Internet motoman....

Fun article on e-mail delivered by scooter...

...Since the system went into place last September at the new elementary school here in Cambodia's remote northeast corner, solar panels have been powering three computers. Once a day, an Internet "Motoman" rides a cherry red Honda motorcycle slowly past the school. On the passenger seat is a gray metal box with a short fat antenna. The box holds a wireless Wi-Fi chip set that allows the exchange of e-mail between the box and computers. Briefly, this schoolyard of tree stumps and a hand-cranked water well becomes an Internet hot spot.

It is a digital pony express: five Motomen ride their routes five days a week, downloading and uploading e-mail. The system, developed by a Boston company, First Mile Solutions, uses a receiver box powered by the motorcycle's battery. The driver need only roll slowly past the school to download all the village's outgoing e-mail and deliver incoming e-mail...

There's an inetresting insight into what Third World people need as the villagers debate what to put in their first e-mail message...

..."I think we should send a message to the governor, asking for land titles," said Kim Seng, 53, who owns a mud-floor restaurant, as his wife listened from a hammock. Conjuring up the power and prestige of a letter sent by computer, he added confidently, "The governor will pay attention to our issues."...

In many places development is stunted because people can't use their homes or land as collateral for loans, because there is no system for creating clear titles.

Mississippi evaporates, bears and raccoons hardest hit...

Jay Random found this quote:

In the space of 176 years, the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself 242 miles. That is an average of a trifle over a mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oölitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upward of 1,300,000 miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod.

– Mark Twain, with an early example of a failed model in the earth sciences

tower of lies...

Wretchard writes:

...The strangest thing about the entire episode was how little anyone in the BBC knew about the actual facts. What Kelly really said. What Gilligan really heard. What the intelligence report really described. The very men who pretended to tell the world about the nuances of the Arab-Israeli conflict and about the cultural currents on a planet hostile to America, could not in the end tell themselves what was in their own correspondent's electronic notebook: even though they had built a towering castle of lies upon it. In a building festooned with telephones, awash in computers, with journalists from the best Oxbridge colleges, nobody knew. Nobody knew...

... In organizations of a certain type, where things must always be as they are imagined, the Emperor must always be magnificently clothed; and the last Five Year Plan always an unparalleled success. Survivors who report that their units have been wiped out are shot at once because such things never happen in the Red Army....

#143: He's "not buying it." No evidence needed...

KRUGMAN TRUTH SQUAD

In Where's the Apology (01/30/04) Paul Krugman tries to leverage two recent reports, one by David Kay and the other by Lord Hutton to bolster the anti-war left's position that Bush (and, to a lesser extent, Blair) are guilty misleading their countries into waging war. He comes a cropper because the case he needs to make requires two steps. First, that the prewar intelligence was weak or deficient and second (and more important), that Bush and Blair deliberately hyped the intelligence to promote war. After some grandstanding and smoke and mirrors rhetoric, Krugman finally faces his problem directly with this paragraph (we added CAPS for emphasis).

"True, Mr. Kay still claims that this was a pure intelligence failure. I DON'T BUY IT: the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has issued a damning report on how the threat from Iraq was hyped, and FORMER OFFICIALS warned of politicized intelligence during the war buildup. (Yes, the Hutton report gave Tony Blair a clean bill of health, but many people — including a majority of the British public, ACCORDING TO POLLS — regard that report as a whitewash.)"

Notice that Krugman's case, as usual, comes down to what he's "not buying" or what some leftwing research group is claiming or what unnamed officials warn or some polls show. Ultimately, the Kay and Hutton reports are of no help to him at all.

He ends this pitiful column on this weak note.

"Still, the big story isn't about Mr. Bush; it's about what's happening to America. Other presidents would have liked to bully the C.I.A., stonewall investigations and give huge contracts to their friends without oversight. They knew, however, that they couldn't. What has gone wrong with our country that allows this president to get away with such things?"

The title of this column, Where's the Apology, says it all. Life would be so much simpler for PK if Bush would just confess.

[The Truth Squad is a group of economists who have long marveled at the writings of Paul Krugman. The Squad Reports are synopses of their discussions. ]

The great blanched beast...

Natalie Angier has a fascinating article on Polar Bears in the NYT:

....Yet as a handful of hardy researchers continue to study the biology and behavior of the polar bear, they are unearthing ever more impressive and sometimes mystifying details about the great blanched beast. They have discovered that full-grown male bears play with each other for hours on end, an extremely rare behavior among adult animals. Moreover, they play at the most improbable time of year: after the long summer fast, when they are gaunt and famished and by any ordinary calculation should be conserving calories rather than frittering them away on sports.

Researchers have also learned that the bears can switch back and forth rapidly between a normal physiological state and one akin to hibernation. During the summer months, when the Arctic ice retreats and polar bears have no base for hunting seals, they migrate onto land, eat almost nothing, and lapse into a state of what is called "walking hibernation": the heart rate slows, the body temperature falls, they cease urinating or defecating, and they recycle nitrogen...

I followed a link (thanks to John Ellis) because Natalie Angier wrote one of my favorite books on science, Natural Obsessions : Striving to Unlock the Deepest Secrets of the Cancer Cell, which I highly recommend. It's a rare combination, digging seriously into biology and at the same time showing us the most fascinating personalities.

Support local Beatniks...

I posted this as a comment to Pedro's post on Bush supporting the National Endowment for the Arts. Someone asked why Conservatives thought this was bad...My take:

It's bad because it's no business of the Feds to decide what art should flourish. And because the ordinary taxpayer should not be forced to provide money to artists who openly despise him and his values (and his intelligence, and his taste, and his clothes, and his coffee, and his traditional morals, and his belief in American freedoms, and his desire to censor Saddam's chipper-shredder deconstructionism.)

On the other hand, it's not quite as bad as some attention-getters describe. A large part of what's subsidized is quite reasonable and sensible stuff. And often when you hear shrill despair because the NEA is subsidizing somebody's trampling-on-the-cross performance art, the truth is that they gave a grant to a museum to cover, say, 25% of one season of art shows. And maybe one of the shows is loathsome, but the NEA never supported that one in particular, and probably didn't even know it was going to happen...and likely the show organizer didn't know what he was going to get.

