasons I just noted, a retrospective study design is so problematic, and if the OTA recommended a best-case approach, why did the Gerson Institute abandon that technique?

Because we had proposed the original best-case review protocol to OTA, we were eager to construct a best-case review. However, we found OTA's (and later NCI's) protocol to have a serious shortcoming when used retrospectively: its focus on only tumor regression. Adequate documentation of tumor regression is unlikely to be collected in most alternative medical practices.

We abandoned the best-case review for the more informative retrospective review. In contrast to the best-case review, the retrospective review describes all patients, including non-responders, giving a more adequate impression of the outcomes of treatment.

Emphasis mine. Because that non-responder language hands the knowledgeable person an industrial sized-clue bat with which to whack that study.

More informative? Not according to the OTA report Hildenbrand was touting when it served his purposes. I think now the average layman can figure out why this dog of a study was published in Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, and not in a serious Oncology journal.

But first, a few more questions are begging to be answered. If Gar Hildenbrand was actually the one who proposed the best-case review protocol to the OTA panel, why did he even propose it, given the arguments presented here? And even if those arguments are valid, if they were indeed “eager” to test the protocol on their own methods, the Gerson Institute is located in a Mexican hospital. Why didn’t they go ahead and conduct the best-case review? Are you telling me that they can’t measure tumor progression? Or that they don’t do so as a matter of course? That they don’t measure disease activity as well as survival (another glaring omission in the paper – the disease-free survival statistics)? If so, they’ve got some serious Hippocratic issues with locating a cancer clinic in that setting.

The OTA already addressed the issue of missing data, however:

Clearly, many patients who benefit from cancer treatment —mainstream or unconventional -- could not be included in a best case review, because their records would not be sufficient to meet these demands. However, an adequate and convincing review could be based on as few as 10 or 20 successful cases. If a treatment is even moderately successful and has been used for many years, that number meeting the criteria should be available.

So I come to the conclusion that what tumor progression data they have is not very favorable. Why? Well, first of all, they could not come up with the requisite 10 ceases with adequate documentation, or they would have not resorted to the song-and-dance routine with the retrospective analysis.

In point of fact, the Gerson Institute actually committed to a best case review, as documented in the 1990 OTA report:

The Gerson Institute, major unconventional clinics treating U.S. patients in Tijuana, has embarked on such a best case review, however. Results have not been reported, but it could prove to be the first successfully-completed study of its type mounted by an unconventional treatment proponent.

Where is that study? It is not on the Gerson Institute website.

Unfortunately for the Gerson Institute, the MD Anderson Cancer Center has a careful review of their claims.

That best case review was published. In German. In the German journal Current Nutritional Medicine. Hiding much, guys? Why yes:

Lechner P, Kronberger J. Erfahrungen mit dem einsatz der diat-therapie in der chirurgischen onkologie. (Experience with the use of dietary therapy in surgical oncology) Akt.Ernahr-Med. 1990;15:72-78.
Purpose: Survival and disease response

Type of Study: Prospective cohort with matched controls

Methods & Results: Two studies were reported in this article:

Study #1: Patients who had carcinoma of the colon with liver metastasis (n=36) were selected from the General Surgery Department of the authors’ clinic in Austria. Patients were selected for the study if a matched control could be found. Controls were matched on age, sex, localization and stage of tumor. (Duration of diet not stated).

Results: In the diet group the mean survival was 28.6 months. For the control groups it was 16.2 months. (Statistical significance not reported.)

Study #2: Breast cancer. (n= 38) Patients were selected from the General Surgery Department of the authors’ clinic in Austria. Patients were selected for the study if a matched control could be found. Controls were matched on age, sex, localization of tumor, receptor status, menopausal status and type of adjuvant treatment (chemotherapy or radiation). (Duration of diet not stated).

Results: No significant differences were seen in terms of metastases and rates of survival between the two groups.

So, in the first study they do exactly what the OTA told them not to do:

This type of study cannot, except possibly in exceptional cases, provide definite proof of efficacy in terms of life extension, nor any estimate of rate of response to the treatment.

The primary endpoint was supposed to be a case-by-case analysis of tumor regression:

The objective of the best case review is to produce evidence of tumor shrinkage (or, in particular cancers, other accepted objective measures of lessening disease) in a group of selected patients (either current or former), with evidence documenting that the patients had the particular unconventional treatment under study and, as far as possible, that they did not have any other treatments during that time period.

This is not to mention that the statistics were not provided (one long-lived individual landing by random in the active group could skew the mean while the rest of the data indicate no difference between the treatment arms).

The second study in that paper was a flat-out failure.

No wonder this paper does not wind up on the Gerson Institute’s website, while the methodologically incorrect (not flawed, but wrong-headed analysis according to the OTA document cited by Hildenbrand) study with the misleading historical comparisons is included.

Finally, well, not finally, but I’m done digging through this particular piece of excrement, we have the issue of non-completers. In point of fact, this is the industrial-sized clue-bat I mentioned above.

The FDA requires companies promoting products with explicit health claims to provide a statistical treatment for drop-outs in their clinical studies. Many volunteer subjects drop out of active arms due to inefficacy. If one were to ignore them and only look at completers, one would get a very favorably skewed view of the efficacy of a treatment. The general methodology used to account for non-completers is called “Last Observation Carried Forward” and as noted in the link, it is seriously biased. Biased against the treatment being studied, in general, because people who drop out often don’t give the treatment a full chance to take effect, given that they are having side effect issues early on in the trial, so they are counted as non-responders**.

In general, clinical trial practice is to bias the design against the treatment in question, and if anything survives that, it meets the Hippocratic criteria for putting something new into a patient’s body.

One area where LOCF does not fulfill the function of raising a high hurdle for treatment effect is in survival studies, because patients lost to follow-up may have died. At the last observation in a survival study, most drop-outs were still alive, unless the treatment is actively and aggressively killing people.

The Gerson study uses 5-year survival as its primary endpoint.

Back to the horse’s mouth:

Over 15 years, from 1975 through July of 1990, 249 patients presented for treatment of melanoma. 53 (21%) are lost to follow-up.

Removing these patients from the failure statistics greatly biases any study in favor of the treatment being studied. Real scientists, real healthcare companies are (rightly) held to a higher standard.

The conservative approach is to treat these patients as dead within 5 years.

The Gerson Institute could obviate these objections by conducting a prospective double-blind clinical trial. They’ve been conducting trials since at least 1987 (assuming the trial published in 1990 took over two years to complete). MD Anderson’s review of the medical literature found:

A total of seven human studies have been identified in the literature as of January 31, 2006. Two were matched control studies15, one was a prospective cohort study16, two were retrospective reviews with historical controls17,18, one was a best case series19 and one was a set of case reports20.

15. Lechner P, Kronberger J. Erfahrungen mit dem einsatz der diat-therapie in der chirurgischen onkologie. Akt.Ernahr-Med 1990;15:72-8.
16. Austin S, Dale EB, DeKadt S. Long term follow-up of cancer patients using Contreras, Hoxsey and Gerson therapies. Journal of Naturopathic Medicine 1994;5(1):74-6.
17. Hildenbrand G, Hildenbrand L. Five year survival rates of melanoma patients treated by diet therapy after the manner of gerson: A retrospective review. Alternative Therapies 1995 Sep;Vol 1(4).
18. Hildenbrand G, Hildenbrand L. Defining the role of diet therapy in complementary cancer management: prevention of recurrence vs. regression of disease. Proceedings of the 1996 Alternative Therapies . Symposium: Creating Integrated Healthcare. January 18-21, 1996 Sandiego, CA.
19. Gerson M. Effects of combined dietary regimens on patients with malignant tumors. Exp Med Surg 1949;7:299-317.
20. Gerson M. Dietary considerations in malignant neoplastic disease. Rev Gastroent 1945;12:419-25.

Note that none of Hildenbrand’s studies have been published in even second tier journals, and two studies in that list date from the 1940s. Now, if you want to base your medical treatment on a study that was state of the art in 1949, go right ahead. As evidenced in the OTA report I (and Hildenbrand) cited, the medical community has bent over backwards to allow a back door into clinical testing for alternative therapies, and the best they can come up with is the crap posted on the Gerson website, which doesn’t even include their best (but still not up to standards) study.

As for me? I conclude that the mainstream medical community isn’t ignoring these studies because of a bias against alternative therapy.

The mainstream medical community is ignoring those studies because they are scientific fuck-ups.

* Having a totally open mind is a character flaw, however, due to the tremendous amount of garbage one’s fellow human beings are willing to toss into the void.

** When proponents of alternative therapies point at low response rates in clinical trials, they forget (or deliberately obfuscate) this treatment of non-responders.

Do you remember? (The "Mad Men" Edition)

2009-09-20T21:53:00.001-07:00

Haven't done this in a while... Inspired by my recent favourite TV show, "Mad Men". Mad Men is a viciously authentic portrayal of Madison Avenue in the early 1960s (or so I understand - I wasn't on Madison Avenue in the early 1960s so I don't really know, but that's the buzz).

We've been through this before... I'm not that old, but I'm impressed with the changes in our world in just my brief experience. It's fascinating to look at how much different our lives are today.

So, without further ado... Do you remember:

- Removable pop-tops on soda/beer cans? Soda/beer cans with NO pop-top (you had to use a church key?) Why a church key is called a church key?

- Rotary (twist) light switches on the wall?

- Push-button light switches on the wall?

- Self-powered TV remote controls (Not sure how these worked - seemed like black magic to me. They were made of bakelite (!) and could induce physiological effects if directed at your brain. I'm not kidding.)

- Bakelite (I know we've done that one before).

- Sodas for .10 (saw it on Mad Men, remembered it)

- Soda machines where you pulled the bottle out of a pair of refrigerated metal jaws behind a long glass door. (Also on Mad Men).

Some obvious ones, also inspired by Mad Men:

- Smoking in the office (like everybody, all the time)

- Drinking in the office (ditto)

- Debaucherous office parties (those still go on, right??)

- Working in an office where all the adult men were WWII veterans?

Some consumerist stuff:

- The first time you saw color TV (doesn't count if it was before you saw black and white TV)
- The first time you saw TV (doesn't count if it was after 1970).
- Cigarette ads on TV
- Liquor ads on TV
- The ABC Mystery Movie
- The Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom
- The Marlboro Man
- The Marlboro Man theme
- "Harvey's Bristol Creme" TV ads (where did THAT come from?)

Kids stuff:

- The old Barbie doll (before they made her figure more anatomically realistic)
- GI Joe with painted hair
- GI Joe with painted hair and WWII fatigues
- Miniature electric cars
- Go-karts with no roll cage and no helmets
- Playing "war" against the Germans and the Japanese (I think we did this before)
- Pop-rocks, candy cigarettes, toy switchblades
- Snap-n-pops (I miss those), cap guns (both the paper and the plastic kind)
- The urban legend that Mikey from the Life Cereal commercial died from Pop-rocks
- Mikey from the Life Cereal commercial
- Life cereal (is it still around?)
- The Green Hornet TV series
- (Who played the Green Hornet's sidekick Kato? No fair Googling!)

Other stuff:

- Pastel and bright earth tone polyester leisure suits (probably the worst fashion disaster since the middle ages)
- Men wearing hats all the time
- Aftermarket or dealer-installed air conditioners in cars
- the green "Ecology" flag (whoa - how 70s is that! I guess we're getting a little ahead of Mad Men now)
- Eartha Kitt (heard her first big hit "Monotonous" on the radio today)
- France Nguyen
- The New Christy Minstrels
(Don't know where that came from... I'm kind of drifting I guess)

Do you remember how much stuff used to cost? Like other than sodas? For example a Mercedes Benz S-class was under $10K in 1977. But TV sets cost way more in the 1960s (even in unadjusted dollars) than they do today. I paid something like $300 in early-1980s dollars for the first color TV I ever bought - and it was like 13' or something.

What I'm really interested in is remembering how we did things before the information revolution. There used to be these huge books at the library that listed businesses and what they produced, where to contact them, etc. I wish I could remember what they were called. How about reading the newspaper to actually get important information? Not just news but classified ads, weather, etc? Or religiously watching local TV news for the weather report? (Maybe some people still do that?)

I'm also interested in remembering what the world was like before overdevelopment - when you really had to plan ahead, and maybe travel a long way, if you needed to buy something specific.

How about running to the mailbox every day in late fall looking for the Sears Christmas Catalog? Have I mentioned that one before?

Finally I heard on NPR this week that Art Ferrante, of "Ferrante and Teicher" fame, died the other day. His partner Lou Teicher died last year. I was always a huge fan of theirs, expecially the soundtrack from "Exodus", which was their biggest hit. Anybody else out there remember them?

Tea Party Rally

2009-09-15T07:31:00.000-07:00

More MSM follies...

Apparently there was a big protest rally in Washington DC on 12 September. The theme was opposition to big government, higher taxes, irresponsible spending, etc.

I knew nothing about it because as far as I can determine, it was not reported by the MSM.

Actively looking for news about this event found only British sources. Glenn Reynolds thought this was strange too, asking "Why is the British press more honest in its reporting on this stuff than the American press?". Glenn also relates this:

Meanwhile, a reader emails: “I’ll tell you what I find impressive. I’m watching the Fox news video about 15 minutes after the end of the event. The crowd has thinned out enough that you can see the ground and there is not a speck of trash on the grass. Absolutely clean. To contrast, google ‘pictures of litter on the mall after the inauguration.’”

Googling to find news about this event revealed mainly controversy over the size of the crowd. Various MSM outlets reported that a photo claimed to be of the demonstration was a fake. I have no idea if the specific photo was a fake, but it looked compatible with numerous other photos of the event that were not fake as well as a You Tube video (from Fox I think) showing the size of the crowd. (The one photo in question definitely was not of the 9/12 event, however, as recent DC landmarks dated it to before 2004.)

I did find one short op-ed column from the Chicago Tribune, where the writer estimated the crowd as 50-60 thousand (look at the video and the pictures and form your own opinions on that) and said "So What. It doesn't mean a thing."

I don't know where this is going but I do think the MSM is haemorrhaging credibility at an unsustainable rate.

Cass Sunstein

2009-09-09T14:10:00.000-07:00

Update: the Senate cloture vote passed 63-37. This guy is now in charge of making all rules for all Americans.

Reportedly today, the US Senate will vote on confirmation of law professor Cass Sundstein to be the "regulatory czar", formally known as the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. (Post edited to correct error: I said the position of "regulatory czar" was new to the Obama administration, but Eric correctly pointed out that OIRA has been around since 1980. See comments.)

Professor Sundstein is notorious for his strange and radical views. He is apparently an animal rights fanatic who has said that pets and livestock deserve legal standing with humans in court (he even published a book with this theme) . This apparently means you could be sued by your chicken (or perhaps someone else's chicken, or maybe a goat) for violation of the chicken's (or the goat's) civil rights. Chickens don't have civil rights, you say? We'll they do if the "Regulatory Czar" says they do - that's what "Regulatory Czar" means: he can make up any loony rule he wants and it will be the law of the land.

Sunstein is also deeply hostile to the 2nd Amendment, publishing legal arguments that it applies only to organized state militia, e.g. the National Guard. This position is contrary to the comments and writings of the authors of the constitution and many rulings of the Supreme Court (most recently DC v. Heller). He is also (as would be expected) strongly opposed to all forms of hunting.

Predictably, I suppose, Sunstein not only believes in high taxes: he apparently believes the government owns everything and everyone. According to him there really no such thing as private property.

If (it looks like when) he is confirmed, it is very likely he will use his position to immediately eliminate all hunting on federal lands (which is almost all hunting in the Western US). He will probably also implement all sorts of new gun control through administrative regulation. He could potentially impose vegetarianism on an awful lot of people fed with federal funds (like most schoolchildren). Not that I think vegetarianism is bad - I think it is good. But I don't think it should be imposed by the federal government.

In addition to saying that homeowners should not be permitted to eradicate rats in their home because this would violate the rats' rights, he has said the government should harvest the organs of certain terminally ill patients to give the organs to someone else whom the government considers more worthy (of a working kidney, or heart), because the government already owns your internal organs. Government death panels? You wish. Try government murder panels.

