One shot, one kill

Wednesday, August 18th, 2004

One shot, one kill cites a New York Times article that states that Marine snipers killed 62 people on Tuesday. As Phillip Carter explains, that’s a lot of killing being done by a relatively small number of Marines:

So we’re really talking about 20-30 Marines — only half of whom are actually shooters, due to the marksman/observer team concept — killing 62 Iraqis in one day.

High body counts don’t indicate success, but they do indicate combat intensity and combat effectiveness:

One point that comes through again and again in stories of engagements in Iraq is that the Iraqi insurgents simply don’t understand tactical fundamentals such as cover and concealment. I have seen Al-Jazeera tapes and U.S. military tapes of engagements where Iraqi insurgents, whooped up by their buddies into a frenzy of martyrdom, literally rush out into the middle of the street to launch an unaimed RPG at U.S. forces. In nearly all the videos, they are instantaneously cut down by a few short bursts of aimed rifle and machine gun fire. No trained soldier would ever do something so stupid. But the Iraqi grunts do it again and again, almost inviting death.

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Still Groping in the Dark?

Wednesday, August 18th, 2004

Cato’s Still Groping in the Dark? summarizes last year’s blackout:

In short, three 345-kilovolt transmission lines went down when heat caused them to sag and come into contact with trees. That created an imbalance between supply and demand along the lines feeding the Cleveland area, which led, in turn, to higher current flow and accompanying lower voltage on a large portion of the remaining Eastern interconnection as the power raced along other routes to get to Cleveland.

When devices known as ‘relays’ detected the unusual power flows around the Cleveland area, they automatically triggered circuit breakers that removed a number of lines from service (a preventative measure to ensure that billions of dollars of capital stock are not fried by unusual power flows). In the words of the report, the ‘cascade became a race between the power surges and the relays.’ The lines that tripped first were generally the longer lines that split the grid into those sections that blacked out and those that recovered without furthering the cascade. The upshot is that ‘protective relay settings on transmission lines operated as they were designed and set to behave on August 14.’

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The Big One

Tuesday, August 17th, 2004

The Big One opens with the “clear, ringing, and, unfortunately, contradictory lessons” of the two World Wars:

The First World War teaches that territorial compromise is better than full-scale war, that an “honor-bound” allegiance of the great powers to small nations is a recipe for mass killing, and that it is crazy to let the blind mechanism of armies and alliances trump common sense. The Second teaches that searching for an accommodation with tyranny by selling out small nations only encourages the tyrant, that refusing to fight now leads to a worse fight later on, and that only the steadfast rejection of compromise can prevent the natural tendency to rush to a bad peace with worse men. The First teaches us never to rush into a fight, the Second never to back down from a bully.

Going into the Great War, no one expected such unprecedented levels of carnage:

The scale and suddenness of the killing that began that summer still has the power to amaze us. The war began on August 4th. By August 29th, there were two hundred and sixty thousand French dead. The first battles were as bad as the last. A German lieutenant led his virgin division into battle in Lorraine that month and, coming under French fire for the first time, looked around after a minute ?to see how many are still fit to fight. The bugler, who has remained by my side like a shadow, says to me sadly, “Herr Leutnant, there is nobody there any more!?” Almost the entire unit had been annihilated at first contact.

The means of annihilation are familiar. The machine gun, in particular, created a zone of death that would simply saw a soldier in two if he entered it. At Waterloo, an infantry soldier could fire twice a minute. The machine gun fired six hundred rounds a minute. Even the infantry rifle now could fire a dozen times a minute, and at a mile’s range.

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Henry Chauncey: The Aptitude Tester

Tuesday, August 17th, 2004

Henry Chauncey: The Aptitude Tester looks at the man who transformed Harvard — and our entire university system — by introducing the SAT:

The son of Episcopalian minister Egisto Fabbri Chauncey and deaconess Edith Lockwood Taft, Chauncey was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1905 to privilege, albeit the sort based more in erudition than wealth. Chauncey was also a gifted athlete, and his baseball exploits at Groton and Harvard attracted an offer to play professionally for the Boston Braves.