The NEA isn't handing out checks to beret-wearing beatniks. It's all much more bureaucratic and stuffy.

Me, I'd like to see a grant go to that Israeli Ambassador to Sweden...

wrap-around guys...

Here's a little more from Omar Masry in Bagdhad. (no permalinks, Jan. 29, 2004)

...As for some of the newer soldiers, they amuse when they show up wearing wrap around dark sunglasses. We used to wear them at first but found that you need to be able to establish eye contact with Iraqis if you want to convey your message, whether its while stuck in traffic or discussing issues outside the Amanat (city hall). One newer brigade commander, a Colonel, tried to come off as real hardcore to us and the locals. He wouldn't wave at any of the Iraqis as we gave him a orientation ride. We get stuck in traffic over near the downtown market district and a little girl walks up and says "I love you", amazingly the facade broke and he cracked a smile, even mustered a "salam" back....  

My posts are accurate (measured by the Gilligan Standard)

Best of the Web notes:

...Meanwhile, the Press Association, a British wire service, quotes a document Gilligan submitted to the Hutton inquiry, in which Gilligan argued that reporters should be allowed a "margin for error": "It is important to have in mind that in the context of political reporting, it can be right to report matters, even if it later turns out that they are untrue."...

Republicans, of course, do not have a "margin of error." Any inaccuracy or mistake is a LIE, and a scandal.

Perhaps we bloggers, when indulging in the almost daily ritual of pointing out errors and omissions in the work of the NYT, BBC, etc, should note that, under the Gilligan Margin of Error Standard, deliberately distorting the news to aid a left-wing agenda is considered to be acceptable.

I've really messed up...

I posted the Pepys diary entry below with the links to the comments on various terms--very bad move. I realized too late that I was pinging all those pages with Trackback pings.

I when I turned "pings' off, it made things worse--I ended up with multiple pings! And now I can't delete the silly thing. [now it's gone]

I sent an e-mail of apologies to the guy who is creating the Pepys blog...

"a pint of sack and a pint of claret"

So cool! Pepys Diary recreated as a weblog!. (Heres an article about it. Thanks to Orrin Judd) All the people and things of interest have links to comments pages. And people are beginning to fill in the comments with information!

You can still get in on the ground floor, this is January of 1660, when the diary begins. Sam Pepys (pronounced "peeps") is young and obscure, but with good connections. he is a fac totem for his cousin Edward Montague, a rising man involved at the moment with engineering the restorationn of the King.

At the office all the morning; dined at home, and after dinner to Fleet Street, with my sword to Mr. Brigden(lately made Captain of the Auxiliaries) to be refreshed, and with him to an ale-house, where I met Mr. Davenport; and after some talk of Cromwell, Ireton and Bradshaw’s bodies being taken out of their graves to-day,1 I went to Mr. Crew’s and thence to the Theatre, where I saw again “The Lost Lady,” which do now please me better than before; and here I sitting behind in a dark place, a lady spit backward upon me by a mistake, not seeing me, but after seeing her to be a very pretty lady, I was not troubled at it at all. Thence to Mr. Crew’s, and there met Mr. Moore, who came lately to me, and went with me to my father’s, and with him to Standing’s, whither came to us Dr. Fairbrother, who I took and my father to the Bear and gave a pint of sack and a pint of claret.

Bargaining chips...

From Ha'aretz, about the terrorist scum being released as "bargaining chips."

Germany has promised to release another "bargaining chip," Lebanese national Muhammad Ali Hamadi, a Hezbollah operative who is serving a life sentence for the murder of American navy diver Robbie Stethem, from Waldorf, Maryland, in Beirut in June 1985. Stethem was a passenger aboard a TWA plane that was hijacked in Athens; he was tortured and murdered in Beirut's airport. Hamadi was arrested two years later in Germany, while trying to smuggle explosives. An indictment was issued against Mughniyeh as well for the Stethem murder; and the U.S. government offered a $25 million reward to anyone responsible for the capture of the Hezbollah terror mastermind...

I HATE this bilge. It should never ever have been tolerated. It is WRONG for us to tolerate the murder of an American Officer. It should not even be thinkable to kill an American. The very mildest response to a first-offense should be to kill a hundred of those terrorist slimesuckers. Second time, a thousand.

If we can't find them, we should kill their families or their friends. If we can't find them, then kill some of the fatuous ninnies who always dote on terrorist psychopaths. (Let the BBC walk in fear...)

Update: Gary notes that "I'm a little over the top."

I am, to be sure. (But what's the use of having a blog if you can't let out a Dean-scream now and then?)

But it just drives me nuts—terrorists slaughter civilians, women and children, blow restaraunts to shreds with bombs stuffed with scrap-metal, and we are supposed to "understand" them and their angst.

If America or Israel fight back wth the same sort of violence, we are "war criminals."

The same crowd is equally indifferent when some murderer is on a killing spree. The poor victims don't even exist for them (unless it's happening in their neighborhood). But once the killer is heading to Death Row, that's "murder," and there are protests and candle-light vigils.

[A certain lefty-screwball invited a group we belong to to a "candle-light vigil" to protest the invasion of Iraq! My blogging and fisking skills enabled me to counterblaste with an instantaneous e-mail to the group which scotched the idea, (and brought me warm thanks from various people who hadn't felt able to speak up.) So perhaps all my huffing and puffing here hasn't been a waste of time!]

On eBay, very cheap...

The US is apparently now getting a lot of the counterfeit tools that have been a problem for a while in Europe. They look just like the familiar brands, sometimes with the brand name, like Makita, sometimes with a different name.

So if you find a brand new power tool cheap at the flea market, or are offered it under the table by a "company rep," (and maybe you think you are getting a deal on stolen merchandise), it's probably you that's getting ripped off.

My suggestion, always buy from a reputable dealer.

The Man Behind the Curtain...

Quoting that invaluable media critic, Cori Dauber:

...But I agree with him that the problem is that the media wants to choose a particular narrative frame for any story, present it to us as if it were "self-evident," and gets very, very, cranky when we want to see "the man behind the curtain." Why do you think the responses to Fox are so over the top, nearly hysterical? By framing stories differently, whether you want to call that conservative spin or something else, the main thing Fox does is to demonstrate that which frame is chosen for a particular story is in fact a choice .....

