USA Inc.

March 15th, 2010

John Robb wrote a piece looking back from 2025 at how the loss of trust in the US government — and its ability to pay off its debts — led to a massive sell-off of assets. He doesn’t advocate for USA Inc.; he merely predicts it — and its consequences:

  • Nearly all roadways, from interstates to local networks, became toll roads. Further, toll road wireless billing systems, run by private companies, were expanded to charge for infractions — from speeding to improper turns — of the National Roadway Conduct statutes.

  • Universal K-12 schools were replaced with a combination of public online education and private in-person services. Education had finally become a commoditized in the form of a buffet of national online programs that provided state of the art educational technique tailored to individual needs (mass customization) at a low annual cost — for example, most programs cost less than $5 a day. In-person private education became a luxury item reserved only for those that could pay for the extra services.

  • National security services were privatized in 2020. Those remaining assets that were still intact following the draw down earlier in the decade (many consider the loss of many of these assets due to looting a travesty and blame it on the failure of Congress to privatize sooner) were either sold through public auction or put into use by the private firms that assumed national security duties. In short, the national security system was finally right-sized to meet the needs of the global security environment with the President assuming the permanent role of Chairman of the board for the holding company that ran it. Much of the funding for the newly minted privatized national security system was accomplished through fees for services provided to corporations for protection their assets both globally and domestically.

  • Police and fire services are still in the process of market consolidation. Early efforts at privatization created a plethora of new firms formed by former police departments and other first responders. By 2023, three major providers have finally reached a scale sufficient to offer national coverage and are quickly gaining market share due to their ability to offer quick response to member needs regardless of location and a very comprehensive set of services (from SWAT to hostage negotiation to HAZMAT clean-up). However, much of the country is still reliant on local providers and franchises of varying quality although this is difficult to determine with accuracy due to widespread corporate purchases of police and fire services for their employees.

  • The courts system has been reformed through the use of computerized automation supplied by several major competitive systems. Expert systems can now yield verdicts in seconds pending the input of evidence. This allows rapid resolution of conflict at the both criminal and civil levels. For most that can afford it, legal consul now includes a certified legal systems analyst in addition to a lawyer, for any major court case. Those that can’t afford it are offered automated legal help that can record testimony and gather facts for the case for a fraction of the cost of the previous system.

Posted in Business, Policy | No Comments »

The Bear Went over the Mountain

March 15th, 2010

In his introduction to The Bear Went over the Mountain, David M. Glantz shares some of the stark realities of the Soviet experience in Afghanistan:

The inability of the Soviet military to win the war decisively condemned it to suffer a slow bloodletting, in a process that exposed the very weaknesses of the military as well as the Soviet political structure and society itself. The employment of a draft army with full periodic rotation of troops back to the Soviet Union permitted the travails and frustrations of war and the self doubts of the common soldier to be shared by the Soviet population as a whole. The problems so apparent in the wartime army soon became a microcosm for the latent problems afflicting Soviet society in general. The messages of doubt were military, political, ethnic, and social. In the end they were corrosive and destructive.

As evidence, one needs only review the recently released casualty figures to underscore the pervasiveness of the problem. Soviet dead and missing in Afghanistan amounted to almost 15,000 troops, a modest percent of the 642,000 Soviets who served during the ten-year war. And the dead tell no tales at home. Far more telling were the 469,685 casualties, fully 73 percent of the overall force, who ultimately returned home to the Soviet Union. Even more appalling were the numbers of troops who fell victim to disease (415,932), of which 115,308 suffered from infectious hepatitis and 31,080 from typhoid fever. Beyond the sheer magnitude of these numbers is what these figures say about Soviet military hygiene and the conditions surrounding troop life. These numbers are unheard of in modern armies and modern medicine and their social impact among the returnees and the Soviet population, in general, had to be immense.

