The Quest for a Charter City

Monday, February 7th, 2011

The quest for a charter city has taken Paul Romer to Honduras, where they seem oddly interested:

Back while Mr. Romer was courting Africans, a group of Hondurans was pondering how to improve their country’s prospects. One idea, a turbo-charged version of existing free-trade zones, was to lure investors to a super-embassy, an area governed by another country’s laws. Then they spotted an online video of a Romer presentation to a conference. “As soon as we watched it,” says Xavier Arguello, “we knew this is what we were talking about.”

In November, Mr. Arguello, an aide to a previous Honduran president and now with a U.S. real-estate company, called Mr. Romer. He arranged for his group, including Juan Orlando Hernandez, president of the Honduran Congress, to meet Mr. Romer in Washington. A few weeks later, Mr. Romer was meeting with President Lobo and aides in a Miami hotel. When Mr. Romer’s abstract explanations were unconvincing, someone suggested Mr. Lobo watch the conference presentation video. He did. He was sold. “What risk am I taking if they come here and build factories, schools, universities, hospitals — and where the people can live,” Mr. Lobo later told skeptical local reporters.

In early January, Mr. Romer went to the capital, Tegucigalpa, to meet privately with various groups, then make his case at a public gathering. “You can’t change the rules in the middle of the game,” he said, flashing a photo of a soccer game on a screen. “Create a new playing field and see if anyone wants to play.” Think big, he pleaded. Build an airport big enough to be a hemispheric hub, he said, turning to his father Roy, former governor of Colorado, to tell the story of how Denver got its big airport.

The next step is for Congress to reaffirm the constitutional amendment, then craft a charter for the new city, which requires approval by two-thirds of the Honduran Congress.

Romer spells out some of the details behind these special development regions (or REDs, as they’re abbreviated in Spanish), which would not be sovereign city-states.

David Wessel’s Wall Street Journal piece briefly mentions two fascinating historical quasi-precedents: Henry Ford’s Fordlandia, in Brazil, which I had heard of, and William Walker‘s so-called filibustering throughout Latin America, which somehow I had not.

Fordlandia was an American-style prefab industrial town established in, of all places, the Amazon Rainforest, in 1928, to cultivate rubber for Henry Ford’s extremely vertically integrated car company. In return for 9 percent of the plantation’s profits, the Brazilian government granted the company 10,000 square kilometers of land — again, in the jungle, or, rather, a hilly, rocky, and infertile region within the jungle.

The Ford managers didn’t understand tropical agriculture, the closely packed rubber trees succumbed to natural predators, and the indigenous workers rebelled against their American-style food, housing, and practices — especially the rules against alcohol, tobacco, and brothels.

The whole thing collapsed, and Ford’s grandson sold it off in 1945, for a loss of over $20 million.

William Walker’s story involves hubris, but not progressive Yankee can-do hubris. Walker, who graduated summa cum laude from the University of Nashville at the age of fourteen, went on to study medicine in Europe and then at Penn, to study law in New Orleans, to run a paper there, to become a journalist in San Francisco, where he fought three duels, and then to go filibustering, or freebooting — conquering vast regions of Latin America, where he would create new slave states to join the federal union. This was just before the War between the States:

In the summer of 1853, Walker traveled to Guaymas, seeking a grant from the government of Mexico to create a colony that would serve as a fortified frontier, protecting U.S. soil from retaliations by Native Americans. Mexico refused, and Walker returned to San Francisco determined to obtain his colony, regardless of Mexico’s position. He began recruiting from amongst American supporters of slavery and the Manifest Destiny Doctrine, mostly inhabitants of Kentucky and Tennessee. His intentions then changed from forming a buffer colony to establishing an independent Republic of Sonora, which might eventually take its place as a part of the American Union (as had been the case previously with the Republic of Texas). He funded his project by “selling scripts which were redeemable in lands of Sonora.”