Sundstein reportedly attracted the admiration of the Obama administration because of his book last year called "Nudge", the theme of which is people are not smart enough to make decisions for themselves so the government should do it for them.

That notion is fundamentally, documentably contrary to the ideals upon which our nation was founded. It is pretty much exactly and specifically why the founding fathers fought the American Revolution.

Now we have a man who not only holds this view but celebrates it (he wrote a book saying the Constitution doesn't mean what it says) - a man not elected by any American - administratively assigned to a position - not provided for in the US Constitution or any law - where he can regulate the lives and behavior of Americans in any way he likes.

This would seem to be the most undemocratic thing that has happened in this country in 233 years.

Confusion

2009-09-03T09:52:00.000-07:00

False friends - words that sound like cognates but aren't, are the bane of the language learner. One that American students of Russian get hung up with all the time is "нормально" (normal'no), which sounds like the English "normal" and many American students use to mean "typical", but which actually means "pretty good" in Russian.

In Chinese, the word for "kiss" is "親嘴" (chin zui), but the slang version is "親親" (chin chin). There is even an export company named Chin Chin with two interlocked hearts as its logo.

In Japanese, the slang word for male member is "チンチン", also pronounced "chin chin".

This must have caused quite a bit of mirth and misunderstanding over the years, especially since the English name of the Chinese company is "King Lucky". o.O

Now, the proper French version of "Cheers" for a toast is "Salut", but informally, they also have an onomatopoeic toast to mimic the sound of full glasses clinking. "Chin Chin".

I'd advise French ladies on a business dinner with a bunch of traditional Japanese businessmen to stick to "Salut" when asked what you say when toasting in French. Unless those ladies like seeing their younger companions trying to suppress a snicker while the older ones turn beet red.

I love the Czechs

2009-08-29T16:07:00.000-07:00

First of all I should proclaim a disclaimer that, unlike my partner John, I am not a scientist. My scientific credentials are sketchy at best - a few undergrad classes and a few courses in the military in scientific subjects - so my opinions on scientific topics are not jealously or zealously held. It is easy for someone to sway my opinions on technical subjects if they have better scientific evidence than me. But I do think I know enough to spot weak science - when the facts to back up a conclusion or theory just aren't there, or the scientific method has been short-circuited.

One of the Czechs I love has scientific credentials that are not sketchy (as it were): Luboš Motl. Dr. Motl is a theoretical physicist who was an assistant professor at Harvard until he was forced out - apparently because he angered the mainstream academic establishment at Harvard in many different ways.

One of the things I like about Luboš is that is attitude towards science is a sceptical one: it takes a lot of good hard falsifiable evidence to convince him. I have been reading his writings for several years now (both his blog and his publications in physics), and for years thought he'd probably eventually be forced out of Harvard, for reasons having nothing to do with his scientific contributions, which are significant. He's pretty cranky when it comes to bad science and his sense of humour, while entertaining, is apparently regarded as very undiplomatic. (I get the impression that his sarcasm and irony simply don't translate in to politically-correct-ese.)

This situation reminds me of why I'm not in academics (which I'd like to be, but it wouldn't be in science, unfortunately): that the truth takes a back seat to the consensus of the crowd, which is far too often wrong. It's basic social science: us humans are social creatures, and tend to go along with one another, and reject those who don't - and that rejection is much more aggressive if the outsider is right, because it introduces the exposition that the crowd is wrong.

But this post is not about Luboš, nor is it about Vaclav Klaus, to whom Luboš refers in his most recent post.

Dr. Klaus, like Dr. Motl, is a controversial Czech academic, although in his case also the president of the Czech Republic.

Instead this post is about freedom, and why the Czechs seem to have a better sense for it than some of the rest of us.

Both Klaus and Motl have been vilified (in Motl's case, perhaps ruined) for their scientific scepticism about anthropogenic "climate change" (so called because "global warming" has apparently already become discredited).

Klaus and Motl, like many other Czechs as well as other citizens of former Soviet vassal states, are pretty sensitive to totalitarianism and suppression of intellectual freedom. Both see a lot of it in western civilization these days, and are vocal in their criticism. Both see the politics of climate change as among the most hostile to freedom - intellectual and otherwise - currently threatening us.

A good bit of what little scientific education I have had was in climatology, meteorology, and oceanography. I once passed on the (fully funded) opportunity to pursue an advanced degree in oceano, for reasons that in retrospect are absolutely stupid (only to study politics instead, to compound my already-epic stupidity). So while I absolutely don't claim to be anything like an expert, I probably do have more qualifications in climatology than most politicians.

What I see is much like what I see in many other fields of academia: corrosive groupthink.

Here's an example:

Still, there are incontrovertible facts. We can measure the amount of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. And we do know exactly what they do. It’s simple physics. If you put “X” amount of these gases into the air, the temperature will warm by “Y.” It’s like putting a lid on a boiling pot of water, or like the heat that builds up inside your car when your park it in the sun with the windows closed. It’s clear that global temperatures have increased in recent decades, right in line with what the physics predict.

OK - I'm not the scientist around here, so maybe some of those of you who are can help me. "You put X amount of gas in the air and the temperature will warm by Y"? Where are the other variables? Like "A", the amount of thermal energy transmitted by the sun, or "B", the amount of energy transported by thermohaline circulation, or "C", geothermal and volcanic energy released by the earth, etc? This is science? "It's clear that global temperatures have increased in recent decades"????

My understanding of climatology says that of all the factors affecting the thermal budget of the earth, the sun is #1 by several orders of magnitude, and normal fluctuations in solar activity can have vastly greater impact on earth's climate than anything humans are thusfar capable of doing. Solar energy is followed by geologic energy, e.g. volcanoes, etc., which still dwarf human activity in terms of energy output.

More compelling is the geologic record, which shows the sun is overwhemingly the dominant influence on climate. (Uh, common sense aside: why is this news to anyone?) The correlation of CO2 output on climate appears, to the scientific layman such as myself, to be as much coincidental as anything else, and because it is coincidental, the correlative data seems likely to diverge, which has apparently already happened:

Here's a graphic:

The red line shows the predictions from the "Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change" at the MIT Center for Global Climate Change. (If that name doesn't scare and alert you, I'm not sure what would.) The rest of the lines on the graph show what has actually happened. The name of the organization that produced the prediction pretty much sums up the situation: a pseudo-academic organization created to push a political agenda.

And that's the point - which the Czechs kind of automatically get because they suffered under this kind of crap from the Soviets for decades: It's not about science or truth or reality, it's about some people who want to exert control over, and expropriate resources from, the rest of us.

The whole fuss about "CO2 emissions" isn't about the climate - it's about control of the world, because CO2 emissions are roughly correlated with wealth, power, and influence. Control who gets to use energy and you control the world.

I don't consider myself a conspiracy nut, although I'm idly amused by conspiracy as an intellectual diversion. But I have to wonder what processes are at work here. Who came up with the idea of controlling CO2 emissions as a way of dictating economic policy? How is this agenda coordinated, successfully, in the face of all the science I can find? My point is this whole business is about political science, not scientific science.

Finally, here's another interesting graphic, showing CO2 vs temperature over geologic timescales. The point of this chart is to show where we are today, in terms of the earth's history:

Because this data is geologic, there's no human influence represented. Anyone please let me know what correlation they detect, and how it applies to us.

Finally: I know it isn't scientific, but I also know experience can be indicative. I watch the local temperatures at my house, in particular in my swimming pool, which is literally 8-10 degrees cooler this summer on average than last year. What does that mean? Possibly not much - local variations do not mean much because global climate can vary assymetrically - it can get hotter in one place and cooler in another while the globe warms or cools overall. But dramatic variations in the mid latitudes from one year to the next also tend to get reflected in global averages - and what I'm seeing is the trend is not up.

I'm hoping for an ice age. They're really very nice in the mid-to-lower latitudes.

The Two Cultures in My Head

2009-08-10T07:57:00.000-07:00

This is a re-post of something on my old blog for a debate I'm having elsewhere on the internet. My views about the two cultures are complex and conflicting, but ultimately, driven by my shit-hit-the-fan outlook on life. If space in the lifeboat is limited, would I rather take the physics major or the English major with me? Well, assuming that neither are sociopaths, the choice is obvious - unless the English major is an Eagle Scout or a Civil War re-enactor.

What follows is a post I wrote back in 2006:

This piece by the Big Arm Woman the Blue Collar Scholar got me to thinking about the relationship of the humanities to the sciences in my own life.

Here’s the punchline from BAW’s post:

Academics should be worried, and not about David Horowitz, because it seems to me that--fair or not--we're heading toward a place where "learning for its own sake," no longer justifies the expense, and the consequences will be dire indeed--and not just for the academics.

I’ve heard this sentiment from professors in the sciences, too. Learning for learning’s sake is no longer the primary mission of the Academy, and it has not been for decades. In order for that to be true again, the Academy would have to give back an awful lot of the resources that society tosses its way, especially in the sciences.

Most of us went to college to get useful skills. Maybe not directly useful right away, but potentially useful nonetheless. Most of us dabbled in our interests, too, but that’s not the primary reason for going to school these days. The reasons that I chose not to finish a Ph.D. in Slavic Literature had more to do with the additional time it would have taken from my life and lack of return on that investment, rather than disinterest in the subject matter – I wanted to start a career. But if Slavic Literature had been my only major, what could I have done with that Ph.D. except teach? We as a society are spending an awful lot of resources on students who major disciplines that do not require large numbers of practitioners in order to be viable parts of our society. The most common majors are not ones that one thinks of when one talks about education creating a highly economically competitive society in the 21st Century.

The ubiquity of student loans means that society, rightly or wrongly, sees a university education as imparting skills that society needs, rather than as a provider of interior decorations that make your mind a more interesting place in which to live. My opinion as a taxpayer is that if you want to decorate your mind, do it on your own dime. ROTC programs give a lot more scholarships in technical disciplines than in the humanities, and I’d like to see quotas imposed on civilian student loans, as well.

That’s not to say that I discount the value of the humanities disciplines. An education that ignores where a student and the surrounding culture have come from makes for a very poor sort of person - I’ve seen plenty of those sorts of people from the PRC.* An education totally at the hands of the peckerwoods in the science and engineering departments also makes for a poor sort of voter, and I do somewhat buy into the notion that educated people should be a bit of the salt of the Earth to the Electorate. Just not at the rate we’re turning out English and Communications majors. To take the analogy to a silly extreme, techies and professionals are the sodium chloride in the salt, and humanities majors are the sodium iodide. Without the iodide the body politic will get sick, but you don’t need too much of it either.

Some of the most fulfilling intellectual activities in my own life have been connected with my two passions in the humanities: history and languages. There is nothing like stepping into a historic place that you’ve read and read about, just to feel the ghosts of the personages from your books whisper in your ear. The first time I walked up the hill from the Moscow Metro to Red Square was such a moment – seeing Lenin’s Tomb and Ivan the Terrible’s cathedral to honor St. Basil (and his own victory over the Tartars) in one glance gives one a staggering view into the scope of Russian history. But without that sense of perspective, I’d be a poorer person, but just as valuable an economic actor by virtue of my chemistry degree. If I’d studied history, most likely I’d have needed additional training in law or business to enter the non-academic workforce. If I’d done that, I don’t see why any of you should have paid for my intellectual peregrinations in the form of student loans.

This whole debate reminds me of John Ray’s "Are We Overeducated " :

All education is not of equal value and our investment in certain categories of it may well need critical examination. It will be submitted here that, at both secondary and tertiary levels, too much value is attached today to education in the 'humanities' and that such education does not bring the benefits claimed for it.

… it seems particularly hard to justify the demands that are made on the taxpayer to subsidise this form of recreation. Education is hugely expensive and tends to be a form of recreation most favoured by the more affluent sections of society. Why 'Joe the worker' has to pay more for his beer and cigarettes so I can study Chaucer free of cost I do not know. It can surely only be described as a monstrous injustice -- robbing the poor to pay the rich. If justice and equity were our concern, it would be fairer to subsidise horseracing. More people enjoy it.

I do not agree with Ray’s premise elsewhere in that article that there is no fungibility in knowledge. The utility of the study of literature is literature’s ability to distill and humanize human experience into manageable and meaningful packages. That broadens my mental experience to include (vicariously, but still better than nothing) the experiences of many people I would never otherwise encounter in my life.

I remember clearly the overview class in Russian Literature that solidified my views on monasticism. We were discussing “The Three Old Men” by Tolstoy, and I came to the conclusion that those men were holy because they had no temptations, and that was not holiness, but rather laziness and absence of temptation that led to their sin-free life. I also then came to the conclusion, at age 23, that raising kids was one of the hardest and most meaningful activities that a human could engage in, and by severing his protagonists from that aspect of life (this story was written after Tolstoy had fathered his 13 kids and then decided that sex was bad, bad, bad…), he’d taken such a huge part of the human experience away that I could not respect their spiritual pronouncements. Sort of the way I look at the Catholic priesthood now.** All this was a complicated digression to prove my point: my views on this subject would be considerably poorer and less thought out if it weren’t for the literature classes I was taking. I certainly have never interacted much with monks (other than buying their wine), so this was a way for me to broaden my mental life in a concentrated dose. This makes me a more educated voter when issues spiritual spring up in the public domain. But studying only literature does a disservice to the student who is really not mentally capable of sorting wheat from chaff without actually having some experiences in the physical world, and like it or not, that describes the vast majority of humanity. I think most people need to major in something practical in order to make any sense out of literature.

On the flip side, an awful lot of techies don’t give a rat’s about much outside their discipline, and making them take a few classes isn’t going to change that. I was never one of those techies who said “why do I have to take this?”. But I knew a lot of people who did. BAW commented that her advisor used to elegantly argue:

"You can go to any community college or vocational school to be trained for a job. You chose to come to a university, which means that on some level you value the life of the mind. And that means you're bright enough to understand that what I'm teaching you matters."

I don’t think that is an elegant argument at all. First of all, a technical school does not teach one how to become an engineer. It teaches one how to become a technician – the difference is the same difference that lies between an inventor and a tinkerer. I know I would have been insulted by someone insinuating that the only thing distinguishing me from a plumber were a few gut courses in English Lit. And Universities aren’t the only places that value the life of the mind: I attended an Institute of Technology that had a tremendous required load of humanities, and allowed us to take our pick totally free of suggestions***, as long as the course levels were high enough.

Engineers have been forced to take all kinds of humanities classes all through their high school and college lives, and very often have come into contact with Marxist, radical feminist, and many other “ist” teachers whose version of reality is not the same as the one the students, or other rational people, see in their real lives. I’d never assume that students had enough of a background, or a good enough experience in previous courses, to be able to sort a good teacher from bad within the first week of class, when this kind of question usually gets asked. I have a similar analogy for techies. When I was TAing the ridiculously low-level, non-honors General Chemistry course at Big U, I ran into a lot of students who hated math. What they thought they were going to do in a technical field baffled me, but the situation was what it was, and I had to teach them. My usual retort to “why did we have to learn all that crap in high school math?” was: “that stuff is in the cannon because it was used to solve a practical problem, and you might either run into that same problem, or more likely need to use a solution derived from that math, in your career, and you need to understand the basics before you can derive anything”. My retort to “I hate math” was “I’ve banged my hand with enough hammers that I don’t love them either, but when I want to drive a nail, I reach for one. Math is a tool. Either learn how to keep from banging your hand with it (most of the time), or get out of the carpentry business.” What I did not do was assume that their experience to this point had allowed them the intellectual vantage to see that all this stuff would be good for them down the road.

So I think that BAW’s advisor’s line is out of line, and that a little humility is in order from departments that have let the Po-Mo rot set into their disciplines so badly. The fact that our technical departments have to offer watered-down versions of physics or chemistry for humanities majors, while we techies take the real deal in the humanities departments, should also make for some humility in the humanities. Science has made for more human progress than any other discipline in the academy with the possible exception of mechanical and civil engineering. It’s only natural that, seeing this, engineering majors and scientists would say “why do we need this crap?”. The correct answer is not “don’t ask me that stupid question, you’re intelligent enough to understand why”, but “ask me that again when the course is over”. But that last answer requires that at least some of the selection of works to study has relevance to the topics of life that the kids are concerned about, and that the discussion turn to those topics.

