Date ►►► November 12, 2005

Hawaii Blogging 2: Manoa Falls

Before the this Hawaii trip began, we were planning on hiking almost everyday. However, one week is too short to explore all of Oahu. Not to mention that I had to show up at work every morning, only to be told there was nothing for me to do that day. Well, finally we had a chance to hike, although it was a short one.

Only four and half miles away from Waikiki Beach, toward the mountain (or hill) where Manoa Road ends, there is a rain forest. It was aptly named: as soon as the road turned upward toward the moutain, rain started to pour, startling us... the Ala Wai canal area we just left a mile back was totally sunny. We wondered if we should actually hike today; but it had been raining off and on like this every day since we got here. If we didn't hike today, we never would.

After driving a couple miles on the winding Manoa Road (Dafydd insisted on calling it "Manure Road"), we got to a dirt parking lot. There was a man sitting under a big unbrella attending the lot. The skinny Japanese parking attendant said the weather has been like this all week and would not likely change. "After all, this is a rain forest," he explained with a smile and a shrug. So we sprayed ouselves with insect repellant, and off we sloshed.

The entire trail is only two miles round trip. From the same trailhead, there is the much longer and more strenuous Aihualama Trail. But that one was closed due to the weather. Since it was a little too late in the day to start a long hike anyway (we spent longer at the U.S.S. Missouri than we expected), we were OK with the shorter.

The vegetation of this forest is like nothing I have ever seen. We felt like we were in Tarzan's forest, and at any moment, he would come swinging by on a vine. According to the guide book, the large trees are kukui, African tulip tree, guava, and mountain apple; Dafydd thought he saw mangrove, too. I cannot tell you which tree was which; but I did recognize palm grass and ferns, and vines hanging like giant Spanish moss from the trees. This really is a jungle. We are so used to a desert mountain hike, this was quite a difference!

The muddy trail follows a babbling stream on the right which makes a soothing sound. We wondered whether there were fish in the stream, but the stream was too muddy to see anything anyway. The temparature was a perfect 80 degrees, but the rain persisted and even got worse. When I saw a large palm that looked like a giant lotus leaf, I suggested we should use that as an unberella, just like the Japanese Anime monster Totoro did in My Neighbor Totoro. After a while, we could not tell if the water dripping into our eyes was sweat or rain.

The moderate slope is not a challenge for serious hikers. But the trail was wet and very slipperly. The reward for this slidey hike is at the end: the Manoa Falls. It's tall and skinny like Yosemite falls, making a perfect splash 150 feet down a sheer cliff to the pool below. We sat down on a bench by the pool and opened our lunch. At that precise moment, the heavens opened with a deluge. Dafydd covered his sandwich with his hand to avoid soggy salami, while I quickly shoveled the entirety of my own into my mouth, almost choking on it.

We wolfed down the food and decided to head back immediately. The trip back was worse than the trip out, even though it was all downhill. Especially because it was all downhill! Muddy tracks that were passable by fast lunging on the way up became a Winter Olympics slalom course heading back down. Our shoes were quickly caked with mud, and we lost what feeble traction we had. We should have worn water skis!

"We should just jump in the river and swim back," I said; "maybe it would dry us off."

The rain was heavy enough that we couldn't really even see the forest for the streams of water in our eyes. We slogged down and down, somehow staying on our feet. And finally, we reached the gravel part of the trail, then the wood planks, then gravel again... and then before we realized it, we were back at the parking lot. The Japanese man had turned into a Hawaiian girl, but she huddled under her drooping umbrella and didn't say anything to us. It was just as well. I don't think I could take another "alooooooooooooo-HA!"

Just as we got to the car, Dafydd said "oh good -- it stopped raining!" I looked up; he was right. I hadn't even noticed, because the water was still streaming from my hair across my eyes.

Everything we were wearing was soaked. We looked like big stacks of rumpled wetwash. We washed our hands with the bottled water we hadn't drunk and slid into the car, dripping all the way back through the sunshine to Waikiki. It was the best day of the vacation so far!

Tomorrow, we're going kayaking in Kaneohe Bay and the Kahana River. I bet it'll be drier.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, November 12, 2005, at the time of 2:54 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Wanted: High-Efficiency Gasoline Engine X-Prize

In chapter 2 of the Wishing Ring, I discussed high-temperature ceramic engines. But of course, there are likely many different ways to rework the basic concept of the infernal combustion engine to make it highly efficient -- which I'm arbitrarily defining to mean operating at 75% efficiency or greater, as opposed to the 12%-15% that we get out of such engines today.