On October 15, 1853, Walker set out with 45 men to conquer the Mexican territories of Baja California and Sonora. He succeeded in capturing La Paz, the capital of sparsely populated Baja California, which he declared the capital of a new Republic of Lower California, with himself as president and his partner, Watkins, as vice president; he then put the region under the laws of the American state of Louisiana, which made slavery legal. He moved his headquarters to Ensenada to maintain a more secure position of operations. Although he never gained control of Sonora, less than three months later, he pronounced Baja California part of the larger Republic of Sonora.

Lack of supplies and unexpectedly strong resistance by the Mexican government quickly forced Walker to retreat. Back in California, he was put on trial for conducting an illegal war, in violation of the Neutrality Act of 1794. In the era of Manifest Destiny, his filibustering project was popular in the southern and western United States and the jury took eight minutes to acquit him.

It gets even “better”:

In 1854, a civil war erupted in Nicaragua between the Legitimist party (also called the Conservative party), based in the city of Granada, and the Democratic party (also called the Liberal party), based in León. The Democratic party sought military support from Walker who, to circumvent U.S. neutrality laws, obtained a contract from Democratic president President Castellón to bring as many as three hundred “colonists” to Nicaragua. These mercenaries received the right to bear arms in the service of the Democratic government. Walker sailed from San Francisco on May 3, 1855, with approximately 60 men. Upon landing, the force was reinforced by 170 locals and about 100 Americans, including the well-known explorer and journalist Charles Wilkins Webber and the English adventurer Charles Frederick Henningsen, a veteran of the First Carlist War, the Hungarian Revolution, and the war in Circassia.

With Castellón’s consent, Walker attacked the Legitimists in the town of Rivas, near the trans-isthmian route. He was driven off, but not without inflicting heavy casualties. On September 4, during the Battle of La Virgen, Walker defeated the Legitimist army. On October 13, he conquered the Legitimist capital of Granada and took effective control of the country. Initially, as commander of the army, Walker ruled Nicaragua through puppet President Patricio Rivas. During Walker’s rule, the country became known as “Walkeragua.” U.S. President Franklin Pierce recognized Walker’s regime as the legitimate government of Nicaragua on May 20, 1856.
[...]
Walker took up residence in Granada and set himself up as President of Nicaragua, after conducting a fraudulent election. He was inaugurated on July 12, 1856, and soon launched an Americanization program, reinstating slavery, declaring English an official language and reorganizing currency and fiscal policy to encourage immigration from the United States. Realizing that his position was becoming precarious, he sought support from the Southerners in the U.S. by recasting his campaign as a fight to spread the institution of black slavery, which many American Southern businessmen saw as the basis of their agrarian economy. With this in mind, Walker revoked Nicaragua’s emancipation edict of 1824. This move did increase Walker’s popularity in the South and attracted the attention of Pierre Soulé, an influential New Orleans politician, who campaigned to raise support for Walker’s war. Nevertheless, Walker’s army, weakened by an epidemic of cholera and massive defections, was no match for the Central American coalition. On December 14, 1856 as Granada was surrounded by 4,000 Salvadoran and Guatemalan troops, Charles Frederick Henningsen, one of Walker’s generals, ordered his men to set the city ablaze before escaping and fighting their way to Lake Nicaragua. An inscription on a lance reading Aquí fue Granada (“Here was Granada”) was left behind at the smoking ruin of the ancient capital city.

On May 1, 1857, Walker surrendered to Commander Charles Henry Davis of the United States Navy under the pressure of the Central American armies, and was repatriated. Upon disembarking in New York City, he was greeted as a hero, but he alienated public opinion when he blamed his defeat on the U.S. Navy. Within six months, he set off on another expedition, but he was arrested by the U.S. Navy Home Squadron under the command of Commodore Hiram Paulding and once again returned to the U.S. amid considerable public controversy over the legality of the Navy’s actions.

Walker returned to the region and fell into the hands of the Brits, who then handed him off to the Honduran authorities — who executed him.

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How the Flu Spreads

Monday, February 7th, 2011

A new study examines how the flu spreads:

The scientists collected data on 370 students from 295 households. Almost 35 percent of the students and more than 15 percent of their household contacts came down with flu. The most detailed information was gathered from fourth-graders, the group most affected by the outbreak.