Chauncey instead accepted an offer after graduation as an assistant Harvard dean and temporary Harvard baseball coach. There, becoming more and more interested in why Harvard was churning out such lackluster graduates, Chauncey found his patron in Conant, a Harvard president who had already caused controversy among alumni by articulating his vision of a student body primarily comprising students with superior academic achievement, regardless of wealth or social status.

One of Conant’s motivations was creating what Thomas Jefferson had coined a “natural aristocracy,” a ruling elite self-selected by intelligence and ability, not lineage. Chauncey’s observations of Harvard classes full of mundane underachievers and Conant’s vision of a better America built by the nation’s best thinkers perfectly coalesced. All they needed was the mechanism to bring their dream society about.

In his research on standardized tests, Chauncey chanced upon the SAT, an obscure mutation of an IQ test that had been developed at Princeton University. Chauncey retooled it to focus primarily on verbal and math skills, and in 1934 he presented it to Conant as their new tool to find the best students in America and bring them to Harvard. By 1941, Harvard required the SAT for all applicants.

World War II helped bring the test into the mainstream. Strapped for officer candidates and with no good way to identify and promote so many leaders so quickly, the Army and Navy contracted with Chauncey in 1943 to give a one-day SAT test to over 300,000 people across the country for help in officer selection. Chauncey’s ability to pull off this logistical feat illustrated the potential for using the SAT to assess high school students nationwide.

Chauncey left Harvard in 1945 to create ETS, a company to manage the test and bring it to a national audience.

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Soichiro Honda: Uniquely Driven

Tuesday, August 17th, 2004

Soichiro Honda: Uniquely Driven explains how the founder of Honda was a driven individualist who hated the myth “that the industrial success of post-World War II Japan was rooted in the country’s traditional values of consensus, sublimation of the individual, and worker harmony”:

Honda left school at age 15 to seek work as an auto mechanic in Tokyo. His first job was hardly auspicious: For a year he cared for the infant baby of his boss’s family. With the child in tow, he often wandered the garage, watching the mechanics and making suggestions. As Honda tinkered with engines in between diaper changes and bottle feedings, it became obvious that his strength wasn’t in child care but rebuilding engines.

He was so good at it that he starting building engines for racing. He soon attempted a full-time stint as a professional race-car driver, but a crash suffered in a race nearly killed him and sent him back to work as a mechanic. A second crash soon after, in which he drove off a bridge with several geishas in the car (everyone survived), put a stop to a nightlife that, like his race-car driving, had veered out of control.

A newly focused and newly wedded Honda began working for a succession of mechanics in the mid-1930s, a period in which he focused largely on refining piston action to build a higher performance engine. When he formed his own company in 1937, Japanese militancy was at its height, and in 1938, Honda’s company was forced to switch to building engines for the Imperial Navy’s boats and planes. After Allied bombing leveled his factory near the end of the war, Honda showed that his mechanical genius extended to pursuits other than cars. For more than a year, he made a living brewing alcohol with a homemade still.

In 1948, he returned to his true love by starting a new company: Honda Motor Co. This time, he took on a partner, Takeo Fujisawa, to handle the back-office operations that Honda found so crushingly dull. They soon came up with the batabata, a motorized bicycle named after the sound the engine made.

Fascinating guy.

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XM-109 25mm Sniper Rifle

Tuesday, August 17th, 2004


When a .50-caliber sniper rifle isn’t enough, there’s the new XM-109 25mm Sniper Rifle:

For some long-range sniper missions, a .50 caliber (12.7mm) round just isn?t big enough. The Barrett company, which pioneered the development of the modern .50 caliber sniper rifle, has now built a 25mm sniper rifle (although shoulder cannon may be a more precise term), the XM109. Ten prototype weapons are being made available for testing this month. Designed to destroy light armor, the XM109 is a semi-automatic 25mm rifle that has a 17.6 inch long barrel and an overall length of 46 inches. It weighs in at 46 pounds and has a 5 round magazine. In comparison, the Barrett M107 .50 caliber sniper rifle in general use today has a 29 inch barrel, overall length of 57 inches, and weighs in at a mere 32 pounds, with a magazine capacity of 10 rounds.

