The Daily Duck

We Stand on the Shoulders of Dumb Luck

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 11:00:00 +0000

Seven bits is sufficient to map all 26 English letters in upper and lower case, the digits 0-9, various punctuation and other symbols, plus 32 control characters.

In contrast, Chinese contains (depending on the counting) 9500 - 22,000 characters. To read Japanese requires several different alphabets totaling over 2000 characters. Arabic, more than 200.

There is no way of knowing why the Greeks moved from logographic / syllabic writing to a true alphabet. The result, though, was a sparse symbol set to represent spoken language.

Without a sparse symbol set, economic printing is impossible. The Chinese invented movable type printing 400 years before Gutenberg, but their teeming multitude of logographs made type sets expensive and difficult to use: how do you collate 9500 characters?

Without economic printing, widespread literacy is pointless.

Without widespread literacy, intellectual progress is glacial.

Without the Latin alphabet, computers would have never happened. Even ignoring literacy and intellectual progress, without a sparse symbol set, the complexity required to map and depict language would have presented a "can't get there from here" problem. (While not pivotally important in comparison with other alphabetic languages, modern English has no diacriticals or, — absent a very few optional spellings — ligatures.)

An small arbitrary change led ultimately to decidedly non-trivial consequences.

There just might be an evolution analog in here somewhere.

Help Wanted

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 04:51:00 +0000

Since juniority does not have its privileges*, Christmas came early to my house. Apparently someone was listening several months ago when I pondered getting a Kindle, then rejected the idea: spendy vs. how hard is it to get myself to the library?

Now that I have one, I need help knowing what to jam in it.

Over to you, with thanks in advance.

What this means is that there's not a snowball's change in Hades I will be around on, or even near, Christmas. Catch when catch can.

Snow Marge

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 19:38:00 +0000

Life During Wartime

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 08:44:00 +0000

(In a case of independent invention—you will have to trust me on this—Gaw and I were writing about roughly the same thing, and using the same vignette approach, at the same time. However, since my lag between conception and production is typically best measured using continental drift, this is coming in a very distant second. And not just in terms of the calendar.)

The last couple weeks have brought an avalanche of books and articles (scroll down a fair bit) about the collapse of first the Warsaw Pact, then the Soviet Union. Twenty-one years ago, the ugly, unshaven head of monolithic, hegemonic communism looked like going on forever, crushing souls every step of the way.

Twenty years ago, gone.

My children are 16 and 15. Despite the interval of a mere couple decades, that world, the one that had revolved around two diametrically opposed organizing principles, and under the ever present specter of nuclear war, is to them terra incognita, no more real, and perhaps more perplexing, than a badly plotted vampire novel. Indeed, for anyone on the sunny side of 45, that whole era scarcely registers.

For me, awareness started early, at age 5, in 1960. I was a preternatural reader. Some years afterwards, my dad told me of a time when we had gone to someone else's house for burger-burn. One of the moms there told my dad "Isn't he cute, he acts just like he is reading the newspaper." To which my dad said "Oh, but he is."

From nearly the outset, then, I didn't have the parental filter between me and the daily news. Even to an otherwise garden variety five year old, there was obviously something implacably awful about Communism.

Which put me one up on those who awarded the Pulitzer prize to Duranty, and a largish heap of liberal arts professors.

Throughout my tenure in grade school, we had air raid drills. The local civil defense alert siren would go off on the first Monday of the month at 10:00 am. We were to stop whatever we were doing, and crouch under our desks.

Having just read about the Cuban missile crisis, and nuclear weapons, I knew two things: it was going to happen and nothing, least of all those desks, was going to help.

Ten years later, I was alone at home when there was a sudden, earth splitting, ear shattering, roar. Knowing the war had started, I ran outside, looking in the direction of downtown LA for the mushroom cloud, knowing full well that death was only moments away.

Nothing. And no sign whatsoever of what had caused all that commotion.

Until the newspaper showed up the next day. For reasons I can't remember, some F-4 pilot did some flathatting, which included going right over my house at treetop level.

As an F-111 pilot, I played a walk-on part in the Cold War. It was a dangerous airplane, more inclined than any I have heard of to rip your head off and ram it down your throat. Handing that thing over to competitive young men in the throes of testosterone poisoning didn't help matters. With regularity that would now be appalling, but then routine, the machines and their crews got splattered across the landscape.

I am not proud to admit this, but their deaths accorded to the rest of us unearned glory.

But then, I suppose that is the fuel on which armies run.

My first tour in England started just after Maggie Thatcher became PM. England was then plagued by strikes and the likes of Tony Benn, Arthur Scargill, and Michael Foote, all determined to nationalize the means of production.

I don't recall that troika apologizing for having less of a clue than a five year old.

A couple times a year, the base went on a week long exercise. The scenario was always the same, and mirrored NATO planning: The USSR invented some pretext, which led to the Warsaw Pact coming through the Fulda Gap, and then the rest of the inner German border, in overwhelming force. In short order, NATO's inferiority in men and materiel proved progressively inadequate to holding off the red horde, and as the exercise reached its end, the only alternative to abject surrender was total war.

Whereupon we would stop flying and do a load-out: two very real nuclear weapons on each airplane, destined for pre-planned targets in the the northwestern USSR.

Some guys joked that they would fly to the Azores instead, and be in charge of the world's only remaining nuclear power.

Me, I figured to roll inverted and take it nose first into the Baltic at 1000 mph.

In 1983, President Reagan was intent on putting nuclear armed Pershing missiles in Europe to counter the USSR's deployment of SS-20 IRBMs. This aroused no small amount of opposition from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, for whom no amount of moral equivalence was too much.

At one point, they decided they were going to ring RAF Upper Heyford with protestors. They chose carefully: one of the Queen's roads went right through the center of the base, which meant the perimeter they needed to surround was much smaller than other American bases.

Our wing commander had other ideas. We were to report on Sunday evening with enough stuff to get us through a week. The CND might be able to close off the base, but they weren't going to stop us flying.