The class and grade structure had a significant effect on transmission rates. Transmission was 25 times as intensive among classmates as between children in different grades. And yet sitting next to a student who was infected did not increase the chances of catching flu.

Social networks were apparently a more significant means of transmission than seating arrangements. Students were four times as likely to play with children of the same sex as with those of the opposite sex, and following this pattern, boys were more likely to catch the flu from other boys, and girls from other girls.

The progress of the disease from day to day followed these social interactions: from May 7 to 9, the illness spread mostly among boys; from May 10 to 13 mostly among girls.

“Our social networks shape disease spread,” said Simon Cauchemez, the lead author. “And we can quantify the role of social networks.”

Thirty-eight percent of children 6 to 10 were infected, compared with 23 percent of 11- to 18-year-olds and 13 percent of those older than 18. Adults were only about half as susceptible as children, but when they got sick they were just as likely to transmit the virus to others.

The school closed from May 14 to 18, but there was no indication that this slowed transmission. It may already have been too late — May 14 was the 18th day of the outbreak, and 27 percent of the students already had symptoms.

The scientists found no difference in transmission rates during the closure and during the rest of the outbreak. This, they write, confirms earlier studies showing that a school has to be closed quite early in an epidemic to have any effect on disease transmission.

Only 1 in 5 adults caught the illness from their own children, and this goes against one of the most common arguments for closing schools: that it will prevent the disease from moving from the school to households.

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Cracking the Lottery Code

Monday, February 7th, 2011

Mohan Srivastava, a trained statistician with degrees from MIT and Stanford, got some lottery tickets as a gag gift, and he started thinking about how the lottery’s tic-tac-toe game works:

“The tickets are clearly mass-produced, which means there must be some computer program that lays down the numbers. Of course, it would be really nice if the computer could just spit out random digits. But that’s not possible, since the lottery corporation needs to control the number of winning tickets. The game can’t be truly random. Instead, it has to generate the illusion of randomness while actually being carefully determined.”
[...]
The visible numbers turned out to reveal essential information about the digits hidden under the latex coating. Nothing needed to be scratched off—the ticket could be cracked if you knew the secret code.

The trick itself is ridiculously simple. (Srivastava would later teach it to his 8-year-old daughter.) Each ticket contained eight tic-tac-toe boards, and each space on those boards—72 in all—contained an exposed number from 1 to 39. As a result, some of these numbers were repeated multiple times. Perhaps the number 17 was repeated three times, and the number 38 was repeated twice. And a few numbers appeared only once on the entire card. Srivastava’s startling insight was that he could separate the winning tickets from the losing tickets by looking at the number of times each of the digits occurred on the tic-tac-toe boards. In other words, he didn’t look at the ticket as a sequence of 72 random digits. Instead, he categorized each number according to its frequency, counting how many times a given number showed up on a given ticket. “The numbers themselves couldn’t have been more meaningless,” he says. “But whether or not they were repeated told me nearly everything I needed to know.” Srivastava was looking for singletons, numbers that appear only a single time on the visible tic-tac-toe boards. He realized that the singletons were almost always repeated under the latex coating. If three singletons appeared in a row on one of the eight boards, that ticket was probably a winner.

The next day, on his way into work, he stopped at the gas station and bought a few more tickets. Sure enough, all of these tickets contained the telltale pattern. The day after that he picked up even more tickets from different stores. These were also breakable. After analyzing his results, Srivastava realized that the singleton trick worked about 90 percent of the time, allowing him to pick the winning tickets before they were scratched.

Naturally he went on to make a lot of money, right?

“I remember thinking, I’m gonna be rich! I’m gonna plunder the lottery!” he says. However, these grandiose dreams soon gave way to more practical concerns. “Once I worked out how much money I could make if this was my full-time job, I got a lot less excited,” Srivastava says. “I’d have to travel from store to store and spend 45 seconds cracking each card. I estimated that I could expect to make about $600 a day. That’s not bad. But to be honest, I make more as a consultant, and I find consulting to be a lot more interesting than scratch lottery tickets.”

He took his finding to the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation — and they didn’t really want to hear about it.