Anyone up for dinosaur hunting?

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Victor Davis Hanson on Bush Hatred on National Review Online

Tuesday, August 17th, 2004

In Bush Hatred, Victor Davis Hanson tries to explain why the Left hates George W. Bush: southern conservatism, evangelical Christianity, a black-and-white worldview, and a wealthy man’s disdain for elite culture. This is what caught my attention though:

Not long ago a Frenchman explained to me why he hates Bush, who “thinks linearly” and has no sense of the “problematique.” Face it: We are now an information society, with a premium on talk, not action. To suggest that one need not be 100 percent certain — but perhaps only 60 percent certain — to act is deeply disturbing. And when you add lingo like “bring ‘em on,” the caricature that Bush belongs on the main street of Gunsmoke rather than in Sex in the City or The West Wing is only strengthened.

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Is education good for growth?

Monday, August 16th, 2004

In Marginal Revolution: Is education good for growth?, Tyler Cowen notes that “It has long been received wisdom that education spurs economic growth,” then points to a skeptical take on the issue:

[T]here is actually a striking global correspondence between the world economic slowdown since 1973 and ever-increasing levels of educational spending. [...] Between 1970 and 1998 Egypt’s primary enrolment rates grew to more than 90 per cent, secondary schooling levels went from 32 per cent to 75 per cent, and university education doubled — yet over the same period Egypt moved from being the world’s forty-seventh poorest country to being the forty-eighth. [...] The rapid growth of Hong Kong, another of the East Asian tigers, wasn’t accompanied by substantial investment in education. Its expansion of secondary and university education came later, as more prosperous Hong Kong parents used some of their newfound wealth to give their children a better education than they had had.

As he points out, “Rich countries spend more on education for the same reason that they consume more leisure.” Anyone whose friends spent five years finishing their English Lit degrees knows that.

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Judoka as Olympic Flag Carriers

Saturday, August 14th, 2004

I don’t know why I watched the Olympic opening ceremonies last night, but I discovered something surprising — an amazing number of countries chose judoka for their flag carriers:

Georgia – Zurab ZVIADAURI (men’s -90kg)

Gabon – Melanie ENGOANGUE (women’s -78kg)

Indonesia – Krisna BAYU (men’s -90kg)

Iraq – Hadir LAZAME (men’s over 100kg)

Iran – Arash MIRESMAELI (men’s -66kg) or/and Seyed Mahmoudreza MIRAN FASHANDI (men’s over 100kg)

Spain – Isabel FERNANDEZ (women’s -57kg)

Israel – Ariel ZEEVI (men’s -100kg)

Kazakhstan – Askhat ZHITKEYEV (men’s -100kg)

Canada – Nicolas GILL (men’s -100kg)

Costa Rica – David FERNANDEZ (men’s -60kg)

Great Britain – Kate HOWEY (women’s -70kg)

Mongolia – Damdinsuren NYAMKHUU (men’s -81kg)

Niger – Abdou ALASSANE DJI BO (men’s -66kg)

Netherlands – Mark HUIZINGA (men’s -90kg)

Hungary – Antal KOVACS (men’s -100kg)

Uzbekistan – Abdullo TANGRIEV (over 100kg)

Portugal – Nuno DELGADO (men’s -81kg)

Fiji – Naisiga RASOKISOKI (women’s -78kg)

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Steroids boost performance in just weeks

Friday, August 13th, 2004

New Scientist recently produced a a study demonstrating that fairly low doses of anabolic steroids boost performance in just weeks:

