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View 752 Friday, December 07, 2012

Pearl Harbor Day

Japan is our ally now, and China is building the Greater Southeast Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere which Japan planned. Japan sought to exclude the Western colonial powers – including the United States – from Asia in a sort of Japanese equivalent of the Monroe Doctrine. “Asia for the Asiatics!” was a common battlecry.

In practice the Sphere operated as a supply source for Japan, although the Japanese insisted that was only because the West wanted war, and the Empire had to be strong. Japan claimed to be the liberator of the Colonies: Manchuria liberated from Chinese occupation, Philippines from the US conquest, Taiwan from China, Hong Kong from Britain, Indo-China from France, Burma from Britain, Indonesia from the Dutch, The Malay States from Britain and Portugal, etc. It included Thailand, which managed to stave off occupation by joining the Sphere and even declaring war on the United States, but the Declaration of War was conveniently lost on its way to the Secretary of State and the United States never considered itself at war with Thailand.

The Pearl Harbor attack is a splendid example of a tactical victory spoiled by a failure of exploitation and pursuit. Had the Japanese carriers refueled their aircraft and sent them back to destroy all the fuel dumps around Pearl and the airfield, and destroyed the ship repair facilities, the war would have taken a different course. Japan still had no chance at victory, and Roosevelt was not open to offers of a negotiated peace. The attack was a strategic blunder of the first magnitude. Yamamoto may or may not have said that “We have awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a sense of terrible purpose,” but it is an apt description of the Pearl Harbor attack and of its effect on the American people. The nation had been divided on the war in Europe, and Roosevelt only won reelection in 1940 on a platform of “Not one American boy is going to die on foreign soil,” but once the nation had been attacked the American Way of War took command, and no Japanese offer of a negotiated peace with return of the Philippines and Japanese payment of reparations was possible.

We move closer to the financial cliff. It is likely that we will go over it. The President wants higher tax rates on “the Rich.” For reasons I do not understand, the Republicans do not seem to be open to negotiation on what is “The Rich.” To most Americans “rich” doesn’t even mean old money (which isn’t going to be affected by any of the proposed tax raises anyway, since their income isn’t “income” open to the income tax) but executives with enormous bonuses, many of them paid for wrecking the company abolishing pension funds. Of course that’s not a very accurate picture of “the rich” but it doesn’t matter: the image is the issue.

Republicans ought to be willing to negotiate over the definition of “the rich”. Start by saying incomes of more than $5 million a year. Raising those taxes isn’t going to have much effect – people in that bracket have many alternatives – and avoiding a Depression is worth a lot. The likely result of going over this cliff would actually cost more for rich and poor alike than raising rates on incomes of millions of dollars.

Of course there are principles involved. There are also realities: government workers will continue to be paid in a Depression. And as the Depression deepens, the negotiating position of “the rich” becomes less tenable. Already the smart people are moving money into safe havens (which are not usually investments that create jobs or move the economy).

I have errands again today. Someone broke the mirror on my car while it was parked outside the house yesterday and while it’s drivable – I had no real problems going to LASFS last night – it’s not safe to leave that so I have to go take care of it. I also have to look for some Christmas presents. More on all this another time, but it does seem to me that there is some room for negotiation on taxing the rich if we can be careful how we define “The Rich.” Of course the really rich aren’t involved in most of this to begin with. When we had 91% income tax rates few paid them. Those high tax rates certainly negatively affect investment strategies and thus have an effect on the economy, but going over this fiscal cliff will have a much larger effect. On Everything. And Everyone.

We lost the election. We have to live with that. So do “the rich.” But we lost the principles last November. It isn’t as if the population didn’t understand what it was voting for – or what would be the consequences of staying home to show Romney what they thought of him. That loss has consequences. We still have a constitutional republic. The losers of elections do not take up arms and rebel, thank God. We are not in a civil war. But we do have to make strategic and tactical decisions. We lost the battle. The Democrats understand the concept of pursuit. We need to understand that retreats are difficult, but they are not fatal. What is fatal is to make a suicidal last stand.

We was sick o’ bein’ punished, an’ we let ’em know it, too;
An a company-commander up ‘an ‘it us with a sword,
An some-one one shouted " ‘Ook it! " an’ it come to sove-ki-poo,
An we chucked our rifles from us—O my Gawd!
There was thirty dead an’ wounded on the ground we wouldn’t keep—
No, there wasn’t more than twenty when the front begun to go –
But, Christ! along the line o’ flight they cut us up like sheep,
An’ that was all we gained by doin’ so!

And so it went in November. Now it’s up to the regulars to save the country. We can make our retreat cost us or cost them.