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Preserve Their Illusions

Monday, February 7th, 2011

Soviet military intelligence followed a simple game plan toward terrorists:

The GRU’s tactics toward terrorists are simple: never give them any orders, never tell them what to do. They are destroying Western civilisation: they know how to do it, the argument goes, so let them get on with it unfettered by petty supervision. Among them there are idealists ready to die for their own ideas. So let them die for them. The most important thing is to preserve their illusion that they are completely free and independent.

Posted in Policy, Viktor Suvorov, War | No Comments »

Ammunition

Sunday, February 6th, 2011

When Viktor Suvorov was beginning his military service, he was taught to count every round:

Cartridges are metal and a lot of hard work. It is more difficult and more expensive to make a cartridge than to make a fountain pen. And another reason for being careful with ammunition is so that you are never without it at a critical moment. Supplying an army with ammunition is a complex logistical problem. If the transport carrying ammunition arrives even a few minutes after you have spent all your ammunition without thinking, then you are dead. But there are no such problems in Beirut. Nobody tells the conflicting groups what the ammunition costs. Nobody tells them the cost of the lives they cut off every day. Nobody mentions the danger that the regular supply of ammunition may be late. The suppliers are certain that it will not be late.

The Soviet Union condemns the civil war in the Lebanon. But there is no need for it to condemn the war. All it has to do is hold back the next transport of ammunition, and war will cease.

(He’s writing in the mid-1980s, of course.)

Posted in Policy, Viktor Suvorov, War | No Comments »

Bruce Charlton’s Concept of Political Correctness

Sunday, February 6th, 2011

Bruce Charlton’s concept of political correctness, or progressivism, starts from the notion that only the intelligent can truly internalize the abstractions of PC thought — but that doesn’t make PC thought right:

PC is atheistic and this worldly — but is trying to be good.

For PC the ultimate evil is selfishness — therefore the highest good it can conceive is unselfishness: i.e. altruism.

This worldly atruism is operationalized in terms of the allocation of ‘goods’ (money, power, status etc).

But PC sees humans as innately selfish — therefore the allocation of goods must be done impersonally — in practice, by rules and bureaucracies.

What governs the principles of PC? Reaction, rejection. The past is tainted. There must be a fresh start. The good is the opposite of what people used to believe. Hence moral inversion.

The fact that all this is anti-spontaneous, anti-natural, alien, scary — is actually taken as a sign of its virtuousness. The truly altruistic must sacrifice themselves.

The mass media is essential to this since it fills our minds everyday, continually displacing the past — so whatever is in the mass media is reality.

(Bruce Charlton, Mencius Moldbug, and others discuss the ambiguous relationship between Christianity and Progressivism over at Foseti‘s.)

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Show the Monster

Saturday, February 5th, 2011

Daniel Zalewski has written a remarkably thorough New Yorker piece, Show the Monster, on Guillermo del Toro, which reinforces my relief that he was taken off The Hobbit and my belief that he was born to make At the Mountains of Madness:

But he was thinking of taking an even bigger risk, and pursuing the adaptation of Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” — his “Sisyphean project.” He had begun sketching images for an adaptation in 1993 and had completed a script in 1998. But the project had seemed too daunting; digital effects weren’t yet good enough to render creatures that changed shape far more radically than Transformers. Then, while del Toro was in Wellington, “Avatar” was released, and its landmark effects made “Madness” seem plausible. Crucially, James Cameron, a friend, had agreed to be a producer for “Madness,” sharing his expertise in designing strange worlds. And del Toro was now less wary of making digital monsters. At Weta, he had experimented with a “virtual camera,” which allows a director to maintain a sense of physicality when filming a C.G.I. creature. “They lay out the animation, you grab a camera, and you can change the angles within that virtual environment,” he said. “One day, I ended up dripping sweat from handling the virtual camera on the motion-capture stage. This camera would be very handy on ‘Madness.’ ”