If I were a humanities prof, I’d turn the question around: why do you think the authors felt compelled to write these works, and why have so many people found them useful through the ages? Unfortunately that presupposes a cannon. Disciplines that have let the Po-Mo barbarians through the gates to gut the cannon have done a way with a great temporal filter to sort metal from dross. Given the subject matter of BAW’s blog - and the fact that she’s a fellow Southerner ;-) - I have a feeling that she made a good choice of advisors, and that her advisor was on the side of the angels in the debate over the cannon, but even for a good teacher, that kind of retort won’t win friends from techies who’ve been forced to jump through Po-Mo hoops in other classes.

I know of a Physical Chemistry Prof who forbade fiction books in his house for his kids. He led a life almost entirely of the mind, albeit with a mathematical flavor – not a literary one. And he was no less a productive chemist for eschewing literature, although I might argue that he was a bigger peckerwood because of it. In the end, I think that my own proclivities in the humanities were fed more by my own curiosity than by any class I ever took, which somewhat gives lie to that “life of the mind” argument. Either you live in that space, or you don’t. Classes have nothing to do with it. I’ll let John Ray have his say on that with regards to literature requirements:

Initially, one must note that what one learns in such a course is literary criticism, not how to write novels, plays etc. Only a tiny minority of our successful writers are English graduates and an even tinier minority of our English graduates are successful writers. A course in English is not, then, vocational training of any sort. It is supposed simply to help you appreciate existing literature better. I would submit, however, that the number of people who become better trained for leisure in this way is infinitesimally small. Who would undertake a university course in English who did not enjoy reading novels? Who reads more novels because he has done English? Who needs an English course to help him enjoy plays? Who has ever been converted to reading poetry because of an English course? I think there is little doubt that to all these questions only one answer can be given: very few indeed. At the secondary school level, I think that there can he little doubt that the study of English literature often has a deterrent effect. How many generations of school-children have come to hate Shakespeare and Dickens because they were forced to study them at school?

Well, I hate Dickens because I hate melodrama, but point taken.

We are heading for the point where society is going to question the return on the enormous investment we’ve made in education. It’s now not possible to get an entry level job without a Bachelor’s, when those jobs used to go to high school graduates. And one can argue that those people holding the sheepskin are less capable than their grandparents who only got through high school. I really would like to see a quota for the number student loans given to humanities majors. I’m not sure that the consequences would be that dire – for everyone except the humanities departments. And you just know that the politically adept Po-Mo idiots will use the resulting budget cuts to further consolidate their position and kill off what is left of utility in a humanities education: Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war; That this foul deed shall smell above the earth With carrion men, groaning for burial.

* Not so much in students from the USSR (when there was such a country), where the life of the mind was perhaps too much in the forefront of the culture. But the PRC turned out many, many students who had no idea of their own, or anyone else’s history, and so were easily manipulated. I remember taking one Chinese grad student down to the WWI memorial. It seems that in China they taught that the US had opportunistically joined in WWI to reap reparations form Germany, and that our casualties had been numbered in the hundreds. I took this student to see the memorial, in which the KIAs numbered in the hundreds for the city and its environs, and asked if this student thought our city had been the only one to furnish troops for the war. History is important, perhaps the most important of the humanities. And literature illuminates history.

** Anyone who argues that priests are responsible for their parish as sort of proxy children has not learned the lesson of riding as a passenger in a car to a place they’ve never been before, and then later having to drive back there by themselves without navigation aids: there’s a huge difference in being totally responsible for something and just being along for the ride with some “here’s your street” comments.

*** Therein lies one of the origins of the complaint “why do we have to take this crap?”. Students have to pick from several groups of classes at big state universities, and those requirements are politically driven by the profs. With the exception of Economics as my social science requirement, and a Western History overview class, I took all Russian Language or Russian Literature classes. No one told me I had to go take an East Asian class to fulfill someone’s idea of a well-rounded education – at the time, I could not have cared less about China or Japan and would have been amazed if you’d told me that in 15 years’ time I’d be speaking Japanese and learning Chinese. By allowing me to discover the world through courses I was actually interested in, I picked up a lot of literature and art that I would have just forgotten in a stand-alone required class. A lot of humanities departments force their subjects down students’ throats and offer the worst teachers and most boring subjects to the general education population, so they are reaping the whirlwind when they get the “what the use of this sh!t?” questions.

Other Voices, Other Battles

2009-08-05T04:51:00.000-07:00

On August 19, 1942 the German 6th Army and the 4th Panzer Army under General Paulus began the assault on Stalingrad, and the beginning of the end of the Nazi threat. It was both a simpler and more brutal time, and I find the taste in music of the day an interesting window into the soul of the peoples who fought that war.

One of the more famous Russian songs from the era was actually composed in 1938. Though written before the war, it has military overtones, taking for its subject the separation of a soldier and his lover. The soldier is admonished both to guard the Motherland and remember the simple girl he left behind. The lyrics mention “the far borders”, which evokes images of the first conflict between Japan and Russia in Manchuria in 1937, which would eventually culminate in the Battle of Nomonhon / Khalkhyn Gol in 1939. However, as pointed out here, the girl sends her song “along the track of the bright sun”, that is looking from East towards the West, meaning her lover was stationed on the Polish border, not the Chinese one.

At any rate, here are the lyrics, in Russian and English:

КАТЮША Katyusha
Слова Михаила Исаковского      Lyrics: Mikhail Isakovsky
Музыка Матвея Блантера           Music: Matvei Blanter

Расцветали яблони и груши,       Apple and pear trees were blooming,
Поплыли туманы над рекой.       Fog crept along the river...
Выходила на берег Катюша,       Katyusha came out onto the bank,
На высокий берег, на крутой.     Onto the high, steep bank.

Выходила, песню заводила          She came out and started a song
Про степного сизого орла,           About a grey-blue eagle of the steppe,
Про того, которого любила,         About the one that she loved,
Про того, чьи письма берегла.    About the one, whose letters she cherished.

Ой ты, песня, песенка девичья,         Oh, you, song, young maiden's song,
Ты лети за ясным солнцем вслед        Fly out, follow after the clear sun
И бойцу на дальнем пограничье        And tell the warrior at the distant border-post
От Катюши передай привет.              That Katyusha sends him her greetings.

Пусть он вспомнит девушку простую,      Let him remember a simple maiden,
Пусть услышит, как она поет,                  Let him hear how she sings,
Пусть он землю бережет родную,            Let him protect the Motherland
А любовь Катюша сбережет.                  And Katyusha will protect love.

Расцветали яблони и груши,        Apple and pear trees were blooming,
Поплыли туманы над рекой.       Fog crept along the river...
Выходила на берег Катюша,        Katyusha came out onto the bank
На высокий берег на крутой.       Onto the high, steep bank.

And here is a modern rendition of the song made in 2005 for the 60th Anniversary of VE Day.

More chilling to American ears are the choral arrangements that call forth images of mass devotion to causes, be they National Socialism or the Komintern. There is no denying the motivational power these songs evoke, but stripped of the lyrics, it is hard to separate Soviet from Nazi propaganda music.

In translation, however, it is apparent that the Soviets were more apt to appropriate religious imagery to motivate the peasantry, as with the song “Sacred War”

Still, the shadowy, moody soul of the individual Russian soldier comes out in some of the other pieces, such as Dark Night:

After the war and the death of Stalin, Russia still struggled with the legacy of the enormous price exacted by the campaign on their soil. The gravel-throated guitar poet Vladimir Vysotsky, of whom Bob Dylan is but a pale imitation, put voice to that struggle in 1964:

БРАТСКИЕ МОГИЛЫ                                         Our Brothers' Graves

На братских могилах не ставят крестов,      On our brothers’ graves stand no crosses
И вдовы на них не рыдают,                             And widows do not sob over them
К ним кто-то приносит букеты цветов,        Someone brings bouquets of flowers
И Вечный огонь зажигают.                            And an eternal flame burns

Здесь раньше вставала земля на дыбы,       Before the earth rose on its hindquarters here
А нынче - гранитные плиты.                       And now granite plates
Здесь нет ни одной персональной судьбы -       Here there is no personal fate
Все судьбы в единую слиты.                         All fates are poured into one.

А в Вечном огне виден вспыхнувший танк,        But in the eternal flame one sees a tank afire
Горящие русские хаты,                               Burning Russian huts
Горящий Смоленск и горящий рейхстаг,       A burning Smolensk and a burning Reichstag
Горящее сердце солдата.                           The burning heart of a soldier

У братских могил нет заплаканных вдов -        At our brothers’ graves are no weeping widows
Сюда ходят люди покрепче.                                Here there come sterner people
На братских могилах не ставят крестов,          At our brothers’ graves stand no crosses
Но разве от этого легче?..                               But really, does that make it easier?

Scott Speicher Found

2009-08-03T03:22:00.000-07:00

I'm not positive but I think I wrote about Scott Speicher in my old blog. Scott was a Hornet pilot shot down in the first Gulf War, who is the only missing servicemember ever to have their status changed from "Killed in Action-Body Not Recovered" (KIA-BNR) to "Missing in Action" (MIA). Subsequently his status was changed to "Missing-Captured", which I believe means there was evidence he was captured alive and held by the Iraqis.

His remains were located yesterday, however, near where his aircraft was shot down, and it appears one of the earliest stories about his fate was the correct one: he died shortly after ejecting from his F/A-18 - whether due to injuries sustained when he was shot down, or inflicted after he landed by the Iraqis, and was buried in the desert near the aircraft crash site.

Resolution of the Speicher case follows many years of changing stories and uncertainty about his fate. Originally the Navy reported he had been shot down by a surface-to-air missile, but later a declassified CIA document said he was probably shot down by an Iraqi MiG - a version of the story later supported by CDR Bob Stumpf, who I believe was there. "Stumpy" said that other members of Speicher's strike group saw the MiG-25 and requested permission (from a US Air Force AWACS) to engage, but were denied, and shortly thereafter they saw a fireball now known to have come from Speicher's aircraft.

CDR Stumpf also said he believed Speicher may have been captured and held by the Iraqis, but was inexplicably declared killed only hours after the engagement by then-Secretary-of-Defense Dick Cheney. He said that it might have been that a potential search-and-rescue operation was aborted because the position was that "SECDEF said he was dead, so why go look for him".

In the years that followed, various tantalizing clues emerged that Speicher may have survived the ejection and been captured, which ultimately led to his status being changed to MIA then outright "captured". Some of the most compelling of these clues came from the 1995 inspection of the aircraft crash site, which proved Speicher had initiated ejection from the aircraft prior to impact, and that the Iraqis had tampered with the aircraft wreckage, both shortly after the crash and shortly before the inspection. The Iraqis also inexplicably returned a flight suit, which appeared to have been Speicher's, which had also been tampered with. It seemed highly improbable that the Iraqis would come into possession of Speicher's flight suit without knowing what happened to the man wearing it.

It was expected that after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, further information would become available as to his fate, and that is what has finally happened. Perhaps ironically, it appears that the original story told by the Iraqis - that Speicher died at the crash site and was buried in the desert - appears to be true.

But there are still a lot of unanswered questions - most notably how he died. Because he deliberately initiated ejection while still in the performance envelope for the ejection seat, the Navy estimated a 80-90% probability that he landed alive. It seems perhaps likely that he was murdered, perhaps while injured, by Iraqis after being captured alive. If that is the case, we still need to know the when, why and how.

Until those questions are answered we do not have final closure on the long, strange case of Scott Speicher's fate.

Happy Fourth

2009-07-04T13:27:00.000-07:00

I was wondering what to write about the Spirit of ’76 that had not been done to death, when inspiration hit me.

The gift that I am grateful for most from the Founder is Evolution. This American system, more than any other system proposed in history, allows the individual freedom to operate and create new things. To not be dominated by an elite who directs evolution in the “correct” direction.

The intellectuals among us focus on the surface manifestations of this gift, but the fundamental gift is from Hamilton – the possibility of economic evolution.

A mechanism to maintain diversity of thought is America’s greatest contribution to the world.

As a conservative-leaning Christian who is not at all happy with the right wing of the Republican Party, I have to say that it gave me great glee to hit upon this idea.

So Alexander, George, John, Thomas, James, John, Ben, and all the rest – thank you. I hope we continue to evolve into something you would be proud of.

No More Flying "Clear"

2009-06-23T07:05:00.000-07:00

TSA's so-called premium service for pre-screened travelers went out of business yesterday, reportedly because their credit was withdrawn.

This is a great example of how you can't even trust the government to do something simple that everyone agrees upon...

Pretty much everyone who flies hates TSA security screening, and apparently with pretty good reason.

The idea was that you submit to a background investigation and biometric ID and they would give you a less painful experience at the airport. Unfortunately, TSA didn't really want to give anyone the opportunity for a less painful experience, so they refused to allow FlyClear members any relief from the overall security screening. In fact, there was MORE to the FlyClear screening because you had to present your "Fly Clear" card (to both a machine and a human), in addition to another picture ID, and your boarding pass, before being allowed to get in line.

The only advantage was either a special line, or the privilege of cutting to the head of the line, to get to the TSA humiliation quicker.

I fly a lot, and I was very interested in anything that would reduce the pain of commercial air travel, so I studied the Fly Clear program closely.

First of all, it was a pain to sign up. You had to fill out a form online and pay, wait to receive paperwork in the mail, then make at least one (and usually 2 or 3) trips to the airport when you weren't flying to get the biometric data taken and the "Clear" card issued. The cost was $128, per year, I think.

The first time I enquired about it was at Washington National. There was a long line, and some friendly-looking folks (not TSA, I subsequently learned, but contractors with the now defunct company that ran the program) passing out literature about the program. I told them I'd sign up right now if they'd let me get past the line, but of course that wasn't possible. I still went to the web site when I got home, and it seemed painful, invasive, and not particularly sensible.

So I watched at the airport to determine what the program really saved. At National there was a second line for the FlyClear program, which was usually pretty short, but once through it you still had to get in the second line to actually get through security. It could save a few minutes - maybe quite a few if you were flying during peak hours and the lines were bad - but overall not much. Out at Dulles, the FlyClear line seemed to be very similar in length to the "Expert Traveler" line, which seemed to be a much better idea and a much better program. Many of the airports I visit, however, didn't even have FlyClear lines, and I found that by simply avoiding travel at peak times (a good idea under all circumstances), you could achieve the same effect as the FlyClear line for $0.

Some of my friends, however, raved about how they liked the program (I apparently knew a substantial percentage of the program's participants, since there were only about 250,000 overall). I took another look, and thought about signing up just as an experiment.

But the other day I was at Dulles. Some rich important-looking old guy got in the "Fly Clear" line at the same time I got in the Expert Traveler line (which was longer, but only a little bit). We got through the TSA screen at the same time, but he was being by TSA that he was required to submit to additional screening. As I headed off to my gate, he was being led away to be strip-searched. TSA seems to relish forcing anyone with the appearance of eliteness to submit to additional screening... in particular officials of other government departments or agencies with official credentials.

That ended my interest in FlyClear, and I guess I'm glad now I didn't pay for it, because it doesn't look like subscribers will be getting their money back.

Cleaning Up

2009-06-15T13:41:00.000-07:00

I'm extremely sick and very busy, not a good combination, so nothing good blogging-wise is going to be coming from me for a while. Instead, I leave you with a funny story about Japanese toilets.

One of my cats is mildly retarded. He likes little noises.

The controls on the toilet in our Japanese apartment were these little bubble pressure switches that beeped when you pressed them. The cat used to get up on the control arm and walk around so he could hear the beeping sounds. Unfortunately, those buttons controlled the seat temperature, bidet action ("gentle spray" to "blow your ass into the next apartment") and water temperature of the bidet ("cold, wet Willy" to "disinfecting a rendering plant").

