Only Communists Get Blacklisted

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

The Old Right opposed both FDR’s New Deal and US entry into World War II. A Story of America First explains the consequences of holding such Old Right positions in Hollywood:

Politicians were not the only ones to lose careers as a result of taking a stand for America First. Lillian Gish was Hollywood’s most prominent America Firster (Edward Everett Horton was another, though he was much less active). Gish’s visibility on the National Committee contributed to her invisibility on the nation’s movie screens — though none dared call it blacklisting.

Richard A. Moore of the AFC dictated this confidential memo on August 28, 1941:

General Wood was in the office today and related a converstaion he had just had with Miss Lillian Gish here in Chicago. Miss Gish stated that since her active association with the America First Committee, she has been “black-listed” by movie studios in Hollywood and by the legitimate theater.

She has been seeking employment in Hollywood during theh past several weeks, and her agent has finally notified her tht he can now obtain a movie contract which will bring her $65,000. This contract, however, has been offered upon the condition that she first resign from the America First Committee and cease all her activities on behalf of the Committee; and upon the further condition that in resigning, she refrain from stating this reason for her resignation.

Miss Gish has not had employment for a long time. She is supporting her Mother and is helping to support her sister.

The movie, curiously enough, was probably John Farrow’s forgotten wartime propaganda effort The Commandos Strike at Dawn (1942).

So, it’s not blacklisting if you’re not a Communist.

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Lysenkoism

Wednesday, August 11th, 2010

Anomaly UK takes an unorthodox look at Lysenkoism:

Lysenko was not a politician, he was not a fraud, he was not an ideologue. Lysenko was a scientist. Lysenko, like the majority of scientists today, worked for the government. In the scientific controversy that involved Lysenko, he reported to his superiors (the government). That was his job as a senior member of the scientific establishment.

The scientific controversy was politically sensitive. Lysenko claimed that his scientific opponents were politically motivated: their science was based on bourgeois ideas of inherited superiority. That claim was not implausible, and Lysenko had no reasonable alternative but to draw the attention of his superiors to the possibility. The politicians did their job — they reached a conclusion about how to run a government department based on the advice they received and their judgement of that advice.

When we tell the story of Lysenkoism, we tell it in the knowledge that Lysenko was wrong. What we look for are the indications that the process was bad — that the wrong conclusion was being reached. My opinion is that there are no such indications. Yes, it was “politicized science”, but the main political force on the science was the belief that orthodox genetics was itself the product of the political assumptions of the Western scientists that developed it. That perception was probably exaggerated, if not totally erroneous, but it was a genuine belief honestly held.

The point is that for politics to mess up science, it is not necessary for anyone to let the political implications of a theory take precedence over the evidence. All that is necessary is for some participants to believe that other scientists are doing that. That is enough to cause theories to be suppressed, and thereby for the science to be systematically skewed.

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God’s Philosophers

Wednesday, August 11th, 2010

Tim O’Neill calls God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science, by James Hannam, a superb and long overdue popular treatment of Medieval science. Yes, medieval science:

The myth goes that the Greeks and Romans were wise and rational types who loved science and were on the brink of doing all kinds of marvellous things (inventing full-scale steam engines is one example that is usually, rather fancifully, invoked) until Christianity came along, banned all learning and rational thought and ushered in the Dark Ages. Then an iron-fisted theocracy, backed by a Gestapo-style Inquisition, prevented any science or questioning inquiry from happening until Leonardo da Vinci invented intelligence and the wondrous Renaissance saved us all from Medieval darkness.

[...]

It’s not hard to kick this nonsense to pieces, especially since the people presenting it know next to nothing about history and have simply picked this bullshit up from other websites and popular books and collapse as soon as you hit them with some hard evidence. I love to totally stump them by asking them to present me with the name of one — just one — scientist burned, persecuted or oppressed for their science in the Middle Ages. They always fail to come up with any. They usually try to crowbar Galileo back into the Middle Ages, which is amusing considering he was a contemporary of Descartes. When asked why they have failed to produce any such scientists given the Church was apparently so busily oppressing them, they often resort to claiming that the Evil Old Church did such a good job of oppression that everyone was too scared to practice science. By the time I produce a laundry list of Medieval scientists — like Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, John Peckham, Duns Scotus, Thomas Bradwardine, Walter Burley, William Heytesbury, Richard Swineshead, John Dumbleton, Richard of Wallingford, Nicholas Oresme, Jean Buridan and Nicholas of Cusa — and ask why these men were happily pursuing science in the Middle Ages without molestation from the Church, my opponents have usually run away to hide and scratch their heads in puzzlement at what just went wrong.