That's probably why one hears denials, given with a straight face, that there is Liberal bias in the media. Even the possibility is taboo, because it reveals that there is someone behind the curtain, pulling levers and making decisions about what is to be "news," and what is to be ignored...

"briefcase-shaped gasoline can"

Thanks to Harm for this fascinating article on a man who collects hand-made objects from the Soviet era:

...Since inspiration struck in the form of the toothbrush-cum-clothes hook, Arkhipov's collection has grown to include toys, tools, mechanical and electronic devices, and improvised forms of transportation. A few items defy classification, "because there is nothing else like them in existence," Arkhipov said.

Some are whimsical, like the briefcase-shaped gasoline can made by a driver after years of ferrying bosses and their attache cases to work. "I think he didn't even know himself why it turned out this way," Arkhipov mused. "He must have dreamed of becoming a boss himself."...

...Many of Arkhipov's objects fall into the category of professions or hobbies that simply couldn't be pursued without personal ingenuity. Soviet stores didn't provide amateur filmmakers with captioning devices or weekend ice fishermen with reels, baskets and rods. In the crisis years of the early 1990s, even firefighters found themselves making their own axes.

Arkhipov has also turned up quirky domestic niceties that few Western consumers would think possible to make by hand -- a flowerpot holder made of an old vinyl record, a hair curler-turned-paint roller, a food tin recycled as a calculator holder....

God made the 20th Century to teach us that the notion that things work better when experts plan them is a fallacy. It's a pity that a hundred-million or so had to die to illustrate the lesson. But now we got it. Right?

#142: Quandary for the Left

KRUGMAN TRUTH SQUAD

We've said before and we will say it again. Thank God for small deficits. They keep the left in line because they can't grow government without raising taxes on the "rich." And, conservatives can't cut taxes further without slowing the growth of government by controlling spending.

Today's column by Paul Krugman, Red Ink Realities (01/26/04), is a perfect example of this quandary for the left. He's completely flummoxed! Clearly he thinks we are not spending enough, but, because of that nasty old deficit, he ends up pushing for higher taxes on the top 5% of income earners. But that's a non-starter. The top 5% starts at about $125,000. Thus a husband and wife each earning $75,000 are well into this bracket and are about as middle class as you can get these days. They pay the full load of payroll taxes, the full load of college tuition and they qualify for few if any tax breaks. They are the real victims of our current tax system.

So why doesn't Krugman want to soak the top 1% instead? Simple. There's not enough money there. The top 1% already pay 35% of the income tax. How much does Krugman think they should pay? 50%? 60%? Trust us, he'll never say.

He ends the column this way:

So here's a test for the Democratic contenders: details of your proposals aside, which of you can do the best job explaining the ongoing budget con to the American people?  

We would suggest another test:

Who will define the middle class by income bracket and then explain that anyone in that bracket gets a tax cut; anyone above it gets a tax increase.

If they all did that the soak-the-rich con would be over.

But what about the outlook for the deficit? Krugman continues to say the deficit is exploding and we keep saying it is constructively small. In fact, the latest projections [PDF] by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office agree with us. Even assuming the current tax rates are made permanent as Bush has proposed and that the Alternative Minimum Tax (ATM) is indexed to inflation at some point, the annual US deficit is still comfortably in the 2% to 2.5% range for the next 10 years. That's good enough to qualify the US for the Euro zone. If France and Germany are kicked out for violating the deficit guidelines we could take their place.

Just kidding!

[The Truth Squad is a group of economists who have long marveled at the writings of Paul Krugman. The Squad Reports are synopses of their discussions. ]

Heartwarming...

Nathan Scharansky told us how the prisoners in the Soviet Gulag would pass tiny scraps of paper with bits of the speeches of Ronald Reagan. Amazingly, Reagan's message of freedom and hope flowed by a sort of capillary action to the most remote and guarded corners of the globe. And the sophisticates and intellectuals who scorned him...what desperate people ever clung to their words? Who remembers them? What torch of liberty did they light?

Now it's happening again. Once again the theorists and "power-to-the-people" types are frothing with contempt at the thought of American values and freedom contaminating the world. And once again a president's speeches cannot be walled away from desperate people...

This is from a column, in awkward but sincere English, by Walid Phares:

...But beyond these two liberated countries, other civil societies expressed their support to the State of the Union. In a sense, it was their state of misery acknowledged in Washington. Students and reformist in Iran cheered. Opposition in Syria and Lebanon breathed better. Southern Sudanese and Nubians reinforced their will. Berbers and liberal seculars in Algeria clapped hands. And from the deepest underground of activism, dissident web sites, with writers around the Arab world, including women in Saudi Arabia, started to count the days. In short: the lowest layers in the region's make-up received their state-of-affairs with the voice of the most powerful man on Earth, the President of the United States.

How ironic. Inside Byzantium (read Washington's beltway), the debate had no respite. It is still about "where are the WMDs?" and "what are we doing in Iraq?" But down-under, in what will become the future generations of the entire Middle East, Shiites, Kurds, liberal Sunni, democratic Arabs and oppressed minorities, women and students are reading President Bush's speech in disbelief. "Who among our own Presidents-for-life and Fundamentalist Monarchs have ever mentioned the mass graves and our vanished human rights?" Let it come from the American President. And if he is not serious, it doesn't matter. What matters is that the Truth was said."   This is from the underground chat rooms.    The people have hope...

This is a good time to be alive. And American. And not a Copperhead. And I just now recollected something that happened during the Afghanistan Campaign. At one point we were bombing near the Iranian border. And just across the border, Iranians were painting arrows on the roofs of their houses. Pointing towards Tehran.

"Byzantium." Good term.

A mystery solved...perhaps

Yesterday I blogged about the James Risen article on the disarray in the Iraqi WMD programs.

...After the onset of this "dark ages," Dr. Kay said, Iraqi scientists realized they could go directly to Mr. Hussein and present fanciful plans for weapons programs, and receive approval and large amounts of money. Whatever was left of an effective weapons capability, he said, was largely subsumed into corrupt money-raising schemes by scientists skilled in the arts of lying and surviving in a fevered police state....

That may explain something that was mysterious.