Our flying orders changed, too. Ordinarily, it was something like free play: takeoff, do stuff, and bring it back in a couple hours in a re-usable condition, and without phone calls. Instead, we were to be gone for just long enough to fill the minimum amount of currency squares, the spend rest of the fuel beating up the pattern.

Good Lord there were a lot of planes; more, really, than approach control, tower and some pilots were prepared to handle. I was flying an instrument approach, and had just been handed off to tower when I heard "Gambler 12, base, gear down, touch and go", which meant some guy had just come off the "perch", and was making a steep descending 180 degree turn towards the runway.

In theory, I had the right of way, and he should have come off the perch so as to roll out on final with sufficient distance behind me.

No harm in looking, though. Whereupon I saw the bottom of a 'vark that was going to hit me if I didn't do something about it. In truth, cleaning up, stroking a little afterburner and taking it around would have sufficed. Somehow, though, merely sufficing just wasn't enough. After all, getting more spacing by altering course to the right and using every bit of afterburner Pratt & Whitney put in the engines could be plausibly explained as, umm, a prudent response to a near mid-air.

As to the low altitude high speed pass right over the Queen's highway, well, that just couldn't be helped. And I insist I was saluting the protestors as I went by.

The CND packed it in on Tuesday. Coincidence? I think not.

Behind the Irony Curtain

In the summer of 1988 I visited East Berlin, the first time I had come into direct contact with communism. So, in a very real sense, until then I had been employed to oppose something read about, but not seen: a phantasm.

Going through Checkpoint Charlie really was like passing through the looking glass, getting a day pass to mingle with the prisoners. Everything was gray and shabby, including the people. Some buildings still showed the spray of machine gun fire from WWII. There was a big department store that had thousands of great deals on items not in stock. I went to the Soviet WWII memorial, and saw about the war from their point of view in the theatre there. The screen looked like it had once been a bed sheet, only grayer. Almost all the seats were broken, and the film had been repaired many times, probably with scotch tape. It needed one more time during my viewing, when the projector jammed. Among many things my kids will never have any direct experience with—slide rules and dial phones being two examples—is what a movie looks like when it stops: a frozen frame, then a slow darkening, then a brown circle becoming a white hole as the film melts.

After the movie, I went to Alexander Platz (in more shameless ripping off, scroll down for the picture). The most prominent feature there is the television tower. The ball at the top is reflective.

When the sun is out, its reflection looks just like the Christian cross.

The most overwhelming impression from my visit, even more than the pervasive shabbiness, was the sinking feeling that the Cold War would go on for decades.

Fifteen months later, it was essentially game over.

What should have been, in retrospect, extremely obvious was that if the Germans couldn't make communism work, no one could.

In mid-1989, before the wall fell, there was a clear sign the gig was up. Shortly after takeoff from an airbase in Poland, a Soviet MiG-23 suffered a compressor stall. Being a single engine fighter, the pilot punched out.

Whereupon the engine recovered, and the now pilotless airplane, apparently freedom loving, headed west. NATO's air defense radars spotted the plane while it was still over East Germany, and scrambled a pair of F-15s to intercept while trying to find out through the Berlin Joint Air Control Center (where Russians and Americans worked in the same room) what the heck was going on.

The Soviets had no clue; they thought the thing had crashed into the Baltic.

The Eagles followed the Flogger until it reached France. Ultimately, it ran out of gas and plunged into a French farm house, killing an 18 year old Belgian.

Coincidentally, the following week we got an in-depth intelligence briefing about the Warsaw Pact air defense system that had been months in the making.

The briefing's conclusion? Their air defenses were rated "excellent".

Where I become an international man of mystery.

Our intel briefings were duly warning us about two new and very dangerous Soviet surface-to-air missile systems, the SA-10 and the SA-12. The briefings included artist conceptions, labeled Top Secret, of the missiles and their launchers, which were roughly as detailed as a five year old might manage with crayons.

Which also happened to be around when I visited Prague. It was a warm late spring day, and all the strolling got me thirsty. I stepped into a 7-11sky for a Coke, and noticed on the magazine rack a military enthusiast magazine. On the cover was an up close color picture of an SA-12 on its launcher; inside were photos of the SA-10. I snapped it up for 275 persuaders (about 38 US cents), and proudly gave it to the intel folks when I got home.

The intel briefing the following week still had the top secret crayola drawings.

Then in August 1991 I visited Moscow and Leningrad. The most awful places I have ever been. I had read Hedrick Smith's book The Russians. Words failed him; they will fail me even more thoroughly.

In Moscow, the hotel for foreigners was the Космос, cryllic for Cosmos. Pronouncing Космос the way it looks like it is spelled gets closer to reality. The lobby, the size of a football field, had dustballs the size of rich ladies' poodles, and more prostitutes per square foot than anyplace else on Earth, including even Congress during the State of the Union address. I changed $20 US for rubles; thank goodness I didn't swap more, as those rubles were no more spendable than broken shoelaces. I noticed all the cars, crappy as they were, had no windshield wipers: to avoid theft, because there were none to be had, they were kept in the gloveboxes unless it was actually raining.

The hotel food was execrable. I soon found that having hard currency was a passport through the looking glass. On one side the Soviet Union: dingy, decrepit, aggressively ugly. On the other, the West, in the form of an Irish Pub, or Pizza Hut. The largest McDonalds in the world at the time was in Moscow: the line to get in the place was 300 yards long.

I wasn't prepared for how beautiful young Russian women are, and appalled by how quickly the workers' paradise ground them down. The human body is not built for standing in endless lines. I saw women in their thirties with varicose veins and open sores on their lower legs.

The coup was the day after I left. Even now I wonder if it was something I said.

Somewhere in my pile of photos awaiting the scanner is one of the last photographs of Dzerzhinsky's statue in front of the Lubyanka.

Shortly after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, a particularly good editorialist at the Times of London, whose name I wish I could remember, wrote a long piece, which I wish I could find, listing by name, twenty or so prominent intellectuals who were apologists for, and sympathizers with, the soul crushing awfulness of communism.

