Mostly notes. Pledge drive continues

View 773 Friday, May 10, 2013

The pledge drive continues, and thanks to all those who have opened new subscriptions or renewed their old ones. This site operates on the Public Radio plan, meaning that it is free to all, but it remains open only as long as it gets enough subscribers to keep it open. If you have not subscribed this would be a good time to do it. And if you haven’t renewed in a while, this would be a great time…

The good news is that I pretty well confine my appeals to pledge week, and I don’t do pledge weeks until KUSC, the LA classical music station, does theirs. And I don’t do advertisements. As I said, the Public Radio model…

There is a bit of a lull in news about the Benghazi affair. It is the duty of the Congress to act as the Grand Inquest of the Nation, and we have the death of our ambassador to explain and policies to prevent this sort of thing to develop.

Subject: The Benghazi Incident

Jerry, as you can probably guess, I’m not exactly a fan of our current president. However, in this case, I can only find one fault with what he did: in my opinion, at least, he turned the job over to the wrong person. This isn’t a matter of 20/20 hindsight; if I’d been asked at the time who should be in charge, I’d have said the same thing: he should have given the job to the Secretary of the Navy.

I say this for two reasons. First, the Navy was almost certainly going to be doing the job, so you might as well give them control. Second, it’s a long-standing tradition that the President can commit the Navy (and, of course, the Marines) on his own authority, but using the Army requires Congressional approval. In this case, of course, I can’t know how effective any intervention would have been, but I’m sure that something would have been done, and the Marines would have been as eager to land at Benghazi as they were on the shores of Tripoli.

Joe

That’s pretty close to my view. Of course what came after that, with the cover-ups and the talking points, and the rest is a bunch of political nonsense designed to obscure facts, but the simple truth seems to be that the President was in over his head, understood that, and turned it over to people who had convinced him they were smart enough to handle their jobs. I am disappointed in Panetta: he had the authority. Why didn’t he use it? As to handing it to the Navy, we are very much in agreement.

Bring back the Iwo Jima

Jerry,

LHD 7 is still out there.

http://www.iwo-jima.navy.mil/

She has the 26th MEU embarked now http://www.navy.mil/local/lhd7/

Dan Greif

Actually the present Iwo Jima is a new ship built to replace the old LPH Iwo Jima, which it did well. It is supposed to be in the Mediterranean and had it been anywhere near Syrtis Major could have easily handled the Benghazi situation. It is a great puzzlement that given unrest in the area and the deployment of the US Ambassador from Tripoli over to Benghazi there were no support assets over there. The USS Tripoli, an Iwo Jima class LPH, was my son’s first sea deployment ship back during the Somalia incidents. She and the Iwo Jima have been scrapped.

The new Iwo Jima is Wasp class, and a bit fancier than the LPH Iwo Jima. It is more capable but also more expensive.

My point mostly was that if we are going to act as if we are the great superpower of the world, the original analysis of Cold War days leasing to the assessment of a requirement for a rapid response force that could inject a battalion of Marines anywhere along the shorelines seems relevant, although certainly needs revision from the time I worked on that problem in the 1950’s. If we are going to meddle in Arab affairs we need a force majeure that can react swiftly to get our agents out fast: few terrorist groups or even local militias care to face a full battalion of helicopter-supported Marines, and sending enough force is usually the best way to avoid actual combat.

Think of this as a ramble. I haven’t thought in detail about these matters for a while because I do not have access to operational details, and it’s details that dictate the actual force requirements. On a strategic level, it’s clear that if we are going in meddle in Arab affairs we need a way to get the meddlers out of there at need.

Changing earth

http://news.yahoo.com/stunning-30-year-timelapse-shows-earth-s-changing-surface-161911528.html

My first thought was, what was the position of the moon each day these were taken.

Was the tide in or out?

A daily overlay might be a better example.

B

Glacial advances and retreats are more a function of rainfall than temperature, and that tends to change in cyclical ways. The rain/drought cycles change across the world. But those are striking pictures, and there’s a good bit to think about.

Regarding your recent columns, there is a successor planned for Hipparchos, Gaia, scheduled to be launched this October by the ESA. It should be capable of doing parallax measurements to some tens of thousands of light years, and easily refine/confirm/refute current "standard candle" definitions.

-Ed

I wonder about the accuracies at that distance, but it should get astronomy back to observations and data, not theoretical  calculations. In particular we can verify the size of the Andromeda Nebula, and thus its absolute brightness, which will help a lot with detgermining distance to far distant nebulae.

Yesterday was spent with Niven, mostly working. And now I have to pay the bills.