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Camp of the Warriors

March 15th, 2010

Steven Pressfield (Gates of Fire) has managed to tag along on a trip to Afghanistan with Marine General James N. Mattis:

Lashkar Gah is our next stop. The name means “camp of the warriors.” Alexander the Great’s warriors. His columns came through here in 330 B.C., skirting the Dasht-e-Margo, the Desert of Death, before setting up the tent city that would become Kandahar and trekking north across the Hindu Kush into the Bactrian plain. I peer down from our vertical-take-off Osprey. You can’t tell me much has changed in 2300 years. Below are mud-walled compounds, irrigated fields divided into squares, dark-eyed men in shalwar kameezes. The tribes even have the same names. Alexander and his generals sat around planning tables just like our ISAF commanders, trying to dope this theater out. The great conqueror employed the same tactics we’re using — he hired his enemies for pay, treated them with respect and sought to make them friends. He invested fortunes, built towns and cities, cut off cross-border sanctuaries (or tried to) and ran operations constituted of assault forces and blocking elements, aiming to trap the foe in between.

I’m talking to a Marine colonel. “Alexander’s mother Olympias wrote him a letter once,” the officer tells me, “getting on his case for taking so long to knock off these primitive, poverty-stricken Afghans. So Alexander captured three tribal chiefs and sent them back to Macedonia, each one carrying an offering of soil from his own tribal homeland; they were supposed to deliver these tokens to Olympias as a gift from her son. But waiting outside the queen’s palace door, the three chiefs got into a fight and killed one another. Alexander’s Mom wrote back: ‘Now I understand, my son.’” I’m not sure what that story means in the current context, but I’m pondering it as we fly back to Kabul at dark.

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The Obesity-Hunger Paradox

March 15th, 2010

This NY Times piece on the so-called obesity-hunger paradox has me lamenting that I have but two eyes to roll:

“Hunger and obesity are often flip sides to the same malnutrition coin,” said Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. “Hunger is certainly almost an exclusive symptom of poverty. And extra obesity is one of the symptoms of poverty.”

The Bronx has the city’s highest rate of obesity, with residents facing an estimated 85 percent higher risk of being obese than people in Manhattan, according to Andrew G. Rundle, an epidemiologist at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.

But the Bronx also faces stubborn hunger problems. According to a survey released in January by the Food Research and Action Center, an antihunger group, nearly 37 percent of residents in the 16th Congressional District, which encompasses the South Bronx, said they lacked money to buy food at some point in the past 12 months. That is more than any other Congressional district in the country and twice the national average, 18.5 percent, in the fourth quarter of 2009.

Such studies present a different way to look at hunger: not starving, but “food insecure,” as the researchers call it (the Department of Agriculture in 2006 stopped using the word “hunger” in its reports).

So, the obese residents of the Bronx are hungry — pardon, food insecure — because they say that sometimes they don’t have money for food? Are they as food insecure as the students at Columbia? How do their beer insecurity numbers compare to their food insecurity numbers?

Clearly, the obese residents of the Bronx are passive victims of a grocery cabal that refuses to sell fresh produce in full-service stores, but instead offers processed foods from corner stores.

Posted in Economics, Fitness | No Comments »

From Men, to Black Cattle, to Sheep

March 14th, 2010

Sometimes economic progress means moving from men, to black cattle, to sheep:

The mountainous region of the north of Scotland contained large tracts of moorland, which were anciently employed chiefly for the rearing of cattle. It was found at a later period that these extensive pastures might be employed with much greater advantage in the feeding of sheep. For this latter occupation the Highlanders were by nature and education as unfit as they were qualified for that of rearers of cattle. The result was, that the sheepfarmers of the south of Scotland made offers of large rents to the Highland chiefs, with which the Highland tenants, or tacksmen, were unable to compete; and the latter, being deprived at once of their lands and their occupation, left the country, with large numbers of those employed under them as herdsmen, and emigrated to North America and other foreign settlements.

Sir Walter Scott says that he can well recollect the indignation with which these proceedings were regarded by the ancient Highlanders. He says he remembers hearing a chief of the old school say, in sorrow and indignation, the words following: “When I was a young man, the point upon which every Highland gentleman rested his importance was the number of men whom his estate could support; the question next rested on the amount of his stock of black cattle; it is now come to respect the number of sheep; and I suppose our posterity will inquire how many rats or mice an estate will produce.”