For back-of-the-fingernail estimate purposes, let's say a car gets on average 30 miles per gallon today. If that constitutes 15% efficiency, then 75% efficiency (five times that) would be 150 mpg. Here is my suggestion for solving the problem of overreliance on Middle Eastern oil imports:

Let the federal government run an "X-prize" contest for the first person to demonstrate a production model of an automobile that gets 150 miles per gallon of ordinary gasoline... where the prize is a federal transportation contract (or series of contracts) worth $1,000,000,000. That's one billion dollars -- but only to be paid when an actual production model is demonstrated, and paid not as a reward but as a contract for new fleets of vehicles for all the federal agencies, from the Department of Defense (military and civilian) to State to Interior to Transportation.

Of course, such an engine could also be adapted to electricity production and to industry; it would transform and revolutionize our economy... and once again move America forward by a quantum leap of technology.

Note that the feds pay absolutely nothing for development: zip, nada, zilch. Not one dime is forked over until the new car is available for production. But the value of the contract is so large that every major automotive developer, plus tons of "backyard inventors," will eagerly leap into the race.

High-temp ceramics are a good point to start; but there's nothing wrong with including ideas like flywheels and such to conserve momentum at the margins, or other ways to increase efficiency, and thus serendipitously reduce pollution by hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, and so forth (those all represent unburnt fuel; greater efficiency would reduce or even eliminate them ).;

Let's unleash the genie of American ingenuity and the power of postive greed to reduce the importance of the Middle-Eastern oil fields (and not coincidentally, the importance of a certain "Yugo" of South America) and give a world-class kick in the butt to the American -- and eventually world -- economy!

A big announcement of such a great race by President Bush himself at a press conference, with all the bells and whistles -- Bush surrounded by conservative budget hawks, military mavins, the heads of several automobile manufacturers, and a bunch of well-known environmentalists and global-warming maniacs -- would be a political rocket to the Moon: at once, Bush would be promoting Americanism, conservatism, energy independence, energy conservation, small business, big business, the economy, and greater military power! And all without spending a dime of taxpayer money until there are actual results.

Golly, I can't think of anything more adventurous and exciting to rouse the American people out of their torpor, short of sprouting wings and a halo (in which case, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State and the ACLU would be after him). I would love to script that speech... I envision Bush actually holding up one of those giant-sized Publisher's Clearing House checks for one billion dollars, payable to "American inventor."

A whopping big tip of the hat to Jerry Pournelle, who told me about this same idea (I think it was original with Jerry) for the original "X-Prize," for development of a completely privately financed lifting vehicle that could fly from runway to orbit, many, many years before the X Prize Foundation came up with the same idea. I'm just adapting it to a more pressing and immediate problem.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 12, 2005, at the time of 12:35 AM | Comments (14) | TrackBack

Date ►►► November 11, 2005

The Wishing Ring, part 3

Foodless Food

By this, the final segment of the Wishing Ring, you're either desperate to know what the heck I mean by "foodless food" -- or else you're so overwhelmed by ennui that you're gnawing your own leg off to escape.

On the assumption that those of you in the latter category will have other things to worry about (such as sudden, catastrophic blood loss), I'll dive right into this last wish of our iconic three.

Throughout most of human history and across most of the world even today, the poor are marked by their thin, gaunt, even skeletal look. They starve. That's the simple fact. Look at the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, if it's not too painful.

But in the civilized corner of the world, and especially in the United States, it's the rich and famous who look like scarecrows. The poor are positively rolly polly; many are actually obese.

This is because only the rich make enough money to afford very tiny portions of food, as Horace Rumpole once put it (courtesy of his author, John Mortimer). Low-fat, low-cal food costs big bucks, as do exercise regimes and personal trainers (and in the case of some stars, hand slappers: they reach for the pork rinds, they get their hands slapped). In fact, America's biggest health problem (sorry) may be obesity, though some medical researchers are backing off of that a bit recently.

The "problem" is that capitalist countries produce so much wealth, including food, that even the poorest can eat three full meals a day... provided he isn't too picky about the amount of fat, sugar, and carbohydrates he consumes. Even begging, let alone a job, generates plenty of income to gorge at fast-food joints three or four times a day. The result, of course, is not pretty; see the tendentious film Super Size Me. But the problem is not limited to the poor: the vast bulk of the middle class is more worried about losing weight than about getting enough to eat.

