| Friday, June
2, 2000
Dear Dr. Pournelle,
Fehrenbach and Korea.
I first read Fehrenbach in 1981 when I reported to
the 2ID in Korea as an infantry 2LT. My company commander had made it
required reading for all company officers and senior NCOs. You are
correct. It's the best that's ever been done or ever will be done about
the Korean War. People ought to read it to see how the next war ELSEWHERE
(not in Korea) will probably open up.
Even before Fehrenbach I had had an earlier, home
spun version of it. One of my platoon sergeants in the mid 1970s was a
Korean War vet. "Squirrel" described his experience as a 17 y/o
rifleman in the 24th ID, first in Japan and then in Korea in 1950.
Japan was a joy. Plenty of half day schedules,
plenty of training holidays, every man with his own houseboy and also girl
if desired. Louis Johnson has caught much of the flack for that.
Interesting how MacArthur has escaped all responsibility for the complete
lack of preparedness in his occupation divisions.
Then the 24th ID was tossed into Korea.
The day by day detail was depressing: His rifle
company melted from 160 men to 35 in about a month. The day the company
mess truck was blown up. The disguised infiltrators with weapons hidden in
stick "A Frame" peasant backpacks. The apathy and abulia that
set in among many. Untrained, poorly condtioned, under equipped troops.
Everything leading to a sheer loss of willpower which led to the obvious,
death. That's the wartime equivalent of basic training stress cards.
Israeli Nukes.
I recently did some research into Israeli nukes. The
'story' to date about Israel's nuclear capability is still full of holes.
The questions of warhead design and testing are just ignored. Over three
decades there has been a steady dribble of information about Dimona and
its capacity, Pennsylvania uranium thefts, and other fissionable material
acquistions.
There is zero information about the twin problems of
warhead design and testing. The Israelis aren't known to have conducted
any tests, aside from the possible south Indian ocean event. This gap
seems not to provoke serious thought among those writing on this subject
(that I've seen). Yet the Israelis are credited with at least two
different warheads. One for a gravity bomb and one for the Jericho
missiles.
Supposedly a state of about 2 million circa the late
1950s set out to develop a nuclear capability and has since constructed
50-200 warheads to at least two different designs without ever having
tested them. While it was doing this it was also subsidizing a mass
immigration and sustaining a conventional military force of 20% of the
population.
A program of the size Israel is reputedly conducting
has proven to be a massive effort for states 8 - 400 times the size. Then
to top it off, this miniscule state supposedly has made this massive
investment without the extensive testing program every other nuclear state
has always found necessary. So I don't find the story as it currently
stands persuasive.
When one looks at the available information there
seems to be only two really viable conclusions:
1. Israel is running a huge bluff about having any
nukes at all.
2. Israel acquired fission materials, proven warhead
designs and possibly completed warheads from an external source, probably
the U.S.A.
This would leave Dimona as a partial or full
Potemkin Village designed to camouflage the true source of their nuclear
capability. The same would apply to the Israeli technician photographs
published in the United Kingdom in the 1980s and other leakages over time.
I personally favor Door #2 as the most logical
explaination.
Mark A. Gallmeier
Interesting. Fehrenbach's book explains the
unreadiness of the entire army, ot just the occupation divisions, I think.
It is certainly a book every officer should read about once every five
years.
I have no data regarding the Israeli weapons
programs, but I would be astonished if the US knows a great deal about
weapons designs that remains unknown to Israel, for the obvious reason
that the US has always been a major target of Israeli espionage, and US
counterintelligence has not always been vigorous in countering Israeli
efforts. In 1940 when there was a mortal threat to Britain, British
intelligence had no difficulty obtaining most US military industrial
secrets. When a friendly country with many emotional and family ties to
the US is in danger, it's not surprising that neutrality acts aren't
vigorously enforced. (All of which makes the Liberty incidident even more
galling.)
Hi, Jerry;
There's another interesting opinion piece on the
alleged No Gun Ri massacre in the Washington Times (my brother at
Georgetown calls it "Washingland"):
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/ed-column-20006218038.htm
Turns out that not only was Ed Daily, the primary
source for the claim that the army ordered its troops to open fire on the
civilians (which would be a war crime), never at No Gun Ri, only joining
that unit after the supposed massacre took place, and not only was did he
never receive the Distinguished Service Cross or other decorations or a
battlefield commission, as he claimed, and not only was he never a Korean
POW (as he also claimed), but that two other supposed eyewitnesses were
also demonstrably elsewhere when the supposed incident occurred.
The story, for which AP took home a Pulitzer, is
falling apart.
In addition, of the seven remaining witnesses, five
now dispute that they were accurately quoted or taken out of context by
AP; two still maintain that the incident happened -- but instead of ten
GIs supposedly confessing to being war criminals, there now are two who
claim only to have shot at refugees (but cannot claim they ever heard an
order to do so), five who claim the story was grossly misunderstood by AP,
and three who have been proven liars (including both of those who claimed
actually to have heard /an order from an officer,/ without which there is
no war crime).