In September 2002 there was a scare because of evidence the Iraqis were developing Aflatoxin as a weapon. It's carcinogenic, and the thought of a cancer-causing terror weapon was especially creepy. But then it turned out that it's extemely carcinogenic in mice, but only mildly so to humans. It's useless as a weapon. (I blogged about it here.)

Well, if you want to sell a terror weapon to Saddam, Aflatoxin is a good bet. Sounds frightful, it's easy to make, and if you spill it it's not going to kill you. And since the results are not expected to happen immediately, it's hard to prove that it's ineffective...

Our left-leaning donor-base is more important than the people of Iraq...

"Human Rights Watch" feels the liberation of Iraq wasn't justified—there wasn't enough slaughter and torture going on. Having children tortured to extract confessions from their parents was too trifling to justify contamination with Right-Wing cooties. Lordy, what a bunch of phonies they are.

To that crowd, a problem is not something you solve, it's something you use to raise funds, and to justify "programs" and "studies." And to build cushy careers untainted with Capitalism and ugly competition. And use to make yourself feel superior to crass Texans and Republicans and other low forms of life. Being a member of "Human Rights Watch" is like being a member of a museum or ballet society, the badge of a self-styled elite.

...Another Human Rights Watch criterion was whether war would make life better for the population being invaded. While life was better for Iraqis today, he said "the jury is still out" on whether life was going to be significantly better for Iraq's people than it had been under Saddam...

'tis a keen pleasure to think of all those Latté Liberals being out of power for the next generation or two, at least here in the US. And them having to watch in frustration while many of their cherished "problems" are being hacked to pieces and eliminated in a new Texas chainsaw massacre...

But be of good cheer, you bloated toads. Eventually the magic of Capitalization and Globalization will lift the Iraqis into comfortable self-satisfied affluence, and they will be faced with the problem of how to feel superior to their fellow citizens. Then they will want to join "Human Rights Watch," and, like the French, look down their noses at their liberators. (And they'll drink latté, or whatever's in fashion, and laugh at people who drink coffee.) 20 or 30 years ought to do it.

(via Jeff Jarvis)

Quoting David Frum...

It’s very odd. People on the left-hand side of the political world are always urging us to remember that other countries have their own motives, values and interests. Yet whenever there is a Republican president, those same people on the left-hand side suddenly tell us that anything untoward that happens anywhere in the world is a reaction to that Republican president....(link)

In a mood to rattle some teeth...

A friend sent a link to the James Risen NYT article: Ex-Inspector Says C.I.A. Missed Disarray in Iraqi Arms Program. I hesitate to quote it because probably everybody will, but, what the heck...

...From interviews with Iraqi scientists and other sources, he said, his team learned that sometime around 1997 and 1998, Iraq plunged into what he called a "vortex of corruption," when government activities began to spin out of control because an increasingly isolated and fantasy-riven Saddam Hussein had insisted on personally authorizing major projects without input from others.

After the onset of this "dark ages," Dr. Kay said, Iraqi scientists realized they could go directly to Mr. Hussein and present fanciful plans for weapons programs, and receive approval and large amounts of money. Whatever was left of an effective weapons capability, he said, was largely subsumed into corrupt money-raising schemes by scientists skilled in the arts of lying and surviving in a fevered police state....
- - - - - -
...Dr. Kay said the fundamental errors in prewar intelligence assessments were so grave that he would recommend that the Central Intelligence Agency and other organizations overhaul their intelligence collection and analytical efforts.

Dr. Kay said analysts had come to him, "almost in tears, saying they felt so badly that we weren't finding what they had thought we were going to find — I have had analysts apologizing for reaching the conclusions that they did."....

No doubt the failures of the CIA will be shoveled all over Bush. "Buck stops here" and all.

But what I'm really bugged about is the way we got into this position. I'm sure that the thinking in the White House, post 9/11, was (the little Neocon inside me knows this): "We've got to stop the terrorists, and the ONLY way to do so is to stop the terror-supporting countries, and the ONLY way to do that is to pick one of them up and throw it against the wall." And then Bush's people probably ran the MANY factors and possibilities through a few iterations of their mental spreadsheets, and everybody came up, as I still do now, with one best answer: Iraq.

But then we were forced by a clamor to seek the approval of the UN, and France and Germany. "We MUST respect International Institutions, we MUST have German bases, we MUST be multi-lateral." And so, to get the approval of the "multi" crowd we decided to ignore our decision-matrix and pretend that our only interest was in WMD's. Because the callous Multi's don't give a damn how many Iraqis are shredded. (Iraqis are no more human or real to them than Texans are.) And they don't give a damn if Saddam was paying bounties for the murder of Jews and Filipinos, (with the occasional US citizen thrown in.) They were at least PRETENDING to believe in WMD's, and in the UN. And so we went the UN route, and enforced their UN Resolutions (which Saddam was in violation of even if he had no WMD's).

And now the very same crowd of prissy ice-hearted bastards is drooling over the lack of WMD's and gloating that the the US and Bush were in the wrong. There's not a hint that their precious UN might have any egg on its face here. I just want to SHAKE those frigid bastards and scream, "YOU forced us to play this stupid game. Why don't you show some guts and take some responsibility here?"

Oooooooh. And while I'm in a shaking mood, I'd love to rattle the teeth of those academic jerks whose only interest in the Founding Fathers of this country is to gloatingly dwell on how some of them owned slaves, yet at the same time are utterly indifferent to millions of blacks being murdered and enslaved in Sudan—not 200 years ago, but NOW. And who also care nothing that progress towards ending this nightmare is being made—NOW. By President Bush, and his warmongering gang. Progress because, and ONLY BECAUSE, we made the decision to clean out one terror-supporting country.

Oooooh, I'm feeling so pissed. How I would love to use my magic powers to pick up little Professor Snib Snib of the History Department, and paint him black and drop him into Sudan. Let him get the real low-down on slavery...

Today's bizzarriry

Charlene heard on the radio the Paul Krugman and Al Sharpton are going on tour together, to promote the new Lefty radio network.

Words fail me...

January oddities...

A couple of things from our garden...

The pink things are ferns, Blechnum occidentale. About once every three years they give us this crazy riot of color in January. (And right next to them a pink Azalea!) Not what one could call tasteful, but fun...They look ratty the rest of the time, but I can never bring myself to tear them out.