[...]

A festering melange of Enlightenment bigotry, Protestant papism-bashing, French anti-clericism and Classicist snobbery have all combined to make the Medieval period a by-word for backwardness, superstition and primitivism and the opposite of everything the average person associates with science and reason.

[...]

As mentioned above, no manifestation of “the Myth” is complete without the Galileo Affair being raised. The proponents of the idea that the Church stifled science and reason in the Middle Ages have to wheel him out, because without him they actually have absolutely zero examples of the Church persecuting anyone for anything to do with inquiries into the natural world. The common conception that Galileo was persecuted for being right about heliocentrism is a total oversimplification of a complex business, and one that ignores the fact that Galileo’s main problem was not simply that his ideas disagreed with scriptural interpretation but also with the science of the time. Contrary to the way the affair is usually depicted, the real sticking point was the fact that the scientific objections to heliocentrism at the time were still powerful enough to prevent its acceptance. Cardinal Bellarmine made it clear to Galileo in 1616 that if those scientific objections could be overcome then scripture could and would be reinterpreted. But while the objections still stood the Church, understandably, was hardly going to overturn several centuries of exegesis for the sake of a flawed theory. Galileo agreed to only teach heliocentrism as a theoretical calculating device, then promptly turned around and, in typical style, taught it as fact. Thus his prosecution by the Inquistion in 1633.

Hannam gives the context for all this in suitable detail in a section of the book that also explains how the Humanism of the “Renaissance” led a new wave of scholars to not only seek to completely idolise and emulate the ancients, but to turn their backs on the achievements of recent scholars like Duns Scotus, Bardwardine, Buridan and Orseme. Thus many of their discoveries and advances were either ignored and forgotten (only to be rediscovered independently later) or scorned but quietly appropriated. The case for Galileo using the work of Medieval scholars without acknowledgement is fairly damning. In their eagerness to dump Medieval “dialectic” and ape the Greeks and Romans — which made the “Renaissance” a curiously conservative and rather retrograde movement in many ways — genuine developments and advancements by Medieval scholars were discarded. That a thinker of the calibre of Duns Scotus could end up being known mainly as the etymology of the word “dunce” is deeply ironic.

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The IED Arms Race

Wednesday, August 11th, 2010

There’s a reason why it’s called asymmetric warfare:

Jieddo was formally signed into existence by the Department of Defense just four years ago, in February 2006. But it has its origins in a personal request written by the chief of US Central Command, John Abizaid, to his superiors at the Pentagon in mid-2004. As the number of casualties caused by IEDs in Iraq mushroomed, he insisted that the only solution was a “Manhattan Project-like” marshaling of scientific and military resources. Since then, Jieddo has gathered a staff of more than 3,600 government employees and contractors, established projects with all four military services and every intelligence agency, and spent more than $17 billion.
[...]
But not only will the insurgents keep inventing new bombs and techniques, they’re also free to fall back on any one they’ve already used: “They can move up and down this spectrum, from complex to easy,” Maginess says. Jieddo, on the other hand, must always deploy every countermeasure in its arsenal, adding more as each new device appears. “It’s only ever going to get worse for us.” And the way the Department of Defense works, a new IED need appear only once to require a corresponding, costly antidote. “I can take $600, go into a bazaar, and make a device,” says one senior Jieddo officer. “And I can tie up $1.2 billion to $2 billion of US money by doing it.”

Here’s how the IED arms race has played out:

The first IEDs were often simple radio-controlled bombs, made from two or three 155-millimeter artillery shells set off by a signal from a cheap household gadget, like a key fob car alarm switch or a wireless doorbell buzzer. US troops, traveling in unarmored Humvees, were defenseless against them until each of the services hastily bought hundreds of radio-frequency jammers — with codenames like Cottonwood, Ironwood, MICE, ICE, Warlock Red, Warlock Green, Jukebox, and Symphony — capable of generating an invisible hemisphere of electromagnetic energy that could drown out those trigger signals. Eventually, Jieddo would oversee the deployment of more than 40,000 jammers in Iraq.

