View 698 Monday, October 24, 2011

Los Angeles braces for an imperial visit. The bards are preparing the panegyric. The police are turning out to barricade many citizens in their homes, lest they inconvenience the President or his 30 vehicle cavalcade of minions. The President will meet more or less exclusively with the 1% — actually, given that it’s about $20,000 to attend his fund-raiser in Hancock Park, it’s more like the .01% — before disrupting traffic at rush hours to go to Burbank where he will appear on a TV show directed at the 99%. He will probably make some kind of symbolic gesture of support to the OWS 99% denouncing the 1%, but not until his treasurer has made certain that the checks clear the bank.

The Presidential Schedule is not published, but so far as I know there are no scheduled events for the local press. This is a fund raising trip to appeal to Hollywood

I was involved in fund raisers for Goldwater and later for Ronald Reagan, and I was not fond of some of Nixon’s fund-raising events in California, but I don’t recall that any of them were as disruptive as this. President Obama’s cavalcade in Los Angeles may be a bit smaller than his Virginia-Carolina motorcade, so it probably won’t be as big as Colonel Qaddafi’s last parade, but it will be big enough.

I doubt the panegyric will be impressive. Few of those for Roman emperors were even when prepared by the best poets of an age that educated its poets.

The Israelis have traded 1,000 well treated prisoners for one mistreated sergeant.

I once told then Israeli President Weizman that I didn’t know how to govern his country. Of course that was preparatory to my suggestions on what I thought they were doing wrong. I still don’t know how to govern Israel, nor do I have the stake in the outcome that the Israeli government does, but that doesn’t stop me from suggesting a different course of action.

Were it up to me to negotiate for the return of a soldier kidnapped by Hamas, I would simply ask how many Hamas officials they wanted in exchange for my sergeant. “I need to know the number, because I have Mossad standing by to make up the list of Hamas officials we will have the IDF take as prisoners. The sooner I have the number the quicker Mossad and our special forces can do their work. We can then have the exchange. Please tell me the number.”

It’s lunch time. I do wonder what President Obama will say to the OWS kids when he is done with his Hancock Park fund raiser.

I have some sympathy for those who have a lifelong debt in exchange for some years of their lives acquiring an education that is in essence worthless. They learned no history, no economics, and little else of any real value, and they have little prospect of a job until the economy revives. They saw a $Trillion spent on stimulus and bailouts with not much result other than enormous bonuses paid to people whose contribution to the world is to move money around in circles. Not much of it seems to get down to the levels where they live.

Their view of the world is somewhat distorted but their education didn’t show them how to see it all more clearly. More on this after lunch, but it is a bit disturbing.

Appearing on the Alex Jones Show today, investigative journalist Wayne Madsen said his sources in Libya provided information revealing Moammar Gaddafi was set-up in an assassination plot.

Early on October 19, Twitter messages from Gaddafi’s hometown of Sirte reported the presence of white flags across the devastated town. Flags were reported at multiple locations in the town, leaving some to believe the rebels were surrendering, The use of white flags to signal surrender is an ancient tradition going back to the Eastern Han dynasty in China and the Roman Empire. Violating the widely accept convention is considered an act of extreme treachery.

Under both the Geneva and Hague protocols of international humanitarian law, it is forbidden to kill or injure persons hors de combat (outside of combat) and doing so constitutes a major war crime.

Madsen’s sources said Gaddafi was told to surrender to the al-Qaeda rebels besieging Sirte before morning prayers at 5 am, but that it was decided to surrender after the sun was well up in the sky so the white flags would be clearly visible.

It also appears likely the arrival of Secretary of State Clinton in Libya may have played into the plot and convinced Gaddafi to surrender.

According to official accounts, however, Gaddafi was attempting to flee Sirte and avoid surrender.

http://www.infowars.com/madsen-gaddafi-flying-white-flag-when-killed/

I have no direct knowledge of this matter, but it does seem a bit odd that the NATO air power including a US killer drone were waiting for the cavalcade out of Sirte. It’s unlikely that they stumbled on it, or that they were maintaining air patrols there. This appears to be a reasonably well planned kill operation. As to whether it conforms to the directive of protecting the civil population of Libya I have no idea.  One wonders how the Presidents of Syria and Yemen understand the messages here.