I ‘eard the knives be’ind me, but I dursn’t face my man,
Nor I don’t know where I went to, ’cause I didn’t ‘alt to see,
Till I ‘eard a beggar squealin’ out for quarter as ‘e ran,
An’ I thought I knew the voice an’—it was me!
We was ‘idin’ under bedsteads more than ‘arf a march away:
We was lyin’ up like rabbits all about the country-side;
An’ the Major cursed ‘is Maker ’cause ‘e’d lived to see that day,
An’ the Colonel broke ‘is sword acrost, an’ cried.

And now it’s time to decide what to do next.

The Nurse who allowed herself to be deceived into giving information about the Duchess to pranksters has committed suicide. Death by embarrassment. She could not survive being made a fool of.

View 752 Wednesday, December 05, 2012

Still somewhat under the weather. Recovering.

I have no idea how the financial cliff or cliff avoidance drama will lay out. The way it’s playing out now, a New Recession – which will become a full Depression – is nearly inevitable. That means more unemployment, expansion of “safety net” expenses, more borrowing, more printing press money.

Earth abides. God reigns, and the government at Washington still lives. It’s not so clear about the rest of the country. One thing I think you can be sure of: prices of necessities are not likely to go down.

As I understand it, soaking the rich might be a fine idea, but they just aren’t rich enough: even total confiscation would not pay off the national debt. Disparity of wealth is always the big problem with democracy. The temptation is always to vote for equality. There is a sense in which the Constitution of 1787 was a conspiracy to suppress democracy in favor of property: it didn’t seek to keep the States from becoming distributist by income or, more likely, death taxes. It simply forbade the Federal government from doing that. Mobility of wealth and capital would take care of the rest. I note that even now, with Federal dominance of so much of the economy, it’s working: wealth flees California for Texas even as I write this.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free. But we all know that, don’t we?

I am frequently asked to do more essays on survival preparations. Of course the preparation depends on what you hope to survive. If it’s a solar flare that turns off the entire electrical grid permanently, the preparation is drastic, starting with a complete change in attitudes. How likely that is can be a matter of considerable debate. We know that in 1859 there was a flare that probably wouldn’t have done that, although it could have caused a lot of damage: all we really know is that it started fires in telegraph offices, and during the flare some telegraph operators sent messages even though their battery power sources were not connected: there was that much current generated in the lines. That is the last known flare of that size after the development of electrical devices and the stringing of long lines of wire.

We have no real data on the frequency of such events over history, but we do know that such solar events cause big auroras. Again we don’t have a lot of data on how far north the aurora australis has been seen throughout history. The 1859 event aurora was seen in the southern skies in the United States. We have better historical records of the aurora borealis being visible in Alexandria, and some have estimated that significant solar events capable of damaging the modern electrical system have taken place about every two hundred years, meaning that we are due for one in this century.

An event that destroys the electrical grid and shuts down the national electrical system – shutting it down for several months would probably cause enough disruption to have the effect of permanently ending it – is not very probable, but it is not impossible, and is about the worst thing short of an asteroid or comet strike.

Preparing for that is not easy, because it is hard to imagine the magnitude of the problem. For those who want more to think about, see Lloyd Tackett’s A Distant Eden. The Kindle edition is available for a dollar, and it’s fairly easy (if disturbing) reading. http://www.amazon.com/A-Distant-Eden-ebook/dp/B007ODDGUC

The book is a hybrid: it’s told as a fiction story, but there are significant elements of non-fiction lectures. It’s easy enough to read – some of the characters are well drawn – and the fictional element allows Tackett to address the problem of psychological preparation and attitude change. You can quarrel with some of the details. I suspect that there will be far more pockets of civilized order in which the National Guard and local government manage to keep control, and far more pockets of localized feudalism (see Lucifer’s Hammer), but A Distant Eden is easily read and a lot shorter than Hammer. Of course if you haven’t read Lucifer’s Hammer it’s also available in a Kindle edition. http://www.amazon.com/Lucifers-Hammer-ebook/dp/B004478DOU/ref=tmm_kin_title_0 Of course Hammer is pure fiction and doesn’t try to be an introduction to survival attitudes and requirements.

Of course the more probable disaster is a collapse of much of the system due to financial failures.