The bombers quickly learned how to circumvent the electronic countermeasures. They used handheld radio-frequency meters and bombs with dummy trial-and-error firing circuits to figure out what part of the spectrum the jammers blotted out and how big the jamming field was. Then they simply switched to new remote controls that used bandwidths beyond the jammers’ range. When US technicians introduced electronic countermeasures to jam low-power radio-control devices like garage door openers and car alarms, insurgents moved to high-power devices, including two-way radios and extended-range cordless phones. Then they moved on to mobile phones in every local cell network, from 1G to 3G.

While this race had been run before, it had never taken place at such speed. With one of the most intensive and ingenious programs of homegrown bombmaking R&D in history, Northern Ireland’s Provisional IRA worked its way through every available bandwidth from model airplane controllers to cell phones. It took them 30 years. But Iraqi insurgents innovated on Internet time. By February 2005, they’d managed the same evolution in just 18 months.

Yet radio-control devices, however sophisticated, only represented the middle of the IED technical spectrum. It wasn’t until the summer of 2004 that Iraqi bombsmiths reached into the high end with the explosively formed penetrator, or EFP. Using technology developed during World War II, today’s EFPs are made from a short length of steel or PVC pipe packed with explosives, sealed and capped with a concave copper disk. When the explosives detonate, the blast energy inverts the copper plate into a ragged slug traveling more than a mile per second and capable of punching through tank armor 300 feet away. Iranians used EFPs during their eight-year war with Saddam Hussein and later supplied the technology to Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon. Bomb-builders there added passive infrared triggers, sensors that detect motion by responding to changes in temperature — like that created by the engine of a passing truck. Because they don’t use radio frequencies as triggers, they’re invulnerable to electronic jamming.

In Iraq, the effectiveness and frequency of EFP attacks soon proved so devastating that individual soldiers began improvising their own countermeasures. One simply bought a toaster in a bazaar and hung it from a pole welded to the front of his Humvee — a heat decoy. According to The Washington Post, this and similar ideas led, in May 2006, to one of Jieddo’s first innovations: the Rhino. The Rhino used a glow plug — an electric heating element for warming diesel engines before ignition — housed in a steel box on the end of a 10-foot boom. It worked so well that it could not only trigger an EFP and take the impact of the high-velocity metal slug but, on at least one occasion, continue working afterward.

It took only six weeks for the insurgents to respond. They adjusted the firing angle of their EFPs so that the slug struck 10 feet behind the decoy. Jieddo countered with the Rhino II, fitted on an adjustable-length boom. Along with electronic jammers, the Rhino II became standard on US vehicles in Iraq. More than 16,000 of the gadgets had been deployed to the Army and Marines by the end of 2008.

But at the beginning of this year, US forces in Iraq reported a new version of the passive infrared trigger, nicknamed the Black Cat. It looked exactly like a regular passive infrared sensor, but the motion detector was altered to be triggered instead by radio frequencies. Shielded to prevent it from being set off by household radios and with reduced reception range, the new device is one of the most devious yet. Designed to detect the passing bubble of a coalition jamming system’s powerful radio field, the Black Cat has brought Jieddo full circle: It is an IED that will detonate only when it detects an IED countermeasure.

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Not Enlightened, but Enriched

Wednesday, August 11th, 2010

The Enlightenment did not end barbarism and violence, Joel Mokyr laments, but it did end poverty in much of the world that embraced it:

In a few areas, useful knowledge turned out to be hugely productive. The rapidly growing cotton industry needed a chemical agent that could bleach fabrics, but traditional techniques were slow and expensive. In 1774, a Swedish chemist, Carl Wilhelm Scheele, discovered a substance that the Frenchman Claude Berthollet subsequently realized had miraculous bleaching properties. The recognition that this substance, later called chlorine, had industrial potential was a British idea. (Its other properties were discovered later: it began to be used as a disinfectant in the mid-nineteenth century, and the widespread chlorination of water began in the twentieth.)