It has not yet come to rats or mice; but red deer are superseding sheep. The clergyman of one parish said lately that within the last few years he has lost about one hundred and twenty of his small congregation, who have been obliged to leave the country where their forefathers had been settled for centuries, because their landlord, a man of enormous landed possessions, had resolved to turn a glen of some ten miles in extent into a deer forest. And it may be added that, in a late session of Parliament, the motion of a Scotch member for the equitable assessment of deer forests and other shooting grounds was set aside.

Posted in Andrew Bisset, Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Kite Power

March 14th, 2010

Parafoils — industrial-sized kites — from the German company Skysails can reduce ships’ fuel consumption by up to 35 percent — and now a Korean team is suggesting dragging a hydroelectric turbine underneath a catamaran hitched to a 6.5 million-square-foot parafoil flying nearly a mile in the air:

As the parafoil pulls the boat, seawater would be forced through the turbine, which generates electricity. The 800 megawatts of electricity produced would separate seawater into hydrogen and oxygen by electrolysis, and the hydrogen would then be stored on-board the ships.

“The calculation shows that, with a large such ship, a gigawatt order electrical power may be harvested by this system,” wrote Park Chul of the Korea Aerospace Research Institute and Kim Jongchul of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, in the journal Energy in March.

“If such ships are deployed at 20-km (12.4-mile) intervals over two temperate zones, one in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in the Northern Hemisphere and the other everywhere in the Southern Hemisphere, the total power produced will be many times that needed by the world,” they wrote.

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The English Constitution

March 13th, 2010

The unwritten English constitution bears little resemblance to the written American Constitution:

The land of England was held on certain well-defined conditions, which conditions were, in the strictest sense, the purchase-money of that land. That purchase-money may be very accurately described to have been made payable as a perpetual annuity to the State, increasing in value as the land increased in value, just as tithe is payable to the clergy, and copyhold and other rents and profits to the landholders.

But the members of the Long Parliament and of the Convention Parliament of 1660 — in the face of the emphatic protest of Prynne and other sound constitutional lawyers — voted that the holders of the land of England should be totally exonerated from the future payment of this perpetual annuity, which constituted the purchase-money of their estates; and that this annuity, or purchase-money, should for the future be paid, in the shape of an excise, by other people, who held none of the land for which they were thus made to pay.

The land-owning members of Parliament used to be much more like voting shareholders. They voted on whether to fund a war or not, because they were footing the bill.

Posted in Andrew Bisset, Economics, Policy, War | 1 Comment »

The Rise and Fall of Society

March 13th, 2010

Foseti reviews The Rise and Fall of Society by Frank Chodorov, which moves from a short history of economics to this Burnham-esque analysis of the modern state:

The bu­reau­crat likes his job. The emol­uments may or may not be as great as what the mar­ket place would pay for such re­al ser­vices as he may be able to ren­der to So­ci­ety, but the ku­dos which is heaped on those who ex­er­cise or rep­re­sent or have ac­cess to pow­er is of im­por­tance; his ego pay is not to be de­spised. But his job de­pends on law, not on pro­duc­tion, and there­fore his pri­ma­ry con­cern is in law, its en­act­ment, its per­pet­ua­tion, its en­large­ment. The more law the bet­ter; which is an­oth­er way of say­ing that his mind is keen­ly at­tuned to the pos­si­bil­ities of re­form. The pro­lif­er­ation of re­forms means the pro­lif­er­ation of bu­reau­crat­ic jobs, with a cor­re­spond­ing abun­dance in hon­orifics and op­por­tu­ni­ties for the am­bi­tious. Thus, a vest­ed in­ter­est in re­form ap­pears, de­vel­op­ing both a class-?con­scious dis­tinct­ness and the skills nec­es­sary to its per­pet­ua­tion and ad­vance­ment. The bu­reau­cra­cy is an aris­toc­ra­cy of of­fice; it is vi­tal to this aris­toc­ra­cy that of­fices once es­tab­lished be per­pet­uat­ed, even though the oc­ca­sion that brought them in­to be­ing is long past, and that those which can­not be kept alive be re­placed by oth­ers. The vest­ed in­ter­est sees to it that the pow­er of the State does not di­min­ish.