I don't think one of them apologized for having less sense than a five year old, either.

The End is Nigh

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 03:37:00 +0000

Last night I was driving home from Anchorage. With thirty-ish minutes en route, I gave NPR a try. Having tuned in just after the top of the hour, I missed the name of the program.

The first segment was given over to a guy who knew the climate was warming, and within 50 years it was going to cook us all, and nuclear power was going to be no help at all, and we are DOOOMED. Unless we change our ways. Apparently, we are too selfish, owning things that we really don't use very much: that means too much consumption, which is why we are DOOOMED. Unless we learn to ditch our individualistic ways, and think in terms of community. I almost get (as in, not by a long shot, but at least not needing to add a half dozen new syllables to "preposterous") how that would work with, say, bikes. But my living room couch? Toothbrush? Oh, and the other problem: waaay too many people.

Then segue to James Lovelock. Nuclear power is good. Waaay too many people. Gaia will fix it: within 50 years, though, the earth will have gotten so hot that the population will drop by 90%, with the remainder living in isolated habitable areas like the Rocky Mountains. And they will be smarter, because of evolution. And it is all a done deal by now; resistance is futile. I wish he could be a little more precise about the end times. I'd feel a right fool if I pay off my 30 year mortgage in 15, only have all turn to toast before the echo of the last payment faded away. Especially since I could have spent all that money, oh, snowmobiles, power boats and fast cars.

One more segue, this time to Margart Atwood flogging her latest novel. It seems she is determined to dominate the dystopia niche. Better yet, the Copenhagen doom-mongering is the perfect tie in.

The garage door closed behind me before the outro, so I till don't know the show's name.

I'm guessing "Sack Cloth and Ashes". A weekly feature supported by generous donations from the Pew Charitable Trust.

The problem of the second derivative

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 23:29:00 +0000

According to the World Meteorological Organization, The year 2009 is likely to rank in the top 10 warmest on record since the beginning of instrumental climate records in 1850, according to data sources compiled by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

Sounds pretty serious. In fact, it might be.

However, parsing this portion of the press release indicates that what it doesn't say is just as telling as what it does. Clearly, since 2009 ranks in the warmest 10 years, warming is continuing.

Maybe, maybe not. Firing up the WaybackMachine^© to the days of yore when I was proficient in Calculus, it is worth thinking about derivatives. When we hear of changes in the Earth's average temperature over time, that is the first derivative: ∆T/∆t, the rate of change in a given quantity at a given point. At the moment, with moment defined as the time span between roughly 1950 and 2000, the value of the first derivative is roughly -- and working from memory here -- 0.2C/decade.

Taking things one step further, the second derivative describes how much the rate of change is changing. Think of a car accelerating from a stop to its top speed. At each tick of the clock, the car has an acceleration rate. However, over time that rate changes: it is very high at the start, and reaches zero at its top speed. The second derivative is negative, strongly at first, before reaching zero at the same instant the car is no longer accelerating.

So what does this have to do with global warming? Global warming can have come to a stop, and still have the warmest years in the record. If average temperatures are no longer increasing, the annual rate of change is zero, and the rate of change of the rate of change is also zero, just like a car that is no longer accelerating.

Taking one step further out on the intellectual limb, this appears to present an insoluble problem for AGW. So long as CO2 concentrations are increasing, there are only three reasons the second derivative can be near zero:

The rate of change is unchanged, but this is excluded because none of the previous ten years are the warmest.

Feedback is much less positive than AGW adherents believe.

The earth is getting less energy from the sun than it did before 2000.

Taken as a whole, which average global temperature does, the rate of change can decrease to zero only if the Earth's energy balance reaches zero.

Near as I can tell, there is no explanation that is not fatal to AGW. So far as I have read, this has gone completely unmentioned.

That must mean I am wrong. But I can't figure out how.

Clueless Hysteria

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 03:28:00 +0000

The Economist is a fully read in member of the Church of Anthropological Climate Alteration (CACA), Hysteria Synod. While I think that position will find no confirmation in the fullness of time, that conclusion is really based on not a heck of a lot more than belief. So, while I find the newspaper's weekly ration of attributing every bad thing other than the heartbreak of psoriasis to climate change tiresome, as a practical matter it isn't possible to demonstrate their belief is any more beliefy than my belief.

Included in this year's annual prognostication issue, The World in 2010, is an article on the plight of the Arctic, On Thin Ice. Here is the nut graf:

For the past three years, the vast cap of shining-white ice covering the Arctic has melted away in summer to an area that would have been unbelievable just a decade ago. At the end of the winter, the frozen seas cover 15.7m square kilometres (6.1m square miles), an area more than one and a half times that of the United States. By September the ice regularly used to melt to 7m square kilometres. But since a great collapse in 2007 the figure has been closer to 4.3m square kilometres. ... As well as this reduction in area, scientists believe that, hidden beneath the surface, the ice is growing ever thinner, setting up the Arctic for another sudden, catastrophic collapse. The big question now is when the ice will disappear totally each summer. There will be an answer in 2010.

According to the author, which matches what I have read elsewhere, estimates for a summer ice free Arctic ocean range from as early as 2013 to no later than 2050.

When that happens, it will be the biggest and fastest change to the Earth’s surface ever made by human influence. The ice, poised between freezing and melting, is an especially sensitive indicator of the planet’s temperature. When it disappears, it will be a disaster for all the Arctic life that depends on ice, from the polar bears that walk on it to the tiny creatures that live within it.

And it will be a disaster for the planet. That great dome of ice reflects sunlight back into space throughout the 24 hours a day of polar summer sunshine. When it turns sea-dark and soaks up the sun, global warming will really take off.

Now we get to play a little game of Spot the Blinkered Philistine Pig Ignorance. Embedded somewhere in these quotes is an incontestable example of rampaging ignorance. What is it?

As it happens, the author, Alun Anderson, has been a research biologist, and edited New Scientist from 1992 to 2005. Apparently, that position did not entail actually knowing basic science.

Just as apparently, the editors of The Economist are equally unencumbered.