Khaddafi’s body has been subjected to practices not permitted under the Quran, so it is clear that Sharia law does not yet govern Libya.

The execution of  Qadafi was no more than he deserved, and the desecration of his body echoes that of the founder of united Libya, Benito Mussolini.

The question now is what happens now, and who is looking out for the US interests there. Iraq will probably break up into its component provinces; almost certainly the Kurds will refuse to accept the sovereignty of Baghdad and the Shia. It is not likely that Baghdad has the means for the conquest of the Kurdish province, which may well proclaim its independence and apply for membership in the United Nations. Libya was united under the Italian rule under Mussolini. Just how strong the union between Cyrenaica and Tripolitania has been forged is not clear. There are plenty of reasons for conflict. The stakes are high, and the US has considerable interest in the matter, but it is not clear that the US has any strong influence over the outcome.

View 697 Sunday, October 23, 2011

It has been an exciting week.

I keep hearing reports that the US was directly involved in the death of Qaddafi. Most reports are one of our drones was involved. There are rumors of US manned aircraft. Meanwhile his body is on display in the public market. One can only imagine what would have happened had the US Seals put bin Laden’s body on display, but that’s another matter.

Qaddafi was likely executed by one or another militia faction, or even by a militiaman, possibly for his possessions. He was shot by rebels, which may have been merciful compared to what they might have done with him. It’s hard to say that beating him to a pulp then shooting him out of hand wasn’t justice. Qaddafi wasn’t quite the monster that Uday Hussein was, but he’d done enough to earn his fate, and indeed the US Air Force tried to kill him with TFX fighter-bombers in the 1986 Operation El Dorado Canyon. They didn’t get him, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. It was an old fashioned harbor bombardment from the old days of Great Powers diplomacy. Reagan acted in retaliation for Libyan terrorist activities after consultation with the Congressional leadership of both parties. Had Gaddafi been killed in the raid the history of North Africa would have been considerably different.

In any event, NATO has brought the tyrant down, which must have been the mission. The official authorization for air NATO air strikes (including US acts of war) in Libya was a UN resolution mandating the protection of civilians from a Khaddafi massacre, but it’s very difficult – for me impossible – to connect an air strike against a convoy fleeing a city just before it falls to the rebels with the mission of protecting civilians. Even assuming that most of those in the convoy were military – and surely some were not since it was a chief of state and his entourage – there were likely to be civilian casualties from the air strikes, not to mention possible massacres in the looting that followed the convoy’s defeat.

And that does raise the question of whether the President of the United States has the authority to order such acts on his own authority. The UN cover mandate didn’t authorize regime change or execution of the chief of state of Libya. The President did tell Ghadaffi to get out (but apparently wasn’t willing to let him get out alive). He has given similar orders to the President of Syria. So far as I know he has not yet ordered either the President or the ruling ayatollah of Iran to vacate that land, and I think no such instruction has been given to the President of Yemen, nor has our President given instructions the Saudi Royal Family on who should be the next Crown Prince, or to the Emir of Bahrain to depart – but, alas, I see no reason why the President could not do something of the sort. He has plenty of precedent. Are those who question such Presidential powers automatically terrorists?

The Constitution empowers Congress to declare war. The President has the authority to protect and defend the Constitution, but unlike the King of England he has not the power to make war on whomever he pleases (a right that remains with the Ministers who act for the Crown to this day). In England you must go to Parliament to get the financing to pay for a war, but the King along can declare it. That right was specifically and intentionally taken from the President and given to Congress (along with the power of the purse). Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who passionately believed that the US ought to be involved in the War in Europe that began in September 1939, understood this very well. He could promise Churchill that the US would come to Britain’s aid, but that was restricted to support until December of 1941 when Germany honored the Axis alliance and declared war after the US and Japan were at war. In those days war was considered a serious event.

The problem with going to the rescue of the Libya rebels without any declaration of war is that the US has little say in what happens next. Perhaps we shouldn’t have any say.

On the other hand, we have spent about $1 Billion on our Libyan adventure, and we don’t know what we have put into power in Tripoli. We do know that one faction claiming to speak for the rebels has said that the basis of law in Libya will be Sharia. It is clear that had we not spent the $1 Billion, Libya would either remain unified under Khaddafi or be partitioned, probably at Marble Arch. Whether that would be a better outcome than unified under Sharia law is not clear to me. It is also not at all clear that the White House thought this through before committing us to borrow a billion dollars from the Chinese in order to intervene in the Libyan civil war. Was this outcome worth the cost?