Strict­ly speak­ing, laws are made by monar­chs and leg­is­la­tors. It was Pharaoh who pro­claimed the law, not Joseph. But it was on the ad­vice of Joseph that Pharaoh act­ed. In our “demo­crat­ic” era, when par­lia­ments make laws, it is the bu­reau­crat who phras­es them, who pre­pares the sup­port­ing ar­gu­ments (which leg­is­la­tors mouth), who es­ti­mates (or un­der­es­ti­mates) the costs of op­er­ation, who sets up the ma­chin­ery (jobs) to im­ple­ment the laws. And when a law in op­er­ation does not ef­fect the so­lu­tion of the prob­lem it was sup­posed to solve, but pro­duces prob­lems of its own, it is the bu­reau­cra­cy that comes up with cor­rec­tives. Ide­olog­ical­ly, the bu­reau­cra­cy is al­ways “left­ist” (if by that term is meant the en­large­ment of State pow­er), not so much by per­sua­sion but be­cause of per­son­al in­ter­est and the psy­chol­ogy of the trade. A bu­reau­crat is a so­cial­ist, or com­mu­nist, be­cause his busi­ness re­quires him to think like a so­cial­ist or a com­mu­nist.

Once a law en­ters the statute books it is be­yond the purview of those who made it, the leg­is­la­tors or the king, and be­comes the spe­cial, pri­vate province of those who op­er­ate it. The more nu­mer­ous and pro­lix the laws, the more im­por­tant and the more self-?suf­fi­cient are the op­er­at­ing spe­cial­ists. No part-?time leg­is­la­tor (whose prin­ci­pal con­cern is in get­ting elect­ed) or king (pre­oc­cu­pied with en­joy­ment) can pos­si­bly make his way through the labyrinth of law with­out a guide. Thus the re­al gov­ern­ing body of the coun­try is its prac­tic­ing bu­reau­cra­cy, whose prospects bright­en with each re­form that be­comes law.

The crux of the problem is that political authority is not containable by con­tract:

No con­sti­tu­tion­al con­stric­tion ev­er in­vent­ed has suc­ceed­ed in keep­ing the po­lit­ical per­son with­in his ap­point­ed sphere, that of main­tain­ing the peace with­in So­ci­ety, of ef­fect­ing eq­ui­ty be­tween pro­duc­ers, of as­sur­ing each mem­ber that his rights shall not be in­vad­ed by an­oth­er. Some oth­er in­stru­ment of con­trol is nec­es­sary if So­ci­ety is not to be pe­ri­od­ical­ly swal­lowed up by the State.

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The Enormous Expense of Modern Wars

March 12th, 2010

What are the causes of the enormous expense of modern wars?, Andrew Bisset asks, in 1859 — and he first turns to David Hume for an answer:

Some writers, and particularly David Hume, seem to think that the question is solved by the consideration of the greater facilities and means for borrowing which existed after the Revolution, and did not exist before it.

In his Essay on Civil Liberty, published in 1742, Hume says: “Among the moderns, the Dutch first introduced the practice of borrowing great sums at low interest, and well nigh ruined themselves by it. Absolute princes have also contracted debt; but as an absolute prince may make a bankruptcy when he pleases, his people can never be oppressed by his debts. In popular governments, the people, and chiefly those who have the highest offices, being commonly the public creditors, it is difficult for the State to make use of this remedy; which, however it may be sometimes necessary, is always cruel and barbarous. This, therefore, seems to be an inconvenience which nearly threatens all free governments, especially our own at the present juncture of affairs. And what a strong motive is this to increase our frugality of public money, lest for want of it we be reduced by the multiplicity of taxes, or, what is worse, by our public impotence and inability for defence, to curse our very liberty, and wish ourselves in the same state of servitude with all the nations that surround us.”

