18 thoughts on “Light-Bulb Liberty”

  1. I’m just amazed that a Congress willing to go to bat for light-bulb liberty and which thinks being required to buy health insurance is unconstitutional also passed the National Defense Authorization Act, which allows the President to detain anybody in military custody forever. It seems to me they don’t have their priorities quite right.

    1. They’re only declining to fund the enforcement for a year. It changes nothing because manufacturers aren’t going to turn on a dime and then turn back. It’s actually quite brilliant (ha!). Congress could do more of this rotating regulation enforcement to save money.

    2. Why would that confuse you? When we throw somebody into a bare cell forever, what’s that bright thing on the ceiling that stays on 24 hours a day? Why yes. It is a bare incandescent light bulb, with the glass too thin to be used as a weapon, no electronics that can be jammed, and no mercury that could hurt the guards or require the cell to be cleaned.

      If we ban incandescent light bulbs then our enemies will be the only ones free to use this technology, and they won’t hesitate to use it against us. We need to have incandescent light bulbs and indefinite detention as part of our national security aparatus.

      On another note, Osram managed to boost high-power red LED efficiency from the current 25% to 61%. link.

      2. Continuing on that unrelated note about LED’s, at 660 nm (the peak of green plant efficiency in the deep-red) a 61% efficiency LED would need a 49.7% efficient solar cell to outperform natural sunlight. When efficiencies go higher than that, you’re better off on a crop square meter basis using a solar cell and narrow spectrum LEDs than using the sun directly. Osram said their efficiency numbers also apply to blue LEDs, which is a good thing.

        Blue light is only used about half as efficiently by plants as the red, but you only need 5 to 20% blue in the spectrum, and to provide 10% blue, the solar cell needs to bump up to 55% efficiency. So when the LED efficiency times the solar cell efficiency crosses 33.5%, they can provide more efficient plant growth on a minute by minute basis than direct sunlight using windows.

        All that was based on the ASTM G-173 standard for natural noon sunlight at (latitude, sea level, tilt angle, blah blah blah, broken down nanometer by nanometer) of about 1000 Watts per square meter. That’s called a sun hour, and in North American we get 5 to 7 sun-hours per day in the summer, which would average to 25% of the peak noon power. To provide that much power in high orbit (and neglecting that there’s more available sunlight in space), the cells would only need to be 13.7% efficient to provide a crop area equal to the solar cell area. We’ve already got orbital solar cells that run at 33% efficiency, so each square meter of solar cell could cover 2.4 square meters of crops.

        The big advantage for a space station, space colony, or deep space mission is eliminating all the windows or concentrating mirrors and fiber optics, plus the much greater design and operational flexibility, because mounting LEDs and turning them off and on is trivially easy.

  2. If you really want ‘old bulbs’, most Wal-Marts have them on sale and in great quantity. Just change to whatever bulb you want. I like the pig tail bulbs, and I use them, with damned few exceptions. But being FORCED to do so, goes against my nature to accept it as ‘for my own good’.

    So, IMHO, we need to change Congress too, with damned few exceptions.

  3. Wasn’t it a few posts back that Gerrib was telling us the light bulb ban defunding was just a compromise? No big deal? Now he wants to complain that Congress gave into Obama’s request, compromised, and added a law (I suspect will be discussed by SCOTUS) to detain Americans indefinitely?

    I note, this is the same President that recently ordered the execution assissination of an US citizen in a foreign country. Simply deprived the citizen of life without due process and without a public trial. And if someone notes the exception for times of war; then I think they just blew their whole argument. And as for whether or not the person was actually an US citizen, well that’s irrelevant. Obama declared the person a US citizen when he ordered the assissination.

    2. Leland, as usual, you’ve taken my 2 + 2 and come up with 16.334.

      Politically speaking, throwing the light bulb bone to the Republicans made sense. As Titus said, this is a temporary reprieve. My issue is that the Republican priorities are way off. If they wanted to “strike a blow for freedom,” not approving indefinite detention of Americans arrested in the US would be a much more significant action.

      Regarding assassinating whats-his-face in Yemen, yeah, I’m not real happy about it. Since the alternative was risk a SEAL team on a raid in Yemen, I can understand if not agree with the decision.

      1. That would depend on your view of whether terrorists engaging in war against the US should be treated under the laws of warfare or by the civil courts. Believing in FREEDOM doesn’t automatically lead to the conclusion that we should empty out all the prisons.

        It’s a debate that requires deep thought, ideas, and epiphanies, all of which are graphically represented by an incandescent light-bulb turning on above your head. Think that’s a coincidence?

        1. Any law that allows the President to arrest and indefinitely detain American citizens on American soil without judicial review is clearly wrong and unconstitutional. Indefinite and arbitrary detention is the mark of an authoritarian state. No deep thought is required.