Another example of the success of the Baconian program was in the field of lighting. Candles were expensive, emitted smoke, and often caused fires. Scientists all over enlightened Europe began to put their minds to the problem. In about 1780, Archibald Cochrane, the brilliant but eccentric earl of Dundonald, lit the coal gas above his tar ovens, mostly to amuse his friends; but we are not sure who first realized that the gas could not only burn well but also produce an immensely useful service. Claims for the breakthrough have been made for Jean-Pierre Minkelers, reputed to have lit his Leuven classroom with gas in 1784, and for Johann Georg Pickel, who certainly lit his German laboratory with gas in 1786. In 1799, the Frenchman Philippe Lebon took out a patent for a “thermolamp,” a glass device that would burn a combination of air and gas distilled from wood. After Lebon conducted a number of well-publicized demonstrations in Paris in 1801, it became abundantly clear that a radical new possibility had opened up. In 1807, some of Manchester’s cotton mills and the entire length of London’s Pall Mall were illuminated by coal gas in honor of King George’s birthday. In the following decade, gaslight turned night into day for many Europeans.

Optimism continued to abound about the potential of useful knowledge to improve the world. In 1780, one of the greatest figures of the Enlightenment, Benjamin Franklin, wrote in a letter that “the rapid progress true Science now makes, occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born so soon. It is impossible to imagine the Height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the Power of Man over Matter…. O, that Moral Science were in as fair a way of Improvement.” He addressed that very Baconian sentiment to his friend Joseph Priestley, the British scientist and philosopher who invented soda water and discovered oxygen.

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The Golden State’s War on Itself

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

Joel Kotkin argues that the state of California shifted from an older progressivism to a newer version over the course of the 20th century:

The old progressivism began in the early 1900s and lasted for half a century. It was a nonpartisan and largely middle-class movement that emphasized fostering economic growth — the progressives themselves tended to have business backgrounds — and building infrastructure, such as the Los Angeles Aqueduct and the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir. One powerful progressive was Republican Earl Warren, who governed the state between 1943 and 1953 and spent much of the prospering state’s surplus tax revenue on roads, mental health facilities, and schools. Another was Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, elected in 1958, who oversaw an aggressive program of public works, a rapid expansion of higher education, and the massive California Water Project.

But by the mid-1960s, as I noted in an essay in The American two years ago, Brown’s traditional progressivism was being destabilized by forces that would eventually transform liberal politics around the nation: public-sector workers, liberal lobbying organizations, and minorities, which demanded more and more social spending. This spending irritated the business interests that had formerly seen government as their friend, contributing to Brown’s defeat in 1966 by Ronald Reagan. Reagan was far more budget-conscious than Brown had been, and large declines in infrastructure spending occurred on his watch, mostly to meet a major budget deficit.

The decline of progressivism continued under the next governor: Pat Brown’s son, Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown, Jr., who took office in 1975. Brown scuttled infrastructure spending, in large part because of his opposition to growth and concern for the environment. Encouraged by “reforms” backed by Brown — such as the 1978 Dill Act, which legalized collective bargaining for them — the public-employee unions became the best-organized political force in California and currently dominate Democrats in the legislature (see “The Beholden State,” Spring 2010). According to the unions, public funds should be spent on inflating workers’ salaries and pensions — or else on expanding social services, often provided by public employees — and not on infrastructure or higher education, which is why Brown famously opposed new freeway construction and water projects and even tried to rein in the state’s university system.

The power of the public-employee lobby would come to haunt the recall-shortened gubernatorial reign of Gray Davis, Brown’s former chief of staff. The government workers’ growing demands on the budget, green groups’ opposition to expanding physical infrastructure, and Republican opposition to tax increases made it impossible for either Davis or his successor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to expand the state’s infrastructure at a scale necessary to accommodate its growing population.

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There are worse things than tyranny of the middle class

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

Why doesn’t the bottom 51% of a democracy simply expropriate the rich?, Eric Falkenstein asks:

A bottom 51% coalition isn’t effective because they are not as skillful at political activity: someone has to write the speeches, write initial checks, and those people usually are above average in economic standing. The top 51% would be a good coalition, but as the top 10% make so much money they are ripe for expropriating. Thus the most logical coalition in [Milton] Friedman’s argument is from the lower middle class to the upper middle class, feeding off the the very rich and very poor.

As depressing as Friedman’s argument may be, there are worse things than tyranny of the middle class: a coalition of the elites with the lowest classes. We have legislators bestowing all sorts of sinecures, pensions, and welfare on the masses, creating a coalition of the unproductive, and they grow in popularity and power by granting more entitlements. The end game is bankruptcy.