Obamagrrr

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:46:00 +0000

Yes, US healthcare costs too much. Yes, too many people in the US have no health care coverage. Yes, there is administrative overhead by the shovel load. Yes, insurance companies can be arbitrary and foolish.

But there might be worse things. I noticed this snippet from The Economist of a couple weeks back, in an article about "guaranteeing" the delivery of public services:

So, for example, existing targets for NHS patients—to have hospital treatment within 18 weeks of referral by their family doctor, and to see a cancer specialist within two—will become legal entitlements.

Four and a half months? This is the goal to which we are striving?

Then, adding nutty to pointless, the Democrats have cooked up a new way to pay for the additional wait: tax cosmetic surgery at 5%. Not only is there a whiff of sexism here, since women are the primary consumers, but there is no rational way to tax buxomizing without also grabbing a slice of the orthodontia pie. Straightening teeth is nearly a right of passage, for which parents already pay dearly. Every time the hope arises that politicians could not possibly be more stupid, politicians promptly dash it.

But, hey, wait, never mind. There is no need to worry about taxing anything! health care premiums will not go up, because, according to Timothy Noah at Slate,

... fully 59 percent [of those purchasing health care through exchanges] won't be paying sticker price. That's because their incomes will be sufficiently low to qualify them for a government subsidy toward the purchase of their health insurance. For this subsidized majority, premiums will be 56 percent to 59 percent lower than they would be if health reform were not passed.

Where the term "government subsidy" absolutely must mean Totally Magical Fairy Dust Money.

There are real issues with health care provision, ranging from moral hazard through tax code distortions to whether the concept of "insurance" is even appropriate.

I don't have to be in favor of the status quo to conclude Obamagrrr stands about as much chance of success as a bunch of monkeys trying to fly by mounting a football.

Philosophistry

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 02:45:00 +0000

|fəˈläˈsäfəstrē|
noun ( pl. -ries):

1. The uncritical acceptance of transparently dubious assumptions in order to arrive at a pre-determined conclusion.

2. The unvarnished word for almost everything issuing forth from a philosopher

The impending arrival of the holiday season, presaged in the US by Thanksgiving, brings forth a hardy perennial: smug veganism.

The target is the benighted, who view animals as, well, animals, so manifestly deficient in the sentient arts that any notions of suffering, other than the truly unnecessary, can be dismissed out of hand.

Leave it to a philosopher to unbenight us. (beday is the word the dictionary is looking for, except for the unfortunate homonym)

The most penetrating and iconoclastic response to this sort of reasoning came from the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer in his story “The Letter Writer,” in which he called the slaughter of animals the “eternal Treblinka.”

The story depicts an encounter between a man and a mouse. The man, Herman Gombiner, contemplates his place in the cosmic scheme of things and concludes that there is an essential connection between his own existence as “a child of God” and the “holy creature” scuffling about on the floor in front of him.

Surely, he reflects, the mouse has some capacity for thought; Gombiner even thinks that the mouse has the capacity to share love and gratitude with him. Not merely a means for the satisfaction of human desires, nor a mere nuisance to be exterminated, this tiny creature possesses the same dignity that any conscious being possesses. In the face of that inherent dignity, Gombiner concludes, the human practice of delivering animals to the table in the form of food is abhorrent and inexcusable.

Well, of course, why didn't the unbedayed think of that?

Perhaps because, in the kind of moral relativism for which intellectuals have become so famous, possessing consciousness does not amount to even the tiniest grasp on time, mortality, loss, dread, sense of self, relatedness, or empathy. Worse, by far, is the unacknowledged, yet essential, binary notion of life. Any "conscious being", the redundancy here is telling, possesses the same dignity as all others, and unconscious beings -- sorry life without beingness -- has no dignity whatsoever.

This is preposterously, offensively, anti-human. That a mouse, fish, cow, each possessing consciousness sufficient for mobility and survival, possesses moral dignity equal to humans, whose awareness is nearly infinite in comparison, is to take for granted an assumption which collapses at the very first question: without humans, does the concept of dignity even exist?

Worse, it is an argument that fails to follow itself to its own conclusion: humans have no more dignity than a mouse.

Perhaps this philosophister needs to read some history to see where that goes.

Marketing Mysteries

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:36:00 +0000

Either there is something seriously wrong with this picture ...

... or women are even more inscrutable than they already were.

Who let this happen?

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 06:34:00 +0000

The region's liveliest system: Amid the bickering and chicanery, people are engaging in democracy.

Sometimes it seems as if Iraqi politicians cannot agree on anything. Parliament has taken months debating a bill to pave the way to elections on January 16th, though at least 296 parties have declared their intention to compete at the polls. Yet outside the chamber many members say they want the same things. The era of sectarian division, they all insist, is over. Shias and Sunnis embrace at press conferences as they present electoral alliances. In the name of reconciliation, politicians disavow the militias that once killed on their behalf. Banners proclaim the goal of “national unity”. Is there any sign that such fine dreams might ever come true?

For all the backbiting, progress is plain. After months of negotiations, six main electoral blocks have emerged to meet a looming deadline for registering alliances. The three that look most genuinely post-sectarian may well be the strongest. The rest sport fig-leaves of diversity but are tainted with past sectarian violence.

Neocons took a beating over Iraq, and the Bush administration's post-invasion competence and leadership were notable primarily for their absence.

However, does anyone, even Andrew Sullivan, wish we could take a mulligan and have Saddam still in power?

Enhanced Condemnation

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:47:00 +0000

No small amount of writing, and plenty of writers, have made the bold claim that torture is always, irrevocably, wrong, and that those who sanction it are, by definition, moral monsters. Oddly, they take this bold stand without coming to terms with their subject, giving a nod to context, or recognizing that the sin of commission must be assessed against the sin of omission.

What they arrive at is a position with precisely the same supposed lofty superiority of pacifism, while completely failing to understand how such blanket condemnations, just like pacifism, are completely amoral.

Brian Appleyard serves as the archetype, although Dahlia Lithwick, GAW (here, here,here), Brit and Andrew Sullivan make the same mistake of arriving at a firm conclusion in the absence of premises.