Russell Seitz recommends http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nh4QIvpdg-M and http://live-webcast.com/events/agu/2012/webcast-fl-live.htm which are the 2011 and 2012 AGU conferences on climate. He concludes that (1) “they’ve got the sign right” meaning that the Earth is getting warmer, and (2) they are making policy driven by factors other than scientific conclusions. Since the Earth has been getting warmer since the end of the Little Ice Age, and there are a lot of budgets riding on global warming policy, neither conclusion is startling. If you want to watch the sausage being made – and see what a few thousand freshmen geologists will be learning in the next few years – this is as good a way as any. I’m getting a bit old to spend time listening to this, but Russell points out that the report coming out of all this is about 40,000 pages long, and you really have to be dedicated to read that. The 2012 presentation above summarizes what’s to come – not necessarily what is in store for the Earth climatewise, but what is in store for us in the reports and science papers.

I confess I remain skeptical: we don’t understand climate. Russell points out that we now have fairly good data on evaporation rates over the oceans, which is something new – prior to that we only knew things like fog and cloud cover in a few places where someone bothered to notice and record it – and that is another reason he’s convinced they’ve got the sign right. Perhaps so. I’ve heard so much prattle about global warming – oops climate change – oops increased variability – increased frequency of hurricanes – oops – that I have trouble taking any of it seriously. Do recall that eventually there was a wolf in Aesop’s tale.

I’d feel a lot better about our understanding of climate if some portion – perhaps 10% — of study money were reserved for contrarian research. But then I’ve thought that about a great number of publicly funded research programs.

View 751 Saturday, December 01, 2012

There is a new round of fusillades from the Believers castigating the Deniers in the Man Made Global Warming imbroglio. The voice of reason can be heard in the discussions, but only faintly as the intellectuals who live on Global Warming Study Grants panic over the latest climate data.

So far as I can tell, there has been no rise in annual global temperature since about 1990, and other data are ambiguous. Since we are dealing with an enormous statistical aggregate – imagine if you will how you might go about getting a single number accurate to 1/10 degree of the average temperature in your attic for the past year, or for the next year, then contemplate doing the same for your neighborhood, and so on – we can’t conclude that Earth’s temperature is or is not rising, even if 2012 turns out to be the hottest year since we began measuring; which is to say that this comments more on our measurements than the earth’s temperature.

Figures released by the UN’s World Meteorological Organisation indicate that 2012 is set to be perhaps the ninth hottest globally since records began – but that planetary warming, which effectively stalled around 1998, has yet to resume at the levels seen in the 1980s and early 1990s.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/29/wmo_global_temp_figures_2012_doha_ninth_hottest/

The 2012 figure for the year so far stands at 14.45°C. If that were the figure for the full year, it would be cooler than 1998 (14.51°C) and most of the years since then (full listing from the Met Office here).

Do we really need to comment on just how meaningful differences of a few hundredths of a degree in a measure of this complexity are likely to be? Moreover, it now appears that Roman and Viking times were warmer than the Believers supposed:

A new study measuring temperatures over the past two millennia has concluded that in fact the temperatures seen in the last decade are far from being the hottest in history.

A large team of scientists making a comprehensive study of data from tree rings say that in fact global temperatures have been on a falling trend for the past 2,000 years and they have often been noticeably higher than they are today – despite the absence of any significant amounts of human-released carbon dioxide in the atmosphere back then.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/10/global_warming_undermined_by_study_of_climate_change/

As I have repeatedly said, we don’t really know much about temperatures to a fraction of a degree, but we are fairly safe in concluding that in Viking times it was warmer over the Earth – and certainly in the Northern Hemisphere – than it is now. In those times Greenland was in fact green (or a lot of it was) with dairy farms. There were vines in Vinland AKA Nova Scotia. There were grape harvests in Scotland and in much of England. There were peak harvests and longer growing seasons from France to China. None of this is particularly controversial: the records exist. Of course we don’t have a way to convert those facts to temperatures at a 1/10 degree accuracy, but it is a fair inference that the summers are warmer and last longer in places where grapes grow than in places where viniculture is impossible because it’s too cold too early.

Similarly we can safely conclude that it was colder in Holland, England, New England, and Europe and Asia in general in the 1700 – 1850 period. We have records. We even have some ocean temperatures taken by sailors with old mercury thermometers, probably not accurate to 1 degree much less 1/10 degree, but at least they are numbers. It was cold enough to carry cannon across the Hudson in December 1776 as we all learned in grade school from American history; those cannon saved Washington in Haarlem Heights. We know that there were markets held on the ice in the Thames well into the 19^th Century. And we have all read about Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates and ice skating on brackish canals.

But we knew all that when I was in grade school. Benjamin Franklin theorized that volcanic ash could cause lower temperatures which might explain why glaciers had covered much of Europe at one time, and why the Little Ice Age was happening. In his time no one doubted that the world had been warmer in Viking times. Much warmer. And I was taught in high school that the Ice Age might come back; that we are in an “interglacial” period.