We have replaced Say’s Law — that supply creates its own demand — with the Liberal’s Law — that demand creates its own supply.
[...]
If you read Roman history, you see the constant struggles between the patricians, equestrians, and plebeians, questions about who is considered a citizen, and finally the apotheosis of the Emperor. There was a general trend from an aristocracy that built the Republic, to the end where a god-like emperor ruled with the support of the masses who were placated with free grain and big coliseum events. It was a barbell strategy, and was unstable, always extending.
[...]
So, perhaps every society has a different optimal coalition at various times, and currently I don’t see what will keep it from bringing everything down to the coalition of a few elites, sincerely deluded as to their belief in the virtue of government spending, combined with a vast entitlement mob at the bottom, all literally feeding off the middle class. It sounds a lot like South America.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 1 Comment »

Agora’s Roman Troops

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

Tim O’Neill reviews Agora — and makes an aside that speaks to hoplophiles:

While the sets were impressively detailed, with Roman and Hellenic elements mixed with Egyptian motifs, the same can’t be said for the costumes, which tended to be “generic ancient tunics and togas” rather than clothing of the specific period. Even less thought was given to the arms and armour of the Roman troops and the warring factions. It seems no-one can make a “Roman” film without equipping Roman soldiers in generic First Century AD helmets, swords and armour, regardless of what century the film is actually set in.

So here the Romans wear what look like left-overs from Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, with brassy-looking pseudo-First Century helmets, short gladius swords and, of course, leather lorica segmentata for armour. It would have been nice for nitpicky obsessives like me to finally see a movie set in the later Roman Period where the soldiers actually look like late Roman troops, but that was probably expecting too much.

Posted in Media, War, Weapons | No Comments »

Rule 2 FAIL

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

Borepatch declares this a Rule 2 FAIL:

A bridegroom in Turkey has accidentally killed three relatives while firing an AK-47 in celebration at his own wedding, Turkish media reported.

The groom lost control of the weapon as he tried to fire in traditional celebration in the air at the ceremony in the village of Akcagoze in south-eastern Gaziantep province.

The guests were sprayed with bullets and the groom’s father and two aunts were killed.

In case you don’t already know the four rules of gun safety, Borepatch presents them — in his own words:

  1. All guns are always loaded. I mean, otherwise, what’s the point?
  2. Never point the naughty end at anything that doesn’t need holes in it. In regards things living, bullet holes let the blood out and the air in, and this is A Bad Thing.
  3. Keep your finger off the trigger until you’re lined up on target, ready to fire. The subject of today’s story didn’t follow this one, either.
  4. Be sure of your target, and what’s behind it. Once the bullet starts down range, you can’t call it back.

Posted in Weapons | 1 Comment »

In defense of conservatism

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

Foseti shares his list of books written in defense of conservatism — starting with modern conservatism:

Witness by Whittaker Chambers – Truly a great book. It’s Chambers’ autobiography. Chambers was a Soviet spy who eventually switched sides.

Suicide of the West by James Burnham – In short, Burnham believes that liberalism is a religion designed to make Westerners feel less bad about the decline of the West. If nothing else, it’s a very solid analysis of what liberalism is (see the 19 points).

In Defense of Freedom by Frank Meyer – This is the classic text arguing that libertarians need conservatives and conservatives need libertarians.

The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk – Traces a particular strand of conservatism through time.

The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America by George Nash – Basically the bible of post-war conservatism.

Foseti has  moved on to the Old Right:

If you want to understand the Old Right, read John T. Flynn, Garet Garrett, Erik von Kuehneldt-Leddin, Albert Jay Nock, Isabel Paterson, and H. L. Mencken. You’ll thank me afterward.

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Good professors make bad kings

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

Good professors make bad kings, Bruce Charlton realized, after reading The decline of the German mandarins: the German academic community, 1890-1933, by Fritz K Ringer:

In other words, I had assumed, up to that point, that if only things were run by people ‘like me’, then things would inevitably be run better.

Before reading the book I had not been aware that I believed this, but although unarticulated, a belief in leadership by intellectals had been a basic assumption.