          1. Abraham Lincoln held thousands and thousands of American citizens on American soil without giving them a civil trial, instead calling them POWs.

            When an American is put on trial for directly supporting enemies during wartime from within the US, they can face the death penalty. If instead they are treated as POWs (or enemy combatants) then they are protected from a trial, since it is a violation of international law and the Geneva Conventions to try soldiers for engaging in acts of war short of war crimes or crimes against humanity. Under the Geneva Conventions, we can’t even deny them an extra helping of mashed potatoes and chocolate pudding if other POWs are getting second helpings. If put on trial in a civilian court these same prisoners could be executed by lethal injection, firing squad, or Old Sparky, depending on the state.

            Indefinite detention at Guantanamo is very impermanent, with only 170 left out of almost 800 who’ve been sent there, and about 120 of those remaining being recommended for release. It’s also against the Geneva Convention to detain POWs after hostilites have ended, so there’s really no way to give an enemy combatant a life sentence, a common outcome if put on trial in a civilian court.

            Given the extremes it takes to get hauled in as an Al Qaeda terrorist (such as getting caught on an airliner with a bomb in your underwear and laptop full of communications to Al Qaeda cells), is the enemy combatant route (with an 80% chance of being released in 5 or 10 years) worse than a civil trial with a near certainty of either the death penalty or a life sentence with no opportunity for parole?

            Keep in mind that these decisions aren’t made lightly or on a whim. Unlike the decision on whether to employ extra-judicial assassination of American citizens suspected of terrorism, a decision based on the determination of Obama’s secret star chamber of top security officials and campaign bundlers, the indefinite detention decisions are made by a tribunal of military officers who aren’t allowed to collect campaign donations, thus ensuring that people aren’t held merely for claiming Michelle Obama looks like a Klingon. Is a judge in a black robe (judicial review) automatically more justice than a judge in a green officer’s uniform?

            Given the high profile of all such cases, and their rarity, I don’t think the current policy represents a danger of secretly apprehending and disappearing thousands of people for criticizing the government. Note that even prominent members of the Tea Party are still free even through the press spent a year claiming they were all racist anti-Obama terrorists, with liberals screaming that they should be rounded up and put in labor camps.

            The question is not so much whether indefinite detention without judicial review is a violation of an American citizen’s rights to due process, it’s whether an American citizen can wage war on America at the behest of foreign powers and still retain all their rights as a US citizen, and whether recognizing those rights is a disservice to the accused by vastly increasing the potential penalties.

            For example, if you were riding around with a drunk friend who accidentally killed someone in a wreck, is the prosecutor denying your right to be tried as an accessory to murder if he decides to drop the murder charge as long as you plead guilty to public intoxication, serve ten days, and pay a $50 fine? Do you demand that you’ve got a right to face a murder trial? Can you make the prosecutor charge you? Is he violating your Consititional rights if he just lets you sit in jail for ten days before dropping the murder charge and all other charges, having indefinitely detained you without giving your your day in court, where you could be convicted of murder and sent to the gas chamber? Does that mean the kind-hearted prosecutor is part of an arbitrary authoritarian state? Maybe, and maybe not, but without looking at both sides of the issue, weighing pros and cons, outcomes and intentions, you could end up demanding policies which produce results you find heinous, your blind pursuit of justice becoming justice’s miscarriage.

            For another hypothetical (and an over-the-top Godwin!), perhaps your sense of social justice and moral outrage leads you help an unemployed Jew hiding out from the Nazis. So you drag him into the street, turn him over to the SS, and demand that he be given a job in Auschwitz because everyone has a right to a job. They agree, and you walk away smugly satisfied at having simultaneously defended workers’ rights, helped an oppressed unemployed person find a job, and gotten the SS to admit that they should do more to help, all because you stood on principle and wouldn’t look away when you saw injustice. Of course the Jew thinks you should’ve kept your mouth shut and minded your own business, aware that outcomes are often more important than process or intentions.

      2. I note Gerrib that you can’t bring yourself to acknowledge Obama’s willingness to both sign a law you disagree and order an execution you are against. And yet, you claim Republican priorities are way off. You can fool yourself, but we’re not fooled about your priorities.

        1. Well, actually I’ve publicly stated my opposition to the NDAA on my blog and to everybody who would listen.

          Regarding Whats-His-Face in Yemen, “not real happy” is usually taken to mean “displeased,” and I said I don’t agree with the decision. I understand it, much like I understand (and usually disagree with) your points.

          I’d also like to point out that two wrongs don’t make a right. Whether Obama was right or wrong to sign it doesn’t mean it was right or wrong to pass it in the first place.