Because Appleyard's position is archetypal, I will use his name as shorthand for this position:

But the ultimate question is, of course: is torture absolutely wrong beyond all considerations of efficacy? The answer in western liberal democracies has to be yes. That answer does not require a metaphysical justification. It is just the way we are and how we define ourselves. … Torture is and will always be inevitable, it is a default human response. As John Gray has pointed out, that it should, once again have become quasi-respectable, is as clear as sign as any that ethical and moral progress is a myth. It is also as clear a sign as any that moments of respite from our fallen natures - like the moment provided by the institutions and mores of the liberal west - should be defended at all costs, not least against our own torturers.

This is facile passing of blithe moral judgment without having gone to the work of taking a stand on anything: subject, object, context, cost are all nulls. Torture is …. well, who knows, except that it includes everything that offends Appleyard. Beyond all questions of efficacy; every one of them? Why is torture rearing its ugly head in the West now, despite having been largely a non-issue (in the West) since WWII? Is it plausible defending the institutions and mores of the liberal west will absolutely never require deciding which is the lesser of two evils? (And, to risk running off topic for a sentence, never mind the astonishment that someone old enough to have witnessed the passing of Jim Crow laws and the full emancipation of women could write "… that ethical and moral progress is a myth".)

Getting to that conclusion, though, requires slogging through some basic principles. Since I have no wish to glaze anyone's eyes to any greater extent then my writing talent demands, I am going to risk sacrificing clarity at the alter of brevity, and rely on comments to fill in the gaps.

A note on terminology. Failing to come to terms with the subject, the starting point, guts analysis from the outset. To grasp that nettle, here are my definitions:

Torture: mistreatment of a captive that causes detectable physical injury.

Coercion: all other forms and degrees of captive mistreatment.

At the outset, I concede torture is always wrong. Because torture obtains nothing coercion cannot, torture amounts to gratuitous violence. As I hope to make clear below, gratuitous violence is always wrong, no matter what form it takes. Pulling fingernails is always wrong. Waterboarding might be; depends.

Further, this is not about law enforcement, assessing guilt, assigning prison sentences. The context is war, which Clausewitz memorably defined as the continuation of politics by other means. War consists of acts of war, the collective point of which is to obtain the political goal obtainable only through war, then return politics to its normal means. Acts of war include blockades, sieges and every employment of deadly force. And coercion.

There are many principles of war, one of which is pertinent here: economy of force. Every bomb, bullet, ship, plane, every act of war demands the greatest possible economy. Not only does any violence or destruction beyond that required to obtain the political goal impose unnecessary suffering, wasted force means less is available to conduct other, more effective, acts of war. Moreover, since the goal of any war is resuming politics by normal means, wasting force will often create post-war conditions that run counter to the political goals the war was intended to achieve, while leaving less capability for future conflicts.

Consequently, both self-interest and morality coincide: the most effective way to conduct a War is to obtain its political goals with the fewest possible acts of war involving the least possible violence. Which also means the most effective war is the least morally offensive. Of course, that is a Platonic ideal; but it is the ideal towards which an ethically conducted war must aim.

There is further distinction to make between wasted force and gratuitous violence. Not all wasted force results in gratuitous violence, but all gratuitous violence wastes force. The former is knowable only in hindsight; the latter is obvious from the outset. (Generally) bombing civilian populations, and mistreating or killing prisoners constitute gratuitous violence because they (generally) do not advance the war towards its goal, and (generally) make the politics following the war more difficult.

That is why the laws of war "prohibit" these things: they distinguish gratuitous from necessary violence. But there are no absolutes, and no moral stands that qualify as other than platitudes without considering the alternatives. That means addressing the nature and principles of war. All acts of war are immoral: war is a complete abnegation of morality. Blowing things up and mowing people down are immoral. Always. Torture or coercion of captives is immoral. Always. However, wars excuse these acts when the failure to perform them is the worst of two evils. All acts of war are wrong in principle, but can be right in the ethical conduct of war.

Which, to repeat, is this: the continuation of politics by other means with the least possible use of force.

This puts coercion as an act of war on equal footing with all other acts of war. The ethical pursuit of war requires using coercion to the extent, and only to the extent, that it minimizes the use of force in pursuit of the war's political goals.

Elevating coercion as a completely impermissible act of war might, considering the nature of our enemy, well delay achieving our political goals and make their purchase come at a higher price, both to ourselves and our opponents. None who prefer that elevation devote so much as a keystroke to the fundamental contradiction they face: the reason we are talking about coercion at all is because it works. Its use produces results closer to the platonic ideal of war than its absence; otherwise there is no point to its use, just like any other act of war. To say coercion is ipso facto wrong amounts to a preference for more violence over less. That is the ground that Appleyard needs to defend, but never even stands upon.

The reason coercion is suddenly a point of contention is due to the nature of the enemy. War between nation states involves, to a surprising extent, information that is relatively easy to obtain, but resources that are difficult to attack. In contrast, essential elements of information about Islamists are difficult to obtain, but, provided with sufficient information, easy to attack.

This oppositional asymmetry makes our use of coercion more likely to be a useful act of war. This does not require some farfetched Jack Bauer/24 scenario. Instead, assume a captive one hand, and our possession of some information on the other. The captive does not know what we know. Under these circumstances, it is possible to coerce verifiable information, by starting with what we know, and extending step by step towards what we don't: it is like pulling at a loose thread.

Unfortunately, the various laws of armed conflict are predicated upon nation states, where coercion would almost always be gratuitous. Compounding this problem is the fact that the laws, such as they are, repudiate all manner of things that we accept as necessary en route to arbitrary prohibition. Per Article 1 of the UNCAT (h/t to Gaw):

1. For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

So, apparently, we can put an Islamist in a maximum security prison until death do we part, but we can't threaten the same Islamist with a lifetime in a maximum security prison in order to obtain information about that which caused us to want to put him in prison in the first place.