So, when you sat down in a stupor early in the morning or after a late night, you might get a little surprise ranging from an overheated seat to a steam cleaning of Uranus. You could count yourself lucky if the seat was hot, because that reminded you of the cat's shennanigans. Otherwise, your impaired brain had to catch the faint whir of the bidet head extending from its recessed niche before it pulled its Stanley Steamer impression on your ass.

The toilet in this video is very similar to what we had, but our control arm was higher, like an armrest on a chair, and had more buttons. The bidet action, however, is pretty spot-on.

Just How Dumb is Western Europe?

2009-06-09T09:04:00.001-07:00

No dumber than anyone else, actually. But they are currently a shining example of Normalization of Deviance.

Why?

This is why.

Gazprom is indeed a power-projecting organ of the Russian State. Putinism is entering the Pirhana stage.(H/T to commenters at the Chicago Boyz)

In his book Riding Rockets, Astronaut Mike Mullane explained that NASA ignored known risks with the Shuttle because the craft had flown without those risks manifesting themselves in an incident. It is a common feature of humanity. Someone tells you that riding motorcycles without a helmet is dangerous. But you do it once and get away with it. You do it twice. A thousand times. But on the thousand-and-first, someone cuts you off, and you spray your brains all over the landscape, realizing, in your last, painful instants on this Earth, exactly why doctors call people like you "rolling organ stockpiles".

You normalized the deviance, assuming the odds would never catch up with you.

I was studying Russian in college when a lot of the debate on the trustworthiness of Gorbachev with respect to the gas supply took place. And that was part of an older debate. I clearly remember the arguments against the pipeline:.

French, West German and British Firms were largely supported by their respective governments in evading Washington’s demands for an embargo on the shipment of technology for a Soviet natural Gas Pipeline to the West. Nor did they pay much heed to American arguments on the danger of dependence on the USSR for energy supplies.

The problem with such warnings is that the negative consequences are many times removed in time from their cause. When Gorbachev, and then Yeltsin proved relatively benign, never seriously threatening Europe's newly acquired energy supplies, the talk of threat was dismissed as American jingoism. Now, between the Russian cut offs over price and the Georgian incident, the threat is being re-evaluated. Perhaps too little, too late, as delayed feedback loops often have more severe consequences than immediate cause-and-effect chains.

Individual Russians, such as Gorbachev, may be friends of the West, but Russia herself is not, and will not be until the last vestiges of serfdom are thrown off of that society several generations hence. Russia sees life as a zero sum game because her society has never created much wealth, it has subsisted on selling natural resources. The wealth from those resources is bitterly fought over within Russian society, and the created wealth of the West is viewed with jealousy.

As far back as in 1991, during the coup that ousted Gorby, Europe should have been taking precautions to diversify its future supply. It did not:

The EU currently relies on Russia for a quarter of its total gas supplies. Of the bloc's 27 member states, seven are almost totally dependent on Russian gas.

Even former Eastern Block countries, where people should have had memories of previous bad experiences with the Russians, fell prey to Normalization of Deviance and wishful thinking.

"It was a huge shock. We thought we had good relations with Russia and that we'd be supplied at all times regardless of what happened between Moscow and Ukraine," he says.

"We thought Russia would protect us."

How could a resident of country within the former Iron Curtain make such a spectacularly obtuse statement? Some of it has to do with the modern intellectual's assumption that Europe has outlawed bad behavior, and that the Russians will play nicely in the sandbox because that is what is expected of them.

The other reason is the special history that Bulgaria enjoyed with the USSR.

There is a Soviet / Russian joke about elephants. The nations of Europe decide to celebrate a year of the elephant by publishing a book in each nation. The French, of course, publish a detailed account of the sex life of the elephant. The German book is a dry, but extremely detailed encyclopedia about elephants. The Soviet book proclaims the superiority of the Soviet elephant. The Bulgarian book merely proclaims that the Bulgarian elephant is the best friend of the Soviet element (see the middle of the posting here, I have heard the same joke made about Mongolia as well, reflecting their tough position between the Russians and the Chinese).

So one can perhaps forgive a modern Bulgarian intellectual for such a statement, suffering as he does from two major blind spots. But not the rest of the West. As can bee seen from the examples of the Shuttle and the helmetless motorcyclist, when the bill for normalizing deviance comes due, the price is often exorbitant.

USAA

2009-06-01T11:06:00.000-07:00

A little free advertising for a bank and insurance company that doesn't do stupid stuff...

Like most people with a connection to the military, I have long done business with the United Services Automobile Association, also known as USAA. They've had my car insurance since I got my first drivers license, because my father was eligible to join from his service in Vietnam. He always said good things about USAA, so I stuck with them when I started paying my own bills. (USAA is a member association, kind of like a credit union, not a commercial bank or insurance company. To be eligible you generally need some connection to the military - as a servicemember or dependant.)

I established mutual fund accounts when I graduated from college, and started a brokerage account when USAA created their brokerage. (Luckily I dodged the bullet with those shysters from USPA&IRA.)

Today I have a couple of all-inclusive "asset management accounts" with them, as well as a couple of old IRAs, all the insurance I'm able to get (they won't write coverage on the Adios Airways HQ in Florida), and one of my two mortgages with them.

Just a little while ago they sent out an email to remind their members that not only have they never taken a cent of bailout money, they are solidly in the black for 2008 and 2009, and are paying record dividends.

I knew all that already (I got a check from them the other day), but it's a pretty important point. USAA does very well because they aren't insanely stupid, like apparently the entire commercial banking industry. They only make loans that make common sense, they don't deliberately screw their members over nickle-and-dime fees (in fact they charge no fees for anything ever, as far as I know), and they don't write insurance that is obviously a bad risk. They especially don't do derivatives and they don't sell their mortgages.

Where would we be, as a country and a civilization, if the commercial banks did business like USAA? Well people wouldn't be living in houses and driving cars they couldn't afford, and we'd probably be richer and stronger than ever, instead of standing over the same precipice that engulfed the Soviet Union.

An old-timey Victor Bout post

2009-05-28T08:34:00.000-07:00

9Q-CSA is, or was, an Antonov 26 with a Victor Bout pedigree operated by Services Air in the Congo. On 26 May, it crashed at Isiro-Matari, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DROC), killing the three Russian crew members. A Congolese loadmaster suffered severe injuries.
Isiro is in the war-torn northeast DROC, in the midst of the prime mineral-smuggling region of the Congo. It is very possible 9Q-CSA crashed because it was overloaded with coltan or casserite, valuable minerals essential in the production of electronics that are the most lucrative natural resources of that part of the Congo.

"Services Air" is a Kinshasa-based air cargo and passenger airline founded by Congolese warlord Kpama Baramoto, who had been former President Mobutu's secret police chief. They are a comparatively active in the DROC, having recently acquired four ex-Fed Ex 727s.
9Q-CSA was leased from OBC (Original Butt Company) Aerolift. It is the third (count 'em, 3) Antonov connected with Victor Bout crashed in the Congo by Services Air. The others were An-12s 9Q-CER, crashed at Mbuji-Mayi, DROC in 2006, and the famous 9Q-CIH, formerly 9L-LEC, the actual An-12 used in the movie "Lord of War", in which Nicolas Cage played Victor Butt, which crashed at Entebbe in 2005. That's about as distinguished a connection with Victor as you can get.

Zawahiri in Quetta?

2009-05-12T17:09:00.000-07:00

There are news reports today that Pakistani intelligence claims that al Qaeda #2 Ayman al-Zawahiri is hiding near Quetta, Pakistan. This is somewhat newsworthy because most leaked intelligence puts the Z-man in North Waziristan. The official party line has held that Zawahiri and his boss Osama have been holed up in caves or huts in remote and tribal Waziristan. While I believe he has been there, I've never been very impressed with the theory that either he or Osama are hunkered down in some remote area, unable to travel or move around. They are surrounded by fanatical devotees, who are surrounded by a very, very friendly population. I think they can travel pretty much at will, not just around Pakistan, but around South Asia and the Middle East.

I've long suspected that Quetta would be a popular location for a fugitive arch-terrorist. It is a cosmopolitan, well developed city in wild and largely-independent Baluchistan, offering better access to Iran and the Arabian Sea than many other locations in Pakistan. It offers lots of good places to hide - more so than remote Waziristan - as well as a lot of creature comforts that I expect city boys like Osama and Z-man probably appreciate. All in all, Quetta probably makes better sense as an uber-terrorist hideout than some hut in the boonies.

So will we find him there? I doubt it because I doubt we are looking there, although really I have no idea.

Pirate Hostage Rescue Email

2009-04-27T20:24:00.000-07:00

The other day I got an email - as apparently did most of the internet - proporting to be the "inside story" of the SEAL's engagement of the Somali pirates holding Captain Richard Phillips.

At the time, I thought the email had a ring of truth, but not a ring of complete truth. Although the jargon and atmospherics of the email sounded right, some of the facts didn't fit the timeline as we know it.

That made this email a little more interesting - maybe from an authentic source who nevertheless didn't have all the facts, but got some of the info second hand from a legitimate firsthand observer.

I really don't know, but the media's reaction has been as interesting as the email itself. The MSM mostly sprang to the immediate defense of the President, insisting the email is bogus.

It may be bogus - some of the assertions in the email don't fit the public narrative. For example, the email said there were several opportunities to engage the pirates before April 12th, including the first time Captain Phillips jumped overboard from the lifeboat on the 10th. The Navy has said the SEAL snipers did not arrive on the Bainbridge until the 11th. The NBC article, linked above, emphatically declares the email to be bogus in the headline, then goes on to say it may have been written by someone involved, but who didn't really know all the high-level discussions and coordination that took place. That's a bit different from totally bogus.

On the other hand, there is a heck of a lot of spin going on in both directions. There is a very good article from Bill Gertz discussing a lot of this stuff. It doesn't exactly contradict the email but instead offers a number of tantalizing new clues. Gertz' article suggests there were TWO water HALO jumps into the area, first with a group of SEALS redeployed from Kenya on the 10th, then another group from Virginia Beach on the 11th.

Gertz also quotes an "unnamed official" (presumably in Washington) who confirms the main theme of the contentious email, namely that the guidance from the NCA was "we would prefer a peaceful solution but you are authorized to shoot "if Captain Phillips life is in danger".

Gertz' sources also disputed the claim that the SEALs missed a chance to shoot when Phillips jumped overboard on the 10th. Apparently that is true, as that apparently happened shortly after midnight on the 10th, and the first group of SEALs did not arrive until later in the day, if those proported facts are correct. His primary source for the article is retired-Marine-General-now-National-Security-Adviser Jim Jones, whom I really do believe is a straight shooter.

So the famous email looks to be not entirely correct, but not entirely incorrect as it portrayed the coordination over 8000 miles of the "modified peacetime ROE" allowing the Navy to engage the pirates. The bigger question is why should a situation of this type require the direct intervention of the President of the United States, and the deployment of special people from Virginia Beach to take a couple of 35-yard shots? Various other narratives have now claimed that Captain Phillips jumped overboard a SECOND time, providing the snipers an excellent opportunity and justification to shoot as they trained their guns on the Captain in the water. With the Captain in the water, why do y0u even need snipers at 35 yards? Why not use rail-mounted miniguns and reduce the lifeboat with pirates onboard to splinters? Answer: because it isn't special enough.

There is, of course, ample precedent for Navy ship captains to deal with pirates on their own authority, without any further fanfare, and every ship in the Navy (and probably all US flagged merchants) should have sharpshooters on board capable of making a 35 yard shot. (Certainly they did in the 19th century - what happened?)

Ultimately this whole story is about the shortcomings of 2nd generation institutions in a 4th generation world. What scares me is that otherwise sane and sensible folks like Jim Jones think its all just fine.

Where's a Cop When You Need One?

2009-04-27T09:01:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it truly sucks to be me. After suffering the slings and arrows of New England's roadways all week, where does my wife decide we need to go this Saturday?

That's right, New Yawk Citay. Queens, to be precise.

Another drive with the escapees from the dipshit asylum. Only this time worse, because all the New Yorkers who never had good skills to start with, but now are even rustier because they only drive on weekends are on the road because... it's the weekend.

So, after suffering, the One Speed Wonder, the Tandem, the Back and Forth Speeder, and so on, I encountered a new one. Yes, that's right folks, something even I had never seen before, despite racking up over 750,000 miles in my twenty some years of driving.

We were in the situation that's a perfect set-up for the Weaver - the right lane is one long traffic snake for miles and miles, moving at about 63 mph. The left lane is the same, about one car length of distance between each car (if that), moving at about 67. When we got to the top of a hill, I could see this was the case for about two miles ahead.

I'm maybe 500 meters past the crest of the hill when I see something in my left-hand side mirror. A black BMW, driving on the shoulder (both shoulders are very wide here) popping up over the crest of the hill, going a good deal faster than us. Now, I see shoulder-as-passing-lane travel like this all the time when traffic has slowed to 20 mph - some dipshit always wants to do that. But never have I ever seen it when traffic is going that fast.

The shoulders of the road here are chock full of debris - dust, cigarette butts, pebbles, stones, broken headlights and other detritus from past accidents, dirty diapers, what have you. So the fucknut is doing about 75 on the shoulder, just past the "Wake Up, Shithead!" rumble strips. He's got a cloud of dust that looks like a mini-tornado is flying down the road, and as he passes us the "clink, clink, clong!" of rocks and broken brake lights are inducing all kinds of FOD on my paintjob. But he's got his 4-way flashers on, so that must make it OK.

I'm hoping that DOT didn't put any road construction signs up in the next half mile, or there's going to be a chain-reaction pile up right in front of my grill. Fortunately there isn't, and the idiot passes me and the next 6 or 7 cars as we crest the next hill. As I begin to get a view of the cars in front of me, I see a familiar gray paint job and distinctive, but low, silhouette on the roof of a car about 10 cars in front of me. Just then, my wife says "isn't that a cop up there?".

Oh yes, it was. This guy flies past a State Trooper doing his "gotta go" routine. My God, I have rarely seen justice so sweet and swift. The irritation of all the times I've been following a One Speed Wonder at 40 in a 25 muttering about cops and timing was just erased in that one instant.

About half a mile later we see the guy pulled over, and I swear the cop car is still rolling forward as the cop has his door open and is jumping out of his seat. It's a big, bald, UFC-looking Trooper, too, and his left hand is doing the finger jab from 30 meters away while he's yelling like a lunatic at the driver of the BMW to stay in his car (Captain Fucknut has his door open, too).

We were about an hour from our destination, and I was laughing all the way to Queens. Hell, it's been two days and I'm still laughing.

And Another Thing...

2009-04-21T04:49:00.000-07:00

Nathan reminded me in the comments to my last post that I forgot a few types of asshole Yankee drivers. I hit (not literally, though it was a close thing) a few of them this morning. Here are the main ones I missed, starting with Nathan's example:

The Can't Read the Merge Signs Moron: A mile back the DOT starts with the "right lane closed ahead signs. Prudent, non-dickead drivers start getting over right then. Certainly by the time you get the 800 meter warning ("lane closed in half a mile"), everyone should be over in the non-closed lane. But no, some asshole has to fly by in the lane that's closing at 80 mph, then try to merge right at the last possible moment, slamming on his brakes and causing all the non-dickheads on the road to go from 60 to 35 as the lead car avoids the asshole's antics. The resulting slowdown in the clear lane causes marginal dickheads who were on the fence about driving responsibly to take the low road and merge at the last possible moment, too. I'm all for having random stealth tire spikes spread out from somewhere between 100 and 400 meters from the actual merge to discourage the last-minute Lucy's of New England's roadways.