  4. George Turner – Abraham Lincoln was fighting an insurrection, which the Constitution specifically recognizes (Article 1, section 9) as a case where you can detain people indefinitely. We are not fighting an insurrection, and since Article 1 is about Congress, Lincoln arguably overstepped his authority.

    The only crime defined in the Constitution is treason, which is defined as “levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” (Article 3 Section 3). That’s the section that talks about courts. So, if you accuse somebody of making war against the United States, you need to take them to court.

    Having been a military officer, I don’t want a group of military officers making those decisions. There are careerists in the military who will, for promotions or other inducements, do what they think their boss wants. Also, the President (any President) can shop the military to find a group of officers who will agree with him. I want an independent civilian judge to make that call.

    Again, do we want to live in a banana republic where the military decides who is and isn’t a terrorist or do we want a free country?

    1. You assume that a civilian judge is more independent from the administration and has less political inducement than a panel of nearly anonymous military officers. I don’t think that assumption is warranted.

      For one, sitting on a tribunal down in Gitmo, while not a career ender, is certainly not a fast-track military appointment. It’s a boring job that isn’t combat or command or even an important role in procurement, with officers rotating through over time. Those officers are people like you (shock and horror!). None of their decisions are permanent since all any particular panel can do is vote to continue detention. Each detainee is periodically reviewed to see if continued detention is warranted, and since 80% of the detainees have been released, it seems these panels take a skeptical view of the need to keep anyone locked up forever.

      Sitting on the tribunals, listening to legal council, lawyers, and endless hours of testimony, is not why any of our officers joined the military, and I’m sure they’d all rather be doing something else. It won’t be a path to career advancement because we aren’t run by a paranoid military junta running an army whose main purpose is oppressing domestic dissent. Our officers don’t compete for advancement by showing how good they are at oppression, nor do they prove their loyalty to the regime by cracking the heads of anyone suspected of speaking out. The trials are not televised, are not used for political grandstanding, and images of the accused are not used to frighten the public into ever greater bouts of paranoid hysteria so they’ll support even more repressive measures.

      In contrast, Obama and Holder decided, for purely political reasons, to put one of the Al Qaeda masterminds on trial in civilian court. They didn’t do this out of a sense of justice to the accused, but to make a political point, that Obama was right and Bush was wrong about military detention. But that wasn’t enough for them. They wanted to put the accused on trial in Manhattan, hand picking both the jurisdiction and the judge, and in effect the jury.

      The potential trial became a huge political battle between the Mayor, the Governor, Congress, and the White House, played out through the media, and everyone took sides. Holder publically boasted that the accussed would be tried, convicted, and executed. Of course the judge would be staking his career, reputation, and future Supreme Court appointment on pleasing the administration and appeasing the public, making sure the accused is railroaded to the gallows with a speed and efficiency that would make Lance Ito’s head spin. Fortunately cooler heads prevailed and this abomination of justice was stopped in its tracks.

      Let’s compare using a specific example. Consider the California kid, John Walker Lindh, who rebelled against his hippy parents, converted to Islam, and ran off to Yemen, finally finding himself in Afghanistan where he ended up in a prison camp where a CIA officer, Mike Span, was killed.

      I’d argue that Lindh was a confused idiot acting as an enemy combatant who would’ve been long ago released by any military court as no longer representing a threat to the US. You’d argue that as a US citizen Lindh has a right to due process through the civil legal system, which he in fact got. Facing three life sentences plus 90 years, he pled guilty to lesser charges and is now serving twenty years in prison, where he was of course assaulted by other inmates. All this for being a confused idiot teenager who rebelled against his parents and fell in with a bunch of incompetent Islamic nutcases.

      So who is wanting a banana Republic and who is wanting a free country where we don’t have show trials and kangaroo courts? Who is concerned with actual fairness and who merely wants the external trappings of justice, the appearance without the actual object? Consider your answer carefully, because thought justice should be blind, it sometimes does require deep thought.

      Should we treat most of these terrorists as enemy combatants and grant them protection under the Geneva Conventions, even the ones who by happenstance happen to hold US citizenship? Should we periodically review their status in front of a panel made up of people like you, or should we frog march them through the US court system where they will be charged with attempted mass murder, treason, espionage, waging illegal war, and everthing else in the book, facing a jury of irrate Baptists presided over by a hanging judge and a prosecutor angling for re-election, after which they’ll be sent to a prison with a super-patriot warden and redneck guards who will look the other way while the skinhead Aryan Nation meth dealers beat them to death in the exercise yeard?

      My point is that at all times you have to keep your eyes open and carefully examine the issues from all angles, weighing the outcomes against your true sense of fairness, because the road to hell is paved with kneejerk responses, unwarranted assumptions, moral grandstanding, blind conviction, and smug satisfaction.

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