The movie would not be an easy sell, though. Del Toro envisaged “Madness” as a “hard R” epic, shot in 3-D, with a blockbuster budget. Creating dozens of morphing creatures would be expensive, and much of the film needed to be shot somewhere that approximated Antarctica; one of the most disquieting aspects of Lovecraft’s novella is that the explorers are being pursued by monsters in a vast frozen void, and del Toro wanted to make the first horror movie on the scale of a David Lean production. But a “tent-pole horror film,” as del Toro put it, hadn’t been made in years. High-budget productions such as “Alien” and “The Shining” had been followed by decades of cheaper thrills. “The natural flaw of horror as a genre is that, ninety-nine per cent of the time, it’s a clandestine genre,” he said. “It lives and breathes—‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre,’ the first ‘Saw,’ ‘The Blair Witch Project’—in dark little corners that come out and haunt you. Rarely is there a beautiful orchid that blooms.” He mentioned Hitchcock’s “The Birds”: “It was a major filmmaker using cutting-edge optical technology and special effects. It was a big-budget movie. It had Edith Head designing costumes, it had all the luxuries. And it was appealing because it had all the polished aspects of a studio film.”

Del Toro thought that nearly all his previous movies had conveyed “sympathy for the monsters.” With “Madness,” he said, he would terrify the audience with their malignancy. First, though, he needed to make Universal executives feel that, in allowing del Toro to design a creature-filled world, they weren’t being reckless—rather, they were commissioning a variation on “Avatar,” the most successful film in history. “Studios look backward,” del Toro said. “Filmmakers look forward.”

Read the whole thing.

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Real Secret Agents

Saturday, February 5th, 2011

If you read the real dossiers of secret agents used by Soviet military intelligence, you would likely be disappointed:

A portrait of an ideal agent for spetsnaz emerges something like this: a man of between fifty-five and sixty-five years of age who has never served in the army, never had access to secret documents, does not carry or own a weapon, knows nothing about hand-to-hand fighting, does not possess any secret equipment and doesn’t support the Comunists, does not read the newspapers, was never in the Soviet Union and has never met any Soviet citizens, leads a lonely, introspective life, far from other people, and is by profession a forester, fisherman, lighthouse-keeper, security guard or railwayman. In many cases such an agent will be a physical invalid. Spetsnaz is also on the lookout for women with roughly the same characteristics.

If spetsnaz has such a person in its network, that means: a. that he is certainly not under any suspicion on the part of the local police or security services; b. that in the event of any enquiries being made he will be the last person to be suspected; c. that there is practically nothing by which any suspicions could be confirmed, which in turn means that in peacetime the agent is almost totally guaranteed against the danger of failure or arrest; d. that in the event of war he will remain in the same place as he was in peacetime and not be taken into the army or the public service under the wartime mobilisation.

The principal task of such agents is to prepare a safe hiding place in advance, long before the commandos arrive in the country:

These are some examples of hiding places prepared by spetsnaz agents. With GRU money a pensioner who is actually a spetsnaz agent buys a house on the outskirts of a town, and close to a big forest. In the house he builds, quite legally, a nuclear shelter with electric light, drains, water supply and a store of food. He then buys a car of a semi-military or military type, a Land Rover for example, which is kept permanently in the garage of the house along with a good store of petrol. With that the agent’s work is done. He lives quietly, makes use of his country house and car, and in addition is paid for his services. He knows that at any moment he may have ‘guests’ in his house. But that doesn’t frighten him. In case of arrest he can say that the commando troops seized him as a hostage and made use of his house, his shelter and car.

Or, the owner of a car dump takes an old, rusty railway container and drops it among the hundreds of scrap cars and a few motorcycles. For the benefit of the few visitors to the scrapyard who come in search of spare parts, the owner opens a little shop selling Coca-Cola, hot dogs, coffee and sandwiches. He always keeps a stock of bottled mineral water, tinned fish, meat and vegetables. The little shop also stocks comprehensive medical supplies.

Or perhaps the owner of a small firm buys a large, though old yacht. He tells his friends that he dreams of making a long journey under sail, which is why the yacht always has a lot of stores aboard. But he has no time to make the trip; what’s more, the yacht is in need of repair which requires both time and money. So for the moment the old yacht lies there in a deserted bay among dozens of other abandoned yachts with peeling paint.