The Weaver: related to the guy above is the dickhead determined to do 90 when both lanes ahead are bumper to bumper at 60 mph for as far as you can see (which is often over a mile at the tops of hills). You, good driver, are in the fast lane doing about 62, slowly, oh so achingly slowly edging past the morons in the slow lane doing 59. Mario Andretti decides to pass you on the right when he sees that the 2 car length gap open up between the car ahead of you on your right and the car behind it. But Mario apparently can't calculate speed and distance worth a shit. He flies past you only to push on the bumper of that car you are slowly edging past. If you are any kind of good driver at all, you're trying to maintain at least one car length of distance between you and the car ahead of you, and that's when the Tragedy of the Commons whips out the giant purple schlong and decides to have its way with you, because Mario zips right in that spot with about 6 inches to spare, causing you to hit the brakes and slow down to 58, sending a ripple effect back about 3 miles of cars behind you. One day, when I'm old, retired, and don't give a shit, I'm going to buy a rusty F350 with a snowplow attachment and clear the road of these dickheads.

Finally we get to the cluefuck sadly not confined to New England. The One Speed Wonder. I'm on the local roads at 5:00 AM. You'd think people up at that hour would savor their sleep, get up, if not at the last possible moment, in at least the penultimate possible moment, and get the fuck on with what they've got to do. But some geriatric cluefuck has always got to be up taking his car for a walk at that hour. It's fishing season up here, there's lots of them on the road these days. We're in the 50 mph zone. He's doing 40 and I'm cussing a blue streak in time to the Zach Brown Band, just waiting for the Ultra-90 commercial to come on the radio. Then we hit the 35 mph zone. Still going 40. Then we get to the 25 mph zone. Still 40. At this point I slow down, because I see far too many cops in that zone at 5:00 AM (at that hour speeding is not really a safety issue, the schools and businesses are not open at that hour - that is pure revenue generation right there). But is there a cop when Captain Clueless brings the good ship Not Paying Attention through the school zone? Nope. Never. Once again: retirement, F350, snowplow.

Enough said.

CIA Torture Memos

2009-04-20T15:09:00.000-07:00

I saw admitted on the news (Fox) today for the first time that waterboarding is routinely practiced on our own aviators and special operations personnel in training. Waterboarding, of course, was a major political issue in the campaign and for the current administration, who has banned use of the practice against terrorists for the purpose of obtaining information to prevent future terrorist attacks. The media made much of the fact that waterboarding was used against Abu Zubaida and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - and no one else - as revealed in the recently released CIA memos on interrogation policy. No word on whether President Obama has also banned the routine waterboarding of US military members.

Musings on Piracy

2009-04-18T21:43:00.001-07:00

Several times I've started posts about how the US Navy (and most of the other 2nd Generation Navies of the world) are adrift without a good intellectual framework for adapting to the 4th generation world. But every time the post gets to be too grumpy and starts to drift itself, and I sh^tcan it.

But, as faithful readers probably know, I am fascinated by modern piracy and the tactical and operational problems it presents. Is it really that difficult a problem? Or are we constrained by our own out-of-control institutions?

The Barbary War of 1801-1805 was our first experience with Islamist piracy, when our country was brand new and our Navy was comparatively weak. Despite that weakness, there was broad bipartisan support for confronting the pirates, even though the European powers were simultaneously seeking accomodation. At that time, despite our relative weakness, the US Navy and Marine Corps distinguished themselves well beyond their apparent capability.

Today, we don't have that problem. We can find, fix, finish, exploit, and analyze (to use the current jargon) to our heart's content. The pirates aren't hard to find, and there is probably a lot more going on with them than we currently admit. (As an aside: as long as I can remember, it has been a consistent theme that there is ALWAYS more going on than we admit.)

We have the technical ability to eliminate the pirates in the blink of an eye - their bases are easily located with Google Earth, and in fact there are Google Earth overlays complete with aimpoints showing the key nodes of the pirate infrastructure available on the internet.

But we can't do it, for reasons having nothing to do with the pirates, or our military prowess. We can't do it because the media will punish the politicians if they make such a decision.

It took me a while to appreciate this fact, because we take it for granted because we are all so conditioned to view the world through the lens of the mass media.

In generations past, this was not a factor. In fact our ancestors could not even have comprehended the idea that a problem this obvious could be hosed up this bad. In this case we have every possible tangible advantage on our side: total technical and military dominance, as well as centuries of legal precedent and customary international law, that should permit us to do anything we darn well please to eliminate the pirate threat.

Yet we remain impotent, because if our leadership - even the Annointed One - were to take decisive action to eliminate the threat, the mainstream media would portray us as the bad guys, and the pirates as the helpless victims.

Such is the nature of the Fourth Generation.

So what do we do? The answer is obvious but subtle: we do it, but we don't let on what we're doing. The answer to a fourth generation problem like piracy in a fourth generation world is a fourth generation solution. Actions against the pirates should be clandestine - that is to say, completely hidden.

Such activities are usually coordinated and approved as CIA-managed covert action, but that is not the only way. However they are done, the actions against the pirates should be accomplished in secret, and denied. Because the media is an active participant in fourth generation conflict (usually pursuing their own agenda, not clearly aligned with other factions), almost any highly assymetrical engagement must be hidden from them.

I saw this little list elsewhere on the internet and thought it was too true to be funny, and it illustrates how most things go these days:

Phases of the Operation:
1. Enthusiasm
2. Disillusionment
3. Panic
4. Search for the guilty
5. Punishment of the innocent
6. Praise and honor for the non-participating

Capt Phillips Rescued

2009-04-12T18:59:00.000-07:00

Breaking news this evening: Capt Richard Phillips was rescued from the pirates holding him on one of the MAERSK ALABAMA's lifeboats.

Apparently what happened is that the lifeboat holding the pirates and Capt Phillips was taken into tow by the USS BAINBRIDGE, and with the lifeboat under tow, one of the pirates was persuaded to come over to the Bainbridge to "negotiate". Probably once onboard the destroyer, the pirate (now reported as a 16 year old boy) was likely persuaded to give some information about the pirates remaining on the lifeboat.

The precise details are still emerging, and probably many of them will not emerge, but it looks like the USS BOXER transferred several probable SEAL snipers to the Bainbridge. Meanwhile President Obama authorized the use of deadly force against the pirates, reportedly only if Captain Phillips life was immediately threatened.

Once in position on the Bainbridge, the snipers waited for clear shots on the three remaining pirates. It is not certain precisely what transpired, but the snipers simultaneously engaged all three pirates, reportedly killing each with a single head shot. Subsequently the SEALs boarded the lifeboat and found Captain Phillips unharmed.

I'm very pleasantly surprised at this bold and successful action. The pirates were apparently surprised as well, protesting that previously they had only wished to hold hostages for ransom, not to hurt anyone, but now they would attack Americans and Frenchmen on sight. It will be interesting to see what happens next.

L'audace, l'audace, toujours de l'audace

2009-04-10T20:16:00.000-07:00

The French have consistently adopted a different policy regarding piracy against French vessels from most of the international community patrolling the Gulf of Aden and Somali coast.

At least three times in the last year, the French government has acted quickly and decisively to free hostages taken by pirates aboard French vessels.

The most recent action was a qualified success - four of the five hostages were rescued unharmed, but the captain of the pirated sailing vessel was killed. He had earlier been quoted writing in his blog, "The pirates must not be allowed to destroy our dream."

This vessel, the S/V Tanit, had been escorted for much of its transit by French naval helicopters, but the helos warned the Tanit that they could not watch out for them around the clock, and the situation was particularly perilous. Nevertheless, when the Tanit was taken (on Tuesday), the French wasted no time in mounting a rescue operation (yesterday).

This compares to the US Navy, who have "monitored" the drifting lifeboat containing Captain Phillips of the MAERSK ALABAMA and a bunch of now hungry and desparate pirates. "Monitored" is apparently a pretty loose term, because when Captain Phillips managed to escape his captors, jump overboard, and attempt to swim away last night, the US Navy did nothing to assist him.

There are four pirates with rifles in the lifeboat, shadowed by a US Navy destroyer a few yards away. Was the destroyer (the USS BAINBRIDGE) not looking when the Captain jumped in the water? Why did they not vaporize the pirates (perhaps using the miniguns or 25mm chain guns they have on the rails for this purpose, or perhaps more precise sniper fire) when the pirates fired on the Captain in the water to compel his return to the lifeboat?

Of course I was not there and don't know exactly what happened, but it really looks like the Navy wasn't paying close attention to the situation. As unbelieveable as this sounds, it wouldn't surprise me. Perhaps more likely, someone on the destroyer watched the whole evolution, but had no authority to take any action to help Captain Phillips without routing a chit through his department head to the CO, who would have then sent a message to the Commodore, who would then convene a VTC with NAVCENT, who would have to coordinate with CENTCOM, who would have to get a JAG review from the Joint Staff and OSD, before doing anything to help out the hostage swimming for his life.

Compare this situation to the French, who have consistently launched a coordinated operation to rescue their people within hours, every time French citizens have been taken.

Mackubin Thomas Owens at the Naval War College makes a compelling case, based on traditional international law, that we are screwing the pooch yet again:

We need to return to an important distinction first made by the Romans and subsequently incorporated into international law by way of medieval and early modern European jurisprudence, e.g. Grotius and Vattel. The Romans distinguished between bellum, war against legitimus hostis, a legitimate enemy, and guerra, war against latrunculi — pirates, robbers, brigands, and outlaws — "the common enemies of mankind."

The former, bellum, became the standard for interstate conflict, and it is here that the Geneva Conventions and other legal protections were meant to apply. They do not apply to the latter, guerra — indeed, punishment for latrunculi traditionally has been summary execution. Until recently, no international code has extended legal protection to pirates.

So first, we should revive that distinction. When they are caught, they should be hanged. Second, I'm not the first to suggest that we should use force to wipe out the pirate lairs. Under the old understanding of international law, a sovereign state has the right to strike the territory of another if that state is not able to curtail the activities of latrunculi.

Most of these principles are still extant in international law, although the current incarnation of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) is a mess. This mess is, in part, due to the failure of the drafters of UNCLOS III to take the threat of piracy seriously. Another big part of the problem is they were a bunch of bureaucrats and sea lawyers with a serious progressive agenda and a bad case of the "be a victim" mentality.

Piracy is not a minor or isolated problem in 2009. It is not confined to Somalia and it's getting worse in a lot of places. Check out this excellent map showing global pirate attacks so far in 2009 alone. You can drill down and get actual incident reports from the individual data points. Want more? Download this Google Earth overlay to get aimpoints for nearly all the pirate bases and infrastructure in Somalia.

The stubborn determination of many among us to be victims, and make victims of the rest of us, baffles me. There are many in the international naval and maritime community who overtly state its easier to pay ransom than to defend yourself, because "you might hurt the ship or some of the other crew".

The piracy problem isn't really that hard to solve. But it's nearly impossible without a spine.

Pyrates!

2009-04-09T19:17:00.000-07:00

Arrgh! I love pirates! Unfortunately the pirates I love are not quite the same as the ones who are getting all the media these days:

The romantic, swashbuckling Pirates of the Caribbean do still exist - I've met and swashed buckles with them. Unfortunately, the pirates getting most of the action these days are not quite so romantic:

Actually these guys look a little more swashbuckling than I expected when I googled pictures of them:

Recently these guys have really made a name for themselves, despite the (supposedly) intense international effort to keep them at bay.

It's been really hard lately to sympathize with the good guys in the pirate war, because the good guys have behaved so much like Governor Swann in Pirates of the Caribbean:

Audacity seems to be prohibited by the sea lawyers who control the world's navies these days, not to mention the merchant lines.

There was a truly dramatic, even audacious, incident yesterday, however, when the heroic crew of the US-flagged MV MAERSK ALABAMA managed to overpower an armed boarding party of pirates, only to have their Captain taken hostage by the retreating buccaneers. There is a story that Captain Richard Phillips surrendered himself to protect the rest of the crew. It's a little fuzzy at this point exactly what happened but it appears certain that Captain Phillips is undoubtedly an old-fashioned hero.

The bigger question is why ships continue to steam unprotected and defenseless through waters that the whole world knows, at this point, is infested with pirates? Also why, with many, many naval vessels, from many countries, operating in Somali waters, the pirates still operate with relative impunity. The excellent navy blog Information Dissemination (the very term makes me cringe) has a very good discussion of the difficulty of the situation.

The arguments do not impress me, however. This isn't really a complicated problem. The core of the issue is the "be a victim" mentality that infests all mature bureaucrasies. Information Dissemination sums it up succinctly:

The United States Navy looks incapable of stopping the piracy problem off Somalia under the current policy, but the US is not alone. The entire worlds naval power collected to fight piracy off the Horn of Africa is equally incapable, and that reality should give our national leaders pause. Piracy is not a strategic threat to the United States, although the side effects of ongoing successful piracy actions can develop into one. The real problem is that the former fishing community of a failed state is achieving continuous tactical success against the worlds largest naval powers, and the naval powers of the global community led by the United States Navy surface warfare community is not only powerless to prevent it, they claim their powerless status, and don't seem to care how powerless they are.

The US Navy has every reason to figure this problem out, because any adversary of a major naval power has a clear tactical example in the form of Somalia piracy for how to conduct a successful commerce raiding strategy against a major maritime power. The complete absence of alarm in the United States Navy surface warfare community that appears to accept being incapable of dealing with this problem should give political leaders serious concern.

The unwillingness of the good guys to tolerate, much less promote, audacity in the war against the pirates is just plain depressing. The Maersk shipping line has a distinguished and honorable history. They are not a bunch of cowards or wussies. There is no international law, convention, or sanction preventing them from defending themselves on the high seas. It is only the bureaucrats and sea lawyers who go on television and say "merchant sailors aren't trained to defend themselves with weapons". They are capable, apparently, of defending themselves with their bare hands against desperate Somalis armed with fully-automatic rifles, but can't be trusted with a few shotguns?

“Use of armed crews who didn’t sign up to fight is a bad idea,” says Giles Noakes, chief maritime security officer for BIMCO, an international association of ship owners. “The industry believes very strongly that it’s not for the companies to train crews to use firearms and then arm them…. If you open fire, there’s potential for retaliation. Crews could get injured or killed, to say nothing of damage to the ship.”

It's all evil, stupid bullshit, and it is so disgusting I can't stand to even think about it. Merchant sailors not trained to use weapons? Ever hear of the Battle of the Atlantic? Half a dozen shotguns could prevent probably 95% of all pirate attacks.

At this point we know where the pirates come from, how they operate, and where they can be found. The world's navies and political leaders, however seem incapable of little more than hand-wringing and excuses. The US Navy's staff responsible for this sorry situation, the Naval Forces Central Command HQ in Bahrain, is an embarrassingly incompetent failure, from the top to the bottom. They make excuses that they aren't allowed to take action by their political leadership, when the truth is they are incapable of planning and executing an operation to walk across the street for a schwarma.

So while the Somali pirates may not be quite as appealing as Geena Davis, they do fit the historic stereotype of the bold seagoing brigands of centuries past. They have way more in common with their 18th and19th century counterparts than we appreciate so far.

We should be splattering them across the waves on sight, which would quickly teach them that sailing under the black flag is ultimately a bad choice, in the tradition of Woodes Rogers, Chaloner Ogle, Stephen Decatur, and David Porter. Instead we've been teaching them that crime does pay, and pays especially handsomely on the high seas, so we're only seeing more and more of it.

Cars, Trains and Feet

2009-04-09T06:26:00.000-07:00

Jim has a recurring feature “Things That Chap My Ass”. I’m generally a bit less irascible than Jim, but my posterior gets rubbed raw on a regular basis, and this rant has been percolating a long, long time. You see, I have a really long-assed commute, and I rub elbows with John Q. more before 8:00AM than most of you do all day, unless you’re in retail. And if you’re in retail – my deepest sympathy to you. So, let’s itemize the irritants, shall we? The things that apply the industrial belt sander to the ‘ol cheeks, as it were.

This item might seem unrelated to commuting, but the very first irritant that chaps my ass in the morning is my Motorola Razor. See, my commute involves a car (sharing the road with some of the craziest assholes to find a driver’s license as a prize in a box of caramel popcorn), a train where my attention is forcibly focused on America’s poor passenger rail infrastructure (as well as its burgeoning obesity problem), and my own two feet traveling through one of the highest profile terrorist targets in the word (not to mention the fact that I walked over this piece of real estate only an hour before it did its Mt. Redoubt impression).