When diet, exercise, and willpower fail, we can always rely upon technology. Instead of denying ourselves the foods we love... let's imagine a world where we can eat, eat, eat, morning, noon, and night, yet never gain an ounce.

It's not only possible, we already have the most of the tools to create exactly that world: foodless food.

What I mean by the weird phrase is food that is engineered to have a precise mix of protein, carbs, fat, and sugar. A stomach-stuffing, belly-busting feast that nevertheless contains no more calories than a grilled chicken salad and a side of cottage cheese.

It turns out, oddly enough, that digestion has a lot to do with chemistry. There is a whole science about it: food chemistry. Our bodies are set up to digest certain types of food, and our taste buds can only detect certain types of flavors (sweet, sour, bitter, salt, and something I'd never heard of before reading this web page: umami).

But nothing says that the two processes must operate in synch. Food can taste sweet without providing a single calorie via digestion; I call this sugarless sugar, and it's sold under many names: NutraSweet (aspartame), Sweet & Low (saccharine), Sugar Twin (cyclamates), and Splenda (sucralose), depending on what you want to do with it -- add it to cooked food or cook with it, for example. By mixing any of these artificial sweeteners with real sugar (sucrose), you can create any degree of sweetness with any level of actual sugar.

The first artificial fat sold openly in consumer goods was Olean (olestra); others will likely follow. Olestra, developed by Procter & Gamble in 1968 but only marketed recently, is an artificial substance called sucrose polyester, "a synthetic mixture of sugar and vegetable oil, which passes through the human digestive system without being absorbed." In other words, it tastes like fat but cannot be absorbed by the body, making it zero calorie. It's not perfect; some people experience various digestive problems when they eat it. But the solution to this problem is easy: if you eat olestra and get diarrhea, and if this bothers you... then don't eat it!

I know that a number of food chemists are feverishly at work trying to develop an artificial carbohydrate for the millions on variations of the Atkins diet. I expect there will be breakthroughs there, as there always are when real money is at stake. And I fully expect artificial protein within the near future... protein that tastes like meat but passes right through. The only remaining problem then will be assembling all these parts into food that tastes authentic, but is in fact ersatz.

The long and the short is that eventually, probably sooner than we expect, we will have very good artificial substitutes for virtually every type of food taste and texture that exists... which means that any recipe could be made full calorie, zero calorie, or any value in between. You can dial your own nutritional prescription.

In other words, foodless food.

You could have pancakes, bacon, syrup, and hot chocolate for breakfast; a BLT with extra mayo and a side of Freedom Fries™ for lunch; and prime rib, mashed potatoes, split-pea soup, apple cobbler, and a grande mocha-vanilla caramel macchiato cappuccino au lait with double-shots of chocolate and fudge for dinner, and have the whole day’s feast clock in at only 1200 calories, comprising 150g of carbs, 33g of fat, and 75g of protein.

"OK, ab Hugh, it would be nice to lose weight without sacrifice. But how is that 'revolutionary?'"

Detour time: what is an economy anyway? Forget all that stuff you learned in Econ 101... does anybody actually offer a class called Econ 101? Any economic system is a method of allocating resources -- natural resources, goods, and services -- among the members of the community associated with that economic system: how do you divide up the apples?

Unless you believe in the Great Wealth Tree, these resources are both limited and unevenly distributed among the population. An economic system distributes them more evenly by allowing a person with too much of resource X to give it to another person who hasn't enough.

It doesn't matter to this definition whether the transfer is voluntary, in exchange for some other resource Y (money, for example), or is involuntary according to some Socialist diktat: the point is that scarce resources are distributed among the population by the rules of the economic system. In other words, economics is a sophisticated system for resource triage.

Medical triage recognizes the scarcity of medical resources in some circumstances (MASH units in combat areas, for example) and allocates that care among patients by various rules. An economic system does the same to allocate a wider set of resources among a larger population over the long term. But both forms of triage depend upon one irreducible fact: that the resources in question are limited. If they are unlimited and unbounded, then there is no reason to allocate them: everybody uses what he wants in a kind of Kropotkian anarchy.

Back to foodless food (I'll bet you thought that, like Grandpa telling a story, I had forgotten where I started). Sugarless sugar and fatless fat are the first baby steps in what I will call designer food: food specifically designed and created for a particular person, using a profile he himself has designed (in consultation with medical knowledge) for his particular needs. It will necessarily force consumers to get over their irrational fears of genetically modified food: greed and vanity are two of the most powerful and positive drives in the human psyche; and in the end, I'm sure they'll overcome our natural desire to live like a bunch of grim and grisly Puritans, depriving ourselves of such frivolities as "pleasure."