Large numbers of such places of refuge have been arranged. Places that can be used as shelters include caves, abandoned (or in some cases working) mines, abandoned industrial plants, city sewers, cemeteries (especially if they have family vaults), old boats, railway carriages and wagons, and so forth. Any place can be adapted as a shelter for the use of spetsnaz terrorists. But the place must be very well studied and prepared in advance. That is what the agents are recruited for.

These agents aren’t told that the spetsnaz commandos will destroy all traces of their work, including any witnesses.

Posted in Viktor Suvorov, War | No Comments »

Kids are taking over e-readers

Saturday, February 5th, 2011

Kids are taking over the e-reader market:

In 2010 young-adult e-books made up about 6 percent of the total digital sales for titles published by St. Martin’s Press, but so far in 2011, the number is up to 20 percent, a spokeswoman for the publisher said.
[...]
Some younger readers have been exploring the classics, thanks to the availability of older e-books that are in the public domain — and downloadable free.

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Do you have a license for that?

Friday, February 4th, 2011

I could not make this up.

David Cox and his neighbors in Raleigh, North Carolina, are lobbying city and state officials to add traffic signals at two intersections as part of a planned widening of the oddly named Falls of Neuse Road.

An engineering consultant hired by the city said that the signals were not needed, but Cox performed his own analysis and produced an eight-page document with maps, diagrams, and traffic projections supporting his position.

So Kevin Lacy, chief traffic engineer for the state DOT, decided to call for the NC Board of Examiners for Engineers and Surveyors to investigate Cox — for practicing engineering without a license.

No, he didn’t claim to be a professional — but he did produce what appears to be engineering-level work. We can’t have that.

Posted in Policy, Urbanism | 1 Comment »

Reproduction Vintage Clothing

Friday, February 4th, 2011

Reproduction vintage clothing — first embraced by the tattooed, fishnet-clad rockabilly set — is going mainstream:

But the style has entered the mainstream, appealing to everyone from teenagers who want glamorous prom dresses, to professional women seeking conservative yet sexy business attire, to senior citizens nostalgic for the clothes of their youth.

“Since ‘Mad Men,’ it’s been crazy busy,” said Letty Tennant, 30, owner and chief designer of Queen of Heartz in Anaheim, Calif. “And you can’t say it’s just a fad because these clothes are timeless classics, not ‘in’ one year and ‘you wouldn’t be caught dead in it’ next year.”

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Cyborg

Friday, February 4th, 2011

The cyborg has become something of a sci-fi cliché, but the term was still novel in the 1970s, when The Six Million Dollar Man hit the air waves — too novel for American audiences, apparently. The show was originally going to be called Cyborg, after the Martin Caidin bestseller it was based on, but the TV audience wasn’t deemed as sophisticated as the book’s techno-spy-thriller audience.

While the term is now used as a (more fashionable) synonym for bionic — a mix of biological and electronic parts — the original meaning of the word was subtly different. In 1960, when Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline suggested artifact-organism systems for exploring space, their emphasis was on systems. Such cyborgs would be cybernetic organisms, in the sense of the then-burgeoning field of cybernetics, the study of the structure of regulatory systems — what we tend to call control theory or systems theory today.

Their piece on Cyborgs and Space reminds me of Cordwainer Smith’s hard-to-explain science-fiction classic, Scanners Live in Vain:

What are some of the devices necessary for creating self-regulating man-machine systems? This self-regulation must function without the benefit of consciousness in order to cooperate with the body’s own autonomous homeostatic controls. For the exogenously extended organizational complex functioning as an integrated homeostatic system unconsciously, we propose the term “Cyborg.” The Cyborg deliberately incorporates exogenous components extending the self-regulatory control function of the organism in order to adapt it to new environments.

If man in space, in addition to flying his vehicle, must continually be checking on things and making adjustments merely in order to keep himself alive, he becomes a slave to the machine. The purpose of the Cyborg, as well as his own homeostatic systems, is to provide an organizational system in which such robot-like problems are taken care of automatically and unconsciously, leaving man free to explore, to create, to think, and to feel.