So, the wife likes to know I completed each leg of the journey safely. Hence the need for a good phone. Which the Razor ain’t. Let’s start with the battery system. We bought 2 Razors about 3 years ago. Right out of the fucking box one charger worked with both, and one with only one phone. Then I got a Crackberry for work. The Crackberry took the Motorola charger just fine. The Razor was not quite so compatible with the BB charger. “Unauthorized charger?” WTF is that? Do 12V converters need a security clearance, now? I didn’t realize HOMESEC was reaching that far. And how come a phone with about 10 times the functionality of the Razor takes both chargers? And how come third-party car chargers don’t trigger the “unauthorized charger” error?

What’s worse is that as the thing has aged, it’s started acting up. Sometimes when I turn it on, I get an “unauthorized battery” error. WTFF? The battery has not been out of the phone since I bought it. Now the damn thing won’t charge on any charger until I turn it on and off a few times. If the phone powers up, how is the battery unauthorized? If you’re going to put in all sorts of useless shit to try to get me to by your name brand charger when I forget mine in some third world hotel room, at least make sure your shit is compatible with itself. ALL the fucking time.

Earth to Motorola: Microsoft’s business model only works when you have a near-monopoly. The word for today, or at least the word for the day I purchase my next phone, is Nokia.

But I’m not done with the phone. Now let’s go to the USB headset interface – which by the way, is also the USB interface for the charger – you can’t use both at once. I resisted a Bluetooth headset for a long time, but the fucking marketers at Motorola decided to try to force Razor users to get one, because there is no 3mm jack on the Razor. You have to use this USB dongle in order to use a wired headset - and the dongle has a huge bulb like a colonoscopy bag. In fact that’s a pretty good metaphor in more ways than one. And fuck you, Motorola if you thought I was going to buy one of your pieces of crap. I got a Jawbone.

The phone also comes with a speakerphone option – which is good given the problems with the headset interface. But both phones seem to have a random number generator built in that determines the speaker and microphone volume levels. Some days it’s great, some days I have to shout, even at full volume. And guess what else? I keep the phone on “vibrate” all the time, but if I have to adjust the volume for the speakerphone, it adjusts the volume on everything, ringtone and all. And guess what else? Oh you know this POS only gets better. Adjusting the volume on the speakerphone while in vibrate mode shifts the ring mode from vibrate to audible tone. I often forget that, until it rings in the middle of a meeting.

We won’t even talk about the user menus, and the fact that the most-used functions are often buried several layers in. OK, I can’t help myself - when you go to the “Contacts” section of your phone tools, what are you most often doing, adding a contact, or trying to reach an existing one? Unless you are a teenager with a severe case of hormone poisoning, I’m guessing the latter. So why is the default screen “Add Contact”?

When Jim rules the world and I am Commissar for Technology Enforcement, some Motorola engineers and I are going to have a little talk. And that dog and pony show is going to involve topics like “Listening to your customers”, “Too many useless features”, “The new requirement that you use the devices you design for 2 years” and “The Commissar’s favorite negative reinforcement tool – the Tabasco and sriracha enema”.

At least the POS was “free” with our Verizon contract.

Now, that we’re done with the phone, let’s continue to follow my journey chronologically, shall we? I get in the car and turn on the radio. Ah, the soothing sounds of Country music. Punctuated by news I need, such as which road has been blocked by New England dipshit motorists driving while Jersey and getting a crash course (hah) in basic physics. All well and good. Except wait, we get to the next thing that chaps my ass about my commute: local radio.

First on the shit list are the dirtbag, small-time marketing firms who create radio spots for local businesses. You guys suck. If you didn’t suck, you’d have an office on Madison Avenue. But I really don’t care about your lack of talent. What makes you really step up from Hooverville to industrial, turbine-powered vacuum pumping is your two-bit, carnival ride, attention-getting gimmicks. Sirens? Really? What mustachioed dipshit in a cheap, polyester suit sporting burn holes from cigars that smell like rolled-up, used Dr. Scholl’s inserts came up with that one? Let me clue you in on some economic reality – local radio survives on two things – long commutes and people who work in jobs where they can’t have earphones. Otherwise, CDs, MP3s and satellite radio would have ground it into the dust. Therefore, pretty much all of your audience listens to the radio in the car at some point in the day, even if they also catch you at work. I’ll ask again: sirens? Seriously? You thought it was a good idea to piss people off before telling them how the dealership extends a hand to people with bad credit? I mean, with that line I’m thinking that my good credit is going to be subsidizing some deadbeats if I shop there, but if you’ve already pissed me off by making me look for a cop or an ambulance in the rearview, the only way I’ll visit that shithole dealership is if I have a howitzer in tow. Don’t tempt me.

And while we’re on the subject, to my local radio station: don’t think I didn’t notice when the law firm whose building you operate out of was interspersing its name through the celebrity station endorsements so it sounded like they were endorsing the law firm. I guess someone’s agent heard, too, because you cut that out right quick. But you still badger the stars who are willing re-dub their songs to your local prejudices. No, I don’t think that Montgomery Gentry are pissed because the Yankees lost. I’ve heard the song on other stations, and I like the local flavor “Bengals” lends to the song. Not to mention that the overdub is not flawless and it sounds like they hiccupped. And substituting your call letters for the word “radio” in every song where the lyrics mention listening to the radio is plain fucking irritating. Your call letters don’t scan with the rhythm of “radio”. Ever.

One day when I’m rich and famous I’m going to buy your station and make you all sign 5 year, poison pill contracts, with a clause about having the station’s broadcast pumped into your office all day. Quality control, see? About six months later I’m going to switch the format to an eclectic mix of slash metal, modern rap and 70’s easy listening. And Yani. Don’t forget fucking Yani.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject, what is with the high number of lowlife advertisements? We’ll start with the bail bonds company. The only time I hear these ads is on the morning commute, about 5:00 AM. I have not figured this one out. Why? Because 5:00 AM is well past the time that someone’s been picked up for disturbing the peace or DUI and I don’t think they have radios in the drunk tank. So these ads are either for relatives so fed up with the loser in question that their outsourcing their pick-up duties, or it’s for people who are planning to get into trouble this weekend. Either way, I’m not happy they listen to the same station I do.

But the real sandpaper on the cheeks administered by the ads on this station comes from Ultra-90. I hear the ads on my morning commute. I hear them on my evening commute. I hear them on Saturday when the kid is pestering me to find a station playing “Cowgirls Don’t Cry”. News flash – when I’m home there is another Country station I can pick up. You’re violating the first rule of radio – don’t make me want to hurl the receiver out the window.

All you need to know about Ultra-90 is contained in this review. I pretty much figured the lay of the land out from what the company did not say on the radio ads, but allowing one of your DJs to become their local celebrity endorser goes beyond money grubbing well into not serving the interests of your listeners as required by your FCC license. AM formula? PM formula? Exactly the same ingredients? Fire the DJ and grow a conscience. Otherwise, when I buy your station, guess what’s going to be the only item on the company cafeteria menu?

OK, the radio is on, ready to alert me to traffic problems. What next?

Now we’re on the road with the cream of the New England driving crop. I know people who have left Rhode Island (reputed to be some of the worst drivers in the nation) for Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania has a lot of drivers moving in from New England, and quite responsibly will not allow you to pick up one of their licenses without retaking the written exam. These people I know, professional people, from Rhode Island, failed the PA test the first time they took it. That just about says all you need to know about getting a license in New England. Makes you think about the term “Masshole”, doesn’t it? Now do you see why I’m firmly convinced that the franchise for driving licensure in New England is outsourced to a certain subsidiary of the Frito Lay company?

Seriously, at a busy intersection in Rhode Island recently, I actually watched someone come to a stop in the left lane a full 10 meters before the stop line. This is a “T” intersection,. And the only choices at this juncture were turn right or go straight, and the left hand lane had only one choice – straight. This fool puts on his left turn signal, then when the light changes, he proceeds to pull a U turn across 2 lanes of opposing traffic (who were already in motion because their light goes green with the opposing left turn green arrow before our light turns green). The screeching of brakes, it was incredible.

But back to my commute: I’ve just pulled out of the driveway. Where now? Oh yes, on the local roads, where I begin my day. It’s dark when I begin my day. And so we run into the all high beams all the time guy. If you can see the tail lights of the car in front of you, turn off the fucking high beams, asshole. Related to this is the guy driving the truck he uses to haul stuff about twice a year and his damned halogen fog lights. Poorly aimed fog lights. These people are the reason I’m shopping for one of these to mount on my car.

Then we run into the “no headlights in town” guy. It’s dark. Or twilight, which is worse. There are not THAT many streetlights in our town. You are driving a gray minivan. Turn your fucking lights on or I’m going flag you down and jump start your genitals, am I clear?

Then, we get to the gas station, on the days I forget to fill up the day before. And we invariably have the pickup truck taking up 2 bays at the busy gas station by the highway entrance – the only one open at that hour in my podunk town. Listen, dick, the guys who really need those trucks, they are almost always courteous about keeping the other bay open. Your bed liner does not have a scratch on it. Your truck has no company logo. You have a King Cab. So I’m betting you don’t really need that monster to haul your family around, you just want to be able to drop “my truck” into casual conversation. Of course you have a set of fog lights mounted on your bumper. And you never pay at the pump. One of these days when you’re in line to pay on a cold fucking day, I’m going to pop open your door, pry up the mesh covering, and drop a week-old squid down your defroster vent. Have you ever been exposed to a putrefying squid? People won’t hear you coming down the street, they won’t see you coming down the street, they’ll SMELL you coming down the street.

Now for the highway. Most of the irritants on my commute occur on the finely-maintained highways of New England.

Oh, let’s do the maintenance before we catalog the ways in which my fellow drivers piss all over the manual. “Work zones” that have not seen a piece of construction equipment in 6 months need to stop, and stop now. I realize that the Feds had a start date attached to their grant, but they also expected a that “work start” involved just a little bit more than setting up the orange signs to double fines in the area. And when the State Road crew is actually on the job, they have the work ethic of a union steward on retirement day.

How about this? When a project runs late and over budget, we get to tie the project manager to a light pole in the area. For every day and every dollar a project is over budget and over time, every driver who uses that route to get to work gets one good swing at the boss. That will put an end to this creative bookkeeping right quick.

And speed limits. Why in the FUCK would you put a 40mph zone on a three lane fucking highway? Why? There are no more exits per mile on that stretch of highway than in the previous ten miles or the ten miles after, so what gives? Lawmakers who mandate ridiculously low speeds on three lane expressways need to be forced to commute to work via Interstate in a fucking golf cart.

OK, I think I’m done with roads, now for the drivers. Like I said before, the majority of the irritants on my commute come in the 45 minute stretch I spend on New England’s lovely interstate system. Let’s chronicle the major sub-types of shithead, shall we?

The cut off drivers in the entrance lane asshole. Most of New England drives while Jersey, and the biggest asshole Jersey habit is riding in the right lane right over highway entrances while people are trying to get on. All through New England, the entrance lanes are far too short for the job they have to do, by at least 50%. So, if there is room, good drivers (read drivers not from around here) get over into the left lane if they see cars coming onto the ramp. New Englanders, however, will sit in the right lane, causing the pokey pickup (see below) to come to a FULL FUCKING STOP in a lane that’s too short to get up to speed even if you come out of the final tight S bend the highway engineers put on the ramp because the project managers could not be bothered to secure the appropriate rights-of-way for a proper exit ramp as fast as you possibly can (which is usually about 40 mph). This is a perfect trifecta of dipshittery (designer, pickup, and Jersey jerk on the highway), but I think we can handle this problem. Once again, when I am Commissar for Technology Enforcement, we are going to have systems installed in all automobiles in New England. This will involve radar and cameras. When those systems detect that the driver of the car is pulling a Jersey, a sign and loudspeakers will pop up out of the roof. The speakers will play Dennis Leary’s “I’m an Asshole” loud enough to wake the dead, and the sign will display the lyrics. This will last for 24 hours, whether the engine is on or not, and the timer will reset itself if the driver pulls another Jersey move. If the system detects the driver is the pickup coot, a sign will pop up saying “Too Timid and Senile to be Allowed on the Road.” THEIR loudspeakers will blare “Rusty Chevrolet” by Da Yoopers, which is funny the first time you hear it, but not so much on the 100th repeat.

The back and forth speeder. Jeezus H Christ on a chrome plated pogo stick, what in the fuck is wrong with you? You climb up my ass when I’m doing 75 in a 65, then, when I get over and let you pass, I meet up with you a mile later doing 60 in the fast lane. Put. The. Phone. Down.

The “match your speed” guy. Closely related to, or often the same person as the previous asswipe. Doing 63 in a 65, then when you go to pass, they catch sight of you in their peripheral vision and suddenly you are both going down the highway at an insane speed. Then, once he knows he’s going to lose the race, he’s back to 63. Dude, you’re joining the state lawmakers in the golf cart.

The afraid to pass the semi guy. I’m following at 4 or 5 car lengths down the highway, you’re doing 72, and I’m OK with that. If you were not in front of me, I’d be doing 75, but I’m not going to pass you for a lousy 3 mph. Then we go to pass the semi and you are down to 60. Seriously, what’s the most dangerous place on the highway? It’s right behind or right beside a semi. So why prolong the pass? I know there’s a Jersey barrier on your left and a swaying rig full of gasoline on the other side, but pretend you’re in the Death Star trench or something. The longer you stay in that situation, the more likely it becomes that when you get to heaven, God will be saying “That was awesome, I saw the fireball from up HERE”. Pass and get the fuck on with your drive.

The tandem. Related to the previous jerk is the asshole doing 66 in the fast lane, when the guy in the right lane is doing 65.5. Pass the motherfucker. Seriously. I’m still a car length behind you, but I can’t see the headlights of the guy in back of me. Shit or get off of the pot.

The pokey pickup. See, where I’m from, pickups are often the hot rod of choice. People soup them up, they put monster truck tires on them, and they drive them fast. Pull the slow semi passing routine on Sothern roads and some good ‘ol boy in a facsimile of Big Foot is going to leave tire tracks on your roof. But north of that Manson-Nixon line, all of a sudden every pickup is driven by a senile old coot in a John Deere cap with no particular place to go. Get. It. Up. To. Speed. Swamp Yankee.

The gas-saver. I actually met one of these at a party once, and it was all I could do not to punch him. Since 55 mph is 10% more fuel efficient (so says one study) than 65, they toodle along trying to reduce their carbon footprint. News flash – that study is old. I actually have one of those instantaneous gas mileage computers in my wagon, and its tubocharged engine is most efficient at 66 or 67, or so says the computer.

And I’ll clue you in on a little basic engineering knowledge that you would have picked up if you hadn’t decided to major in English and take the easiest electives that didn’t get you up before 10:00 AM, thereby avoiding anything useful you could have gotten out of four years of college: what optimizes a single-body system does not necessarily optimize a system with a lot more moving parts.

Let me explain the concept behind stoplights to you. No, seriously, I don’t think you’ve ever thought about what a stoplight means beyond a red light that doesn’t let you get to where you’re going as fast as you’d want to. Have you? I didn’t think so. A stoplight is actually the most common mechanism for optimizing a complex system that you are likely to encounter in your conscious life.

If it was all about you, - if you were the only one on the road - we’d eliminate stoplights and let you run straight through town. But other people need to get where they are going too, and in order to cut down on accidents, we accept inefficiency in any individual journey to optimize the OVERALL efficiency.

Similarly, when you are toodling down the interstate at 55 (or 50 because you don’t know how to push the accelerator enough to maintain speed going up a fucking hill), that semi behind you has to swing out into the left lane at 60 mph if he wants to stay on schedule. But then he drops to 53 going up a hill, making everyone else slow down behind him. Then speed up as the semi pulls in front of you traffic slowly gets unfucked from your little display of moral superiority. Every ounce of gas up and down the whole highway that’s wasted because people who will actually be missed if they don’t get where they are going have to speed up and slow down around your rolling hazard zone? That gas is added to YOUR carbon footprint, not theirs. And God forbid anyone get into an accident because of your shitheadery – THAT carbon usage will get you the title of Bigfoot for the rest of your life.