The first rigorous study of the performance-enhancing effects of testosterone in young men was not carried out until 1996. Volunteers were given weekly injections of either 600 milligrams of testosterone enanthate or a placebo for 10 weeks (bodybuilders usually take much larger doses). Performance tests done at the end of this period showed the hormone had improved muscle size and strength in those doing strength training, and to a lesser extent in those who did not exercise.
[...]
In the latest study, Weatherby monitored the performance of 18 male amateur athletes over a six-week training regime. Nine were given weekly shots of testosterone enanthate at a dose of 3.5 milligrams per kilogram of body weight for six weeks (equivalent to roughly half the dose of the 1996 trial), and nine were given a placebo.
[...]
The most unexpected finding was that the greatest increases in muscle size and power occurred just three weeks into the trial.

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Net Publishing Made Profitable

Friday, August 13th, 2004

Net Publishing Made Profitable explains “extreme publishing”:

After 13 years of experimenting, veteran Net publisher Adam Engst has finally stumbled on a good business model — fast-turnaround e-books. [...] From the get-go, Engst has pioneered just about every revenue model on the Internet — ads, subscriptions, sponsorships and the now-ubiquitous tip jar — with mixed success. [...] But now Engst thinks he’s finally cracked it. Since last fall, Engst has published a series of rapidly produced e-books using a system he calls “extreme publishing.”

The nine books in the Take Control series range in topic from customizing Mac OS X to setting up a wireless network.

The books are written by a small stable of independent authors, who receive 50 percent royalties, a rate unheard of in traditional publishing. Edited collaboratively over the Net, the books are published “within moments of going to press” as small, downloadable PDF files.

Costing $5 or $10, the books come with free updates for readers — the electronic equivalent of second and third editions. The books are nicely laid out and designed to print well on home inkjets. They include lots of links to information on the Web.

Crucially, the books are timely. Print books, on the other hand, especially computer-oriented reference texts, are often out of date by the time they hit store shelves.

So far, Engst has sold about 20,000 copies in the Take Control series. The series’ best seller, Upgrading to Panther by Joe Kissell, has sold about 6,300 copies, a respectable number for a niche publisher.

Someone needs to explain to Engst that “extreme” is extremely dated.

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Wired News: Let the Web Games Begin

Friday, August 13th, 2004

Wired News: Let the Web Games Begin reminds me how awful American Olympic coverage is:

Despite its contractual lock on Olympic footage, NBCOlympics.com is offering only highlights of selected events after they have been broadcast on one of the network’s TV channels. U.S. customers of AT&T Wireless’ mMode information service will also get video clips. By contrast, those online in the United Kingdom can watch live simulcast coverage from BBC TV’s five video streams.

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The Mystery of Fascism

Friday, August 13th, 2004

David Ramsay Steele opens The Mystery of Fascism with these Cole Porter lyrics from 1934:

You’re the top!
You’re the Great Houdini!
You’re the top!
You are Mussolini!

There was a time when everyone loved Mussolini:

Mussolini was showered with accolades from sundry quarters. Winston Churchill called him “the greatest living legislator.” Cole Porter gave him a terrific plug in a hit song. Sigmund Freud sent him an autographed copy of one of his books, inscribed to “the Hero of Culture.” The more taciturn Stalin supplied Mussolini with the plans of the May Day parades in Red Square, to help him polish up his Fascist pageants.

Then he became the Mussolini we think of:

The rest of il Duce’s career is now more familiar. He conquered Ethiopia, made a Pact of Steel with Germany, introduced anti-Jewish measures in 1938, came into the war as Hitler’s very junior partner, tried to strike out on his own by invading the Balkans, had to be bailed out by Hitler, was driven back by the Allies, and then deposed by the Fascist Great Council, rescued from imprisonment by SS troops in one of the most brilliant commando operations of the war, installed as head of a new “Italian Social Republic,” and killed by Communist partisans in April 1945.

Of course, Mussolini, famed right-wing fascist, started as a socialist agitator:

Soon after he arrived in Switzerland in 1902, 18 years old and looking for work, Benito Mussolini was starving and penniless. All he had in his pockets was a cheap nickel medallion of Karl Marx.

