November 25, 2008
Slow Posting

I got up early today and had an eye exam (still have two functional ones). They were dilated in the process, so it will be a while before I spend much time on the computer. Meanwhile, here's an interesting discussion on arming ships against pirates in modern times. We seem to have managed to deal with this a lot better in the past. I think that we should bring back letters of marque, for not just pirates, but lawless terrorists in general.

[Early afternoon update]

A related question: why don't we hang pirates any more?

...the number of attacks keeps rising.

Why? The view of senior U.S. military officials seems to be, in effect, that there is no controlling legal authority. Title 18, Chapter 81 of the United States Code establishes a sentence of life in prison for foreigners captured in the act of piracy. But, crucially, the law is only enforceable against pirates who attack U.S.-flagged vessels, of which today there are few.

What about international law? Article 110 of the U.N.'s Law of the Sea Convention -- ratified by most nations, but not by the U.S. -- enjoins naval ships from simply firing on suspected pirates. Instead, they are required first to send over a boarding party to inquire of the pirates whether they are, in fact, pirates. A recent U.N. Security Council resolution allows foreign navies to pursue pirates into Somali waters -- provided Somalia's tottering government agrees -- but the resolution expires next week. As for the idea of laying waste, Stephen Decatur-like, to the pirate's prospering capital port city of Eyl, this too would require U.N. authorization. Yesterday, a shippers' organization asked NATO to blockade the Somali coast. NATO promptly declined.

As I noted, there seems to be a problem with the modern approach.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:10 AM

November 24, 2008
Can Hillary! Be SECSTATE?

She may be Constitutionally ineligible. Sometimes commenter Jane Bernstein notes via email that Article 1, Section 6 clearly states that:

No Senator or Representative shall, during the time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil office under the authority of the United States, which shall have been created, or the emoluments whereof shall have been increased during such time: and no person holding any office under the United States, shall be a member of either House during his continuance in office.

Emphasis mine. Federal salaries, including the schedule for a Level 1 Cabinet officer (such as Secretary of State) were increased at the beginning of the year, by executive order. IANAL, but by the letter of the law, it would seem that she cannot be appointed to that position.

There are two potential outs.

One is trivial--she isn't a "he," she's a "she," so she could amusingly argue that the section doesn't apply to her. I suspect that this would probably fail on Fourteenth Amendment (and perhaps other) grounds, though, as well as common sense.

The other would be to argue that the intent was to keep Congress from creating or increasing salaries of a position in order to provide a new or better job for one of its members, and to eliminate this potential conflict of interest. Since the increase was done by Executive Order under a previously passed law, she could argue that Congress didn't increase the pay in this instance. However, the letter of the law wouldn't allow this interpretation--it doesn't say anything about the emoluments increasing by act of Congress--it just says that if they increase (for whatever reason) she cannot have the position.

If true, the good news is that it would also apply to John Kerry. And it doesn't apply to Barack Obama, since he wasn't appointed--he was elected.

[Update a few minutes later]

Also, if the logic is correct, it would apply to Rahm Emmanuel, as well as any other potential congressperson or Senator angling for an appointment.

[Update on Monday afternoon]

More thoughts from Eugene Volokh.

[Bumped to the stop]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:48 AM

A New New Deal?

Tyler Cowen has some history:

The good New Deal policies, like constructing a basic social safety net, made sense on their own terms and would have been desirable in the boom years of the 1920s as well. The bad policies made things worse. Today, that means we should restrict extraordinary measures to the financial sector as much as possible and resist the temptation to "do something" for its own sake.

In short, expansionary monetary policy and wartime orders from Europe, not the well-known policies of the New Deal, did the most to make the American economy climb out of the Depression. Our current downturn will end as well someday, and, as in the '30s, the recovery will probably come for reasons that have little to do with most policy initiatives.

There was also this little item that caught my eye:

A study of the 1930s by Christina D. Romer, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley ("What Ended the Great Depression?," Journal of Economic History, 1992), confirmed that expansionary monetary policy was the key to the partial recovery of the 1930s. The worst years of the New Deal were 1937 and 1938, right after the Fed increased reserve requirements for banks, thereby curbing lending and moving the economy back to dangerous deflationary pressures.

Why?

Because of this news:

ABC News has learned that President-elect Obama had tapped University of California -Berkeley economics professor Christina Romer to be the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, an office within the Executive Office of the President.

It seems like a much better pick than those of us concerned about an FDRophilic president could have expected. Maybe we won't replay the thirties.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:05 AM

The Worst And The Dumbest

Remember that civics test? Well, this should inspire confidence in our political "leadership":

US elected officials scored abysmally on a test measuring their civic knowledge, with an average grade of just 44 percent, the group that organized the exam said Thursday.

Ordinary citizens did not fare much better, scoring just 49 percent correct on the 33 exam questions compiled by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI).

But they did fare better. What does this say about our so-called "elites"? Forget about a literacy test for voters. How about one for candidates?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:14 AM

November 15, 2008
The Wrong Lessons From History

Exploding the myths of Clintonomics:

The bull market took off precisely when then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan took his foot off the brakes and hit the gas in 1995. It was also then that Republicans took control of Congress -- further blunting the effects of the Clinton tax torpedo that had taken effect the previous year.

Clinton also benefitted from innovations long in the making, including the Pentium chip released in March 1993 and Microsoft's Windows program released in August 1995. These together made the Internet boom possible.

As for the budget surpluses, they came as a complete surprise to Clinton economic forecasters, whose static models only predicted their tax hikes on the rich would narrow the budget gap, not get it into the black.

Their "deficit-reduction plan" didn't create the surpluses at all. They were a direct result of a tidal wave of capital-gains revenues generated by the GOP-led stock boom.

Relieved that Washington would no longer threaten to take over 14% of the economy by socializing medicine or raise taxes even higher, the market took off like a shot at that point. And capital gains tax receipts exploded, flooding federal coffers.

Clinton's own long-term budgets predicted no surpluses of any kind during his administration and beyond.

Bill Clinton never had a plan to end deficits. The Republicans and economic circumstances did it for him. But I'm sure that this myth that Bill Clinton balanced the budget will prevail in the minds of the media and Democrats, just as the false myth that Roosevelt, and not the war, got us out of the Depression continues to prevail many decades later. They have to rewrite history to justify their continued plunder. And of course, the near-term danger is that President-Elect Obama and the Congressional majority will use this mistaken history as a justification for tax hikes in a recession, which could be economically ruinous.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:20 AM

November 14, 2008
This Historical Analogy Is Always Dangerous

...but...the Moon is to Mars as the Canary Islands were to the Americas.

Discuss.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:29 PM

November 11, 2008
Hoover, Or Reagan?

Which president will Barack Obama want to emulate? He has said that he admires Reagan, but only for his transformational qualities, not for his political beliefs. But if he persists in his apparent desire to implement some combination of Hoover and FDR policies (raising taxes on the productive, protectionism, enforcing high wages), he'll end up making a bad situation much worse, and end up being a one-termer for sure.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:12 AM

An Extinct Species?

Would that it had been so. In honor of Veterans' Day, here's an interesting story of a recording captured to preserve the memory of the war that was to end all wars. Unfortunately, that part didn't work out.

[Update mid morning]

On the ninetieth anniversary of the Armistice, three British veterans are still alive. The oldest is 112, the oldest man in the country. Did he ever imagine, in the midst of the war, that he would survive another nine tenths of a century beyond its end?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:42 AM

November 06, 2008
Back To The Classics

The stick has been inducted into the Toy Hall of Fame. It's got to be one of the world's oldest toys. There are very few things that encourage and nourish the imagination to the same degree.

I don't know if I've told this story before (now that this blog is seven years old last month, I'm bound to start repeating), but when I was a kid, my grandfather had a couple toys that he made. They consisted of a length of quarter-inch steel barstock, with one end bent into a handle, and the other bent sideways into a short axle, on which he put a kid's wagon wheel. We had a blast pushing them around, and me and my cousins used to fight over who got to play with them.

[Evening update]

I should note that, while sticks make great toys, we shouldn't allow NASA to play with them, if it's going to cost billions of dollars and set the program back for years.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:18 PM

November 04, 2008
A Change Of Pace

A first-hand account of the charge of the Light Brigade has been found.