That is schizophrenic enough. Adding insanity to delusion, though, is the consequential preference for more violence, a longer and more costly war. This is the rock upon which all laws of war founder: no party to a war observes them, nor should they, to their detriment.

Even worse, this ignores knock-on consequences. If coercion is on the table, then every time we capture an Islamist with meaningful information, then other Islamists must act as if we obtained all that information. Disrupting their OODA loop is just as important as tightening ours.

Taking coercion off the table, however, produces the opposite result. Our opponent can continue to function unhindered; our blanket prohibition plays to our enemy's greatest strength.

This is the problem into which we run head on without understanding precisely what it is we are talking about, and why. We are left without any defendable reason to engage in actions which we accept, en route to prohibiting things which are less violent than the alternatives. Coercion as an act of war is no different than any other. Sometimes it is the least bad alternative on offer; other times it is gratuitous violence no one should tolerate. The only meaningful criteria is whether, given what was known at the time, the intent of any act of coercion and the likelihood of its outcome contributed to obtaining the political goals for which the war is being fought in the first place.

The alternative is subjecting those upon whom these decisions are forced to ex post facto judgment -- I hold the Goldstone Report on Operation Cast Lead as an excellent example -- that from the outset would condemn actions the intent of which, by definition, were undertaken as the least costly way to advance the war towards its end.

Just to be clear: the preceding in no way is a justification for any actions undertaken during the Bush administration. Perhaps some, most, or all, of what that administration authorized had no "efficacy", and was patently obvious from the outset as nothing more than pointless, gratuitous torment, and richly deserves punishment. I don't know, nor does anyone reading this.

What I do know is that a sweeping assertion that coercing information is so uniquely awful that it requires blanket prohibition requires steadfast denial of what war is about, and an unknowing preference for blowing things up and mowing people down. Illegal always and everywhere, regardless of efficacy, is not some statement of the non-obvious, it is the applying of moral blinders simply because they are comfortable to wear.

Instead, as an act of war, coercion is to be judged like any other. An ethically pursued war requires condemning gratuitous violence no matter what form it takes; equally, coming to terms with war and the nature of the enemy will inevitably mean, at least on occasion, that not coercing information is far worse than doing so.

How one thing is not like the other

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 08:41:00 +0000

In his most recent diatribe against evolution, OJ applauds Islamic countries for embracing creationism.

What a bizarre notion [that creationism corrodes scientific education]. Americans just won pretty much every Nobel prize and we reject Darwinism.

Any estimates as to how many of those Nobel Prize winners think creationism would be a valuable addition to American science classes?

Speaking of Halloween Jokes

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 04:45:00 +0000

In a costume ripped out of today's headlines, my daughter went as a blind airline pilot.

She has an acerbic sense of humor.

I so do not get this

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 16:03:00 +0000

Experts Puzzle Over How Flight Overshot Airport.

Include me as one of those experts.

To put things in an idiotshell (nutshell does not do it justice): The pilots overflew their destination by 150 miles, which means they went about 250 miles, or 30 minutes beyond their descent point.

They went 400 miles, or about 50 minutes, without talking to anyone. Getting lost on the frequency handoff between sectors happens occasionally, either through a controller directing the crew the next frequency and not noticing the absence of a readback because the crew missed the call, or the controller forgetting to make the hand-off in the first place.

It happens. No big deal. There are several means to overcome this: controllers attempting contact through other aircraft in the area, transmitting on "Guard" (while airborne, radio 2 is set to a common monitoring frequency), or telling the companies operations control to send the new frequency to the crew via datalink.

No big deal unless all efforts are to no avail, over a prolonged period, as here. That raises serious issues about crew situational awareness.

Not to not worry, they get even more serious.

At Northwest/Delta, flights over one hour require recording fuel and arrival time at least once per hour. Clearly, they weren't doing this.

But wait, there's more. The ancient, hand-tooled, traditional round-dial approach to flying required deriving information from a fair amount of abstract data.

Not anymore:

The aircraft with the headless vectors (all speed and no direction) at the controls was an A320, this picture is from an MD11. However, for the point at hand, the distinction is without difference. The crew had to completely ignore, or be droolingly ignorant of, certain very graphic symbology.

To wit: in the center display, the line down the center represents where the airplane is going. It is never not there. Well, okay, sometimes in flight re-programming of the Nav System can lead to the magenta line disappearing. This is always accompanied by "holy cr*p", and immediate action to unscrew the thing. It is never not there, but it will not be there after overflying the destination.

Here's my best, expert guess. The crew took off their headsets on reaching cruise altitude. Absolutely standard procedure. Unfortunately, both pilots forgot to turn on their overhead speakers. This rendered attempts to contact them by radio mute.

However, it also requires them to utterly deaf to the fact that silence on the radios is not normal. (Unless one is transiting the depths of Canada even further into the night, that is.)

And not pay attention to the flight plan.

Or the airplane.

Or the clock.

Or, well, you get the point.

Nearly all aircraft mishaps have a fairly lengthy chain of circumstances for them to occur.

Not this one. All it took was two guys with room temperature IQs and a perfect lack of professionalism.

Nothing new under the sun

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 08:09:00 +0000

Bret has taken on the not-quite-latest religion: AGW.

That reminded me of a recent trip to Exit Glacier, which due to Climate Change has been receding for the last fifty years. And, for what must be entirely unrelated reasons, had been receding just as quickly for at least 150 years prior to that:

Click on the image for better resolution

Each of the squiggly white lines in the image represents a terminal moraine; that is, a mound of glacial debris left at each pause in a glacier's retreat. The oldest* moraine, from 1815, is well out into the valley. In the next 100 years, the glacier retreated roughly half the distance (and likely more than half the volume change) to its present location.

The same is true for nearly all glaciers in Southeast Alaska and neighboring Canada.

So what natural process ended in 1950, to be replaced by AGW?

Glaciers have a terrible, implacable beauty. They are extremely dangerous.

It is also worth noting that there is probably no environment on earth deader than a glacier. There is only one life form of any note: glacier worms that look like short pencil scriggles, and appear to feed on pollen blown onto the glacier.