And I've been doing a lot of things outside, and there's this one fern frond, I don't even know what species it is, but it sticks out, as you can see, and catches the sun and just shines like a lantern...

Zoom in

I long ago had a book called Powers of Ten. It was a long series of pictures, each showing one tenth of the last one, getting smaller and smaller, going from fields of galaxies down to protons and such.

Now some people at Florida State University at Tallahassee have done the same thing in a Java applet. You can see it here.

Thanks to Darren Kaplan

THIS is what's important...this is what we should be worrying about...

From The Guardian, Libya's black market deals shock nuclear inspectors

...Colonel Muammar Gadafy of Libya has been buying complete sets of uranium enrichment centrifuges on the international black market as the central element in his secret nuclear bomb programme, according to United Nations nuclear inspectors.

The ease with which the complex bomb-making equipment was acquired has stunned experienced international inspectors. The scale and the sophistication of the networks supplying so-called rogue states seeking nuclear weapons are considerably more extensive than previously believed....

..."What was found in Libya marks a new stage in proliferation," said one knowledgeable source. "Libya was buying what was available. And what is available, the centrifuges, are close to turnkey facilities. That's a new challenge. Libya was buying something that's ready to wear."...

...A centrifuge is made up of hundreds of separate components. Typically, a country covertly seeking the uranium enrichment technology will seek to cover its tracks by obtaining a design blueprint and then purchasing the varied components separately from different suppliers.

The German ship was seized by Italians after a tip-off from the CIA. Knowledgeable sources said the centrifuges on board were "made-to-order" in Malaysia for Libya, based on designs directly or indirectly from Pakistan....

"Turnkey systems." "networks considerably more extensive than believed." Chew on that a little as you listen to the "debates."

The "anti-war Left" wasn't anti-THIS war...

...Mass graves "are everywhere," said Sandy Hodgkinson, a U.S. State Department attorney who has been working with Iraq's Human Rights Ministry, the agency in charge of investigating the mass graves. "You follow reports, and they turn up in places you would never suspect."

Iraq is littered with bodies stuffed dozens at a time into cemetery plots, bodies shoved over cliffs, tossed in lakes or hidden in farm fields where vegetables still grow, said Saad Sultan, 32, a lawyer and detective with the Human Rights Ministry's mass graves research team.

So far, 282 possible mass grave sites have been identified, 55 have been confirmed and 20 have been explored. But nine months after Hussein's fall, the total number of graves is unknown. So, too, is the number buried, though the figure is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.

Among Kurds alone, for example, there are at least 182,000 people missing, 8,000 of them from one clan, the Barzanis.... (Chicago Tribune)

When I find a magic lantern, and the genie gives me three wishes, I think number one is going to be to send the entire "anti-war left" mob off to Iraq and let them sift the sands with teaspoons to help find the remains of the victims of the merciless war that they did so much, and worked so hard to support and encourage and prolong. Sort of like how the GI's marched Germans through the concentration camps...

#141: Lap swimmer in a cesspool ...

KRUGMAN TRUTH SQUAD

We returned from a winter break and had the experience of reading Paul Krugman's last eight columns in one or two sittings. Try it sometime! It's like watching a lap swimmer in a cesspool. He just goes back and forth treading in the same muck. He even had the audacity to write yet another column (we've lost count) on Enron. Conveniently forgotten are such facts as that the principal Enron transgressions date back to the Clinton administration when Krugman was a paid member of their advisory board. To hear him now, Enron was a Bush problem from the gitgo and he blithely uses the term as a metaphor for the administration's cozy relations with big business donors.

What a guy!

But the main thing we noticed in these columns was acceleration in the trend toward Howard Dean that we spotted a few months ago. Krugman was always a latent supporter, but now he has become a true "Deaniac" just as the Democratic primary voters are coming to their senses and rejecting the kind of angry, extremist Bush-bashing that is Dean's (and Krugman's) trademark. Krugman even echoed Dean in knocking the centrism of the Clinton administration.

If the Howard Dean flame-out continues and the Democrats nominate a moderate, Krugman will have to climb out of a pretty deep hole. It'll be fun watching.

[The Truth Squad is a group of economists who have long marveled at the writings of Paul Krugman. The Squad Reports are synopses of their discussions. ]

Ignore that noise, just dominos falling ...

Remember how so many people were shoveling scorn onto the administration for its "diplomatic ineptitude" in announcing a tough Iraq contracts policy just before negotiating with our faux allies on Iraqi debt relief? And remember how they mostly did not admit that they had been wrong, when France, Germany and Russia capitulated immediately thereafter? Did not admit that they were wrong, but just dropped the subject and tried to pretend it never happened?

Well, they are still pretending, and its still happening. We could have hardly asked countries like Kuwait to compromise their more-or-less legitimate debts before the truly odious ones were reduced. Now that's happening, and Cori Dauber has winkled the news out of some very obscure corners of newspapers, such as this, from page 8 of the NYT:

WASHINGTON, Jan. 21 — Former Secretary of State James A. Baker III has secured pledges from four Persian Gulf nations to reduce their holdings of Iraq's debt, a senior State Department official said Wednesday.

The official said negotiations with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar had been far more difficult than earlier discussions with Russia, France, Germany, Japan and other large creditor nations in Europe and Asia....

Get ready for the lies...

President Bush mentioned personal Social Security accounts again, and one can be sure that he will be pushing them. In fact, I recall that that was one of his campaign promises.(Poor naive old-fashioned fellow, he actually seems to think that a promise is a promise.) It will be very good news for this country. In fact the numbers that are being run on this look astonisingly good...

But get ready for the lie. Scoundrel Democrats are already saying that Bush wants Granny to put her retirement nest-egg into Enron. Actually, there is no possibility of a plan passing that does not require investments to be prudently diversified. Index funds are being suggested as possible vehicles. People will not be allowed to put their SS dollars into cocoa futures. And all this won't even apply to Granny, she's too old.

It's a nonsensical lie, but expect to hear a lot of it from our Democrat friends. (Josh Marshall will doubtless find a more subtle subtle way to slip in the same evil blade.)

Tomahawks and the SOTU...