Cool

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:21 PM

September 15, 2008
Not That The Analogy Isn't Still Stupid

But I'm reminded that Jesus was a preacher. Barabbas was the community organizer. And a freedom fighter, like Bill Ayers. Also like Ayers, he got off on a technicality.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:29 AM

August 04, 2008
Get Ready To Split A Gut

...at the world's oldest jokes.

Well, OK, not so much. It says they're old jokes, not good jokes.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:34 AM

More SpaceX Perspective

Clark has a round up of links.

It was a little strange, and sad, descending into the LA basin yesterday. I had a left window seat, and I looked down at the old Rockwell/North American (and back during the war, Vultee) plant in Downey, which had been abandoned back in the nineties, and saw that Building 6 appeared to be no longer there. A lot of history in manned spaceflight took place there, but now there's almost no manned space activities left in southern California at all. Not in Downey, not in Huntington Beach, not in Seal Beach. It's all been moved to Houston, and Huntsville.

Except, except. A minute or two later, on final descent into LAX, I saw Hawthorne Airport just off the left wing, and quite prominent was the new SpaceX facility, which had previously been used to build jumbo jet wings.

So perhaps, despite the indifference of local and state politicians, the era of manned spaceflight in LA isn't quite yet over. And of course, Mojave remains ascendant.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:42 AM

July 27, 2008
Compound Interest

Some interesting thoughts on the insane notion of banning it to save the planet. Also, comments about law students' economic literacy.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:08 AM

July 21, 2008
Baseball History In The Making?

Assuming that this is correct, the biggest shut out in history is 22-0. Detroit is currently leading the Royals 18-0 in the top of the eighth, with men on second and third, and two out.

[Update a couple minutes later]

They got one more run to end the inning. Going into the bottom of the eighth, it's 19-0. They scored ten runs in that inning. Three more in the ninth ties the record, and four breaks it. It could happen. Their bats seem pretty hot tonight, and Kansas City is deep into its bullpen. The Tigers just brought in Dolsi to preserve the shut out.

[Update a couple minutes later]

They blew it by relieving Miner. Dolsi let in a run on a wild pitch.

Dang.

[One more update]

Wow, they really blew it. The Royals got four runs in the bottom of the eighth off Dolsi and Lopez. Of course, once they lost the shut out, it didn't really matter. But people are going to be asking for a long time why Leland relieved out a pitcher who was pitching a three-hit shut out, with one who had an equivalent ERA.

[Update on Tuesday morning]

I guess I'd misread the box score. Miner had been replaced the inning before, before it looked like there was a history-making shut out to preserve.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:17 PM

July 20, 2008
Ich Bin Ein Dummkopf

Obama's three hundred foreign policy advisors apparently weren't enough. His new choice of location for his German sermon from the mount, to win over valuable electoral votes of the German people, seems to have backfired as badly as the attempt to emulate Kennedy and Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate:

Andreas Schockenhoff, deputy leader of the conservative bloc in Parliament, said Sunday that the choice of the Victory Column, also known as the Golden Angel, was an "unhappy symbol" since it represented so much of Germany's militaristic past.

Rainer Brüderle, deputy leader of the opposition Free Democrats, said Obama's advisers had little idea of the historical significance of the Victory Column. "It was the symbol of German superiority over Denmark, Austria and France," Brüderle told the newspaper Bild am Sonntag.

The monument was built in 1864 to commemorate Prussia's victory over Denmark. When it was inaugurated, Prussia had defeated Austria during the Austro-Prussian war in 1866 and the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71.

The column has been originally located near the Reichstag, now the Bundestag, or German Parliament, which is close to the Brandenburg Gate. But Adolf Hitler relocated it about two kilometers, or one mile, toward the western part of the city to the Grosser Stern, or Great Star.

Too bad Leni Riefenstahl isn't around any more to film the event for him. Then later, he could reenact his grandfather's liberation of Auschwitz.

Maybe if he gets a couple hundred more advisors, he can find one with a clue. I've never seen anyone have so much trouble getting good help. It must be tough being a messiah.

I do have to say, though, that watching this kind of thing for four years would be entertaining. I just wish that he wouldn't be in charge of anything important during the show.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:28 AM

July 16, 2008
Thirty-Nine Years Ago

On July 16th, 1969, the largest rocket ever built thundered off the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, delivering three men and the equipment and supplies they would need to land two of them on the moon and return the three of them safely to earth, fulfilling the national goal declared eight years earlier. The anniversary of the landing is this coming Sunday.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:32 AM

July 13, 2008
One Week To Plan

Next Sunday will be the thirty-ninth anniversary of the first human footsteps on another world. As I do every year, I'd like to remind my readers of a ceremony that I and some friends came up with to celebrate it. If you think that this was an important event, worthy of solemn commemoration, gather some friends to do so next Sunday night, and have a nice dinner after reading the ceremony.

Oh, and coincidentally, Friday was the twenty-ninth anniversary of the fall of Skylab. James Lileks has some thoughts. Next year, it will be the fortieth, and thirtieth anniversaries, respectively, of the two events. It was ironic that our first space station came plunging into the atmosphere almost exactly a decade after the height of our space triumphs in the sixties. The seventies really sucked.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:37 AM

July 03, 2008
The High-Water Mark

One hundred and forty-five years ago today, was the beginning of the end of the southern cause:

The names of the places associated with the charge are deeply indented on the American conscience. Every summer, "The Angle" and "The High Water Mark" are crowded with visitors who come to commemorate the event and ponder those terrible minutes when American killed American in a desperate contest of wills and ideals. So much carnage in such a small place- it is difficult for us today to realize the horror those young men faced, and how quickly the hopes of the North and South were determined in this famous battle.

Even if they had won Gettysburg, the fall of Vicksburg the next day to Grant probably sealed the fate of the Confederacy. The war might have lasted longer had Lee's Pennsylvania campaign been successful, but it seems unlikely that the south could have held out long enough.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:48 AM

More Space Fascism Commentary

Thomas James notes some irony in Dwayne Day's piece:

...when one follows the Google search link he does provide, a good number of the results have to do with James Hansen calling for trials of oil executives and others who question the political orthodoxy of global warming...trials whose political nature and predetermined outcome would no doubt have pleased the arguably fascist Roland Freisler.

Not exactly the point that Dr. Day was trying to make, I suspect.

[Previous post here]

[Update a couple minutes later]

Speaking of fascists, Thomas also offers a preview of August in Denver:

...come on..."Students for a Democratic Society"? As if the hippie nostalgia of Recreate 68 wasn't bad enough, we now have someone reanimating that corpse? I thought it was the right that supposedly clung to the faded glories of a distant golden age.

OK, so I guess it won't be another Summer of Love.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:47 AM

Never Again

Eric Raymond sees the same disturbing things I do in Senator Obama:

I am absolutely not accusing Barack Obama of being a fascist or of having the goals of a fascist demagogue. I am saying that the psychological dynamic between him and his fans resembles the way fascist leaders and their people relate. The famous tingle that ran up Chris Matthew's leg. the swooning chanting crowds, the speeches full of grand we-can-do-it rhetoric, the vagueness about policy in favor of reinforcing that intoxicating sense of emotional identification...how can anyone fail to notice where this points?

There are hints of grandiosity and arrogance in Obama's behavior now. As the bond between him and his followers become more intense, though, it is quite possible they will not remain mere traces. I'm not panicked yet, because Obama is still a long way off from behaving like a megalomaniacal nut-job. But if the lives of people like Napoleon, Mussolini, or Hitler show us anything it's that the road from Obama's flavor of charismatic leader to tyrant is open, and dangerously seductive to the leader himself.

There is one more historical detail that worries me, in this connection. There is a pattern in the lives of the really dangerous charismatic tyrants that they tend to have originated on the geographical and cultural fringes of the societies they came to dominate, outsiders seeking ultimate insiderhood by remaking the "inside" in their own image. Hitler, the border Austrian who ruled Germany; Napoleon, the Corsican who seized France; and Stalin, the Georgian who tyrannized Sovet Russia. And, could it be...Obama, the half-black kid from Hawaii?

Again, I am not accusing Barack Obama of being a monster. But when I watch videos of his campaign, I see a potential monster in embryo. Most especially do I see that potential monster in the shining faces of his supporters, who may yet seduce Obama into believing that he is as special and godlike as they think he is.