Consequently, I have a tough time seeing how the warming of the last 200 years has had any negative effects whatsoever.

Never mind apocalypse.

Glaciologists are able to date terminal moraines by well defined arboreal forest succession stages out to about 200 years. Each of the white lines in the photo is dated by how long it takes for the differing forest type to appear.

Trimlines (think bathtub ring, but in this case the high-ice mark below which the glacier sheared everything) on either side of Exit Glacier's valley show that not only has the glacier retreated, it has also lost a great deal of depth.

Islands in the Sky

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:28:00 +0000

Hellooo ... This is Mr. Clue calling.

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 05:13:00 +0000

The newspaper of record has a front page story*, providing even more evidence of man-made global warming:

Pause in rise of global temperatures blurs a cause

Decade-long plateau tied to ocean conditions may hamper climate treaty.

The world leaders who met at the United Nations to discuss climate change on Tuesday are faced with an intricate challenge: building momentum for an international climate treaty at a time when global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years.

Which should, but did not, raise this question: What combination of facts would be sufficient to cause its believers to reconsider AGW?

Of course, there is a reason it is still warming even though it isn't:

Scientists say the pattern of the last decade — after a precipitous rise in average global temperatures in the 1990s — is a result of cyclical variations in ocean conditions and has no bearing on the long-term warming effects of greenhouse gases building up in the atmosphere.

Which should, but did not, raise this question: Which part of the latest IPCC report predicted this?

If I have parsed the above para correctly, the warming in the 1990s was not due to cyclical oceanic changes, but the not warming is. Which also means, if I have my basic physics, conservation of energy division, right, that the cyclic ocean changes that did not make heat appear made heat disappear, because the only other alternative is that it radiated into space. Which would mean, well, ummm ... I know, the pause in rise of global temperatures blurs a cause.

In other news, the tornadoes are not getting more frequent, hurricanes are quiescent, and Arctic sea ice coverage appears heading towards its "long" term average.

In the print edition of today's International Herald Tribune, anyway.

Not all fanatics are religious.

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 16:50:00 +0000

The other SWIPIAW and RAWAD suited up for the season opener.

To Own, or Not To Own

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 07:45:00 +0000

For years The "Economist" has been on something of a jeremiad about tax policies that subsidize home ownership, typically through a mortgage interest deduction. Now, they are taking on the question of whether home ownership makes sense at all.

On the plus side, homeowners accumulate wealth, invest more in their neighborhoods, pay more attention to schools, etc. To the extent that is true,

Home ownership, in short, benefits everyone—not just the homeowner—and the more there is of it, the better. Which is why it is usually encouraged by the government. In America, Ireland and Spain, homeowners can deduct mortgage-interest payments from taxable income.

Yet, against this must be weighed the worldwide financial crash, which was tied directly to "... this supposed miracle of social policy:"

The disaster began with defaults on American subprime mortgages, a financial instrument designed to spread home ownership among the poor. It gathered pace after the failures of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government-sponsored enterprises that provide cheap home loans. As a result, the home-ownership rate in America has fallen for four years, the first time that has happened in a quarter of a century. In 2008, 2.3m families lost their homes or faced foreclosure—double the average before the crisis—reducing the home-ownership rate from 69% in 2004 to 67.5% at the end of 2008. The number of owner-occupied dwellings also slipped in Britain in 2007-08 for the first time since the 1950s.

Hence the scare quotes around "Economist." The sheer dunderheadedness required to equate the social argument for home ownership -- regardless of its actual merits -- with government induced corruption of lending standards would earn an instant scathing on any free-to-read blog. Why the heck does anyone pay for this dreck? (Speaking as one who pays for it ...)

The main arguments for home ownership, though, are not primarily economic, but social. Home ownership, argue those who want to expand it, benefits society because it encourages stable, more law-abiding communities; it makes people more likely to vote in local elections and join clubs; and it benefits future generations because, it turns out, the children of homeowners do better at school and have fewer behavioural problems than children of renters.

...

[And,] More stable neighbourhoods are more law-abiding. According to a study of New York City, the home-ownership rate was second only to income as an explanation for different crime rates.

Further, children of homeowners do better at math and reading, graduate high school far more often, and have far fewer teen pregnancies.

However, correlation is not necessarily causation. Such consequences could flow from the birds-of-a-feather effect. Or not. Unless they do. Given the distribution of human talent, it is hard to argue against the possibility of the successful herding with their own kind, with the knock-on effect of sequestering relative failure.

Too bad The "Economist" left off perhaps the most potent argument for home ownership of all: self sufficiency. Renters need do nothing for themselves; they need take no precautions, nor think of prevention. They can simply, and only, call the rentier.

In contrast, and here I will induce from personal experience to discover the general rule, successful homeowners must take charge of their own conditions. For example, last winter I called on a heating contractor to do an inspection. As a consequence, I learned the fan motor, because of starting current exceeding spec, was giving signs of failure rather sooner than later.

As a renter, I would have relied upon the rentier to figure that out ahead of time, and paid for that figuring, and paid for someone else to do the work, most likely after the thing failed.

As an owner, I bought the motor, and, with my son, replaced it. We, as a family, gained the economic benefit of self sufficiency. He, as a man-child, learned how to approach a novel problem in such a way as to prejudice the future into providing a solution: having never done such a thing myself, success was only possible through careful analysis and proceeding very methodically.

These lessons, far from trivial, are unavailable to renters. The lesson they learn is depending upon someone else to provide.

But what of the subsidies to homeownership? In essence, the mortgage interest deduction represents a transfer of wealth from renters to homeowners, led to the housing asset bubble, and weakened financial services.

Right?

Hogwash. To arrive at that conclusion requires ignoring that rentiers also get to deduct interest, along with a whole host of other things, from income. Removing, as The Economist desires, the interest deduction for owner occupied housing amounts to preferring dependence upon others instead of self-provision. Further, by focussing on ownership, the article completely neglects what renting entails. Owners provide their own property management and, in a great many cases, their own maintenance. For a given amount spent on housing, paying for these things must mean smaller and meaner accommodation.