I suppose it wasn’t obvious at the time that flying his vehicle wasn’t going to be particularly challenging for the astronaut. (I believe Chuck Yeager had a few choice words on that.)

What kind of high-tech homeostatic systems did they have in mind?

One device helpful to consideration of the construction of Cyborgs, which is already available, is the ingenious osmotic pressure pump capsule developed by S. Rose for continuous slow injections of biochemically active substances at a biological rate. The capsule is incorporated into the organism and allows administration of a selected drug at a particular organ and at a continuous variable rate, without any attention on the part of the organism. Capsules are already available which will deliver as little as 0.01 ml/day for 200 days, and there is no reason why this time could not be extended considerably. The apparatus has already been used on rabbits and rats, and for continuous heparin injection in man. No untoward general effect on health was noted when the injector was buried in animals. As long as five years ago, an injector 7 cm long and 1.4 cm in diameter, weighing 15 gm, was successfully buried under the skin of rats weighing 150-250 gm. The photo on page 27 shows a rat weighing 220 gm with an injector in situ.

The combination of an osmotic pressure pump capsule with sensing and controlling mechanisms can form a continuous control loop which will act as an adjunct to the body’s own autonomous controls. In this manner, these controls can be changed to the desired performance characteristics under various environmental conditions. If these characteristics were determined, such a system would be possible today with the selection of appropriate drugs.

Not exactly Steve Austin.

(Hat tip to Nyrath.)

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The Two-Income Trap

Friday, February 4th, 2011

Ilkka describes Elizabeth Warren, author of The Two-Income Trap, as one of the few sane American liberals who defends middle-class norms:

The basic thesis is that even though modern families have two wage earners, this doesn’t provide extra financial security unless they save more, which most don’t. Also, having two incomes doubles the probability that one of them goes suddenly away, and unlike in a one-income family, there is no slack since the other partner can’t join the workforce to bring in extra dough in case of a layoff.

Furthermore, families have to zero-sum-compete with all other two-income families for ever scarcer goodies. For example, the first fifth of this book shows how housing in America has become so expensive because middle class families want their kids to go to “good schools” (a euphemism for “good people”). Public schools in desirable and thus expensive districts are already de facto private schools; the “tuition fee” is just paid to the mortgage company. Decoupling your home address from your school address by school vouchers would alleviate this problem. Desirable schools with more people coming in than they could take would raise their prices and/or select students with entrance exams, just like good universities already do and progressives have no problem with it.

Posted in Economics, Education, Urbanism | No Comments »

Soviet Conscripts

Friday, February 4th, 2011

Soviet conscripts served for two years — not long by American professional-soldier standards:

I often hear it said that the Soviet soldier is a very bad soldier because he serves for only two years in the army. Some Western experts consider it impossible to produce a good soldier in such a short time.

It is true that the Soviet soldier is a conscript, but it must be remembered that he is conscript in a totally militarised country. It is sufficient to remember that even the leaders of the party in power in the Soviet Union have the military ranks of generals and marshals. The whole of Soviet society is militarised and swamped with military propaganda. From a very early age Soviet children engage in war games in a very serious way, often using real submachine guns (and sometimes even fighting tanks), under the direction of officers and generals of the Soviet Armed Forces.

Those children who show a special interest in military service join the Voluntary Society for Cooperation with the Army, Air Force and Fleet, known by its Russian initial letters as DOSAAF. DOSAAF is a para-military organisation with 15 million members who have regular training in military trades and engage in sports with a military application. DOSAAF not only trains young people for military service; it also helps reservists to maintain their qualifications after they have completed their service. DOSAAF has a colossal budget, a widespread network of airfields and training centres and clubs of various sizes and uses which carry out elementary and advanced training of military specialists of every possible kind, from snipers to radio operators, from fighter pilots to underwater swimmers, from glider pilots to astronauts, and from tank drivers to the people who train military doctors.

Many outstanding Soviet airmen, the majority of the astronauts (starting with Yuri Gagarin), famous generals and European and world champions in military types of sport began their careers in DOSAAF, often at the age of 14.