It is, indeed, an assumption of the modern political elite, and has been the assumption of Dichter und Denker (poets and thinkers) for a couple of hundred years (since the Romantic era) — but it was not an assumption of traditional societies before this.

Indeed, as I read in Ernest Gellner at about the same time, in traditional societies the intellectual class (priests and clerks) was subordinated to the leadership — which was essentially military.

Intellectuals were — Gellner said — essentially ‘eunuchs’ — in the sense that they were not allowed to build dynastic, hereditary power — this was reserved for the military leadership.

So priests and other intellectuals with power were sometimes actual eunuchs, or servants and slaves, or celibate (legally, not sexually, celibate — i.e. they could not have legitimate heirs), or members of a legally circumscribed minority (such as Jewish merchants and money lenders), or — like the Chinese mandarins — they were prohibited from handing on their status to their children (entry to the mandarinate being controlled by competitive examinations).

The ‘natural’ leaders of human society throughout most of history are the military leaders — the ‘generals’. The aristocracy were essentially the military leaders.

But in modern societies, the Mandarins have progressively taken over the leadership.

People ‘like me’ run things; the military leadership (unless they are themselves mandarins — as increasingly is the case — and servile to political correctness) are officially feared, hated and despised; indeed any aspirant for power who is not ‘an intellectual’ is officially feared, hated and despised.

Fritz Ringer’s books was a revelation because he described a familiar and recent society that had indeed been a mandarinate — and this was Germany in the nineteenth century and leading up to the first and second world wars. Germany was at that time the academic intellectual centre of the West.

And ‘yet’ the mandarinate had been a disaster — leading to two world wars and National Socialism and also (ironically) to the eclipse of the German mandarins — who were purged virtually overnight in 1933 (only a few obedient Nazi mandarins were allowed to stay — like Martin Heidegger).

The German mandarins were nationalist, that was the focus of their ideology (the distinctive superiority of German culture) and that is one variety — very rare nowadays except in small nations and would-be nations like Scotland or Catalonia.

Of course the most widespread mandarinate was the Soviet Union whose ideology was (mostly) anti-nationalistic/ international communism. And international left-mandarinism is now the dominant form of government in the West.

Since reading Ringer, when my eyes were opened, my experience has hardened into conviction that — as a generalization — mandarins make very useful servants but very bad leaders. Good professors make bad kings.

The main problem is, I think, that mandarins are expert at ignoring common sense reality and focusing on abstraction.

Mandarins live ‘in culture’ — they are ‘Kultur’ experts. Culture is the source of their expertise and prestige — culture comes between mandarins and common sense.

When, as is normal, mandarin abstractions are substantially incomplete and significantly biased, then there is no limit to how bad mandarin leadership can be; because any feedback provided by ‘reality’ can be ignored by mandarins in ways which are impossible to normal people.

Posted in Bruce Charlton, Education, Policy | No Comments »

Swearing a JetBlue Streak

Monday, August 9th, 2010

I couldn’t make this up:

JetBlue Flight 1052 from Pittsburgh had taxied to a stop at Terminal 5, Gate C around noon Monday when flight attendant Steven Slater, 38, was struck in the head with luggage that a passenger was trying to unload from an overhead compartment, according to an airport official with knowledge of the incident.

Slater demanded an apology from the passenger, the official said, but the passenger refused. The two argued before the passenger told Slater to “f— off”, the official said. The official said that Slater then got on the plane’s PA system and directed that same obscenity at all the passengers and added that he especially meant it for the man who refused to apologize.

Slater is alleged to have then activated the plane’s inflatable emergency slide, grabbed two beers from the galley, then slid down the chute, the official said.

The attendant then ran from the tarmac into the terminal, the official said. He made his way to his car and drove to his residence in Belle Harbor, Queens, the official said. The official said that jetBlue officials waited until about 25 minutes after the chute was deployed before they notified Port Authority Police. The wait enabled Slater to make the getaway, the airport’s police force. Steve Stampley, a jetBlue spokesman, declined to comment on the alleged reporting delay.

Authorities picked the flight attendant up at his home on Beach 128th Street Monday afternoon and brought him to the Port Authority Police station at JFK airport for questioning. The official said that Slater was calm when arrested and remained calm throughout his interrogation and the booking process. He was charged with reckless endangerment and criminal mischief. He was awaiting arraignment Monday night.
[...]
Gawker unearthed what appears to be Slater’s MySpace page, which mentions overcoming alcohol and substance abuse, and includes comments about how he ‘loves to max it out with trips around the world, sometimes on a moment’s notice!’