It is also not clear that we have thought through the next step – or any succeeding steps – of what’s next in the Middle East. We’ll know more after the results of today’s elections in Tunisia.

President Karzai has announced that after the US has spent $1 Billion a month in Afghanistan, he would take the side of Pakistan if there were a conflict between the US and Pakistan.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/24/world/asia/karzai-says-afghanistan-would-back-pakistan-in-a-conflict-with-us.html

I am not much in favor of imperialism as a policy for the United States, but I do favor competent imperialism over the present policies. If we must have an empire, should we not be competent at it? Of course there is the problem that Afghanistan has little to nothing that we want.

I was opposed to extending our Afghan adventure beyond the punishment of the Taliban for harboring out enemies; left to me we’d have been out as soon as Kabul fell to the anti-Taliban forces, with perhaps a billion dollars in bribe money squirreled away to be spent at the discretion of whomever we left behind as resident. Our policy in Afghanistan should have been simple: don’t harbor our enemies, don’t let your country be used as a base for attacks on the US, and apply to the Ambassador if you need anything. Been good to know you. A policy, by the way, that would have been as welcome to the Afghans as to the Legions.

Iraq is another story. We’re pulling out. We have spent $Trillions, we have left chaos, we have removed a major threat to the stability of Iran, and I am not sure what we got out of it. And Iraq certainly does have stuff we want. Oil, to begin with. A fair amount of Yellowcake – uranium ore. Lots of other stuff. And we’re running out because the Iraqis insist on applying Iraqi “law and order” to the US forces in Iraq.

I’d be tempted give them a $3 Trillion bill on the way out, and leave an occupation force in one of their major oil fields where we’d be pumping oil and selling it until most of the bill was paid, but that option was apparently never considered. Incidentally, we could defend our occupied oil fields with Sudanese and for that matter Libyan mercenaries, which we pay for out of the oil proceeds.We wouldn’t need a large US force in Iraq; they could be in Kuwait . Pumping lots of Iraqi oil would drop the world price of crude, and be a great jobs program for the United States.

There is no way that we could leave US troops in Iraq subject to the tender mercies of the Iraqi courts. US troops are not going to be subject to Iraqi law. But can you imagine the Japanese making that sort of demand as part of their surrender in 1945?

The result of the Iraqi war? We have removed Iran’s worst enemy. We have installed a Shiite government in Iraq. We have succeeded in changing the Middle East beyond Iran’s fondest and wildest dreams. This is the result Iran has worked toward since we invaded Iraq. They have their goals. Now we go home.

I don’t much like Empire as a policy, but if we are going to play Empire, can’t we find someone who knows how to do it competently?

The Libyan rebels have an official story about Qaddafi’s death. There will also be snuff footage. Maybe we could get the TV rights? They ought to be worth something. Not $1 Billion, but every little bit helps.

View 697 Friday, October 21, 2011

They are now displaying Khadafi laid out on a child’s mattress stuffed into a freezer in a mall. Sic semper tyrannis, and it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy, but it does raise some problems of International Law.

The UN mandate to NATO and the US strike forces was to protect the civilian population of Libya from Kadaffi and his sons and his mercenaries and his tribal supporters and the Libyan fascisti who found his rule congenial. I don’t understand how shooting up his 40 vehicle convoy fleeing his home town was any larger threat to the civilian population of Libya than the 42 vehicle cavalcade in which President Obama is riding. Surely Qadafi wasn’t driving through shooting everyone he saw. Surely he was no threat to the civilians?

Now of course I do not mourn Khaddaffi and his sons. But I do mourn blows to the Constitution of the United States, which clearly gives the Congress the power to declare war. We understand that the war powers are and must be ambiguous – particularly so in the thermonuclear ear. During the Cold War the President had the power to order the release of thousands of nuclear weapons in retaliation for an incoming strike to the United States. One of the problems I worked on was how to structure the chain of command – now just organizationally but physically – so that the counterstrike could happen without putting the power to begin Armageddon into the hands of a bored Captains and Lieutenants sitting in concrete bunkers in bases out near the end of nowhere; and how to train those Captains and Lieutenants to make it credible that they would, at need, launch those birds at need.