I found this article on the popularity of a tomakawk as an all-purpose breaching tool in Iraq interesting. What most caught my eye was a tiny hint of sanity in the bureaucratic looney-bin of military procurement:

...In the summer of 2001, Prisco submitted his company's tomahawk to the Soldier Enhancement Program, a congressionally mandated system that allows the military to evaluate and adopt commercially available, off-the-shelf items. But after almost two years, progress on the tomahawk proposal seems to have bogged down.

Then, just a few months ago, Prisco learned of a relatively new program, the Rapid Fielding Initiative. Prisco said that in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, RFI was introduced as a way for military units about to be deployed overseas to quickly equip themselves with commercially available items that are not part of the military inventory.

RFI provides a brigade commander with a budget and the discretion to purchase whatever he feels he needs for the members of his unit — typically, a list of hundreds of individual items. It is a limited program, however. RFI budgets and ordering authority are given to an individual brigade commander in the months prior to a deployment...(via Stryker Brigade News)

Quite a few people have been saying that we need a larger military. Quite possibly it's true (though I suspect that if Bush and Rumsfeld were suddenly in favor of it, most of those people would suddenly be against it.)

Well, the procurement process employs a huge number of people. Get rid of half of them, and we could probably pay for an extra division. For all the small stuff, we should just have a testing lab to evaluate products, and more importantly, to make sure information flows between units. (Web forums and blogs would be helpful. There's an interesting mention in the article of units getting "menus" from previously deployed units.) Then give the various units budgets and let them buy what they like.

Some mistakes would be made, but they would be dwarfed by the savings in overhead, and by the better decision-making that would be done by people who actually have to live and fight with the gear, or eat the food. And who would be much more rigorous in evaluating the trade-offs between price and utility.

I think it's Office Depot that has a program, where businesses give people or departments budgets for supplies, and Office Depot keeps track of them, so people can just order supplies without any purchasing-department overhead. That's a model we should be following more.

It's called "choice." As in school choice, private Social Security accounts, Medical Savings Accounts... President Bush is pushing choice on a variety of fronts, though not as hard as I think he should. If I had had written the SOTU, the domestic half would have had a theme, rather than being just a Clintonian hotch-potch. You can guess what the theme would have been.

Platinum asteroids...

John Kalb wrote a comment to the "What use is a newborn child" post below, that made me think. (I hope he will be flattered by that and not mind that I think he's wrong.)

The issue is that space will only become a source of resources in the distant future. No one doubts that there are valuable minerals on the moon and Mars, but the cost of bringing them back here now would be prohibitive, and it will stay that way until at the very least we have factories on those planets to refine whatever raw materials we find there and then send the finished products back.

China's rhetoric about mining the moon's riches for the benefit of humanity is just that. For now, the only place in space of any strategic or economic value is low Earth orbit.

First of all, the idea that minerals and resources are what we are short of, and need to go hunting for, is wrong. It's a holdover from the Industrial Age, when coal or oil or iron ore were limiting factors to a nation's success. But the more we enter into the Information Age, the less important they become. Which is why their prices (adjusted for inflation) have been falling for the last hundred years or so. And why, despite dire predictions, we don't run out of any of them—in fact we find our reserves growing. And why the countries that specialize in providing them tend to be among the poorest. All this is a byproduct of the Information Age and its technology. NOTHING we are doing now is hindered by lack of minerals!

[To help understand this, reflect on a similar change that happened when Humankind went from the Agricultural Age to the Industrial Age. The previous limiting factor had been agricultural production. Countries were often stopped dead in their tracks by famines. And all progress was limited because most people were of necessity poor peasants and farmers. And armies were limited by the number of available peasant recruits. Once industrialization hit, all was changed and agriculture was no longer a bottleneck. Industrial nations don't have famines. And they are able to drastically reduce their farm populations and put those people to more productive work, while producing more food—often to the point of awkward surpluses. And Krupp's cannon trumped any number of infantrymen on the battlefield.]

Even if (getting back to question of space), even if there are platinum boulders ready to be plucked from low orbit which will pay for NASA's budget, that's not the point. That wasn't Pedro's point. John is thinking like those 16th Century chaps who though the New World would "pay off" in gold and silver. There was a lot of gold, but in fact (to name just one of many many items) the humble potato was a far more valuable discovery, allowing Europe's population to increase by tens of millions. And the ideas that have emerged from this hemisphere are incalculably more valuable yet.

Spain took the lion's share of the silver, and it impoverished her. Japan, a country with no resources, adopted a collection of American ideas on business management, and used them to become stupendously wealthy. Ideas, inventions, wisdom, increased human happiness and potential, those are the payoffs from new worlds. And there's no way to predict when and where they will happen.

Businesses need to consider short-term payoffs. As a nation, we should be pushing ourselves into space because we need to grow—our souls need to grow. There will be payoffs from that, probably bigger than we can imagine.

Really? Why?

I think I like this gal, Juliette Ochieng (thanks to Rosemary)

...Those against the proposal raised some valid concerns—there are things here on Earth that require more immediate fiscal attention--though, in my opinion, their reasons often lacked vision. But that’s not what this post is about.

In a particularly heated point in the exchange, McDonald managed to silence her male colleagues by invoking that great silencer of American men everywhere (a paraphrase; pen and paper will be on my night table from now on): “You men have to let the woman speak now!”

Really? Why? Was her opinion more important, more valid just because she’s the owner of a vagina, a uterus, a set of ovaries and a set of breasts?

The frightening part is that the guys did shut up and let her speak.

Now, as many know from reading my musings, I spent two decades in the military and, were those that have known me to give a description of my personality, I’d imagine that the phrase “shrinking violet” would never come up. There have been times in which I’ve had to exert some assertiveness and aggressiveness to allow myself to be heard. Such is life for a woman who works among mostly men. However, what got me about McDonald’s tactic was that she felt that she deserved to be heard solely because she’s a woman, not because she had a unique perspective on the subject discussed...

"Turning Troops Into Teachers"

Here's a thought-provoking article about a splendid program to turn retired military personel into teachers.

...Service men and women make particularly good teachers, Peters said, because they offer knowledge from outside the classroom and a bearing that makes them unlikely to be intimidated, even by the most unruly middle school students.

"These are mature, seasoned leaders. They're not just young people coming out of college who have little experience doing anything," Peters said. "Normally, they've been around the world at least once. Normally, they've already been teaching young recruits in the military." ...