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Home for Life

Monday, August 9th, 2010

Ellen Kathrine Hansen loses credibility right off the bat, with this opening sentence:

Judging by looks alone, you’d never guess that the simple one-and-a-half-story house on a residential street outside Århus, Denmark, is anything more than an ordinary single-family home.

No, judging by looks alone, I’d guess that that was some kind of Scandinavian eco-friendly house — and it is:

Specialized windows, tight insulation, and a climate-control system minimize the need for electricity and heating. The sun handles the rest: Solar panels, solar thermal collectors, and the Home for Life’s south-facing orientation allow the house to generate enough electricity and heat to make it carbon neutral.

So, how much does a carbon-neutral home cost?

Our first prototype cost about US $700 000 to build, not including the design and planning.

I’m sure a big chunk of that expense comes from economically inefficient photovoltaics and automated window blinds:

The house generated 800 kilowatt-hours of electricity last August, used just a bit more than half of it, and fed the rest back to the grid.

There are two basic ways to reduce the cost of heating and cooling a home:

One approach is to design houses with small windows and thick walls filled with insulation; this strategy prevents the sun from overheating the interior, cuts down on air-conditioning in the summer, and reduces heat loss in the winter. But it doesn’t make for a delightful living experience. The people living in one such house complained to me that it was so heavily insulated you couldn’t even hear birds singing outside.

So we decided to build a house that didn’t wall itself off like a fortress from the sun but instead invited sunlight and fresh air in. In a word, that means windows. Our test house has about double the window area of an ordinary Danish house. We chose specialized panes with two or three layers of glazing, which in the cooler months reduces the heat escaping from the inside while allowing lots of heat and daylight to enter. In fact, the windows alone deliver half of the heating needed in the winter.

The windows’ frames also add insulation. They’re made of a brand-new type of polyurethane (the stuff that foam is made of) strengthened with thin glass threads.

Engineers at Velfac, a VKR subsidiary, tested more than 200 materials before finding one that was at once highly insulating and durable and had a pleasing surface finish. Because of the material’s strength, a weather-resistant frame can be made with just a slim sheet of this polyurethane.

The large windows cut down on the amount of indoor lighting and mechanical ventilation needed — good news for our net-zero-energy goal. But sometimes we need to keep the interior heating in check. To do so, a roof overhang on the south side provides shade when the sun is high in the summer, and shutters and blinds on both sides of each window regulate the transmittance of heat and provide privacy.

To further reduce the risk of overheating, we programmed the windows to open on their own to let in fresh air. Sensors in every room track the temperature, carbon dioxide levels, and humidity, and a weather station on the roof monitors outside conditions. Our control system, from another VKR company, WindowMaster, uses that information to decide when to lower the solar screens or slide open selected panes. These automated adjustments of the windows, rather than traditional air-conditioning and heating, provide the bulk of the house’s temperature control.

The big win comes from passive solar heating:

In total, the Home for Life ought to use about 60 percent of the energy of a traditional single-family house in Denmark: 15 kWh per square meter per year for lighting, household appliances, and running the active components of the house and 32 kWh/m² per year for hot water and heating. It’s the latter where the Home for Life really stands out: Its heating consumption is just half that of an ordinary Danish home. Once all the systems are fine-tuned, we estimate that the house will generate a surplus of about 9 kWh/m² per year.

The shape of the house made a big difference. Its overall surface area was kept to a minimum because that is a major factor in heat loss. In addition, the tip of the roof is tilted to the north, which increases its surface facing south. That side of the roof is covered with solar panels, solar thermal collectors, and skylights, each of which plays an important part in determining the house’s overall energy budget.

First, let’s look at the electricity. The 50 m² of polycrystalline solar panels generate about 5500 kWh a year. That’s 20 percent more electricity than the house needs, although in winter it does draw some power from the electricity grid. These solar cells, with 13 percent efficiency, aren’t the best on the market, but they’re a good compromise for the price.