Bisset sees the rising costs of war as a direct consequence of the shift away from feudalism:

Under the old English constitution, the legislating classes had a direct personal interest in keeping down the expenses of the government: that is, those who voted for wars and subsidies carried on the wars and paid the subsidies with their own blood and their own money; whereas, under the constitution substituted in the room of it, about the middle of the seventeenth century, those who voted for wars and subsidies carried on the wars and paid the subsidies with other people’s blood and other people’s money.

Those, therefore, who profess to be the advocates of good and economical government, will never attain their object till they obtain the restoration of that part at least of the principle of the old constitution, which gave to those who had the power a strong and direct interest in keeping down the expenses of the government.

A rentcharge proportioned in amount to the incidents or branches of tenure by knight-service in time of peace, and to the main trunk, or a certain number of days’ actual military service, in addition to those incidents, in time of war, would effectually accomplish its object, and save the nation from the ruin in which the system of the last two hundred years, if persisted in, will overwhelm it long before another period of two hundred years has elapsed.

I can only imagine how irresponsibly a government might behave if those in power had no incentive to keep expenses down…

Posted in Andrew Bisset, Economics, Policy, War | No Comments »

Bottled Wind

March 12th, 2010

Modern windmills rise hundreds of feet above the ground, where the wind is stronger, but the future of wind power may be underground:

In the abandoned mines and sandstones of the Midwest, compressed-air storage ventures are trying to convert the intermittent motions of the air into the kind of steady power that could displace coal.

Compressed-air energy storage plants use compressors to store electricity generated when it’s not needed. The air, pumped into large underground formations, is like a spring that’s been squeezed and when it’s needed, it can deliver a large percentage of the energy that it received.

The first and only such plant in the United States went online in 1991, and though the technology didn’t take off, it did prove that it worked. And now, combining cheap wind energy and compressed-air storage could create a potent new force in the electricity markets.


“This is the first nonhydro renewables technology that can replace coal in the dispatch order,” said David Marcus, co-founder of General Compression, a new company that received $16 million in funding from investors including the utility Duke Energy to build a full-scale prototype of their energy storage system, which would be deployed with arrays of wind turbines.

The dispatch order is how grid operators decide which power plants to switch on. They have to balance the amount of generation and consumption or they risk the grid’s stability. The amount of power people use goes up and down, but it stays above a certain level all the time. To meet that need, utilities buy consistent always-on power from the large, cheap coal and nuclear power plants that are the backbone of the electric grid.

The electricity they need to meet the peaks in energy demand is generated by what are known as peaking plants, usually powered by natural gas. When the wind is blowing, it is usually the cheapest peaking power available, so it keeps the natural gas plants shut off. If they want to replace coal plants in the pecking order, though, they’ll have to work all the time.

Using cheap wind energy to displace expensive natural gas energy seems like a good idea, but intermittent wind capacity can’t displace reliable natural gas capacity — without storage:

The nation’s largest energy storage option right now is pumped hydroelectricity. When excess electricity is present in a system, it can be used to pump water up to a reservoir. Then, when that power is needed, the water is sent through a turbine to generate electricity. The U.S. electric system has 2.5 gigawatts of pumped hydro storage capacity, but most of the good, cheap sites are already occupied, and creating new reservoirs is not environmentally benign.

While wind farmers say storage isn’t technically necessary until the amount of wind power on the grid exceeds 20 or 30 percent of the electrical load, private analysts, the Electric Power Research Institute, and the Department of Energy have identified grid-scale storage as a key need for the rapidly diversifying electricity system.

And going forward, compressed-air energy storage looks like the cheapest option available. Independent analysts have come to similar conclusions.

“CAES is the least cost, utility-scale, bulk-storage system available. If other factors such as its low environmental impact and high reliability are considered, CAES has an overwhelming advantage,” one Department of Homeland Security physicist concluded in a 2007 paper in the journal Energy (.pdf).