...Troops to Teachers was started in 1994 to ease the transition to civilian life for people laid off from soldiering during the military downsizing. In 2001, money was included in the federal No Child Left Behind law to expand the program and convert it to a recruiting tool for low-income schools...

...Surveys by the American Association for Employment in Education show chronic teacher shortages in math, science and special education teachers. National Education Association numbers show that 10 percent of the nation's 3 million teachers are minorities, and 21 percent are men, a 40-year low for the profession.

By contrast, 40 percent of the Troops to Teachers participants go into math, science or special education. More than 85 percent of participants are men, and one-third are minorities. ... (via Betsy Newmark)

I suspect a lot of people could, and should, go for a second career in teaching. And I gather that the teacher's mafia has put a lot of obstacles in the way of that. I would hope that, along with giving parents choice in schools, we will work towards giving people the choice to become teachers.

Actually, I'm for encouraging second careers for almost everybody. It just appalls me to hear friends from European countries tell of people being expected to choose a career when they are in High School, and stick with it until retirement. Tragic antidiluvian lunacy.

Of what use is a newborn child? --Franklin

Pedro writes

[Lefty-blogger discussing Bush Space Plan asks:] "WHAT'S THE PAYOFF?" Holy rocket ship to the moom, batman, some of you people need to read a little less narcissitic literature and dig into some rock-'em sock-'em science fiction. 'What's the payoff?' Are you freakin' kidding me? How about the resources of an entire freakin' planet? No wait, one extra planet, one extra large satellite (the moon), a couple of little ones (Mars' moons), plus the asteroid belt thrown in as a bonus. PLUS the spin-off technologies. But how can you ask "What's the payoff?" when we're talking about an entire planet? NASA = bloated gov't, OK, we can fix that, and it's a valid point. But "What's the payoff?"

If you gotta ask, it probably means you don't really want to know. Reminds me of how our Great Plains region was once thought of as the "Great American Desert." And Alaska was "Seward's Icebox."

Elves, are they cool, are they hot?

I find my daughter's fascination with all things Tolkien, both books and movies, entirely admirable. Still, I had to wonder when I noticed her going to a site called hot-elf.com!
(It's actually a very nice site, if you are a Legolas Greenleaf fan. It even has recipes for Lembas.)

"Iraq 2.0"

Omar Masry is an American with Arab parents serving with an Army Civil Affairs unit in Iraq. I like his blog, called Iraq 2.0

Watching TV news about Iraq your usually subjected to three main themes: raids, soldiers standing around a street, and aftermath of a car bomb or roadside explosion. What you don't see is manuever commander (someone in charge of an area) of units running tankers in front of others in line for fuel at refineries so they can get more supplies for their respective neighborhoods.

You don't see captains normally trained to drive the most advanced tanks in the world pulling over a trash truck to see if it really is being used to clean up trash in the neighborhood he's working in. You don't see a Major normally assigned to a Cavalry Regiment giving a presentation on how hes working to move internal refugees out of buildings to be handed over to Iraqi ministries with slide graphics that consist mostly of pictures of Iraqi kids. Normally his graphics would be infantry formations or flanking moves, instead theres a picture of him giving a male sheikh the traditional arab customary kiss on the cheek. Briefings that would normally be preceded by a call to attention as the commander walks in are sometimes replaced with the Iraqi translator giving his/her "5 arabic phrases to learn today" lesson.

I dont think they could ever really make a good American movie about Iraq because so much here isn't black and white (good vs. evil) like American movies tend to portray; its infinite shades of gray, where so many decent and honorable Iraqis are paralyzed by fear and too many of the corrupt minority fashion themselves as sheep's in wolf's clothing...(Jan. 5, '04, no permalinks )

It's sure not the same Army we had when I was growing up...

Fellow of the Institute ...

One hears rumors of how State Department types get bought off by the Saudis, but here's an actual example I wasn't aware of:

....Second, the Democrats want these guys to stay credible, because they will always be there to criticize hawkish Republican proposals. Joseph Wilson is a prime example of this. He got a cushy job at the Middle East Institute after he left the government. The Middle East Institute, by the way, gets $200,000 of its $1.5 million annual budget directly from the Saudi government, and an undisclosed amount from Saudi individuals.

Hmmm. Do any of you RJ readers have contacts in the House of Saud? Could you just let them know that some of their critics in the Blogosphere might become a lot friendlier, if we were, you know, treated with consideration? Appreciated?

Or maybe I should just organize something, and then apply for funding. It doesn't have to be real; I'm sure prince Bandar doesn't expect Joe Wilson to crank out scholarly papers on neocolonialism. I suppose I would need an accommodation address in DC, and a fancy letterhead with crescents and scimitars and such. I could call it MERE; Middle Eastern Research Enterprise...I'll be the Director, various other warbloggers will be Fellows... (Maybe we should wear fezzes, to give the right flavor.) It's a cinch we will be more creative than State, and think up tons of good reasons to do nothing, and to leave the Middle East just like it is.

But probably we will prove to be less pliable than the willows in Foggy Bottom, and will not bend to just any breeze. A strong wind of appreciation will be needed.

But some of us are looking at the stars...

Mike writes, (concerning Lileks's Space musings)

...Oscar Wilde said a wonderful thing: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” That one works for me on more than one level today. The right hand holds the sword, the left hand holds the sextant. Beautiful - and inspiring in its own right. James, once again I most humbly tip my hat to you.

I'm not enthused about the Space Initiative, because I think giving NASA the job is really a way a making sure that the big scary space genie stays in the bottle.

BUT, I am pleased with it because it is a great big thumb o' the nose to the Jimmy-Carter-turn-down-the-thermostat types who will whine that we have problems here on earth to solve first. This is the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA you're talking about here, and we can fight a war, grow the economy, shoot bricks into space AND stillspend more to exacerbate our social problems than all the little countries put together.

And it's not really very big, budget-wise. Space has been running less that 1% of the Fed budget. The cost is a bit of a bullshit issue. (Anyway, how come no one says "we need to spend money solving social problems before we subsidize professors to deconstruct James Joyce?" Or before we subsidize sugar beets?)