I don't know if the McCain campaign has the savvy or moxie to properly go after Obama, but I think that there will be a lot of 527s who will, once the campaign really starts in the fall.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:25 AM

June 23, 2008
Not Ready For Prime Time

More historical ignorance from Senator Obama:

Obama's unfavorable comparison of the legal treatment at Gitmo with that at Nuremberg suggests either that he doesn't know what he's talking about - or that he feels free to exploit the ignorance of audiences that don't know the truth of the matter.

Hey, it's all about fooling the rubes. The sad thing is that the press never questions him on this kind of thing.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:14 AM

June 19, 2008
Cyd And The Cape

Both are discussed today over at Lileks' place. Also, judicial overreach in the Great White North.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:39 AM

June 17, 2008
Learned Nothing, Forgotten Nothing

Andy McCarthy says that Barack Obama is the September 10th candidate:

The fact is that we used the criminal justice system as our principal enforcement approach, the approach Obama intends to reinstate, for eight years -- from the bombing of the World Trade Center until the shocking destruction of that complex on 9/11. During that timeframe, while the enemy was growing stronger and attacking more audaciously, we managed to prosecute successfully less than three dozen terrorists (29 to be precise). And with a handful of exceptions, they were the lowest ranking of players.

When an elitist lawyer like Obama claims the criminal-justice system works against terrorists, he means it satisfies his top concern: due process. And on that score, he's quite right: We've shown we can conduct trials that are fair to the terrorists. After all, we give them lawyers paid for by the taxpayers whom they are trying to kill, mounds of our intelligence in discovery, and years upon years of pretrial proceedings, trials, appeals, and habeas corpus.

As a national-security strategy, however, and as a means of carrying our government's first responsibility to protect the American people, heavy reliance on criminal justice is an abysmal failure.

Obama is going to be pounded on his appalling historical ignorance throughout the campaign. "Auschwitz" was just the beginning.

[Update at noon]

Apparently the McCain campaign thinks that this is a major vulnerability for Obama:

As the war of words between the two presidential campaigns is escalating, McCain advisers and surrogates unleashed some of their harshest language yet in describing Obama.

On a conference call with reporters, former CIA chief James Woolsey and others said Obama's policy regarding the handling of terrorism suspects would create an opening for more attacks like those on Sept. 11, 2001.

Randy Scheunemann, McCain's foreign policy adviser, said Obama represents "the perfect manifestation of a Sept. 10 mindset."

"If a law enforcement approach were accurate, then you wouldn't have had Sept. 11," Kori Schake, a McCain policy adviser, said.

I think it's going to be 1972 all over again. The reason that the "superdelegate" concept was come up with was exactly to prevent this. It would seem that they're not doing their job.

Of course, it's still several weeks until the convention. If I were the McCain campaign, I wouldn't actually be pounding Obama this hard until he is safely the nominee. It probably helps Hillary! more at this stage than it does them, particularly since the public has a short attention span, and isn't necessarily going to remember this by November.

[Mid-afternoon update]

Another history lesson for Obama:

Yasin fled the United States after the bombing to Iraq, and lived as Saddam Hussein's guest in Baghdad until the invasion. He is still free, and wanted by the FBI.

Picky, picky, picky.

Anyway, it can't possibly be true. As everyone knows, Saddam had absolutely no connection to terrorism, or World Trade Center bombings.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:51 AM

June 10, 2008
What's Wrong With Redneck?

Andrea Mitchell felt compelled to apologize for calling southwest Virginia "real redneck country."

Well, she's right, it is. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I think that what she should be apologizing for (which perhaps she is, obliquely) is the insinuation that that's a bad thing. While I understand that a lot of southerners take umbrage at the word, it's really just a synonym for Scots-Irish, and it came over with them from England (and no, it has nothing to do with working in the hot sun). It was a phrase used to describe Presbyterians from northern England, who wore red collars. They were the people who settled Appalachia (and other regions). Eastern Virginia (and Maryland and Delaware) was settled by the so-called Cavaliers of southwest England, who had lost the Civil War to the Roundheads.

I think, though, that in the mind of east (and west) coast media elites like Andrea Mitchell, "redneck" is synonymous with "hillbilly," which is unquestionably an uncomplimentary term, and why the apology was necessary. It's also a mark of the cultural ignorance of those same media elite about flyover country.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:49 AM

What To Take With You?

I agree with the commenters who say that almost anyone from the modern era transported to medieval Europe would be unlikely to live more than a few days. I'd certainly have pretty bad odds.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:33 AM

A New Project In The Works?

Alan Boyle has an interview with Paul Allen. This isn't right, though:

Adrian Hunt, the collection's executive director, told me that putting a pilot in the V-1 turned out to be a terrible idea.

"The theory is that you open the cockpit and you jump out just when you're getting close to the target," he said. "There's a slight design fault there. Once you open the cockpit, that's the intake for the rocket - and it tends to suck in things, including people.

"...intake for the rocket"?

It was a pulse jet.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:04 AM

June 06, 2008
A Tour Of What We Liberated

On the anniversary. Enjoy.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:16 PM

In Defense Of A Small Town

A lovely evocative essay, from Jim Manzi. Though it's not really the subject, it's an appropriate one somehow, for the anniversary of D-Day. This is what blogging is all about.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:44 AM

Mormons And Infrastructure

Jon Goff has a truly excellent post on what will be required for space settlements, with useful historical analogies. I've always considered the LDS analogy quite apt, both in terms of types of technologies and infrastructure needed for the emigration, and the motivations. As he notes, unfortunately, the space community often uses unuseful historical analogies and/or fails to recognize where they break down.

But what he describes would be a true "Interstate Highway System" for space, as opposed to what Mike Griffin considers one (Ares/Orion).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:25 AM

June 05, 2008
Forty Years

I recall waking up to my clock radio, which was announcing that Bobby Kennedy had been shot and killed the night before in LA, on June 5th, 1968. It was quite a shock to someone growing up in a family of Democrats, coming so soon after the King assassination, and a reminder of the assassination of his brother less than five years earlier.

Now, decades on, it's pretty clear to me that, like his brother, he was vastly overrated, but his death was a tragedy nonetheless. Not because we were deprived of a great leader, but because we imagined we were, and it was traumatic, particularly for the left. To the point that, like JFK, though he was killed by a leftist (in this case a vengeful Palestinian) they had to concoct bizarre theories to make it appear to be a "right wing" conspiracy. Both the Kennedy assassinations are wounds from which so-called liberals have never really recovered, or gotten over their anger.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:26 AM

June 02, 2008
One Man, One Way

Phil Bowermaster has some thoughts on what I think is actually quite a likely scenario for the first human on Mars. It won't be done by NASA, though, or likely any government space agency. They simply can't afford to take the risk when it's funded by taxpayers, as we've seen when the nation gets unreasonably hysterical over astronaut deaths. It will be a privately funded expedition, which will be able to do so without the intrusion of politics.

And of course, this will be more in the nature of such exploration. After all, the vast majority of polar exploration (e.g., Peary, Scott, Amundsen, Shackleton) was privately funded. Once we get the cost of access to orbit down, and establish an orbital fueling infrastructure, it will be quite feasible to raise the money for private adventures such as this.

Sadly, NASA is contributing almost nothing to those goals, instead spending billions developing expensive government-owned/operated launch vehicles and capsules that will likely become obsolete before they first fly.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:41 AM

May 28, 2008
The Uncle Seems Real

OK, Occam's Razor would indicate that Barack Obama has a maternal great uncle (i.e., his mother's mother's brother), named Charles Payne (middle initial unclear) who served with the 355th Infantry that liberated one of the camps in the Buchenwald complex, despite previous concerns on that score.

It seems very unlikely that he would have a great uncle by that name, and that someone by that name would have had that service record, who also was an Obama political supporter, and he would put forth such a story, and that they are not the same person, despite the confusion about the middle initial. So, if we ignore the "Auschwitz" reference, and the fact that he calls his great uncle his uncle (understandable, given that he had no actual uncles, at least on his mother's side), the story is accurate.

But it's not that easy to ignore Auschwitz.

That's because "Auschwitz" has become one of the most emotionally charged words in the English (well, OK, it's not English--it's German) language. It's one of the most emotionally charged words in any language, for anyone who is aware of what happened there, and few educated people aren't, regardless of their native language.

The word is significant in the context of the Obama campaign for two reasons.

First, because it has such emotional connotations, particularly for Jews, with whom Obama has had trouble closing the deal, it looks like he's pandering to them. I'm not saying that he is, but it has that appearance.