California is about to further bankrupt itself in a vain attempt to halt man made global warming. I say vain attempt, because what California does will have no affect on global warming no matter whether the Believers or the Deniers are right. California just doesn’t produce enough CO2 to have that much effect. If you want to stop CO2, use the Strategic Air Force to bomb China and India into the Stone Age. Be careful to use neutron weapons detonated at optimum burst height. If you’re a real earth saver fanatic, save some of the weapons to use on the United States. Short of returning to the Stone Age (Bronze won’t do, still too much mining and burning of trees), we will need wealth and lots of it to deal with global warming; bankrupting industrial economies is not likely to help.

Whatever is happening with climate, if we don’t like the trends and want to change them, we are going to need a lot of money.

I don’t like rising CO2 levels either. Or perhaps I do. What I don’t like is open ended experiments with no immediate way to reverse them. I’d feel a lot better about the CO2 levels if we were working hard on ways to bring the CO2 level down at need. Temperature is easier to control – as Franklin observed, there are ways to lower the Earth’s temperature by changing the albedo. Believers can begin by going out and painting their roof white. We can also use lighter colored streets – next sunny day go out and put your hand on the black asphalt, then on the lighter colored concrete of the sidewalk. You may be surprised. It’s a lot more than any 0.1 degree temperature difference.

Of course I don’t know that rising CO2 levels do more harm than good. That seems to be a matter of both scientific and ideological debate. What I do know is that one ought to be wary of irreversible changes. Sometimes they can be all good – I think of no compelling argument for abandoning polio vaccination – but I prefer to have a way to go back if we’ve taken a wrong road.

Which is to say that I’d like to see more funding for studies on how to reduce the CO2 without making ph changes in the oceans. Given the amounts we spend on relatively useless computer models of climate, surely we can afford some attention to that? And please don’t tell me that we ought to plant more kudzu.

Tracy Walters calls my attention to this:

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/archive/2012/global-temperatures-2012

It seems to present the best approximations we have; but note the complexity of what is being measured. Now note that we are talking about a few tenths of a degree rise in a century; and we are not back where we were in Viking times.

Harvey Mansfield is always worth paying attention to. I strong recommend his weekend interview in today’s Wall Street Journal http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323751104578149292503121124.html

The title is The Crisis of American Self-Government, and he sees it as crisis indeed. As usual he says little that will strike you as new, but it is connected to other things you also knew, and shows just where we are going “if this goes on.” The picture is darker than many think.

While you are at it, go find “How Washington DC Schools Cheat Their Students Twice by Caleb Rossiter. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324352004578131361948093492.html It will tell you nothing you did not suspect, but be aware that this is in Washington DC. It is hardly hidden. Apparently it’s Good Enough for the Master of the Nation. Presumably everyone in the Capitol and the White House know all this, and either do not care, or do not know what they can do about it. And they control ever increasing parts of the national public school system. This is what Washington DC does. Coming soon to a school hear you?  Be afraid.

I would suppose that Caleb Rossiter is the son of conservative political scientist Clinton Rossiter, who died in 1971, possibly from despair over the future of the republic.

And on the same page of today’s Wall Street Journal is a reprint of a Hoover Institution blog by Charles Hill:

The Coming World Disorder

The mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler prophesied that "We shall not get through this time without difficulty, for all the factors are prepared." Kepler was predicting the Thirty Years’ War of 1618-1648 that would launch the modern international state system in which America and the nations of the world still operate.

What ominous factors caused Kepler to shiver? Disturbances, upheavals and conflicts. Merchants moaned about untrustworthy bankers. Diplomats strutted even as they wavered. The masses sullenly made deals they needed to survive when the gathering storm broke. Varieties of religious fervor caused many to prepare to be slain rather than submit to rule by others.

The 1648 settlement at Westphalia, though setbacks were many and vicious, enabled procedures fostering what eventually would be called "the international community," a term that curled many a lip in the midst of twentieth-century world wars. Those wars were attempts to overthrow the established world order. Those wars failed, but in recent decades have become seemingly interminable, and have required the stewards of world order to confront what George Shultz labels "asymmetrical" warfare in which professional standards have been turned into self-imposed liabilities by enemies who reject civilized international conduct.

No international order has proved immortal. Kepler today might note that the world order shaped by the war he predicted might now fail to survive to celebrate its 375th anniversary. As President Obama ponders his Second Inaugural Address, what Keplerian factors are now "prepared" for war?

The causes of war as discerned ever since Thucydides’ time are three: wars of ideology, of fear, and of gain.

The ideology of Islamism has been on the rise for generations and now aims to expropriate the Arab Spring. The ambitions of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and Sunni fanaticism are transmogrifying into the kind of major religious war that the Treaty of Westphalia sought to forestall.