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On the Hunt for Bottlenecks

March 12th, 2010

Lean manufacturing, Bill Waddell says, is the application of the old scientific management concept to the entire factory — not just the direct labor slice:

While any number of authors and ‘experts’ with little actual factory experience point out that the original Ford plant had a Time Study Department and Shigeo Shingo did not consider himself fully dressed in the morning if he did not have his stop watch, there was a huge difference. They were not timing isolated operations looking for direct labor cost savings. They were on the hunt for bottlenecks, looking for anything restricting flow. The only time that matters in a one piece flow plant is the longest time in the flow. Reducing any other time saves nothing. (I imagine Eli Goldratt used a stopwatch when he made his much publicized breakthrough in the chicken coop business. As Goldratt quite accurately points out: An improvement at the bottleneck is an improvement in the system; while an improvement anywhere else is a mirage.) Just because these fellows were carrying stopwatches does not mean they saw factories remotely like Taylor did.

Lean practitioners go from one end of the process to the other looking at every action and every cost, looking to optimize the total. The traditional approach puts direct labor and machine operations on a pedestal. Every other activity is first and foremost supposed to optimize direct labor performance to the old Taylor standard. Only after that goal is met should management then pursue the second goal of minimizing the support cost. One can almost envision the operatic soloist alone in the spotlight while the other performers and the orchestra are hidden in the shadows all doing whatever they have to in order to make the soloist look good. In the remaining traditionally managed American factories, it is the machine operator, surrounded by inventory and a gang of material handlers, inspectors and foremen all assigned the task of making sure that, come what may, that operator makes or exceeds the rate for the job. Lean looks at that and says, “Nonsense”.

Posted in Business, Theory of Constraints | No Comments »

What if World War 3 has already started and nobody has noticed it?

March 12th, 2010

What if World War 3 has already started and nobody has noticed it?, Richard Fernandez (Wretchard) asks:

If conflict in the 21st century takes takes the form of intelligence operations and targeted assassinations is it really war any more? Maybe it’s illegal to attack a government but if you do it slowly, quietly enough, then no red lines are crossed; no Security Council resolutions are enacted.

The Daily Telegraph quotes former British Labor Environment Minister as saying his party has been infiltrated by a secret cell of Islamists who are slowly but surely taking parts of it over.

“They are acting almost as an entryist organisation, placing people within the political parties, recruiting members to those political parties, trying to get individuals selected and elected so they can exercise political influence and power, whether it’s at local government level or national level,” he said.

But Islamists aren’t the only ones who’ve discovered that it’s possible to conduct war by other means. The Weekly Standard described the extraordinary extent and success of the Administration’s Drone War. Kenneth Anderson says that America is policing the lawless parts of the world from the air with robots.

The Predator drone strategy is a rare example of something that has gone really, really well for the Obama administration. Counterterrorism “on offense” has done better, ironically, under an administration that hoped it could just play counterterrorism on defense — wind down wars, wish away the threat as a bad dream from the Bush years, hope the whole business would fade away so it could focus on health care. Yet for all that, the Obama administration, through Predator strikes, is taking the fight to the enemy.

Anderson bemoans the Administration’s failure to put forward a legal doctrine under which it conducts this extraordinary program of targeted assassinations. But why should it? If the press doesn’t demand it and conservatives are content to watch the perps zapped then perhaps it is better not mentioning it at all.
[...]
America’s enemies may not have much in the way of lasers, satellites and missiles but on thing they have a lot of is a lack of scruples. And ruthlessness may be the one military commodity worth anything any more on our politically correct planet. Maybe the reason Kenneth Anderson will never get his wish is that it is so much more convenient to deny you did it rather than to ask for permission. The basic principle of 21st century warfare is that that like CS Lewis’ devil it’s main aim is to convince everyone that it does not exist. The days of uniformed armies, navies and air forces may be numbered and in their place a world where disputes are settled by assassins, robotic or otherwise, cris-crossing the continents looking for a man with a problem.