Following a spell of vagrancy, Mussolini found a job as a bricklayer and union organizer in the city of Lausanne. Quickly achieving fame as an agitator among the Italian migratory laborers, he was referred to by a local Italian-language newspaper as “the great duce [leader] of the Italian socialists.”
[...]
From 1912 to 1914, Mussolini was the Che Guevara of his day, a living saint of leftism. Handsome, courageous, charismatic, an erudite Marxist, a riveting speaker and writer, a dedicated class warrior to the core, he was the peerless duce of the Italian Left. He looked like the head of any future Italian socialist government, elected or revolutionary.

With the arrival of the Great War, Mussolini switched to a pro-war position, enlisted, and was seriously wounded. After the war, he gathered former Marxists and ex-soldiers into his new Fascist movement, an effectively violent political group that marched on Rome to seize power — only to have the king “beg” them to take the reins.

Fascism is generally presented as evil, Communism as well-intentioned:

Intellectually, Fascists differed from Communists in that they had to a large extent thought out what they would do, and they then proceeded to do it, whereas Communists were like hypnotic subjects, doing one thing and rationalizing it in terms of a completely different and altogether impossible thing.

Fascists preached the accelerated development of a backward country. Communists continued to employ the Marxist rhetoric of world socialist revolution in the most advanced countries, but this was all a ritual incantation to consecrate their attempt to accelerate the development of a backward country. Fascists deliberately turned to nationalism as a potent myth. Communists defended Russian nationalism and imperialism while protesting that their sacred motherland was an internationalist workers’ state. Fascists proclaimed the end of democracy. Communists abolished democracy and called their dictatorship democracy. Fascists argued that equality was impossible and hierarchy ineluctable. Communists imposed a new hierarchy, shot anyone who advocated actual equality, but never ceased to babble on about the equalitarian future they were “building”. Fascists did with their eyes open what Communists did with their eyes shut. This is the truth concealed in the conventional formula that Communists were well-intentioned and Fascists evil-intentioned.

(Hat tip to Reason’s Hit & Run.)

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WSJ.com – Behind Aetna’s Turnaround: Small Steps to Pare Cost of Care

Friday, August 13th, 2004

WSJ.com – Behind Aetna’s Turnaround: Small Steps to Pare Cost of Care:

When patients run up six-figure medical bills, health insurers shudder. A few years ago, Aetna Inc. was notorious for playing tough in such situations. It haggled with doctors and hospitals about discounts, while telling its clerks to see if some charges should be disallowed as medically unnecessary.

Aetna still keeps a close eye on costs, but it is trying to make allies out of former enemies. Aetna’s chief medical officer, William Popik, cites a case last year when his department tracked down three hemophilia experts, seeking advice about treating a hemophiliac boy whose care was costing $500,000 a month. The three doctors spent hours reviewing the case. Then they recommended adjusting the boy’s care so he wouldn’t need such large doses of a blood factor meant to help clotting.

The boy’s own physician embraced the changes. Within months, treatment costs dropped 75% and the child’s health improved, Aetna says.

Such expert coaching on tough, costly cases is becoming an important part of Aetna’s strategic plan. Health insurers have been berated in recent years for alleged interference by non-health professionals in treatment decisions. But Aetna officials believe that by turning to medical experts, they can save costs and improve care simultaneously. The company has impressed Wall Street analysts by recovering from a period of operating losses, while establishing one of the slowest rates of medical-cost increases in its industry.

Aetna owes a lot to its new information systems:

The insurer recently completed an overhaul of its computer systems, which had become snarled by a series of rapid-fire acquisitions in the 1990s, including the $8 billion purchase of U.S. Healthcare Inc. in 1996.

A few years ago, Aetna’s information systems were a messy patchwork of technologies. Aetna at times paid bills of people who were no longer customers or paid the same claim twice. Because Aetna had incomplete information about its medical costs, company officials say, it unwittingly underpriced its premiums, leading to losses and embarrassingly incorrect financial projections.