Thucydides traced the war that ruined ancient Greece to Sparta’s fear that Athens’ growing power was crossing the line where it would be impossible to contain. Israel faces that threat from Iran, as today’s international structures for the maintenance of international security have failed to halt Iran’s drive, propelled by religious ideology, to possess nuclear weapons. Israel, bereft of its traditional sense of American support, is making ready to act against Iran’s menace to its existence. President Obama’s priority must [be to] repair relations with Israel by visiting the Jewish state and convincing its leaders that the U.S. understands Israel’s uniquely dangerous position.

And there now grows a deepening appetite for gain. America, perceived as eager to shed the burdens of world order in order to be "fundamentally transformed" through European-style social commitments, talks of engagement even when Iran’s "diplomacy" is a form of protracted warfare. The enemies of world order translate the American election results into the lexicon of abdication, telling themselves that their time has come: there is a world to be gained.

Only America’s return to world leadership can halt this deterioration. "Sequestration" will relegate the U.S. to a second rate power and must be reversed to enable American strength and diplomacy to be employed in tandem. Without this the prediction of a Kepler for today must be grim.

Of course the disaster he sees is one in which the United States returns to a realistic policy and ceases going about the world seeking dragons to slay. That subject is worth a lot more time and energy than I have at the moment, but I am not at all sure that our recent attempts in Iraq and Afghanistan have had beneficial effects on the world worth the costs they have levied on this republic. The Cold War ate much of our freedom. I thought at the time that it was worth the costs. Whether our experiment in world order after the collapse of the USSR has proven to be worth the costs is another story.

In any event, we will not have the means to do any of that after we go over the financial cliff this January first. Which probably means that the neo-cons will manage to get the Republicans to do whatever it takes.

But it is worth discussing: do we really need an enormous standing army? The case for the Navy is more compelling, but do we really need to spend more on the military than the rest of the world together? Just how much defense do we need, and what are we defending from whom? I ask seriously.

View 751 Wednesday, November 28, 2012 though Friday, November 30, 2012

Wednesday

Another day more or less devoured by locusts. I continue to think about the situation, in hopes of getting things in order.

Continuing to examine basic facts for rational analysis. Among them: the United States still leads the world in manufacturing, and is either first or second in total exports among the nations of the Earth. We also rank very high in agricultural production. What we don’t do is employ as many people doing all this as others do. We can expand all this, but it end unemployment because productivity continues to rise. Why, then, do we not compete with cheap labor. But that depends on what we mean by compete, doesn’t it?

We also import vast quantities of crude oil; but we also export vast quantities of highly refined petroleum products.

Federalist No. 62 – “It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow.”

Friday, November 30, 2012

Thursday I had dinner with Niven and we worked on Anvil, our latest attempt to save the world. Today I am still recovering from something between flu and a cold. I haven’t got much done today.

In part because things don’t make sense. It is difficult to understand what the President is doing. He had the Secretary of the Treasury approach the Speaker with a proposition that he well knew was impossible – $160 Trillion in new taxes. Rush Limbaugh is convinced that the President intends to let the new taxes and sequestrations happen. That will put the economy in even worse shape.

It is clear that whatever happens, it is time for intelligent people to take a number of precautions in case there is a new depression. A new Great Depression. That is difficult to prepare for, particularly since we have an enormous debt and a very great deal of paper money backed by not much. Inflation is possible – actually reoccurrence of stagflation, a shrinking economy, high unemployment, and inflation rates of 10% or more. That too is hard to prepare for.

Entertainment, including story tellers, generally do all right in such conditions: people want escape from their lives, and the prices of books adjust to rising costs of living. Some other occupations are safe enough. Many others are not. And the number of takers – people who have no choice but to rely on government for subsistence – rises. And of course those who have capital try to preserve it, not risk it on new enterprises that increase employment. This is all truism, but the truisms must be remembered. If the United States does in fact go over the fiscal cliff that looms larger every day, the results will be far reaching and last longer than you expect, even if it is corrected quickly thereafter. And of course Obamacare will happen whether we have a fiscal cliff or not.

It’s a lot to think about.

I have done enough research on polonium to be confidant that the Swiss laboratories have a good chance of finding evidence if Arafat was in fact poisoned. If he did, it is not automatic that he was killed by foreign assassins: there were plenty of domestic rivals and others within his own entourage who had motive to kill him. But I don’t know, and this is pure speculation not any attempt to follow breaking news. I’m depressed enough about the way the President is treating the financial cliff ahead without worrying about the consequences of complications arising from Arafat’s death.