Wretchard later cites the example of Chechen-separatist-turned-Russian-loyalist Sulim B. Yamadayev, who was shot and killed in Dubai — by a Man With a Golden Gun:

The killer fired three bullets from a gold-plated gun at the victim’s chest as Sulim Yamadayev climbed from his car in the private car park beneath his luxury residence in Dubai.… The March 28 murder was the latest apparent contract-killing in an extraordinary trail of blood leading from Chechnya that already stretched to Istanbul, Moscow and Vienna. And now the bustling emirate.

Yamadayev was the fifth person to be murdered in recent months seen as an opponent of Ramzan Kadyrov, the Kremlin-appointed president of Chechnya, a mainly Muslim region of Russia’s southern fringe that fought two wars with Moscow.

Western armies and intelligences agencies are held to different standards than those of the rest of the world, Wretchard says:

This means that for the foreseeable future, the use proxies will be increasingly necessary to carry out operations. Caught between the Scylla of preventing attacks on their constituents and the Charybdis of maintaining their carefully manicured images, politicians may simply opt for cut-outs to perform electorally impermissible acts at acceptable PR costs. Political correctness has made decency an operational burden. Israel is a democracy it simply can’t do for reasons of frank military necessity what Chechnya might do on a whim. America’s laws mean that terrorists who recognize no law must given the the benefit of every due process, and more so to remove every suspicion they’re not getting their “rights”. There are some things they can’t do which their opponents can.

Political correctness, which has already driven open debate on subjects like race, education and healthcare underground and substituted coded speech in its place, will increasingly substitute hypocrisy for morality in international affairs without reducing the brutality of the battlefield by one whit. But perhaps its purpose is to craft an asymmetric battlefield, not reduce its savagery. The terrible struggle will continue, each side playing by a different set of behavioral rules. To even things up, a reliance on proxies and combat drones plus the increasing use of euphemism and subterfuge are likely to be used to meet the touchy-feely requirements of the 21st century. The other side, with fewer material resources, will retain the advantage of being able to operate unapologetically. Ian Fleming who created the character of James Bond, described his first mission of his fictional hero as that of discrediting an enemy agent protected by the Press by the Rube Goldberg method of bankrupting him at the Casino Royale. James Bond may have had his Bentley, wholewheat toast, Tiptree “Little Scarlet” strawberry jam and china egg cups, but he could never do anything directly; and it was always his foes who had the advantage of terror, useful in the hard places of the world. And 007 would have lost too, even at the Casino Royale simply because things had to be just so. Strangely enough, one reason why the intellectuals of the West find their enemies so attractive is that they are so brutal. It’s the audacity that bewitches them.

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Bachelor Number One

March 11th, 2010

Rodney Alcala had already had been convicted for the 1968 rape of an 8-year-old girl when he appeared on The Dating Game in 1978 — and won:

Mills, who was bachelor No. 2, said he had an almost immediate aversion to Alcala. “Something about him, I could not be near him,” Mills recalled. “I am kind of bending toward the other guy to get away from him, and I don’t know if I did that consciously. But thinking back on that, I probably did.”

Alcala was able to charm Cheryl Bradshaw from the other side of the “Dating Game” wall.

“Who will it be?” the host asked her at the end of the show. “I’ll take One [bachelor No. 1],” Bradshaw said, and out strolled Alcala.

If Alcala appeared likable to viewers at home, Mills said he was the complete opposite when they sat together in the show’s green room, where the show’s contestants waited before going on air.

“He was quiet, but at the same time he would interrupt and impose when he felt like it,” Mills said. “And he was very obnoxious and creepy — he became very unlikable and rude and imposing as though he was trying to intimidate. I wound up not only not liking this guy … not wanting to be near him … he got creepier and more negative. He was a standout creepy guy in my life.”

Within months of his “Dating Game” appearance, Alcala would become a killer, prosecutors said, abducting and murdering a 12-year-old girl in 1979. Before the decade was over, Alcala would claim four more victims, according to testimony at his trial.
[...]
Though Bradshaw chose Alcala as her date, she refused to go out with him, according to published reports.