If you’re that concerned about your footprint, carpool and eliminate some trips, dickhead. I HAVE to be on the road, and sleep is not just nice to have, it’s a safety concern, so I’m not getting up half an hour earlier to poke on the Interstate. The footprint you should be worried about is mine, on your ass.

Finally, we get to the Rhode Island habit of poking on the entrance lane, all the way to the end of the lane, and still entering the 65 mph zone at 40. Look, asshole, that pedal on the right hand side? It’s called the accelerator for a reason. ACCELERATE. Or stay on the local fucking road.

Jeezus I met every one of these dipshits on the road this morning. I’m sure I missed a few subtypes, but that’s what the comments section is for.

Now we get to the commuter rail station. PATH and other commuter rails in the NY metro area are owned by the respective states, but they outsource their actual operations to Amtrak. So you can imagine how efficient they are. I once had a commuter train completely forget my stop. A Local. Supposed to stop at all stops. All I got was a half-assed apology. I really didn’t want to go to Princeton anyway, but my boss wasn’t having any of THAT. Fortunately, she was on the same train, so everyone believed my story.

So, let’s get our tickets, shall we? In typical Amtrak fashion, only one window is open and every day-tripping senior citizen is in line asking 100 stupid questions (seriously, the first time you’re heading into NYC by train is when you’re 68?), so I head right to the automated ticketing machines. And I run right into the gauntlet of yuppie assholes.

OK, dude, you’ve got your suit, you’ve got your wing tips, you’re all ready for that big presentation at the main office in the City. What you don’t have is common courtesy or a fucking clue. Stop trying to look important, stop asking the guy traveling with you, who is similarly blocking the other machine, where the fucking coffee is. That big pink and brown sign back there? Yeah, the one that says Dunkin’ Donuts? That’s where the coffee is, dipshit. No, there is no Starbucks in this station.

And stop trying to loudly talk business at 6 o’fucking clock in the morning. You’re in front of the ticket machines. That means you don’t really belong in the city. You’re attached to some branch office. How do I know? Because the people who belong in the City have monthly rail passes. I don’t belong in the City either, but when I’m done buying my tickets I get the fuck out of the way so the line of people behind me can complete their transactions. Get your ticket, get your caffeine, and get the fuck out of my way. Yuppie bastard.

Now we get on the train. It’s run by Amtrak, so the seats are uncomfortable (and narrow, but we’ll get to that in a moment), at least once a month the lights go out in my car, and at least once a week there is a car with no AC in the summer (and the windows don’t open) or no heat in the winter. The trains sometimes sway like Axle Rose on a bender because the tracks aren’t level, and they don’t police their yards – I was once on a train that hit a parked car.*

I get on the train, though, I have to. More self-important yuppie bastards. Talking on the phone. Add the day-tripping teenagers and private-school commuting teens being, well, teens, and sleep is pretty much impossible. So I break out the lap top.

I must give out “pervert vibes” or something, because the skinny hot chick never sits next to me. Oh no. Well, in her defense, she probably gets hit on a lot. Most of them have regular seatmates they sit with every day. But, as an episodic commuter, I come face to face with the fact that America has an obesity problem, and much of it is resting on my right thigh during my commute on the train. Seven times out of ten I get the guy with the BMI of 45. I’m not kidding about the number – BMI is deceptive when you have a lot of muscle, but believe you me, these people are not hiding muscle underneath that bulk – I lived in Japan and I know what the physique of a sumo wrestler actually feels like sitting next to you on the train. (Yes, they wear those yuukata when out and about, I was always afraid the little cloth belt was going to come undone and the commuter car would get flashed). These Americans are not sumo wrestlers. More like Jell-o wrestlers. Take that metaphor anyway you’d like. My elbows aren’t just tucked into my ribs – there is no room there. My elbows are in front of me and my body is doing some sort of mutated impression of a T. Rex. while I type.

And don’t start on the halitosis. I’m not talking about coffee breath. People, brush your fucking teeth before you inflict yourself on the public.

Finally, we get to NYC. Penn and Grand Central stations are full of non-New Yorkers at 8:00 in the morning. How do I know? Because one New York habit of which I thoroughly approve is their fast walking pace. I spent my first 18 years in the sticks. I walked fast because if I wanted to get anywhere on foot, it was a loooong walk. The first city I ever lived in was Moscow, USSR. People did not have cars, they walked or took the Metro, and they walked fast, especially my peers just out of their hitch in the Army. So I walk fast. So do New Yorkers. NY commuters do not, and the main stations are full of bottle necks – stair cases from the lower tracks, escalators, and wide, grand lobbies than narrow into little passageways. Real new Yorkers fly through them. The under-caffeinated drones in my way do not. Get to work, people. Or the new Commissar for Technology Enforcement is going to make a power grab to include walking in his definition of “technology”, and the enforcers are going to be armed with cattle prods.

Yeah, by the time I’ve finished my 2 hour 45 minute commute and get into my office in time for my 8:30 meeting, I’m in a fine mood. How about you?

* The car was parked parallel to the tracks in a place it was not supposed to be. The driver was not on the tracks, but forgot that trains are generally a bit wider than the tracks themselves. This was in the yard of the final stop for this trian, my stop. I was literally 2 minutes form my stop, maybe 10 minutes by foot. And we sat there. And sat there. I swear, if I ever catch the driver of that car, he's going to be entering a golf cart a school bus demolition derby.

Rental Car Reviews: Chevrolet Cobalt

2009-04-05T17:36:00.000-07:00

Update:
I'm done with Hertz... another week, another dirty, smelly, raggedy Cobalt. I complained about it at the counter and the agent didn't offer me any alternative. The car, when I found it, was gross. It had what appeared to be bird droppings on the dashboard. I went back inside to the counter to complain more specifically, and all the agents pretended to be busy and determinedly avoided me. They apparently recognized why I had come back. When I turn the car in, I know they won't ask me whether I was satisfied with the rental - they never do, unlike most of the other rental companies. In the future I'll rent from Enterprise, or National. No more Hertz.

Bottom line up front: The absolute bottom of the automotive food chain.

Usually I rent from Enterprise - generally good service, fairly new, clean cars, good prices, and you can print out your receipt online, which is a big plus.

The Prius the other day came from Enterprise. They called it an "upgrade", but since I had asked for a compact car, I didn't really think so, but it was a novelty.

Routinely Enterprise gives me a 2- or 3-class upgrade. Not long ago I was in Salt Lake City with skis - I had reserved a compact (as always), and they saw the skis and gave me a totally duded-up Explorer for no extra charge. If you're renting a car, I recommend Enterprise.

It regularly surprises me how simple stuff in business sometimes eludes seemingly large, smart companies. Enterprise is an example of a good business - giving me a nicer car when they have them sitting around costs them essentially nothing, and now I'm giving them free advertising that will live forever in Google's cache.

On the other hand...

When I fly United (about whom I don't have much good to say either, but they own the only flights in some of the routes I fly), I usually rent from Hertz because I get double miles for the rental. I don't know if Hertz has gone to crap everywhere, but it looks that way to me.

I don't remember the last time I got a car from Hertz that had less than 25000 miles on it, was clean, and didn't smell funky. Even thought they usually have a lot of really fancy cars sitting around, they seem to always give me the crappiest car they have available. Not sure what the point of that might be. And they seem to charge more for it. The rentals are almost always on the expense account or I wouldn't be renting from Hertz. If it was coming out of my pocket I'd do something else.

I usually get a crappier car than I realized was even out there. This time was no exception. Hertz gave me a Chevy Cobalt with about 29000 miles. It was dirty, the carpets were badly stained, and it smelled really strange. It had power nothing - well maybe power steering, but I'm not even sure about that. It was loud, it had weird vibrations, and it used a surprisingly large amount of gas for such a small car.

While I realize this car may not completely represent General Motors' product line, it really seemed to symbolize their situation - a cheap economy car that wasn't very economical and offered a hell of a lot less for the money than most of their competitors. As I was driving it, I kept thinking "this is what the Federal government is throwing away my future to preserve". I kept picturing those $75-per-hour UAW workers assembling this rolling piece of FOD and thinking about moving to Australia, where I could purchase the 60th-anniversary Land Rover Defender 110 brand new for about 45K.

(Defender 110s in the United States is a discussion for another time... I want one, but I'm not willing to pay 7-8 times the global average to have one here in the States.)

The Chevy Cobalt seemed to have essentially nothing to recommend it. The one I drove looks (from brief Googling) to be about $15K new. I can scarcely imagine a worse value. You can have a Toyota Corolla or a Honda Civic for the same money, and the difference in terms of value and quality is more than 100% - it's so dramatic you can't even characterize it. I can think of no more obvious example of what's wrong with GM than the fact that the Chevy Cobalt costs the same as a Civic or a Corolla. Had you told me that was true before I started writing this post I wouldn't have believed it.

If they are the same money, why is Hertz renting Chevy Cobalts? Especially raggedy, stripped-down, bad-smelling Cobalts? There's something going on there that isn't consistent with my understanding of the free market.

I used to think Hertz was associated with Ford. Ford's various small cars are far superior to the GM equivalents - and Ford didn't take any bailout money. While I used to be an actual GM fan and didn't like Fords, the situation has completely reversed in the last 20 years or so. I've driven several small Ford rental cars, and had no significant complaints, although they weren't Corollas or Civics either.

But in recent history I've gotten a steady stream of dirty Chevys, Kias, and Hyundais from Hertz, vs. Fords, Chryslers (who I'm kind of contrarian and positive about), and various quality Japanese models from Enterprise. (Also I don't want to dis Hyundai - some of their latest cars are very good, but the ones I've gotten from Herts were crap.)

We need to let the free market work: crappy products at crappy prices should be allowed to fail in the marketplace. The fact that we're artificially preventing this from happening makes me want to go live in a cave.

日本海軍

2009-04-02T10:32:00.000-07:00

I'm kind of hoping that the Japanese shoot down that NORK missile. US saber-rattling in the area will come to no avail because of Chinese counter-measures. Japan, on the other hand, can take the moral high ground. Not to mention this is no time for the US to re-open wounds inflicted by Bush by throwing its weight around.

I share some concerns about resurgent Japanese militarism a generation or two from now, but it's time for countries other than the US to pony up some capital for their own defense. The militaries of Western Europe are a joke. Not the individual soldiers or units, but their ability to project power (sometimes even within their own territory) - they are wholly dependent on US logistics, as the Tsunami relief effort clearly showed. Japan maintains a maritime security force that can project power beyond its borders, and is much closer to potential hotspots than what is left of the European navies (excluding the UK).

I'm not terribly enamored of the way the Japanese handle their own Imperialist history - the Germans were required to re-apply for admission to the human race after WWII, whereas the Japanese were not, given Stalin's quick occupation of Sakhalin. A divided Japan would have not have served Western interests at all. But the interment of war criminals in Yasukuni Shrine still galls.

I have a personal interest in the enmity between the Chinese and the Japanese - I've lived in Japan and speak Japanese (as does my wife), but my father-in-law is a former KMT soldier who fought them on the ground in Northern China.

I think my father-in-law's attitude is quite instructive. Before the War, his family did business with the Japanese, in fact he had a Japanese godmother. He still speaks Japanese to me when my Mandarin fails. However, he spits every time he sees the Imperial flag (the one with the sun's rays). I think the time to put the emotions of WWII away and ask Japan to take a more active role in the defense of the PAC rim has come.

Nothing will stop the regime in Pyongyang faster than public demonstrations of impotence, and a Japanese intercept would do that quite nicely.

Rental Car Reviews

2009-03-27T20:33:00.000-07:00

New feature here at Refugees: Rental Car Reviews.

I seem to travel every week, and drive a different rental car every week. I'm unlike many people that I usually seek out the smallest, simplest, most modest rental car I can find, because usually that means it will be easier to park, easier to maneuver in traffic, and cheaper to rent and refuel. Sometimes I get a larger more luxurious car anyway, despite my requests, and sometimes I get something completely random.

Last week I was rented a Prius, for the first time. I'd never even sat in a Prius, much less driven one, so it was an interesting experience. I thought about looking into buying one when gas was $4 a gallon, probably like everyone else, but felt like you could get most of the same fuel economy with a different, much simpler and cheaper, vehicle.

So... I got in the Prius and it took me a good while to even figure out how to start it up. Actually, you don't start a Prius, you turn it on, kind of like a golf cart. There's a big round button on the dash that you push, but you have to shove the door-opening key-fob thingy into a slot in the dashboard first.

That sort of sets the tone for driving the Prius: everything about it is a little strange, and different.

The dash in front of steering wheel is blank. The normal instruments (speedometer, fuel guage, etc) are in an LED cluster very far forward, underneath the sloped windshield, near the center of the dash. It took me a while to find them after I figured out how to turn the thing on.

There is a large multifunction display in the middle of the dash, where such things are located, but it has a number of unusual functions, including control of the radio and environmental controls, as well as a very distracting display of the Prius' multi-mode drive train. It shows you graphically whether the electric motor is driving the wheels, the gasoline motor is supplying power, or the wheels are recharging the battery through regenerative braking. The display is somewhat helpful in driving the car in an economical way, but probably somewhat dangerous because it can absorb too much of your attention.

Another display available is cumulative fuel economy, which is more helpful. It shows instantaneous and average mileage, and a chart showing mileage over the last 30 minutes. The most helpful part of that display is a bar graph of instantaneous mileage. Driving to keep that bar graph as high as possible proved to be the best way to get the best mileage.

I was disappointed in how "conservative" the programming of the drivetrain turned out to be. I though I could, by really going easy on the gas pedal, drive around in electric mode for a good while until the battery got low. The gasoline motor is programmed to start however, at the first sign of battery depletion, or the slightest acceleration.

The mileage looked pretty good however, as I was able to score up to 48 MPG on the cumulative mileage display by driving very carefully. But I'm a little sceptical of the display, because when I filled up the tank it looked like I got more like 35 MPG than the 47.9 the display indicated when I stopped for fuel. You'd have to drive the thing quite a bit to determine if the mileage indicated was really correct.

The fit and finish of the vehicle was adequate, but not great for a Toyota. The interior was very modern and unconventional, with strange cupholders, weird controls, etc, but not particularly impressive in terms of quality and appearance. Everything looked like a very cheap plastic, and the upholstery was typical economy-car fabric. I don't know if there is a fancier version of the Prius with a more luxurious interior.

Handling and performance were adequate - pretty good for an economy car, expecially a hybrid. There was a little more acceleration than I expected, and the car didn't feel off balance as I sort of expected.

Cargo room in the back was adequate - actually pretty good as a rental car because it was easy to get the suitcases and luggage into the baggage compartment.

Overall I didn't come away thinking I wanted to run out an buy a Prius, but it was very adequate as an economy car. I don't actually know what they cost, but I could see how some people would really like them.

Also I don't know if its possible to reprogram the car to make it less prone to starting the gasoline engine and get better gas mileage - from what I saw it looked like it should be easy.

Boy is this some exciting internet content or what!

Call of the (Socially Inept) Wild

2009-03-27T06:51:00.001-07:00

We live next to a State game preserve. Like many in the Northeast we have a deer problem. And a coyote problem. Probably 3 - 4 times a month, the coyote pack takes down a deer within 500 meters of the house, waking us up with the noise of the kill and the fighting over the scraps afterwards.

Once in a while someone gets lost from the pack and spends half the night howling like some sort of mutated wolf with his testicles in a vise.

The other night we had something new. A coyote sat in the woods right behind the house and yipped. Not howled. Yipped. It sounded something like "arrrip, arrrip, arrrip". He'd repeat this about 10 times, shut up for 30 seconds or a minute, and just when you started to drift back to sleep, he'd start up again. Just when I'd had enough, and decided that getting fully awake enough to reach for the shotgun was warranted, he stopped. Did I mention the mangy cur pulled this at 2:30 AM? On a day I had to get up at 4:15 to catch my train?