Aetna President Ronald Williams, who joined the company in 2001, ordered a $20 million revamp of data systems. What emerged was the “Executive Management Information System,” which Joshua Raskin, a health-care analyst at Lehman Brothers, last year called “the single largest driver of the Aetna turnaround.” That system, known as EMIS, helped Aetna identify and dump unprofitable corporate accounts.

Frankly, insurance is all about data. You’d think all insurance companies would stay on top of their information systems.

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Amid Chaos in Iraq, Tiny Security Firm Found Opportunity

Friday, August 13th, 2004

Amid Chaos in Iraq, Tiny Security Firm Found Opportunity tells a story about making money admidst the chaos of war:

In July last year, Scott Custer and Michael Battles, two former Army Rangers in their mid-30s, found themselves in charge of a $16 million contract to guard Baghdad’s airport. Barely funded with credit cards and money borrowed from a friend, their nine-month-old company had neither guns, accountants nor guards. It had to hire Nepalese Gurkhas to staff the project. Since then, the company has squabbled with corporate clients and Pentagon auditors. Four employees have been killed

Yes, their names are Custer and Battles, and they named their company Custer Battles:

The company that became Custer Battles could hardly have sprung from shallower roots. In late 2002, it was still in search of a name. Its co-founders considered Azimuth Partners, after the name of a compass point, but instead chose to name the company after themselves. Mr. Custer, 35, a distant relation of the ill-fated Gen. George Custer, concedes they draw giggles in Iraq, where it’s often noted that Custer was defeated by the locals. “We don’t really have a comeback,” he says.

With the company’s payroll on credit cards, Mr. Battles borrowed $10,000 for an exploratory trip to Iraq. Custer Battles won a contract to provide security for the Baghdad airport:

Custer Battles’s bid was cheaper, but more important, it promised to have 138 guards on the ground within two weeks, faster than the others.

“We got that contract because we were young and dumb and didn’t know better,” says Mr. Custer, a former Army captain who studied at Oxford and Georgetown universities. “Anyone with experience would have said they’d be there in eight weeks.”

Frank Hatfield, the senior U.S. airport official in Iraq at the time, says speed — not cost — was the deciding factor. All he wanted, he says, was an assurance Custer Battles could handle the contract.

Custer Battles lacked more than experience. No banks would lend it money. In the end, the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority lent it $2 million in $100 bills that Mr. Battles stuffed into a duffel bag and personally deposited in a bank in Lebanon.

They had only two weeks to set up the project. In mid-July last year, new hires mustered in Jordan and had to be convoyed across the desert. The company had to buy all its equipment from the U.S. with only three full-time employees in its Virginia office to help.

It found half of the guards it needed in Nepal, a common source of private security guards, and the rest in the U.S., mostly ex-soldiers hired through word of mouth. Mr. Custer flew in an accountant from Deloitte & Touche LLP, who immediately bought a safe.

The airport facilities were littered with broken glass and human excrement. Expecting to stay indefinitely, Custer Battles rehabbed the offices with carpet and wallpaper, installed showers in the bathrooms and added a wireless Internet connection. A short distance away, the company built a trailer park to house employees, complete with swimming pool and pool table. This was done partly to demonstrate Custer Battles’s seriousness to potential clients.

They got the men in place two days early but had to sacrifice basic logistics, such as payroll systems. Mr. Custer says the company didn’t figure out how to pay people until well into the next month.

Less than 10 miles from the city center, Baghdad International Airport quickly emerged as perhaps the safest and best-placed real estate in Iraq. The company took full advantage. Custer Battles built kennels for 18 bomb-sniffing dogs beside the camp and has parlayed the animals into $16 million in Army contracts. It also used a terminal to house 40 Filipinos brought in to provide catering services.

Incidentally, “salaries can run as high as $20,000 a month for top ex-soldiers” in Iraq. “Most of the guards hired by Custer Battles came from a Kurdish subcontractor who paid its employees less than $200 a month.”

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