You can watch the episode, if you’re so inclined:

Even without knowing that a serial killer is involved, I feel compelled to cringe at The Dating Game. How can you not worry about our civilization, watching a show like that?

In the 1970s, were they really letting convicted child-rapists out of prison in less than ten years?

(Hat tip to Todd, who knows a little too much about serial killers…)

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The Grope that Ended a Dynasty

March 11th, 2010

Before backing the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan against the Soviet invasion, Charlie Wilson supported the right-wing government of Nicaragua, led by President Anastasio “Tachito” Somoza:

The Somoza family ruled Nicaragua from the 1930s until the late 1970s, and Tachito Somoza was effectively leader of the country from 1967. Wilson was a strong supporter of the right-wing Somoza, and felt that his strong anti-Communist regime was being undermined by Jimmy Carter’s wishy-washy human rights-focused foreign policy. In trying to cajoul President Carter into supporting Somoza, he fought in the House appropriations committee, and at one point threatened to wreck President Carter’s Panama Canal Treaty if the U.S. did not resume supporting Somoza.

Wilson’s admiration for Somoza was unaffected by his offer of a large cash bribe to Wilson the first time they met in person (which were unnecessary — Wilson was a true believer). And when Wilson set up a meeting between Somoza and an allegedly former CIA operative, in a small party where the booze-was flowing freely, Somoza was initially delighted at the offer of a 1000-man squad of ex-CIA operatives to fight on Somoza’s behalf. But in a drunken stupor, Somoza made the mistake of fondling Tina Simons, a secretary of Wilson who was also his girlfriend at the time. (It was not Wilson but Somoza’s mistress Dinorah, who was present at the meeting, who went into a rage and ripped Somoza from Tina.) The fiasco embarrassed Somoza, who then lost interest in the squad when he heard about the price tag of US$100 million. Wilson was so embarressed by the situation, and in his awkward attempt to hijack US foreign policy after word of the meeting leaked out, that he abandoned his support for Somoza.

The aftermath? Somoza was ousted and exiled to Paraguay where he was assassinated. Nicaragua fell to a revolution led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front, and President Reagan later authorized the CIA to support the remnants of Somoza’s National Guard, the “contrarrevolucionarios” that became known as the Contras. And Tina Simons ended up testifying against the alleged CIA operative and disappeared into the witness protection program.

Charlie Wilson was embarressed and disgraced by the Somoza fiasco, which left people thinking he was reckless and had terrible judgment. But failure is the mother of success. Wilson learned from this experience: who he should work with in the US government, what was realistic, who he should trust, and the avenues of influence and barriers to success that faced him as he sat in Congress. It was this experience that taught him what to do when going solo on US foreign policy. And that was what led to Charlie Wilson’s War.

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Invisible Causes of Death

March 11th, 2010

As a strong proponent of division of labor, Adam Smith favored standing armies over militias:

Among his arguments in favour of standing armies in modern times, Adam Smith enumerates the greater difficulty of preserving any considerable degree of order and prompt obedience from the noise of firearms, the smoke, and the invisible death to which every man feels himself every moment exposed, as soon as he comes within cannon-shot, and frequently a long time before the battle can be well said to be engaged. “In an ancient battle,” he says,” there was no noise but what arose from the human voice; there was no smoke, there was no invisible cause of wounds or death. Every man, till some mortal weapon actually did approach him, saw clearly that no such weapon was near him.”

It is not unworthy of remark that Hobbes endeavours to account for the courage of the London apprentices in the civil wars, on a principle the reverse of this — namely, the invisible nature of the death. “Among theirs” — that is, the parliament’s soldiers — “there were,” he says, “a great many London apprentices, who, for want of experience in the war, would have been fearful enough of death and wounds approaching visibly in glistening swords; but for want of judgment, scarce thought of such death as comes invisibly in a bullet, and, therefore, were very hardly to be driven out of the field.”

Posted in Andrew Bisset, Economics, War | No Comments »

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