AP, however, sticks by its story. What else can they
do? --
Dafydd ab Hugh
Never attribute to stupidity what can satisfactorily
be explained by malice. The truly powerful are rarely stupid.
I don't doubt that some troopers shot some
civilians. I don't even doubt that some officers ordered troops to fire on
civilians getting too close to US troops; there are well documented
incidents, but in the only case I know anything about warning shots were
fired and warnings issued and there was almost no time for a decision. The
systematic murders described in the original AP story were supposedly done
in cold blood on orders from on high, and I never did believe those. But
as you say, what else can AP do at this point.
Jerry,
The Tiresias font seems to share a number of
similarities in look and purpose with Trebuchet MS, which has been
included with Windows and IE for a few years now. It's also a free
download below. I use it for all email communications (where text clarity
is important) and anywhere else it makes sense, since to me it seems to be
the most readable screen font around.
"Trebuchet MS, designed by Vincent
Connare in 1996, is a humanist sans serif designed for easy screen
readability. Trebuchet takes its inspiration from the sans serifs of the
1930s which had large x heights and round features intended to promote
readability on signs."
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fontpack/default.htm?fname=%20&;fsize=
Thanks. I find that Trebuchet is in FrontPage and
I have put your letter in that text. I usually use Arial for that.
Comments from readers welcome.
Jerry,
>So now we know, but it (Bitstream Tiresias) doesn't do us any good
since using it on web page isn't going to help anyone out there. Ah well.
It may not be helping people surfing with a PC.
However ... If the market for set-top boxes does pick up steam lots of
people are going to view sites on low resolution screeens. And if WAP
phones live up to to the hype everybody is going to be surfing on 2-by-4
screens.
So maybe it is not a font to simply shrug off.
Regards, Svenson.
A fine utility to try is ctbios
available at
http://www.ping.be/bios/numbers.shtml
The website in general is a great resource for
motherboards, bios and the like.
Regards,
¯`·¸¸·´¯`·¸¸·´¯`·¸¸·´¯`·¸¸·´
Kerry M. Liles kerryl@allinson-ross.com Allinson-Ross
Corporation
Thanks! It is a great place, and I have
downloaded the ID program. Thanks for telling me about it.
Dr. Pournelle,
Why would you want to change your font? Serif fonts
are much more readable. Since your site is information-oriented (i.e.
mostly text), readability should be a prime concern.
Of course, if you must change, I vote for Arial.
BTW, I was going to send this to you anyway:
http://www.lineone.net/express/00/05/31/news/n2140mars-d.html
Having read your interview with Mr. Niven online
yesterday, I think you'll find this machine preferable to activating
Olympus Mons.
-- John Alexander Web Developer, Faculty Resource
Center The University of Alabama johnalex@bama.ua.edu
Actually, I have never contemplated changing from
Times Roman for the default text (but of course viewers may set whatever
default they like); it's the various quote and emphasis fonts I've thought
about. Mostly, when I ran across the discussion of readability on the
Tiresias page I became curious. Apparently it is not universally agreed
that for on-screen text serif is preferable to sans serif so far as
readability be concerned. My preference is for Times Roman, but apparently
there's some controversy over all that.
Zubrin has counted on making oxygen from Martian
atmosphere as part of his Mars Now program, and I never doubted you could
build such machines, but I suspect it would take a LOT of them to
terraform a planet.
Now that everyone has downloaded QuickTime for the
Dune preview, might I suggest a visit to:
http://www.lordoftherings.net/
And much thanks to Mr. Dobbins, as usual!
Steve Setzer
Fair warning: the movie parts of this can take a
LONG time to download...
For what it's worth, Trebuchet is more
readable than Arial -- cleaner.
For a similar reason I prefer Century
Schoolbook for serif. Although that is not optimal for screens, I like the
"lighter" impression it gives. Georgia
is otherwise recommended as an optimized screen serif.
Overall, however, truetype kerning sucks.
/ Bo
-- "Bo Leuf" <bo@leuf.com> Leuf fc3
Consultancy http://www.leuf.com/
Well, since others are voting....
Please DON'T use Arial for large blocks of text. I
will never forgive Wired magazine for setting most of their body text in a
sans-serif font. I think most people are wired to find serifs easier on
the eyes. Sans-serif is (or should be) for headings and subheads.
Setting mail in Arial does set it apart as clearly
"not yours", but I think judicious use of colour and/or
indenting could do that as well. I find the arial a bit large for taste. A
monospace font might be more traditional, although we seem to be tending
more and more towards a populace that has never read email from a
text-mode client.
-- Kjell
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