Auschwitz was the site of the deliberate extermination of many of them (as well as Catholics, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others deemed "unworthy of life" by the National Socialists aka Nazis) and one might cynically think that an attempt to say that one of his family members was responsible for the liberation of the camp would give that constituency a warmer feeling for him, despite his many foreign policy advisors who clearly are not fans of the state of Israel (e.g., Zbig).

Buchenwald, on the other hand, while atrocious beyond normal human understanding, was merely a slave labor camp, and not historically abnormal in a time of war. The people who died there did so under the stress of work and disease, rather than as a deliberate attempt to wipe them off the planet. Which, of course, says much more about human nature and history than it does about the Nazis.

But beyond that, it is of concern because it reveals a profound ignorance of history and/or geography.

Anyone familiar with the history of World War II knows that Auschwitz (despite its Germanic name, which like Dansk to Danzig after the conquest in 1939, was a rename--the Polish name is Oswiecim), was in the occupied country of Poland, which before the war had hundreds of thousands of Jews, and after the war had...virtually none.

Furthermore, anyone familiar with that history knows that American troops never advanced past the River Elbe, in Germany, and that the Soviet forces advanced all the way across Poland and into eastern Germany, raping and pillaging as they went. Which is why there was an East Germany. Has Barack never heard of that "country," which was a colony of the Soviet Union, of which his mother was not obviously unfond (to understate the issue)?

No one, in other words, familiar with that history, would imagine that an American soldier, under Patton, had contributed to the "liberation" (scare quotes because the Soviets never liberated anyone--they only enslaved them) of Auschwitz.

Obama didn't know this. Nor, apparently, did anyone on his staff, since he had been spouting the same fable since 2002 and no one had bothered to correct him. Or if they had, they were ignored. I'm not sure which is worse.

Given his unfamiliarity with Jack Kennedy's less-than-successful negotiations with Khrushchev, it makes one wonder what else he doesn't know.

[Late evening update]

Some have taken issue of my characterization of Buchenwald as "merely a slave labor camp."

This has to be taken in context. I'm not sure what part of "atrocious beyond human understanding" with regard to that camp the commenters don't understand.

I wasn't excusing it in any way. I was simply pointing out that in the historical context of war, in which civilians were generally enslaved or killed, and disposed of when they could no longer work, it was hardly abnormal. Auschwitz (and Treblinka, and Sobibor, and Chelmo, and Betzec, and Majdenek) were in a separate class, previously unknown, which gave rise to the term "genocide," in which the intent was to wipe out an entire people. I'm sorry that some don't get the point.

[Thursday morning update]

Well, I certainly seem to have stirred up a hornet's nest among some. Let me pick up the remains of the straw men that were strewn around and kicked apart here overnight.

For the record, I did not say, or imply, that Buchenwald was a summer camp. I did not say, or imply, that the leftist Hitler's crimes were a "drop in the bucket" compared to the leftist Stalin's. I did not say, or imply, that working people to death is not murdering them. I did not say, or imply, that anyone's death (including Anne Frank's) was less tragic because it occurred at Bergen-Belsen than at Auschitz. I did not say, or imply, that I would "smile with satisfaction" if I were at Buchenwald instead of Auschwitz.

I'm not sure how to have a rational discussion with anyone nutty enough to have managed to infer any of the above from what I actually wrote.

Also, for the record, I am not now, and have never been a Republican, or (AFAIK) a "right winger," unless by that phrase one means a classical liberal. As for "sitting down with my Jewish friends and discussing this," I not only have Jewish friends, but Jewish relatives by blood, or perhaps I should say had, because they include many who doubtless died in both types of camps.

[Update a few minutes later]

One other straw man. I did not say, or imply, that because of this single incident Barack Obama was unfit to be president of the United States. But it is part, albeit a small one, of a much larger tapestry.

[One more update]

To the people in comments asking me what I meant by this, or why I wrote it, I don't know how to better explain my points than I already have. If after having actually read it carefully, for comprehension, you still don't get it, or willfully choose to misinterpret it, I can't help you.

[Update again]

OK, I'll make one attempt, for those who think that I am somehow "minimizing" what happened at Buchenwald. Perhaps they don't understand the true meaning of the word "atrocious," as in the phrase I used, "atrocious beyond human understanding."

I wasn't using it in perhaps a more popular (and trivial) sense as "that movie or meal was atrocious." I was using it in its most literal sense, as in a place where actual atrocities occurred. The two words are related, you know?

[Update about 9:30]

If I change the phrase "merely a slave labor camp," which is what seems to be generating such irrational fury and umbrage, to "not a site for the extermination of a people on an industrial scale," will that mollify people? Probably not, but I'll do it anyway.

[Afternoon update]

I'm wondering how much of the rampant insanity, straw mannery and outrage in comments would have been avoided had I merely omitted the word "merely".

[Friday morning update]

I have one final (I hope) follow up post on this subject.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:52 PM

May 27, 2008
In The (Red) Army Now?

It wouldn't shock me if Obama's uncle was in the Red Army, given his mother's apparent political beliefs, but I suspect that he's either repeating a family myth, or gaffeing again. I don't think that this is his Tuzla, though. If he claimed to have liberated Auschwitz himself it might be Hillary-class, but not this.

[Update a while later]

Does Obama even have an uncle who could have served in the US Army?

It's one thing to get your concentration camps confused, but conjuring up family members puts this in a different class of fabulism. Does he really think that no one will call him on this? Well, considering the way the media has been swooning for him, maybe he does.

[Update a few minutes later]

Heh. From comments, I agree. Maybe he was thinking about his Uncle Joe...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:43 AM

May 26, 2008
Memorial Day

I've been busy working on an article, and finishing the gutters (all done now except strapping the downspouts, because the straps I got are too short), so no posting today. But I did want to note the history of the holiday, for those unaware. Unlike Veteran's Day, it's not a day just for remembering war dead, but dead loved ones in general. I remember as a child that my grandmother would always go up to her home town of Beaverton, Michigan (sometimes stopping by on the way home from our cottage by Houghton Lake) to put flowers on her husband's (my grandfather, who died when I was six) grave.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:11 PM

May 25, 2008
The Cosmic Ghoul Missed One

Congrats to JPL on the successful (so far) landing of the Phoenix. Interestingly (though almost certainly coincidentally), it happens on the forty-seventh anniversary of Kennedy's speech announcing the plan to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade.

And (for what it's worth--not much, to me, and even more certainly coincidentally) it's the thirty-first anniversary of the initial release of Star Wars in theaters. I didn't see it that day, but I did see it within a couple weeks. I remember being unimpressed ("the Kessel run in twelve parsecs"...please), though the effects were pretty good. But then, I was a fan of actual science fiction.

[Update late evening]

It's worth noting that (I think) this was the first soft landing on Mars in over twenty years, since Viking. Surely someone will correct me (or nitpick me) if I'm wrong.

[Monday morning update]

OK, not exactly wrong (it has been over twenty years), but it's thirty years. I'm pretty good at math. Arithmetic, not so much.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:43 PM

One Of The Last Of The Paperclips

Dennis Wingo remembers Ernst Stuhlinger.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:43 PM

May 16, 2008
And In Plenty Of Time For Christmas

Hey, Father's Day is coming up, too. This isn't new, but it's the first time I'd come across it. Behold, the complete ACME catalog. Considering the election coming up, I could use the anti-nightmare machine. And the atom re-arranger sounds like a proto-form of nanotech and molecular assemblers.

I wonder if they have a gift registry?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:13 PM

May 14, 2008
The Month Of The Natural Disaster

May '08 has been a pretty rough month for the planet and its inhabitants, what with the volcanoes and tornadoes and cyclones and earthquakes, <VOICE="Professor Frink>and the drowning and the crushing and the evacuating and the staaaaarving, glavin</VOICE>.

Jeff Masters has a roundup and some history, and some inside info on why the death toll in the country formerly known as Burma was so high.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:01 AM

May 10, 2008
Don't Know Much About History (Part Two)

Jack Kelly has more thoughts on Obama's frightening ignorance of American history (hey, it would be nice if he could just figure out how many states there are):

Sen. Obama is on both sounder and softer ground with regard to John F. Kennedy. The new president held a summit meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev in Vienna in June, 1961.

Elie Abel, who wrote a history of the Cuban missile crisis (The Missiles of October), said the crisis had its genesis in that summit.