Then there’s the heating, which comes in through the windows or the solar thermal collectors. The 6.7 m² of collectors catch the sun’s rays on copper plates installed on the lowest part of the roof. Underneath the plates, copper pipes circulate a fluid that absorbs the heat of the plates, converting 95 percent of the sun’s energy into heat. The collectors can catch indirect sunlight, too, so the house still has heat on cloudy days.

Should more interior heating be needed, we use an air-source heat pump. In one common configuration of this type of pump, air passes through a heat exchanger placed outside the house to transfer the air’s warmth to a liquid. The liquid travels to an electrically powered compressor inside the house, which applies pressure to raise the fluid’s temperature further. In general, a heat pump is far more energy efficient than conventional oil or electric heating, and it has lower CO2 emissions, too. But the pump’s performance depends heavily on the amount of heat contained in the air; when it’s cold outside, these heat pumps aren’t efficient.

To avoid that problem, we used a heat pump designed by another VKR subsidiary, Sonnenkraft, which uses the solar collectors to preheat the cold winter air before it reaches the heat pump. The pump can now easily produce 20°C water even when the outside air is below freezing. After the liquid is compressed, the heat travels through pipes in the floors and to radiators. In all, our solar collectors and pump can produce about 8000 kWh’s worth of heat a year.

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Sympathy Deformed

Monday, August 9th, 2010

To sympathize with those who are less fortunate is honorable and decent, Theodore Dalrymple says, but every virtue can become deformed by excess, insincerity, or loose thinking into an opposing vice:

I first started thinking about poverty when I worked as a doctor during the early eighties in the Gilbert Islands, a group of low coral atolls in an immensity of the Central Pacific. Much of the population still lived outside the money economy, and the per-capita GDP was therefore extremely low. It did not seem to me, however, that the people were very poor. Their traditional way of life afforded them what anthropologists call a generous subsistence; their coconuts, fish, and taros gave them an adequate—and, in some respects, elegant—living. They lived in an almost invariant climate, with the temperature rarely departing more than a few degrees from 85. Their problems were illness and boredom, which left them avid for new possibilities when they came into contact with the outside world.

Life in the islands taught me a lively disrespect for per-capita GDP as an accurate measure of poverty. I read recently in a prominent liberal newspaper that “the majority of Nigerians live on less than $1 a day.” This statement is clearly designed less to convey an economic truth than to provoke sympathy, evoke guilt, and drum up support for foreign aid in the West, where an income of less than $1 a day would not keep body and soul together for long; whereas it is frequently said that one of Nigeria’s problems is the rapid increase in its population.

As it happens, an island next door (in Pacific terms) to the Gilbert Islands was home to an experiment in the sudden, unearned attainment of wealth. Nauru, a speck in the ocean just ten miles around, for a time became the richest place on earth. The source of its sudden riches was phosphate rock. Australia had long administered the island, and the British Phosphate Commission had mined the phosphate on behalf of Australia, Britain, and New Zealand; but when Nauru became independent in 1968, the 4,000 or so Nauruans gained control of the phosphate, which made them wealthy. The money came as a gift. Most Nauruans made no contribution to the extraction of the rock, beyond selling their land. The expertise, the management, the labor, and the transportation arrived from outside. Within just a few years, the Nauruans went from active subsistence to being rentiers.

The outcome was instructive. The Nauruans became bored and listless. One of their chief joys became eating to excess. On average, they consumed 7,000 calories per day, mainly rice and canned beef, and they drank Fanta and Château d’Yquem by the caseload. They became the fattest people on earth, and, genetically predisposed already to the illness, 50 percent of them became diabetic. It was my experience of Nauru that first suggested to me the possibility that abruptly distributing wealth has psychological effects as well as economic ones.

Read the whole thing.

Posted in Economics, Policy, Theodore Dalrymple | No Comments »

A Second English Civil War

Monday, August 9th, 2010

In his biography of Edmund Burke, John Morely notes that the war of [American] Independence was virtually a second English civil war:

The ruin of the American cause would have been also the ruin of the constitutional cause in England; and a patriotic Englishman may revere the memory of Patrick Henry and George Washington not less justly than the patriotic American. Burke’s attitude in this great contest is that part of his history about the majestic and noble wisdom of which there can be least dispute.

This reminds me of The True History of the American Revolution. Modern Americans see the Revolution as a war of Americans versus Brits, when it was really a war of Whigs against Tories — and many of the British generals were Whigs.

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

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