All those war and peace decisions in which a mistake could wipe out a significant portion of humanity  — Herman Kahn asked, “Will the survivors envy the dead?” – all those decisions might have to be made in minutes. There wouldn’t be time for a Congressional debate or even to summon Congress into session. I do not believe that is true of Khadaffi, It seems to me that if we wanted to wage war on Khadaffi – and I certainly argue that shooting up his convoy, killing his sons and bodyguards, is close enough to war as to make no never mind – if we are to wage war on Qadhaffi then let the President go the Congress and explicitly say so. That is what the Constitution demands.

I do not mourn the tyrant, and he go not more than he deserved, and less than he meted out to others. His sons were not such rapacious monsters as the Sons of Saddam Hussein are reliably said to have been, and I know those who argue that had power passed from the Colonel to one of his sons the result would not only have been good for Libya, but better than the Libyans will now get; but I do not know that my opinion is worth much. I do know that the tyrant of Syria must be frantically casting about trying to buy at least one nuke from North Korea.  If he isn’t, he hasn’t thought out the situation.

And the haggling over who gets the body continues. Perhaps the similarities to the fate of the other founder of Libya willl continue.

And meanwhile there are to be elections in Tripoli, while many pray that the Mamelukes will get their act together and regain control of Egypt. Syria boils. Yemen froths. And the United States, having engaged in the territorial disputes of the Mid East, is broke, dependent on Middle East oil, and refuses to develop the resources that are already close to home and developable with less environmental impact than wars have…

Incompetent Imperialism is a very expensive policy.

A Global Warming Demonstration

I was going to put this in mail, but I ended up writing so much that it became a view if not a report.

Subject: Replicating Al Gore’s Climate 101 video experiment shows that his “high school physics” could never work as advertised | Watts Up With That?

Jerry,

Interesting test of Al Gore’s cookie jar experiment.

(URL given below.)

The bottom line is that Gore’s experiment is a fraud.

Jim Crawford.

Well, to begin with, the bottom line is that if the reported duplication of the experiment is a true report of an actual event, and if the analysis of the reported original experiment is correct, then one might be justified in saying that the original experiment is a fraud; although the word “fraud” implies deliberate misrepresentation.

First, the Climate 101 video. It’s shown on the Wattsupwiththat video (URL below) but perhaps it’s better to start with it from a neutral source: http://vimeo.com/28991442 .

I haven’t been able to find a date for this videocast. There’s a lot in it, pretty well all favorable to the view that Earth is warming due to man’s release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. A major part of it is a presentation of a dramatic experiment. I will describe what is shown:

Two identical jars are shown. In each there is one of the old glass mercury human temperature thermometers. Above each is a large heat lamp, clearly putting out considerably more than the something less than the solar constant of under 1.5 KW/square meter. The two thermometers show identical values of about 96 degrees F. There’s a tube leading into one of the jars, and it’s apparently connected to a CO2 source; the narrator tells us this, and tells us that the jar is now filled with CO2. Within seconds the temperature of that jar begins to rise, headed up to about 100 F before the camera cuts away from the experiment and the narrative continues, telling us that the lamps are like out sun and the jars (each of which contains a small globe of Earth) are like the atmosphere.

The rest of the narrative gives a fairly standard summary of the Global Warming Believer position, including a rather distorted moving line chart of rising CO2, and the statement that increased CO2 brings increased temperature, which makes warm air; warm air contains more moisture; the air above the ocean is now more saturated than it used to be (no references to that given) and this makes for more extreme weather. The videos show hurricanes.

It’s all very scary.

There’s another critique of the two thermometers video, (it’s on the URL that was in the message) but before you go to that I want to analyze the experiment’s relevance to the Global Warming/Climate Change discussion.

My first thought was that it looked pretty clear to me that when the CO2 was injected into the jar, it was a lot more than doubling the CO2 level already in there.

The atmospheric CO2 level is certainly rising, from 315 part per million in 1958 to above 375 parts per million in 2004. It’s clear from the experiment video that what was in the CO2 augmented jar was more like 750,000 parts per million; the experiment isn’t all that valid an analog to the real world. Moreover, the heat lamps shining on the jars were putting out one heck of a lot more than a KW/ square meter.