"There is reason to believe that Khrushchev took Kennedy's measure in June 1961 and decided this was a young man who would shrink from hard decisions," Mr. Abel wrote. "There is no evidence to support the belief that Khrushchev ever questioned America's power. He questioned only the president's readiness to use it. As he once told Robert Frost, he came to believe that Americans are 'too liberal to fight.'"

...It's worth noting that Kennedy then was vastly more experienced than Sen. Obama is now. A combat veteran of World War II, Jack Kennedy served 14 years in Congress before becoming president. Sen. Obama has no military and little work experience, and has been in Congress for less than four years.

If we elect someone as callow as Obama, maybe Khrushchev will be proven right.

[Update a little later]

Heh. Suitably Flip has a new lapel pin for Barack:

.

[Late afternoon update]

Now he can't even make up his mind. I guess he was for the unconditional meeting before he was against it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:08 AM

May 01, 2008
State Department Issues New Language Guidelines

December 15th, 1941

WASHINGTON (Routers) In an effort to drive a wedge between moderate Germans and those more extreme, the State Department issued new rules today, stipulating that the word "Nazi" was not to be used by department employees to describe the enemy. Germany recently declared war on our country, as part of its alliance with Imperial Japan, which itself attacked us at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii a little over a week ago, and with which we are now at war.

"Nazism has a great many admirable features," said a department spokesman at Foggy Bottom, "and we want to make clear that despite the fact that the Nazi Party rules Germany, we have no quarrel with the vast majority of Nazis with peaceful intent."

She went on to describe the National Socialist universal health care plan, its youth programs that inculcate loyalty to the government, its strict and necessary control over unbridled private industry, its wage and price controls, its strict separation of church and state, its progressive views on food purity and safety, and other beneficial features of the fascist system.

"Many of the Nazi programs have their counterparts here in President Roosevelt's own New Deal, such as the NRA, the CCC, our price monitoring boards, and so on. In fact, many of the ideas of National Socialism were first developed in our own progressive country, and we in turn might want to consider examining their policies for more ways to improve our own."

She went on, "...if we call Hitler and his staff, who lack moral legitimacy, 'Nazis,' we may unintentionally legitimize their rule, and end up offending many of the peaceful National Socialist Germans with whom we can develop a productive relationship after the defeat of the extremist Hitler regime. We don't want to tar all Nazis with the racism and war mongering of the more fanatical members of the party."

"We are concerned that use of the term "Nazi" to refer to the murderous extremists may glamorize their racism, give them undeserved moral authority with the German people, and undermine our ultimate war strategy of winning their hearts and minds. We want them to understand that we recognize Nazism as an ideology of peace, and welfare for the common good and betterment of all Germans. Not to mention their understandable desire for lebensraum."

When asked what term employees were to use to refer to the enemy, she replied, "We haven't quite worked that out yet. We're considering 'the Hitler gang' for now."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:26 PM

April 30, 2008
Libertarian Transhumanism

Rob Bailey has an interview with Peter Thiel. I agree with him that "transhumanist" is a misleading word, and it's not useful to use it until there's agreement on what is human. Unlike people like Asimov (and Kass) I don't believe that we lose our humanity when we live indefinitely long.

I would have been interested to hear his thoughts on space.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:35 AM

April 18, 2008
The Fascists Lose In Italy--Again

Jonah Goldberg's book has provided a clearer, better-focused lens through which to view the world. For instance, it now becomes clear that the recent Italian political earthquake was a victory for the true, classical liberal right, and a major defeat for a resurgence of the smiley-faced fascism that has held much of Europe in its grip for the past decades, despite the defeat of the more virulent forms of it in World War II. Here are the values that won, and lost:

The election campaign itself was the most rigorously fought in Italy since its liberation from Fascist rule in 1944. Berlusconi, often portrayed by the media as something of a clown if not a conjurer of tricks, put the case for a market-based capitalist and democratic system in simple but powerful terms.

His rival, former Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni, leader of the new Democratic Party, succeeded in putting forward the case for a social-democratic system, with the state playing the central role as a distributor of wealth and welfare.

Berlusconi spoke of discipline, family values, hard work and individual generosity. Veltroni countered with his talk of solidarity, sharing and collective compassion.

Text coloration mine. All of the red rhetoric could have come right out of Benito Mussolini's playbook. The green stuff is "right wing."

With this defeat, and the complete political demise of one of the oldest and most extreme fascist movements--the Communist Party--perhaps the Italians have finally laid the old socialist to rest.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:59 AM

April 16, 2008
Remembering Slim Chipley

Most of my readers will find this of no interest at all, but I just ran across a new blog dedicated to remembering the good old days in Flint, Michigan. Nostalgic memories abound.

The population trend in the sidebar is depressing. When I was a kid it had a population of almost two hundred thousand, and there was an ongoing feud with Grand Rapids over whether it or Flint was the second largest city in the state (after Detroit, of course, which had its own hemorrhage of people). Now it's down to just a little over half that.

[Update in the evening]

OK, again, unless you're from southeast Michigan, this will be meaningless, but via the blog above, I found a coney blog. That actually understands the difference between Flint and Detroit style.

And there are those who say that it's a lost art. For many, Angelo's defined the Flint coney island, and once he died (my father was in the hospital with him at the same time, as they both had heart attacks in the late sixties), it became franchised, and lost the magic. But my mother used to tell me (and we even went there when I was young) that the original Flint Coney Island, on Saginaw, north of downtown, was the best. But it went under decades ago.

Anyway, I'm glad to hear that it's a hit in Phoenix. Maybe we can keep the brand alive.

My darling Patricia doesn't understand the appeal. But then, she's not a fan of raw onions. Nor is she a fan of me after I ingest them. But once in a while, I have to indulge, consequences be damned...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:40 PM

April 15, 2008
Sixty Five Years

...since the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This is why Pennsylvanians (and other Americans, in every state) want to keep their guns, and won't vote for people who want to take them away, not because they lost their jobs. And one always has to question the motivations of a politician who professes the desire to see an unarmed populace.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:54 PM

April 12, 2008
Party Like It's 1961!

It's kind of late now if you didn't make plans, and I gave advance notice a few days ago, but tonight is Yuri's Night, as we are reminded by Phil Bowermaster.

And in response to a previous commenter that we shouldn't be celebrating a Soviet victory in the Cold War, we should be long past that. We won, and in fact, if Gagarin hadn't flown, we might not have gone to the moon. Of course, it's debatable whether or not that was a good thing for our expansion into space, in light of the history since.

In any event, it's an historical event, to celebrate the first time a human left the planet and went into space far enough to actually orbit, and almost half a century later, it transcends politics and a dead communist (and fascist) empire.

We aren't attending a party, both because we're not much on partying, if it means loud atrocious dance music, but also because the nearest (and only) one that anyone could muster up in Florida was up in Cocoa Beach. That nothing was organized in the metropolitan tri-counties of Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade says something about the importance of space in our culture, but I'm not quite sure what.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:01 PM

April 03, 2008
Only Nine Days Left

Until Yuri's Night. It will also be the twenty-seventh anniversary of the first Shuttle launch.

Looking at the map, the only Florida party I see is up in Cocoa Beach. Between Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale and Miami, you'd think that south Florida would be able to come up with something.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:35 AM

March 30, 2008
Back In LA

I took a little longer to drive back from Phoenix because I did two things that I've never done, in all the times I've made that trip over the past thirty years. I stopped at the Colorado River in Blythe and walked across, and I stopped and did a quick tour of the Patton Museum at Chiriaco Summit. I'd show the pictures, but I don't seem to have my card reader with me. I might pick one up at Fry's tomorrow.

The latter was more impressive than I expected, considering that it's private, not official. More so on the interior than outside, though. They have a number of tanks out there, in various states of decrepitude and disrepair, and no signs to provide any useful information about them. Still worth a visit, though, for anyone interested in military history.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:02 PM

March 22, 2008
War Critics Decry Interminable And Unwinnable Conflict

January 15th, 1945

WASHINGTON (Routers) With the "Allied" forces continuing to be bogged down in the Ardennes Forest, many are questioning Roosevelt administration war policies, the unreasonable length of the war, and even whether or not it can be won.

The 7th Army's VI Corps is waging a desperate, and perhaps futile battle with German troops, surrounded on three sides in the Alsace region. A whole month after the beginning of the renewed German offensive, with almost twenty-thousand American troops dead in this battle alone, there remains no clear end in sight, or hope that the American lines can be closed.