Eventually, we will be forced by greed and vanity to drop the idea that there is something sacred about comestibles; we'll start treating them as any other product, to be fiddled with and altered at will, subject only to the laws of product safety that govern goods such as minivans and semiautomatic pistols. With this religious prohibition against genetic food gone (it will die hard), normal market forces will create food that is better, healthier, and cheaper... and eventually, food will become so cheap that anyone will be able to afford the best-tasting and healthiest food in any quantity, designed personally for him. Food, even gourmet food, will no longer be a scarcity.

Therefore, we will no longer need triage to "distribute" food. The effect of this will be electrifying in itself: since (supra) the economy affects only those things that are scarce -- there is no fee for breathing air -- when food is no longer scarce in any sense of the word, then food will, by definition, no longer be a part of the economy.

Put it this way: why would you pay gourmet prices to get an incredible meal at a restaurant when you can get an equally incredible meal, just as much to your taste and just as healthy, but at a fraction the cost, through Amazon.com? And why pay even Amazon if your home cooking computer can create the same food for you for free?

Foodless food may be the first step of what some thinkers, capitalist and Marxian alike, call the "post-economic society" (science-fiction writer John Barnes falls in the latter camp and is responsible for first explaining this concept to me a number of years ago; hat tip to John). A post-economic society (PES) is one in which all the necessities of life and even many of the luxuries become, due to technological advance, so cheap and plentiful that they literally are no longer a part of the economy, as above. A PES can be both completely capitalist and fully socialist at the same time: one definition of socialism is the belief that it's the government's responsibility to supply all the necessities of life to all citizens; but if all the necessities of life can be made available to all the citizens at a tax cost of $5/year per person total, then taxes would in essence be zero... and you would still be free to engage in capitalist activity with no tax drag on the economy.

You have to understand that government control is measured not so much by its scope as its extent to each person: technically, it's "government control of the press" if Congress were to require, as its only requirement, that every publication in the United States include a little smiley-face on page 4. The scope of this silly example is universal. But the extent of the control is so trivial that it's a joke; only the most theoretical purist would say such a tiny requirement damaged freedom of the press.

So a government can be fully socialist -- every citizen is entitled to all the necessities of life for free; but if the cost is so trivial that you do not even notice it, then for all intents and purposes, the cost is nonexistent... and you have pure capitalism and pure socialism existing happily together in the same PES.

But technology will not stop with designer food; it will proceed apace. Eventually, technology will swallow up every kind of scarcity -- except the artificial scarcity: novels by Dafydd ab Hugh are scarce simply because I'm the only one who can produce them, not because novels themselves are in short supply (would that they were! then my own books would sell better). As more and more scarcities vanish, our idea of what constitutes a "necessity" will expand -- why shouldn't it? -- until the only thing in a PES that is not free for the taking is a service that one person performs for another. And even those can typically be done by machines; there is no reason a machine cannot learn to cook, to practice medicine, and to try legal cases.

In the final stage of a total PES, the only commodity for sale will be status: you status will be enhanced if you have a human butler, instead of a buttle-bot. If you employ a human chef while all your friends just have chef-o-matics, they will envy you. It is irrelevant if your butler and chef are any better than machines; they can even be worse! The status is that you have them at all.

Which means that anyone who can do something idiosyncratic (a painter, writer, composer, aide de camp, major domo, prostitute, performer, or other personalized service) will make "millions" of whatever money is used. But the only thing he can spend it on is more idiosyncratic, personalized service from someone else. The butler will have a juggler on retainer. The prostitute will have a personal secretary!

And that will be the greatest revolution of all: every concept of law, economy, war and territory, national sovereignty, and social control will crumble... and there is no way of predicting what type of society will spawn in its place. Nobody knows what a PES looks like, because none has ever existed on this planet. But surely it will be utterly unlike any society that has gone before... truly the "end of history," at least as we know it.

And all for the want of a cheesecake calorie!

In this absurdly long and drawn out series, the Wishing Ring, an agony in three fits, I have pointed out three fast approaching inventions, each of which has the capability of changing our entire universe: E-paper, high-temperature ceramic engines, and the mother of all inventions, foodless food. Besides the obvious reason for the series -- to waste time dreaming about the future when I should be building my own web page -- there is a higher calling, which I call ab Hugh's First Law of Prediction:

Any speculation about the future of society that does not take into account the unstoppable advance of technology is not worth the paper it's printed on.