Of course, purchasing a home amounts to an automatic savings plan. Over, typically, thirty years, a homeowner will have put aside a substantial amount of money. On the flip side, though, people could have put their down payments into equities and rented rather than owned. Over the last 30 years, those equities would have been the better bet. (Also, oddly enough, the article faults equity tied up in houses as being illiquid, while two paras prior faults homeowners for using the equity in their houses. Which is it?)

Right?

Well, perhaps. Owning property as well as shares is called diversification, which, last I heard, is A Good Thing. Taking the longer view, though, owning property is a form of retirement planning. Paying off a mortgage means one's living costs plunge: all that is left is maintenance and property taxes. Until his dying breath, a renter continues to buy property for the rentier, while also paying for maintenance and property taxes.

Ultimately, this article failed. It performed a journalistic non sequitur, blaming home ownership for grotesquely stupid government policy, then used the consequences of doddery as proof that homeownership isn't such a good idea after all. The focus on mortgage interest deductions for homeowners is equally mystifying, giving further credence to the suspicion that The Economist's primary value lies in twee literary stylings, rather than any particular knowledge about economics.

So, To Own, or not to Own?

Homeowners are self-selecting. Absent CRA infections of traditional lending standards, being able to purchase a home requires significant self discipline and planning for the long term. No one should be surprised if communities comprised of such individuals are statistically temperamentally different than those that are not.

A free society should encourage self-sufficiency over dependency. Renting does just the opposite. Instead of rewarding the acquisition of a dozen skills, renting makes them pointless. And instead of providing the freedom to shape and improve one's own environment, renting leaves people at the whim of others.

For those who, through choice or fate, have the personal skills to, in effect, set up a business of their own, home owning makes sense. For society, whether to encourage owner occupied housing depends a great deal on how much that society values freedom.

The Economist ends with this:

As Adam Smith wrote in “The Wealth of Nations” two centuries ago, “a dwelling-house, as such, contributes nothing to the revenue of its inhabitants.”

Apparently they have not read, or do not remember, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Remembering Don Hewitt

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 01:55:00 +0000

Don Hewitt, the creator of "60 Minutes", died last week at the age of 86.

Nowhere in this toadying, boot licking, supine obit that would make my dog look like a curmudgeonly cynic in comparison is there any mention of "60 Minutes'" Audi sudden unintended acceleration item of 1986.

That day, National People's Radio ran a retrospective of Terri Gross "Fresh Air" interviews with Mr. Hewitt. Her questions had all the ferocity and incisiveness of a Beanie Babie too fond of valium. Should you have been sufficiently bereft of luck to tune in, you would have listened in a great deal of vain to have caught even a glancing reference to that hit piece.

The one that nearly bankrupted the company. The same one where the demonstration was rigged. "60 Minutes" was a pioneer in more ways than one. It would be another seven years before Dateline NBC performed its own fauxreporting.

At least Dateline apologized.

It is undoubtedly bad manners to speak ill of the dead, but the hagiography, amounting to no more than self-congratulatory spittle, in the face of his arrogance and unwillingness to let facts get in the way of a good story is really too much to stomach.

Profiles in Pusillanimity

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:23:00 +0000

The Yale Press banned images of Muhammed.

In the book “The Cartoons That Shook the World”.

Yale University consulted two dozen "experts" in making their decision. Apparently, cravenness loves company.

Supply & Demand ...

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 12:58:00 +0000

... not just a good idea, it's the law.

Minimum wage laws are aggravating unemployment.

Young people typically find it hard to get established in the labour market because of their lack of experience, which makes them especially vulnerable in downturns. But even before the recession Britain’s youngsters had been faring worse than their counterparts elsewhere. Between 1998 and 2005, the jobless rate for 16-24-year-olds in Britain was lower than the average for the OECD, a club of mainly rich countries, but since then it has been higher. The unemployment gap between that age group and 25-54-year-olds widened from 2004 to 2007 in Britain while staying broadly the same across the OECD.

Now, why would that be:

The timing of the deterioration points to two possible explanations. A commonly held view is that British youngsters have been displaced by the influx of youthful migrants from eastern Europe since 2004. But this is the “lump-of-labour” fallacy—that a job for a Polish cleaner means one fewer for a native worker. Research by Sara Lemos, an economist at Leicester University, and Jonathan Portes of the Department for Work and Pensions last year found that the wave of migration had not increased youth unemployment.

A more likely explanation, though still disputed, is that the minimum wage was pushed up too much a few years ago. When it was introduced in April 1999, the main rate was set at £3.60 ($5.80) an hour, a fairly modest amount. There was a lower floor of £3 for 18-21-year-olds, because young workers’ chances in the labour market were recognised to be especially sensitive to pay.

Since then, however, both rates have risen by 59% and outstripped average earnings, which have gone up by 45% in the past ten years. The increases were particularly big in the four years to 2006, adding to the suspicion that the minimum wage was implicated in the rising rate of youth unemployment over that period.

Duh.

Not so sedentary Saturday

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 14:18:00 +0000

Recently the other SWIPIAW and I took part in a local bike race, the Fireweed 200. Not seriously, mind you. And it wasn't really as arduous as all that -- we did it as part of a four person* relay team, so an average of 50 miles each isn't really that bit a deal.

The view from the saddle was not particularly horrible (yours truly is in the foreground):

TOSWIPIAW and I cresting Thompson Pass, just before the descent into Valdez:

On the way back, we got an upclose and personal view of the Alaskan pipeline:

* To be exact, three women and me. My idea for the team name was "Three Squeezes and a Wheeze". "Team Big Love" was the winner, though.

Backyard Bruin

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:48:00 +0000

One recent-ish morning I looked up from my Corn Flakes to see an interesting and, thankfully, momentary addition to our backyard (apologies for lousy pictures; it was early and there wasn't quite enough light):

I am used to the zoopoint on our wild cousins: outside boxes looking at the animals on the inside. Interesting feeling having it the other way around.