There are serious questions about the competence of Generals Bradley and Patton, concerns that were only heightened shortly after the beginning of the battle, when two armies from Bradley's army group were removed from his command and placed under that of the British General Montgomery. General Montgomery's comments in a press conference a week ago have served only to buttress such legitimate doubts. He didn't even mention their names in describing the limited efforts to recapture lost ground, that remains unsuccessful, with the Germans continuing to take the initiative.

Many point out that these lengthy battles, and lengthy wars, are somehow indicative of a fundamental failure of American policy, not just in waging the war, but in the very decision to enter into it.

"It's not just that we're a whole month into this battle with no clear resolution or exit strategy. In a few more months, this war will have gone on as long as the Civil War," said one Republican critic of the administration. "And that one was Americans against Americans. We should have expected to do much better against Germans. After all, this war has now gone on twice as long as World War I, when we mopped up the Kaiser in a year and a half." He went on, "It's clearly the fault of this Roosevelt administration, that lied us into war, and then botched it. I'll bet that had Tom Dewey won the election a couple months ago, he would have exercised his judgment by immediately implementing his policy of not having entered the war."

Others disagree. One administration spokesman has said on background that this seems like flawed logic.

"One can't judge war progress by a calendar. Wars aren't run on a schedule, and every one is different," he pointed out. "And neither can one judge the progress of a battle that way, or by the casualty count. Often the heaviest fighting occurs just before victory. Our heaviest losses at Normandy were just before we took the beach and the cliffs."

"Yes, the fighting is fierce in the Ardennes now, but Hitler is waging a war on two fronts, and he's down to young boys and old men as soldiers. We will simply have to outlast him, and I'm confident that we will start making serious progress into Germany in a month."

But war opponents will have none of it.

"This administration has been telling us we've been winning for two and a half years, ever since Midway," said the leader of one of the prominent anti-war groups. After over three years of killing and terror, it's time to stop the lies, and the war."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:52 PM

March 19, 2008
I Wouldn't Have Guessed That

The last Soviet premiere was a Christian.

I find arguments (such as Dennett and Dawkins, and Hitchens) put forth that religion is the source of all evil in the world to be tendentious. Much evil has been (and continues to be) done in the name of a god, but the most nihilistic, murderous regimes in history, in the twentieth century, were godless. Belief in God (or lack thereof) is neither a necessary, or sufficient condition for evil acts. The real dividing line, as Jonah points out, is not whether or not one is a deist, but whether or not one is an individualist. Say whatever else you want about a classically liberal society--it might leave some behind, but it won't murder them wholesale.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:23 PM

March 09, 2008
Rewriting History

Is it possible that Hillary! is being less than truthful about her and Rwanda?

I think it's a lot more likely that she either didn't advocate action on Rwanda at all, or did so only in passing. If so, this would have to be the definitive example of her attempt to claim responsibility for everything good that happened during her husband's presidency, while disavowing all responsibility for his mistakes. This was, in my opinion, the most shameful moment of the Clinton administration. It ought, by rights, to have a place in Hillary Clinton's "thirty five years of experience working for change." Or perhaps she might claim that she wasn't that interested in foreign policy at the time, or that for whatever reason she just didn't pick up on the genocide in Rwanda until it was too late to act. That would at least be honest.

But if, in fact, Clinton missed the chance to urge her husband to help stop the Rwandan genocide, then she should not pretend that she was, in fact, right there on the side of the angels all along. That's just grotesque.

In a related question, do bears defecate in the sylvan wilderness?

"Grotesque" doesn't start to describe the former First Couple.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:59 AM

March 06, 2008
Back To The Drawing Board

Lileks:

I just remembered that I called the Bob Davis show this morning to talk about the new theory re: Moses and the Ten Commandments: dude was high. Apparently a professor somewhere has suggested that the entire experience was the result of a mushroom or some such ceremonial intoxicant. I called to say I didn't believe it, because if Moses was tripping we wouldn't have ten commandments. We would have three. The first would make sense, more or less; the second, written half an hour later, would command profound respect for lizards who sit on stones and look at you, because they're freaking incredible when you think about it, and the third would be gibberish. Never mind the problem of getting the tablets down the mountain - anyone who has experience of watching stoners try to assemble pizza money when the doorbell rings doubts that Moses could have hauled stone tablets all the way down.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:51 AM

March 04, 2008
Scottish Innovation

This isn't new, but I'd never seen it before, and figured that many of my readers hadn't either. The world's only rotating canal lock. There's more info at the usual source, of course. It's a pretty clever design.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:32 AM

March 02, 2008
Confused

Selena Zito writes that all of the remaining presidential candidates are Scots-Irish.

Really? This is the first I'd heard that Hillary! was of Scots-Irish descent. I'd always assumed that she was from Puritan stock. That's the way she's always acted. And Obama is obviously, at best, only half Scots-Irish.

Zito doesn't seem to quite get the concept, either:

How can there be such scant understanding of a 30 million-strong ethnic group that has produced so many leaders and swung most elections?

Perhaps because political academics and pollsters parse the Scottish half off with the WASP vote and define the Irish-Catholic half as blue-collar Democrats. They are neither.

There is no "Irish-Catholic half" of the Scots-Irish. Scots-Irish aren't Irish at all. Neither are they Scottish. They were mostly Anglo-Saxon, not Celtic. They were also a violent people with an honor culture, mercenaries from the border area between England and Scotland. As the article notes, they were sent by the English to colonize Ulster, to get them out of Britain after the war between England and Scotland was settled and they had no more need for them. The ones too violent for Ulster were shipped off to America, so they're a double distillation of the most violent culture that the British Isles produced. After they fought (mostly for the South) in the Civil War, many of them headed out west.

People who think that America is too violent blame it on the proliferation of guns. But they confuse cause and effect. We have a lot of guns because we have a lot of Scots-Irish (aka rednecks). But it comes in pretty handy during war time.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:29 AM

February 12, 2008
Honest Abe

I know that no one knows or cares any more, with that abomination known as "Presidents Day" (we're supposed to honor Millard Fillmore and Franklin Pierce along with Washington and Lincoln?), but today is Lincoln's birthday, something that we actually observed when I was a kid.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:44 AM

February 08, 2008
Happy Birthday, Chuck!

Alan Boyle has a roundup of links about Darwin's birthday. I don't have much to say right now, except that his theory is probably the most controversial, and most misunderstood (and most powerful as well, in many senses) in the history of science.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:52 PM

February 05, 2008
In Praise Of Hegemony

Some thoughts from Arnold Kling.

Someone has to be the hegemon. The goal should be to ensure that it is one that maximizes individual freedom and productivity.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:17 AM

January 23, 2008
The Definitive Interview

With Jonah Goldberg, about his new book. By Frank J.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:13 AM

January 18, 2008
What Happened Ten Thousand Years Ago?

...that caused the apparently contemporaneous development of agriculture on opposite sides of the world?

...fresh evidence, in the form of Peruvian squash seeds, indicates that farming in the New and Old Worlds was nearly concurrent. In a paper the journal Science published last June, Tom Dillehay, an anthropological archaeologist at Vanderbilt University, revealed that the squash seeds he found in the ruins of what may have been ancient storage bins on the lower western slopes of the Andes in northern Peru are almost 10,000 years old. “I don’t want to play the early button game,” he said, “but the temporal gap between the Old and New World, in terms of a first pulse toward civilization, is beginning to close.”

Let's see if they find a monolith.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:19 AM

December 28, 2007
Are You Better Off?

Year	US Life Expectancy at Birth
1905	47.8
1975	72.5
2005	77.9

Five and a half years extra life expectancy after 30 years. Not bad. An extra 30 after 100 years. Nice. I guess the combination of stress, pollution, moral decrepitude, corroded job protections, declining medical care and all the other crises of the day are actually coincident with increased lifespan. Don't be optimistic about it; it's not fashionable.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 12:58 PM

December 19, 2007
On This Day In History

Thirty-five years ago, the last mission to the moon ended. We haven't been back since (by definition), and who knows when we'll return again. No time soon, and no time affordably, with NASA's current plans.

And nine years ago, Bill Clinton was impeached, the first time that happened to an elected president, though the Senate, under the dubious "leadership" of Trent Lott, had a sham trial afterward that let him off.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:34 PM

December 07, 2007
Sixty-Six Years Ago

On a beautiful Sunday morning in Hawaii, a sleeping giant was awakened, and filled with a terrible resolve.