(And ab Hugh's Internet Corollary: any such online speculation that ignores technology is not worth the paper it's not printed on.)

So the next time you hear some idiot talk about what Social Security will be doing forty years from now, whether he works for CBS or the Bush administration, ask yourself whether the technological advances in the next four decades will render the whole discussion moot.

Then kick back, have a beer, and blog, ranger, blog!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 11, 2005, at the time of 11:48 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

The Wishing Ring, part 2

High Temperature Ceramic Engines

Despite innovations galore over the past hundred and twenty years or so (depending on what ancestors you're willing to count), the internal combustion gasoline engine is basically the same today as it was in 1885/1886, when Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz independently invented it. Probably the most notable improvement was electronic fuel injection (1966); fuel injection can improve the power output of similar-sized engines by roughly 40%, and make it impossible to impress your wife by cleaning the carburetor. But even that is just a slightly more efficient way to squirt gasoline into a cylinder and mix it with oxygen to produce an inflammable mixture that burns reasonably well.

The real problem with the classic internal combustion engine is much more basic: to really get full efficiency out of burning fuel, you have to burn it at really hot temperatures, upwards of 5000° Fahrenheit. But at that temperature, steel cylinders, pistons, and the engine block itself will melt like a nervous Republican in a warm filibuster.

Say hello to ceramics.

When you say "ceramics," most people think of the cute, clay ashtrays that their children continually make in school for their nonsmoking parents. There are gobbledygook definitions of ceramics that chemists use; but for our purposes, we're talking about non-metallic, non-organic substances usually made by forming a powder into some shape, then "sintering" or firing it (heating it just below the melting point). You get a smooth, glassy material that is incredibly resistant to heat... and can also be strong, lightweight, non-corroding, and almost eternal. You can study up on ceramics here; I'll wait.

So what do these powdery, ashtray-thingies have to do with engines? The most important properties of ceramics for engine design is that they're lightweight -- and they don't melt easily.

I don't want to get too deep in the mathematical weeds (which look like little, green integral signs), but there's an equation governing gas pressure called Gay-Lussac's Law. To really boil it down, pressure P is equal to a constant k times temperature T: P = k • T.

Pressure, the pressure of the exploding gasoline-air mixture inside the cylinder, is what you want out of an internal combustion engine: the pressure pushes the piston up. The more pressure, the more horsepower you have. Gay-Lussac's Law tells us that the way to get more pressure is to burn the gasoline at a hotter temperature.

The problem is that the cylinder, piston, and all the rest of the engine is made out of steel, except for those parts made out of plastic (say "thank you, Mr. Clinton!" for plastic engine parts). And steel, along with Clintonian plastic, melts. Thus, you simply can't burn gasoline much hotter than we already do, about 1350°F. If you try it, your engine will end up looking like a Salvador Dali clock.

Enter the ceramic engine. Ceramics are very heat resistant, which is why even nonsmokers can stub out cigarettes in them. In an all-ceramic engine, you can burn gasoline much hotter, as much as 5000°F. Because that law above assumes everything is expressed in Kelvin, not Fahrenheit, this means you're burning the gas at three times the temperature, which should produce about three times the pressure, hence three times the horsepower.

In fact, it's even better. Much of the weight of your car's engine is used for water and oil pumps, hoses, and the radiator, all to keep cooling the engine and reduce friction in the cylinders... none of which you need in a ceramic engine. So they weigh less but produce more power.

Finally, the hotter you burn gasoline, the more completely it burns. Air pollution is basically the unburned remnants of incomplete oxidation (a fancy word for "burning"); so a high-temperature ceramic engine will be extremely clean. Why Ed Begley jr. isn't running around selling these things door-to-door, I'll never know.

The drawback is that so far, we can't make them well enough to keep them from developing microcracks. But this is simply an engineering problem that requires no staggering breakthrough. Similarly, it's tough to mass-produce them; but we'll have those techniques down pat relatively soon.

(Ceramics can also be used for superconducting, which means magnetic-levitation trains, and for rocket engines and turbojets for airplanes. They can be manufactured arbitrarily small, so they can also be used for nanotechnology tools. But that's another story.)