My first reaction was that this is a clever visual, but it’s not a relevant experiment confirming the validity of the CO2-caused Global Warming hypothesis. (We’ll call that the Anthropogenic Global Warming or AGW hypothesis for the rest of this essay.)

I was also a bit puzzled. I’d already seen the experiment and result, but it wasn’t the result I’d have predicted. What we’re measuring here is the temperature of the glass rod surrounding the mercury in the old-fashioned clinical thermometers used in this video. Those thermometers were exposed to both the air temperature in that globe and also the radiation from the heat lamps. The heat lamps were clearly a lot hotter than the jars. It’s hard to estimate what the direct radiation temperature of the thermometer would be, but I’d think it would be hotter than the atmosphere in the jar. This made me wonder if the experimenter had allowed the thermometers to reach equilibrium temperature before he injected the CO2 into one of the jars.

And clearly injecting just-expanded temperatures into the jar should result in cooling, which wasn’t observed in Gore’s video, but perhaps that was very brief. It all depends on how fast the air temperature in the jar is recorded on the oral thermometers – and of course an oral thermometer won’t show any cooling, since they don’t. You have to shake them down to make them show a lower temperature.

See what’s happening: the heat lamps are heating the jars. The jars then heat the air in the jar. But some of the radiant heat goes through the glass and into the jar and strikes the thermometer bulb, directly heating it; I don’t know, but I’d guess that this is may be a a more significant heat source than either the air or the CO2 in those jars. I’d think the equilibrium temperature in those jars would be higher than the 96 F (about 300 K) that I get from a close look at the video at the moment of introduction of the CO2.

In other words, the results of the experiment surprised me a bit. They weren’t what I expected.

Now I show you a replication of the Gore experiment.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/18/replicating-al-gores-climate-101-video-experiment-shows-that-his-high-school-physics-could-never-work-as-advertised/#more-49446 (This is the URL that was in the original message.)

The result surprised me, although not as much as the Gore experimental results did: the replication did not show any temperature change at all in either jar, although the jar lids got fairly warm. That surprised me, but it wasn’t astonishing; the Gore video results are astonishing.

Explanation? Well, the air to glass temperature conductivity at 300 K isn’t high for either air or CO2, so it’s going to take a while for the heat lamps to heat the jars, the jars to heat the air, and the air (or CO2) in the jar to heat the glass thermometers. You sure won’t be able to do it in a short video, or indeed at all.

Second, there’s no reason for the CO2 jar to come to a different equilibrium temperature than the air jar because neither one of them is letting a significant amount of radiant heat from the IR lamps into the jar. If there had been, the thermometers would actually register higher temperatures than the air temperature in the jar. All the recorded heating is lamp to jar lid to air to thermometer. There isn’t any greenhouse effect. My mistake was in assuming that some of the radiant heat did pass through the jar lid and down to the glass bulb of the thermometer, and that would be enough to be recordable. Apparently there isn’t enough.

Gore’s problem is that not even the AGW theory would predict that this experiment would give the results shown on the video: meaning that the video was staged, it wasn’t an experiment at all, it was a video production. I can’t prove that, but it sure seems the likely result.

A number of web sites are saying that Gore’s video was a fraud. I won’t go so far as to say that, but I am now confident enough that I would be willing to be Al Gore a lot of money that he can’t replicate the experiment to get the results he claims. Since I can’t bet Al Gore, I’ll see if I can find someone closer to hand willing to bet say, $5,000 that the experiment can’t be replicated. . .

Some have stronger opinions. http://www.westernfreepress.com/2011/10/11/gores-climate-101-video-very-likely-faked/

It is that time of the year: KUSC is having its pledge drive. I time mine to coincide with theirs, so be prepared to be bombarded for a week with exhortations. I operate this place on the Public Radio Model – it is free, but if not enough donate, it will go away. So far it is healthy. It needs subscriptions and renewals to keep it that way. SUBSCRIBE NOW! RENEW NOW! Thanks!

This sure would be a good time to renew your subscription. If you  never subscribed, jump aboard! This is a great time to do it.

OATH OF FEALTY is a best selling novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle; it is about an arcology built in Los Angeles after rioters managed to destroy a large part of the city (and themselves). I still like the story a lot.