I was at the memorial about a year ago. Some of the tour guides there were present at the scene, and described the chaos and heroism. There is a project to capture their memories and pictures, before they're all gone.

The memorial itself is deteriorating, and needs to be replaced. If you'd like to help, today might be a good time to do it, while we remember.

[Update mid morning]

Here's a story about five of the survivors.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:11 AM

November 24, 2007
Last Of Its Kind?

Over sixty years after it went down, a P-38 Lightning has been found buried on a beach in Wales.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:14 AM

November 22, 2007
Forty-Four Years

This Thanksgiving is also the forty-fourth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.

When we were in Dallas for a wedding a couple weeks ago, we went over to Dealey Plaza, where we'd never been, and went to the Sixth Floor Museum. I'd watched the coverage at the time it happened, and seen many photos and the Zapruder film, but you can't really get a sense of what it is like without actually seeing the historic site of the assassination. It wasn't what I'd imagined. I think that I'd always inflated the distances in my mind. It seemed almost mundane to look at the street that the limo had driven down, and up at the window of the repository where the sniper had lurked in wait.

Anyway, here's an interesting article about the Zapruder film, and the mythology about it, that helps explain something that has provided fodder for the conspiracy theorists over the years.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:17 AM

November 18, 2007
A Couple Items From GeekPress

Paul Hsieh points out an interesting end of an era, that most people weren't even aware they were in.

And is this illegal? It certainly is hilarious. And gratifying to anyone who's been called by a telemarketer (i.e., anyone with a land line, and perhaps even with cells these days).

If it's breaking the law, I assume that it would involve impersonating a police officer.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:06 PM

November 11, 2007
Remember The Doughboys

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
Canadian Army

Note that the number of WW I vets has dwindled down to a tiny few (my maternal grandfather was one, who died in the early sixties). Barring some miracle medical breakthroughs, in another decade they will all lie (at least metaphorically) in Flanders fields. Honor today the few who are still with us, and their compatriots who no longer are. And thank, silently or otherwise, those in harm's way today overseas.

[Note: this is a repost from two years ago. I may update later if I have any further thoughts in context, but you might want to read this related post from yesterday, if you haven't already. I'll be keeping this post at the top of the blog all day.]

[Update a few minutes later]

Google (uncharacteristically) remembers. I don't think they observed Memorial Day.

Glenn also has some additional related links.

[Update a few minutes later]

Even the BBC has figured out that things are going pretty well in Iraq. How long will it take the Gray Lady and the networks to figure it out?

[Evening update on Veteran's Day]

I had a post a few days ago about overaged adolescents who want to "make a difference." Well, here are people who want to make a difference, and really do:

All of us are volunteers. We're in Iraq because we want to serve. We are well educated and physically fit and could have pursued a variety of other life options. But, to paraphrase Defense Secretary Robert Gates, we are driven by the romantic and optimistic ideal that we can improve the world. We are seeing real progress on the ground, and we are helping Iraq to change.

Idealism, however, does not diminish our longing for home or the pain of missing family. It does not dispel all fear and doubt, and it does not heal our wounded or fallen friends. So when we are feeling disheartened, we open the care packages and read the letters.

And I don't see any whining about their pay or benefits.

Send them some more.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:59 PM

November 09, 2007
The Night Of Shattering Glass

It's been almost seven decades since Kristallnacht. Today is the sixty-ninth anniversary. Hilda Pierce remembers:

In Paris, on Nov. 7, 1938, a 17-year-old boy, Herschel Grynszpan, distraught over the treatment of his German Jewish parents in Poland, shot and killed the German minor official Herr von Rath. That was the excuse for Kristallnacht two days later.

Thousands of people participated in this horrendous carnage, an organized massacre dictated by Berlin. Not just hoodlums, but ordinary middle-class men and women, neighbors, former friends, smashed windows, looted Jewish shops, burned synagogues, tortured and beat senseless thousands of Jews and the rest sent to concentration camps. In my Vienna, the bloodshed was even greater; hundreds of Jews committed suicide. There it happened on Nov. 9. Austrians had one great regret, that so much needless damage was inflicted on property.

Crystal Night was the beginning of the Holocaust. It sowed the seeds for the Second World War. Had Hitler been stopped at that time, the war and genocide might have been avoided. All these valuable people, Jews who had contributed so much to the world in science, art, music, mores and medicine, could have continued giving their invaluable gifts to mankind.

Sadly, though, many in modern Europe seem to have forgotten:

Take the much-abused term “neoconservatives,” which has become code for the Jews who have supposedly suborned America in Israel’s interests. In the Guardian, Geoffrey Wheatcroft lamented the fact that Conservative Party leader David Cameron had fallen under the spell of neoconservatives’ “ardent support for the Iraq war, for the US and for Israel,” and urged Cameron to ensure that British foreign policy was no longer based on the interest of “another country”—Israel. In the Times, Simon Jenkins supported the notion that “a small group of neo-conservatives contrived to take the greatest nation on Earth to war and kill thousands of people” and that these “traitors to the American conservative tradition,” whose “first commitment was to the defence of Israel,” had achieved a “seizure of Washington (and London) after 9/11.” According to this familiar thesis, the Jews covertly exercise their extraordinary power to advance their own interests and harm the rest of mankind.

Gee, that somehow seems familiar.

But of course, it's much worse:

The British media uncritically regurgitate Palestinian propaganda even when it is demonstrably false. In April 2002, many outlets labeled Israel’s assault on the refugee camp in Jenin a “massacre” with thousands dead; in fact, some 52 Palestinian men had died (of whom the great majority were terrorists), along with 23 Israeli soldiers. In last year’s Lebanon war, the media propagated manifestly false Hezbollah claims of Israeli massacres that later proved to have been staged.

During the same war, the Guardian published a cartoon depicting a huge fist, armed with brass knuckles shaped like Stars of David, hammering a bloody child while a wasp representing Hezbollah buzzed around ineffectually. The image suggested that Israel was a gigantic oppressor, slaughtering children in brutal overreaction to Hezbollah, a minor irritant. It was reminiscent of an earlier cartoon in the Independent that showed a monstrous Ariel Sharon biting the head off a Palestinian baby, which won first prize in the British Political Cartoon Society’s annual competition for 2003. By showing Jews killing children, both cartoons employed the imagery of the blood libel—the medieval European calumny that sparked many massacres of Jews by claiming that they murdered Gentile children and used their blood for religious rituals.

No anti-semitism here folks. Move along...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:57 PM

September 05, 2007
Nobody Expects The Iowan Inquisition

Behold, the machine shed of horrors.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:26 AM

August 20, 2007
The Upper Rockies

Not sure how to categorize this one, but here's a recent travel photoessay from the wilderness of Idaho and Montana, that reminds me of why I miss the American west. Sounds like my kind of road trip.

Warning, not for the bandwidth challenged.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:06 AM

July 23, 2007
I Remember It Well

It's been forty years since the Detroit riots on Twelfth Street. We drove down from Flint afterward to look at the damage. I'd never seen a war zone before, but it looked like I imagine one might. A year later, the Tigers came back from a two-game deficit to win the World Series against the Cardinals (the first time in series history that had happened), which went a good way toward healing the city.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:52 AM

July 16, 2007
The First Anglosphere Revolution

Jim Bennett has a review of Michael Barone's interesting new book on the English civil war, and its influence on the Founders.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:08 AM

July 04, 2007
A Reminder

That few, if any, contemporary politicians are the equals of the statesmen who were the founders. Sadly, few are even taught such things in either the public schools, or the universities.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:05 PM

Doing July Fourth Right

Popular Mechanics has twenty ways. They left out the most important one, though:

It is instructive, and educational (particularly for those who haven't seen it since high-school civics class, if then) to read aloud Jefferson's work of genius, the Declaration of Independence. In so doing, we are reminded of the principles on which this country was founded, the offenses committed against our ancestors by the English king, and the reasons that we forged our own nation.

So, I hope that you thank the founders who solemnly pledged "their Lives, their Fortunes, and their sacred Honor"--who sacrificed so much, and actually underwent bombardment by true explosives, so that you could enjoy your barbecued ribs and potato salad, and the benign burning of colorful chemicals launched on rockets.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:06 AM

July 01, 2007
Perspective

Today is the hundred and forty fourth anniversary of the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg. In the three bloody days of that battle, on the Union side alone, we had about as many casualties, killed and wounded as we've had in over four years in Iraq.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:02 AM

June 12, 2007
"Tear Down This Wall"

It's been twenty years since Ronald Reagan stood by the Brandenburg Gate and demanded the beginning of the liberation of eastern Europe. Only two and a half years later, the wall came down. I remember listening to radio reports about it, and for one of the few times in my life, I had a very real sense of history being made.