I have a heartfelt desire to see smaller government, but not because I think we can't afford more. Those deficit snivelers have rocks in their heads. Our economy is going to grow far faster than our debts. It's been doing that for several centuries now. Remember what happened the last time we had a tax-cuttin' President? Fellow named Reagan? To this very day we hear whinging about how he increased our national debt by 1.3 Trillion. Sounds ombinous, but not one of those lying-with-statistics crybabies ever mentions that our national wealth grew by 17 Trillion in the same period!

Light'n out for the territories...

Moira writes

...The daughter and I were discussing Bush's space-speech on the way to Tae Kwon Do lessons yesterday. After disposing of the pragmatic issues we moved on to the dreams. She enthused about being an astronaut and walking on Mars, I owned that it was a mournful realization for me that I would never leave the earth. I added that I would die a happy woman if she were ever able to do so, or, really, if I could see the first solid attempts to light out for the territories. But never to leave home at all! The human race living in its parents' basement apartment forever. That's a melancholy notion...

New realm in the air...

Rand Simberg points to an interesting article by Greg Klerkx, The Citizen Astronaut

...These days, unfortunately, the shuttle is not the best advertisement for space travel of any kind. More important, NASA has never really accepted the idea that space travel should be for anyone but professional astronauts. The agency did all it could, for instance, to stop a businessman, Dennis Tito, from visiting the International Space Station in 2001.

Underlying NASA's resistance is a fundamental disdain for sullying the human space flight enterprise with the brassy sheen of commerce. But this is backward thinking. Was Charles Lindbergh any less inspirational because he was, to put it bluntly, an aerial privateer chasing a cash prize?

President Bush's Mars initiative neatly places NASA's goal of exploration in the public spotlight. Now the agency needs to allow the rest of us to participate.... (Klerkx has a new book out also, Lost in Space : The Fall of NASA and the Dream of a New Space Age. I'm going to take a look at it.)

It's not just commerce they disdain, the bureaucrats don't want to share space with the common man. They are elitists. It's no accident that elitists of all stripes are attracted to government. Only the state can overrule the marketplace.

It's worth keeping in mind how we dealt with a similar situation, with a new realm in the air where private enterprise was slow to grow to a self-sustaining size. In the 1920's the US Government used airmail subsidies to greatly expand our then tiny airlines, and encourage the creation of larger and faster planes. I wrote a post about it here; it's a very interesting bit of our history. The gist of it was that we subsidized capacity. The airlines with airmail contracts got more money if they flew bigger planes, even if there wasn't mail to fill them. In effect this was subsidizing the carrying of passengers, and of course the development of bigger planes.

But, one important thing—the US government didn't try to decide what the "goal" of airlines should be! That was good, because we really didn't know enough to decide. For instance, the transports that were created in the 30's were vital to us in WWII. But the Air Force was totally uninterested in them. If government masterminds had tried to save resources by allocating them according to a master plan for airplane development, the results would have been far worse.

You get what you pay for...

I don't ever expect to penetrate the walls of ignorance behind the "Macs are too expensive" meme, but this article has some useful figures...

A true story: A neighbor of mine asks me for advice on buying a new computer, his first. He tells me he wants to use it for editing home movies, playing music, surfing the web, email, and he would love to make his own DVD’s. I tell him to look at an iMac or eMac and he says they are way too expensive. He then says he sees TV commercials offering Dell’s for $500, and wants to know why Macs are so much more expensive. I ask him if he really wants to make his own DVD’s and edit home movies and he says ‘yes’. I tell him to call Dell and ask them to configure a PC that can do that. He does, and then comes back over and accuses Dell of ‘bait and switch’. They want $1500!!.....

On crumbling clouds of stone...

Dave T has posted a poem inspired by the Northridge Quake.

...I was browsing through the essays of Montaigne not long ago,
Reclining in the shadow of the century-old oak that shades my home,
Half drowsing in the warmth of a hazy winter day
In the city of the angels, where the sun first strikes the Ring of Fire.
We cannot hear the music of the spheres, he wrote,
Because our hearing sense is deafened,
Like the smith among the hammers of his forge,
By continual exposure to that marvelous harmony...

---

...If you could scale a few more rungs upon that cosmic ladder,
Growing 'til the stratosphere lapped round your chest,
Your heartbeat once a century, your breaths the measure of millenia—
Then you would just begin to hear the song of Earth
It rises from her iron core, engendered by the almost stellar heat
Of actinide decay, the life-bestowing legacy of dying stars...

I like it. Putting things that are more-or-less scientific into poetry or any sort of artwork is very ambitious, and is an easy way to make yourself look foolish. Erasmus Darwin could have taken some lessons from Dave.

Charlene and I were in the big quake of '89, and this rings too true: You'd see that all of us have built our lives, the castles of our dreams,
On crumbling clouds of stone...

Never forget, never forgive...

My friend Brad sent me a link to some fascinating photos of the USS Cole being raised by a Norwegian recovery ship, which floods, partly submerges, and then raises up from underneath, lifting an entire destroyer out of the water! Splendid sight.

Of course Kim is a brutal dictator, BUT...

Here's a story I don't feel like quoting much of...

There is a cell in Nongpo prison where they take the women whose babies are to be killed.

As in the other cells, the women are packed so tightly they can only crouch, squeezing together, for sleep. There is no room to lie down, so when one of the women goes into labour, the others stand up to make space...(via Judd)

One thing that's become obvious to those who are not intentionally blind, is that President Bush is not your usual BS politician. If he says something, he means it. He included (for good reasons) North Korea in the Axis of Evil.

He hasn't forgotten! The issue isn't going to go away!

SO, sure as the sun rises,

We get to look forward to...

The very same cast of idiots who pulled for Saddam and dote on Castro....

Defending Kim Jong Il from the horrors of American hegemony....(NOW will probably defend Nongpo Prison's late-term abortion rights)

'tis amazing how deja vu seems to repeat itself over and over.

Well done, Ambassador...

Sweden will summon Israeli Ambassador Zvi Mazel on Monday to explain his damaging on Friday a piece of art depicting a Palestinian suicide bomber displayed at a Stockholm museum.

"We will ask him to explain and from our side we will maintain that it is unacceptable to destroy works of art in this way," Swedish Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Anna Larsson said Saturday.