The men in charge of DOSAAF locally are retired officers, generals and admirals, but the men in charge at the top of DOSAAF are generals and marshals on active service. Among the best-known leaders of the society were Army-General A. L. Getman, Marshal of the Air Force A. I. Pokryshkin, Army-General D. D. Lelyushenko and Admiral of the Fleet G. Yegorov. Traditionally the top leadership of DOSAAF includes leaders of the GRU and spetsnaz. At the present time (1986), for example, the first deputy chairman of DOSAAF is Colonel-General A. Odintsev. As long ago as 1941 he was serving in a spetsnaz detachment on the Western Front. The detachment was under the command of Artur Sprogis. Throughout his life Odintsev has been directly connected with the GRU and terrorism. At the present time his main job is to train young people of both sexes for the ordeal of fighting a war. The most promising of them are later sent to serve in spetsnaz.

When we speak about the Soviet conscript soldiers, and especially those who were taken into spetsnaz, we must remember that each one of them has already been through three or four years of intensive military training, has already made parachute jumps, fired a sub-machine gun and been on a survival course. He has already developed stamina, strength, drive and the determination to conquer. The difference between him and a regular soldier in the West lies in the fact that the regular soldier is paid for his efforts. Our young man gets no money. He is a fanatic and an enthusiast. He has to pay himself (though only a nominal sum) for being taught how to use a knife, a silenced pistol, a spade and explosives.

After completing his service in spetsnaz the soldier either becomes a regular soldier or he returns to ‘peaceful’ work and in his spare time attends one of the many DOSAAF clubs. Here is a typical example: Sergei Chizhik was born in 1965. While still at school he joined the DOSAAF club. He made 120 parachute jumps. Then he was called into the Army and served with special troops in Afghanistan. He distinguished himself in battle, and completed his service in 1985. In May 1986 he took part in a DOSAAF team in experiments in surviving in Polar conditions. As one of a group of Soviet ‘athletes’ he dropped by parachute on the North Pole.

DOSAAF is a very useful organisation for spetsnaz in many ways. The Soviet Union has signed a convention undertaking not to use the Antarctic for military purposes. But in the event of war it will of course be used by the military, and for that reason the corresponding experience has to be gained. That is why the training for a parachute drop on the South Pole in the Antarctic is being planned out by spetsnaz but to be carried out by DOSAAF. The difference is only cosmetic: the men who make the jump will be the very same cut-throats as went through the campaigns in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. They are now considered to be civilians, but they are under the complete control of generals like Odintsev, and in wartime they will become the very same spetsnaz troops as we now label contemptuously ‘conscripts’.

Posted in Policy, Viktor Suvorov, War | No Comments »

On government employment

Thursday, February 3rd, 2011

One of the things that drew Foseti, then a neo-fusionist libertarian-conservative, to Mencius Moldbug’s neo-reactionary point of view was that Foseti had an inside look at how government bureaucracy works, and Moldbug was the only writer who seemed to understand that elected officials aren’t in charge any more.

Now Foseti has written his own piece on government employment, answering questions and explaining how it works:

I’m suggesting that the bureaucracy runs the show. You might take that to be a bad thing. But, it’s important to remember that it’s far superior to the alternative. We would really be screwed if Congress was actually running the show. In this sense, one can agree with me that the bureaucracy is in charge and be very happy (not cynical) about the status quo.

I share my cynicism with people in government all the time. Almost alll agree that agencies have immense power — and they see nothing wrong with this fact. I sometimes push back that the bureaucracy is totally unaccountable. This often gets some objection, but not in the form of a coherent argument opposing my position.

Accountability does not work in the bureaucracy. I can’t stress this point enough. The defining feature of the bureaucracy is lack of accountability. It’s very hard to understand the complex ways in which the total absence of accountability affects and organization.

If someone really really screws up, they will not be given any new work. That’s about the extent of accountability.

The bureaucracy changes it’s mind when the media and the academics change their mind. This is rare — I haven’t seen it happen yet. This also means that only tangible results that fit media narratives and academic biases inform policy.

Read the whole thing.

Posted in Mencius Moldbug, Policy | 1 Comment »

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