[Update in the afternoon]

Apparently, it was neither the first, or the last time that Reagan called for the wall to come down. It was almost a lifetime habit, right up until it actually fell.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:53 AM

June 08, 2007
Fuel of the Future

From the May 2007 and May 1857 issue of Scientific American:

We believe that no particular use is made of the fluid petroleum, from the 'tar springs' of California, except as a lotion for bruises and rheumatic affections. It has a pungent odor, and although it can be made to burn with a pretty good light, its smell is offensive. This, perhaps, may be obviated by distilling it with some acid; we believe that this is not impossible in this age of advanced chemistry. If the offensive odor could be removed, a valuable and profitable business might be carried on in manufacturing burning fluid from it.

I find the hubris that we can predict we know what energy we will be using for lighting in 150 years astonishing. But whatever it is, if we project economically viable reserves vs. current usage, we can project we will run out of it. It's a good thing we found a replacement for whale oil and tallow in time.

I think scientists and journalists misunderstand what 'finite' means when it comes to resources. Even a compact finite sphere can seem infinite if as you approach the edge, you slow down, the sphere grows, or your direction changes. When resources get scarce, price rises slows down usage, viable reserves grow, substitutes change usage patterns and magically--as if stayed by an invisible hand--we never run out of anything.

For thousands of years the only thing consistently getting more expensive is the value of human attention (Simon).

[Update from Rand, Saturday afternoon]

Per a comment:

Now, I consider myself a moderate libertarian and thus strongly disagree with them on this but while I am a strong believer in innovation and technological progress, the argument about finite resources does give me pause at times. What about industrial metal ores etc...?

Could we not at some point simply run out of materials to use?

I would point out that there's no such thing as a non-renewable resource. Except, of course, time, and (ultimately) energy. It will be a very long time, though, before we run out of either, at least as a species.

By the way, Sam. What's with all the marathon posting? Did you just lose your job? Not that I don't appreciate it. Just sayin'...

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 02:29 PM

June 05, 2007
Forty Years Later

And the left continues to attempt to rewrite the history of the Six-Day War. I remember the war, and some of the jokes about it afterward (it was so short because the Israelis were renting their tanks from Hertz), though it was no laughing matter at the time--I had many Jewish schoolmates. And in a sense, of course, the war goes on, because Israel's enemies refuse to abandon their goal of destruction of the Jewish state.

[Update in the late afternoon]

And predictably, the Arabs blame all their problems on their failed attempt to destroy Israel four decades ago.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:30 AM

May 28, 2007
Remember The Hood

When a leader has been responsible for a military disaster in a misbegotten war, it's time for him to resign.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:35 PM

April 23, 2007
What A Different World That Would Be

Most familiar with the history of the second world war are aware of the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler in 1944. But this is the first time I heard of one a year earlier. If the story is true, it's ironic that the Fuehrer was saved by a British bombing raid.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:56 AM

March 03, 2007
The First Amphibious Landing

...by the Marines happened 231 years ago, in the Bahamas. Before they were the US Marines.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:26 AM

January 29, 2007
Missing Mutiny

Cecil Adams apparently never heard of the Wilkes Exploration Expedition, in which he suppressed a (probably justifiable) mutiny. Unless the question is about successful mutinies, but it doesn't seem like he uses that restriction in his own examples. And of course, it's also unsurprising that he's unaware of it--it's a little-known part of American history, at least until this book came out.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:28 AM

January 10, 2007
Early American Horticulture

In Jamestown.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:05 AM

November 10, 2006
Happy Birthday, And Semper Fi

I had never realized that the anniversary of the founding of the Marines was the day before Armistice Day. It's been two hundred thirty one years. They're older than the nation itself--there's never been a US of A without them.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:38 AM

September 02, 2006
Whether To Laugh Or Cry, Take Two

Such may indeed be the state of our edumacational system. Early to bed, early to rise, makes one have no fear except fear itself.

[Sunday morning update]

Alan K. Henderson has some more misnamed action figures.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:24 PM

August 24, 2006
Death Of A Myth?

Two thirds of a century later, many historians are saying that the RAF didn't win the Battle of Britain.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:34 AM

August 13, 2006
August 13th

The Berlin Wall was erected forty five years ago today. And it's been sixty-six years since the beginning of the Battle of Britain.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:15 PM

August 07, 2006
Nomenclature Question

Did anyone call WWII WWII during WWII? Or was it only called that in retrospect? If not, what did they call it?

Would it make sense to simply rename the Cold War WWIII and call this one WWIV, so we can get away from this stupid "War On Terror" name?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:35 PM

July 20, 2006
Begorrah!

Celts in Turkey?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:55 PM

July 15, 2006
More Fodder For The Hunley Mystery

It's hatch was unlocked.

Yeah, this is kind of geeky, but it was one of the very first subs, after all...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:55 PM

June 06, 2006
The Turn Of The Tide

Everyone seems to think that the big story of the day is the number of the beast, but I think that it's much more important to remember what happened sixty two years ago. The Donovan does, in pictures. Black Five does as well, with a link roundup.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:58 AM

June 03, 2006
History Repeats?

An interesting explanation (besides the abundant media bias) why the Bush administration doesn't get as much credit for the economy as it should.

And as to media bias, answer this quiz:

Was U.S. economic growth higher during the time John Snow was Treasury Secretary, or during the time Robert Rubin was Treasury Secretary?

Answer is at the link.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:42 PM

May 24, 2006
End Of An Aviation Era

The last commercial transport has rolled off the assembly line in southern California. There's still a large aerospace industry there, but no more manufacturing, at least for transports.

Very few of the facilities that were built during the war to build airplanes still do so, if they exist at all. I remember when I worked in Downey at the old Consolidated-Vultee (which later became Convair) plant that was later purchased by North American (and became the space division during Apollo), you could still walk out in the back parking lot and see the lines from the old runway where the "Valiants" and other aircraft would roll out of the factory and take off over the dairy farms and orange groves. It's all suburbia now, and the plant is being converted to film studios and other uses.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:08 PM

May 16, 2006
What Have The Pythons Done For Us

Jim McCormick dissects the latest Roman-bashing revisionism, over at Albion's Seedlings.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:58 AM

April 19, 2006
Hitting Back

I didn't note it yesterday but April 18 is another anniversary of a blow for freedom. It was the sixty-fourth anniversary of the Doolittle raid on Tokyo.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:18 PM

April 18, 2006
Honoring The Dead

I'd forgotten that April 19th was the anniversary of more than one revolution. Sixty-three years ago tomorrow, the doomed Jews in the Warsaw ghetto rose up against their Nazi oppressors. Unfortunately, their revolution wasn't successful, but at least they took many of the barbarians with them, and it once again displays the folly of disarming the citizenry.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:14 PM

The Midnight Ride

Two hundred and thirty one years ago today, Paul Revere protected the right to bear arms, making his famous ride to warn the countryside around Boston that the British were marching to confiscate their guns (tomorrow will be the anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord). It's ironic to note that that city now has some of the strictest gun control laws in the country. Perhaps it's time for another revolution up there.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:29 AM

March 17, 2006
Half A Century

Of Buffalos.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:11 PM

March 14, 2006
Strange Bedfellows

"Callimachus" writes about the modern left's new-found love for the Confederacy.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:24 AM

March 12, 2006
What Was The Rush?

Ireland has finally gotten around to repealing laws against the Irish imposed by the English from the era of the Norman invasion.

Another good argument for sunset clauses...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:49 PM

March 06, 2006
Remember The Alamo

It fell a hundred and seventy years ago today.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:55 PM

January 08, 2006
Natural Jamming

Well, you learn something new every day (more, if you're lucky, and work at it).

Here's an interesting story for WW II buffs. There were several reasons that Operation Market Garden was a failure, but this is one that I'd never heard before. The troops didn't get properly reinforced because they couldn't communicate with radios, due to high concentrations of iron in the ground around Arnhem. It's the old story of "for want of a nail." If they'd had satellite phones, the war might have ended months earlier (and the Battle of the Bulge been prevented).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:33 AM