The next day, my wife, who was having a bad day dealing with stupid people, mentioned that the coyote was just one in a line of mouth breathers she'd been dealing with. "I'm surrounded by idiots. Event he local wildlife is retarded. Come on, he didn't figure out that the pack either couldn't hear him or was so embarrassed by his lame-assed howl that they were lying quiet in the woods pretending to be asleep?"

She's right. He was probably the coyote equivalent of the geek who always shows up at the gathering uninvited, unshowered and smelling of cheese.

She and I have had this conversation before about sharks. The kelp-hugging ecologists love to say: "Sharks like seals. If you don't look like a seal, you won't get bitten. They bite you by mistake."

Yeah, right. Most sharks prefer seals. Most people don't prefer stinky tofu. But it is on the menu in some restaurants.

So one of the rules I live by is to always be on the lookout for the retarded shark*.

*The retarded coyote is not going to live long enough to put his genes into the pool if he pulls that shit again.

Your Amusing Cultural Misunderstanding of the Day

2009-03-25T09:00:00.000-07:00

My wife was not born in America. She did not arrive on our sunny shores until she was 11. However she did complete High School here. This means that she speaks English without an accent, save for the slight taint of New Yorkese in words such as daughter, and a twinge of Southern she picked up from me.

That lack of an accent can fool you. Stuff that we learned in elementary school, stuff that wasn't repeated in middle or high school, often passes her by. Between worlds, she is, never totally at home in either one.

So, the other day she got ahold of one of those Scholastic magazines they use to teach elementary school kids about stuff - usually there's one for every holiday. St. Paddy's day was no exception. Now, despite the Prussian surname, my background is heavily Scotts (Clan Munro) - Irish (Brady). So the wife calls me the other day and says:

- "wow, the Shamrock is a plant"

- "uh, yes, dear, how did you make it though school in NY not knowing that?" o.O

- "we had Italians and blacks, no Irish"

- "but you went to school in New York City"

- "the Italians weren't big on St. Patrick"

- "but surely, someone hung one up in the hall, sometime as a decoration"

- "if they did, they didn't bother to tell me its name"

- o.O "so, what did you think it was, then?"

- "a rock. possibly, a fake one. 'sham' and 'rock', see? but I thought it was an Irish rock"

- "no, dear, that's the Blarney Stone"

This is from the woman who thought for the longest time that the idiom for "the whole thing" was "the whole kitten and poodle". Well, you have both popular pets, don't you? Made sense to her.

o.O

Sad

2009-03-20T06:51:00.000-07:00

I belong to a group of friends who call themselves the UCF, after a long-running joke that started over on John Scalzi's forum. You can see the logo one of our members made for us over on the side bar.

Yesterday, one of our number suffered a terrible personal loss, and we're noting that and nothing more on our blogs today.

Take time to appreciate those around you who make your life worth living, for truly no one knows what will happen tomorrow.

Hendrix and 'Nam

2009-03-10T05:14:00.000-07:00

I've seen a number of references to the soundtrack to The Watchmen, usually noting that it failed, with the possible exception being in the "The Ride of the Valkyries" in the Vietnam sequence and "All Along the Watchtower". (Thanks Eric)

I'm not a fan of Moore, naked allegory or comic books in general, so I'll probably give The Watchmen a miss. One thing I did notice is that everyone was referring to the Wagner, and some people were referring to the Hendrix song as an homage to Apocalypse Now. I'm sure both are homages to the movie, as I don't expect Moore to have any original insights into the actual war. But the use of "All Along the Watchtower" in Apocalypse Now was motivated first by the stories of the vets themselves.

When I was a kid, my adult world was filled with Vietnam Vets, and to a man they responded to Hendrix in a special way. I never understood why.

Then, years later, I stumbled across this, by Sgt. Mike McCombs.

It is, hands down, the best Vietnam memoir I've ever seen, especially regarding the Special Forces.

And it has a wonderful tribute to Hendrix that bares the soul of the 'Nam Vet like a prayer to Mars:

It's always Jimi I think. His music is pulsing in my head. The headphones vibrate like an arclight and the guitar screams like the Phantoms used to. PurpleHaze, Voodoo Child, The Wind Cries Mary.... They beat on my mind. They twist in corridors long empty of the companionship of the brothers who always knew. The brothers who shared it with me.

And the past lives again. MP gyrates to All Along The Watchtower. Willie's foot taps to Gypsy Eyes. Weet sits and downs shum, body moving to Foxy Lady. It's like Jimi invented this kinda friendship, this kinda thing for all of us. It's the key to remembrance. The key to old friendships, somehow not quite dead. Though they all are. 'Cept when Jimi plays.

We were all musical conservatives, really. Well..., mostly. But Jimi picked up a guitar and strummed our souls with sounds like we'd never heard. The heart and the mind throbbed with the bass, the nerves trying to keep up with the rip. The music was not our style, but we lived by it; we loved it. Highway Chile, Long Hot Summer Night. Life blood. You were more likely to hear Bach there than Rock 'n Roll. But Jimi was there - in every hootch, in every meal, in every breath we took, in every waking hour. In many of the sleeping one.

Maybe it was 'cause he was dead, like so many we knew. Maybe it was 'cause he was different, like we thought we were. Or maybe he just found what really counted to all of us. Crazy fookin' music for a crazy fookin' war. Dunno. Just was. Just is. The spokesman of an age, the poet laureate of the Viet Nam War.

According to the SF rumor mill, Sgt. McCombs requested "Purple Haze" be played at his funeral.

When you get time, go immerse yourself in the words of the good sergeant. He died in 1997, but someone ought to remember him by making a movie out of his recollections. I'd watch it.

Brain Rinse

2009-02-25T12:12:00.000-08:00

“The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot stove lid again. But he won't sit upon a cold stove lid, either.” – Mark Twain

Jim has made several interesting posts on information warfare.

Of all the words he’s written on the subject, the most important quote is this one:

When information arrives, how many folks ask themselves: How was this information acquired? Is it complete? Is it accurate? Is it biased. Is it relevant? Is there enough detail? Do I accept it because it reinforces what I think I know, or do I reject it for the same reason? How can I verify it? How can I test it? If I can't test and verify the information, do I accept it anyway? If so, why?

Those who fail to ask themselves such questions place themselves and those who depend on them, at a significant disadvantage - they will always be at the mercy of those who can observe the universe critically, adjust their worldview appropriately, decide and act.

I have an affinity for that type of inquiry because I am an accredited professional in information warfare – I hold an MBA with a subspecialty in marketing. Some segment of society wages information warfare on the individual practically every day of his or her life. And the individual wages it right back.

I’ve lately been noticing one facet of human thought that is probably closely related to, in fact may be one of (before you nitpick, please remember I said one of) the underlying causes of, true believer syndrome.

Permit me to take a bit of an excursion of ascientific fancy.

When we humans walked the savannahs, death stalked us with pointy teeth and twitching tails. While the human herds relied on each other to look out for danger, each person also double-checked his peers.

Along with that danger came a certain doggedness and trust in one’s own instincts. If a primitive human thought the face of a predator had shown momentarily between the branches of a certain bush, he or she might be inclined to skirt that area even when others in the group see no danger. And, if that human were correct, his or her descendants would be a little more prolific, and a little more cautious, and a little more apt to stick ideas that they knew, or even just suspected, to be true (rather than new ideas that might be more fruitful, but also might be false) than the rest of the herd. Nature is a bit more harsh in punishing false negatives than false positives. We humans are wired to avoid Type II error, because it might eat us.

Mind you, the kind of mind that took the whole scenario apart and figured out that the predator only used those hiding places for certain times of the year when it was migrating and realized that in the other times of the year that tree was a good place to hide to do the human’s own hunting is the kind of mind that would be most useful in a highly technical environment. Unfortunately, that’s also the kind of mind that takes risks and gets eaten more often.

Now, the scenario I just outlined was something I pulled out of…thin air, yeah, that’s it. But I suspect that something very similar actually went into the natural selection of human beings. This is probably also related to our propensity to see patterns where no pattern exists, as my friend Eric said:

We innately despise the idea the universe is random and uncontrollable and grotesquely unfair. It's contrary to our natures. The same litters of brain cells that help a lemur make it to the next branch or a chimp spot the leopard in the brush just happen, I think, to make it all-to-easy to see order reigning in strings of unrelated and meaningless coincidence.

Human beings tend to believe things long after they’re disproven. The more the belief is tied to pattern recognition, per Eric’s point, the harder it is to shake. I do believe that this is related to the fact that to ancient humans, the face they thought they saw in the acacia tree might just be a lion, whether or not anyone else in the tribe saw it, too.

Once a piece of stupidity gets internalized, it takes a lot of repetition of fact to shake it out of the heads of the majority of people. As Terry Pratchett said: “A lie can run around the world before the truth gets its boots on”.

I would add as a corollary that an old truth is like a barnacle. You have to scrape it off when it’s no longer true, it doesn’t fall off by itself. Received wisdom that has shown itself to be valid, even if only once, is very, very hard to shake. This is true even when that piece of information is manifestly out of date. There might be a lion under that tree after all.

There is, in marketing, a concept called the “first mover advantage”. If the first product to market is given enough lead time, and fills a need well enough, it is often impossible to dislodge for decades, even generations. Think Frisbee. Think Kleenex. The classic example, the classic practitioner of this, is Procter and Gamble.

When P&G launched the first liquid dish detergent, it was billed as the Dawn of a new era. Thousands of housewives gratefully used what was a revolutionary product. Have you ever tried to wash dishes with homemade soap? I have. My grandparents were poor and frugal, and my grandmother made her own pumice and other soaps used for everything from scrubbing tractor parts to dishes to removing the dirt and top layers of skin from a kid’s hands. Using soap to wash dishes sucks. Dawn was and is a great product.

Dawn is still, years after its launch, the leader in its class. Kids use what their moms used. I did. Mom used Dawn, and that’s the brand I bought when I left for college. There are families whose forebears were richer than my grandmother and they are on the fourth generation of Dawn loyalists.

But Dawn is on the expensive side of the category, as it can afford to be, with that kind of loyalty. P&G is also famous for offering several different products to fit various segments of the market. And so, Joy was born. Now, the next time you go to the Wal-Mart, pick up a bottle of Joy and a bottle of Dawn at the same time. Did you realize that they were both P&G products, or did you think they were competing companies? Even if you realized that they were both P&G entities, did you ever look at the patent numbers on the bottles?

Now, I’m not privy to P&G trade secrets, and maybe Joy has a slightly different blend of the surfactants covered in those identical patents, but the smart money is on a common blend with different colorants and perfumes added at the end of the manufacturing process. Perhaps there’s a dilution factor, but I dilute the stuff before using it anyway. I now use Joy, and have ever since I took my first marketing class that used P&G as a case study.

If you pay more for Dawn than for Joy, I believe that you’ve lost a skirmish in the information war, you haven’t scraped the barnacle off of your hull, directly because of what I was talking about: old wisdom is hard to shake and seldom challenged in what we in marketing call a “low involvement purchase”. If there were two identical cars at two different prices, a lot more people would pick up on that because a consumer’s conscious involvement in a purchase is directly proportional to the amount of money at stake - although the Mercury brand always struck me as a little odd in this respect.

But a lot of people who might read the two paragraphs above will still use Dawn.

Conmen, tricksters, marketers and intelligence agents realize that once an idea gets into someone’s head, even if it is disproven in a way that the rational brain realizes is legitimate there is an emotional residue akin to an aftertaste that colors perceptions. Unless the new idea totally dominates the old one, the old one tends to stick. This is at the core of the marketing adage that “perception is reality.

I hold advanced degrees in both marketing and science, so I’ve always been at war with that perception = reality bromide. Perception defines the reaction to reality. The scientific marketer asks “at what point does reality overcome perception in a human’s response to his or her environment”. The “high-involvement” decisions I talked about above give one clue. Even in low involvement decisions, at some level of superiority humans forget the aftertaste and go for a new flavor. Once again, from the P&G archives comes an example that shows that the first mover advantage can be overcome: the story of Tide laundry detergent.

In the 1920s, Americans, even those with washing machines, used soap flakes as detergent. Gray clothes, rings around the collar, and undissolved soap were common, especially in hard water. In 1933, P&G introduced Dreft, the first liquid laundry detergent. It was considerably better than soap flakes in hard water, but only marginally better at heavy soiling. But it was the first mover, and did reasonably well. During WWII, a P&G scientist defying orders from management to drop the problem (which had been classed as insoluble) came up with the formula for Tide. It sat on the shelf until wartime restrictions lifted. The delay was probably fortunate for P&G, because, after the war, sales of washing machines skyrocketed, allowing for a spectacular product launch of Tide. Dreft was left in the dust because Tide’s superiority was so great even loyalists had to agree that Tide was better.*

Moving from the realm of commerce, the more insidious form of this phenomenon I call “mental aftertaste” is that on many topics, there is no way for the layman to perform a test such as directly comparing the washing efficacy of Dreft and Tide that once and for all changes their perceptions. Once the tone has been set by the first mover, it extremely, extremely difficult to shake a perception. You can prove to people that a particular astrologer is a fraud and they will continue to believe in astrology in general. You can show them the studies that have debunked the connection between aspartame and brain tumors, and there is still the fuzzy feeling that aspartame is just not natural, and that there is something wrong with it. Never mind that they can’t articulate exactly what the harmful effect is – it’s just bad. They fall back on the aphorism that artificial things are never good for you (give me azythromycin over mold-derived penicillin any day). And they never acknowledge, probably never realize, that their hostility is tied to the emotional response elicited by those poorly run and poorly reported-upon stories about aspartame and brain cancer. The rational argument has been disproven, but the emotional aftertaste remains.

Conspiracy theories rely on this habit of thought. So do medical myths. How many people still believe that cellphones might cause some form of harm, even if they concede the data show there’s no link to brain cancer? How about high voltage lines?

The sad thing is that people who don’t recognize and modulate (not eliminate, modulate) this tendency of human thought become sheep at best, conspiracy theorists at worst. For the last several years the anti-vaccinationists have been taking a beating on the logical front with several studies giving pretty good evidence that there is no link between the thimerosol preservative formerly used in vaccines and the incidence of autism.

At the beginning of this year, several very shocking revelations about the ethics of the lead author of the original study that should have demolished any credibility that the MMR / Gut / Measles Virus hypothesis ever had. Andrew Wakefield faked the data. He made inappropriate compensation to his subjects for their participation. He was paid by ambulance chasers to find a link between vaccines and autism. His work is totally discredited.

And yet, even when forced to acknowledge that there is no link between either the measles virus or thimerosol (now completely absent from vaccines), parents in the Autism community will still look at vaccines with suspicion. Any minor news item about adverse reactions to vaccines, no matter how rare, no matter how mild, will be freshly jumped upon with cries of “see, we were right!”. It’s sad, really, considering all the people this has harmed. The well has been poisoned, and even after the poison has been neutralized, everyone thinks they taste almonds in the water.

I’m willing to bet something similar will happen with the LHC. Even though Wagner, Plaga, and Rössler have been exposed as cranks and frauds, people are still uneasy about the collider, not because of anything specific, but because the emotional aftertaste of the Wagner lawsuits has primed them to believing that there is something vaguely sinister about the experiment. When scientists, with very good reasons, laugh at their fears, it’s called arrogance. And yet, had Wagner and Rössler not come to the fore, would anyone think twice about the safety of the machine? Other than the very mundane, but very real concern of mechanical failure, that is?

Our human habits of thought make us susceptible to certain weapons in the information warfare arsenal. This is a weakness. But not a totally harmful one. In fact, I think that it is likely that having this weakness also gives us the ability to experience hope. One reason I am such a fan of science, to the point where I actually became a professional in it, is the power of the scientific method to counteract human gullibility while preserving hope.

Scientists have a lot of personality quirks and annoying traits, but the one trait that is much more common in that tribe than in the general population, one the general population would do well to emulate is the forced habit of washing one’s brain of previously held notions when evidence – tested evidence – proves those notions wrong.

*People with small children will probably immediately recognize that P&G made lemons out of lemonade by repositioning Dreft as a more gentle detergent suitable for infant clothes.