There are, of course, other ways to make car engines much more efficient -- momentum-storing gyroscopes, fuel-cell technology, electric battery cars, and cars driven by broadcast power. But each of these requires very significant conceptual breakthroughs to make them at all practical... and each but the first would require creating a whole new fuel-delivery infrastructure across the entire country: hydrogen filling stations, electrical car rechargers, or huge microwave broadcasters. I'm convinced that ceramic gasoline-burning engines can be perfected much more quickly than these other systems. And remember, I'm the guy who predicted the French would betray us, so you can trust me.

But how, you ask -- those of you who haven't nodded off from all the excitement -- does any of this qualify as revolutionary? "What's in it for me?" demand those of you who haven't called Sally Struthers recently to inquire about careers in the exciting field of automotive repairs. I'll explain it in three words: Oh Eye Ell.

Why the hell does anybody on the planet care about the non-Israeli part of the Middle East, including those who live there? Because the world runs on oil, and that's where most of it is. We live and die by the price of crude, currently about $53 a barrel. For those of you who went to public school, hence learned nothing about evil capitalism, the price of anything is set by supply and demand -- at least until the Democrats get back in charge. The supply of oil expands, but not as fast as demand, especially with China industrializing like mad. Therefore, the price rises: too many straws, not enough glasses.

But with ceramic engines, more power per gallon means many more miles per gallon, not only for cars but for jumbo jets and for trains. And that in turn means we would need significantly less gasoline than we need now. Less gasoline = reduced demand = drop in price... probably a fairly significant drop, possibly down to the $25 - $30 range for a barrel. That spells less money in the pockets of Mad Mullahs and Wacky Wahhabis. It also means less money for oil-producing states like Texas, Oklahoma, and California; but those would be balanced by lower prices for other goods and services: the Arab (and Persian) Middle East has almost no other economy than oil, and such a huge drop in demand would devastate it.

Devastate it, and also make the Middle East much less important to the rest of the world. It would end the unlimited flow of petrodollars into the Donna Karen purses of terrorists. Thus, it would make the job of democratizing the region much easier. As Wretchard wrote a while back, “if a normal army travels on its stomach, a terrorist insurgency travels on its wallet.” And today, that wallet is an oilfield in Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Kuwait. So let's all wish for a quick solution to the remaining engineering problems and a speedy introduction of high-temperature ceramic engines.

Today, ashtrays -- tomorrow, the world!

And besides the world, tomorrow will also bring the third installment of the exciting Wishing Ring series of dry, pedantic lectures, the one you've all been on tenterhooks for: Foodless Food.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 11, 2005, at the time of 11:46 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

The Wishing Ring, part 1

Here are three upcoming inventions that you probably haven't thought much about, but which will revolutionize the world. I will divide this post into three parts, to give the illusion that I have more to say about it than my feeble imagination can actually dig up.

E-Paper

Assuming you are over the age of twenty-five and know what a book or magazine is, open one up. Take a look at it. Very different from a computer screen, eh? You can lie on the couch or on the floor and still read it. You can even read it in the bathtub without electrocuting yourself (unless it's the Neve Campbell issue of Maxim). You can take it with you to the beach or the mountains, read it in direct sunlight or by flashlight on a camping trip. You can look at the centerfold under the covers when your Mom thinks you're asleep, which is how most of us got our first glimpse of Byte Magazine.

Now imagine a book or magazine that looks exactly like print -- but whose software driven words and pictures morph on the paper like a webpage. That, my slavish devotees and soon to be competitors, is e-paper, also sometimes called smart paper, though one company seems to have trademarked that phrase.

In one version under development by Gyricon, Inc, a spinoff from Xerox's famous Palo-Alto Research Center (PARC), the "paper" actually comprises tens of millions of tiny balls, like pixels... say as many as 1250 to the linear inch, the typical density of professionally printed magazines today. These spheres are contained between two sheets of clear polymer by a sticky fluid, allowing them to twist and spin freely (much like Bill Frist's political spine).

That would make almost a hundred and fifty million on an 8½ x 11 size sheet. In the simplest case, these spheres are black and negatively charged on one side, white and positive on the other. Like registers in a computer, tiny currents running alongside the spheres can flip any particular one to be either black side up (a black dot at that position) or white side up (a white dot). Flipping the right sequence of balls creates words, line drawings, even graytones. Anything that a super high quality laserjet printer can print can appear instantaneously on a page of e-paper, only to be replaced by the next page whenever the reader clicks the page-turn button.

The albedo (reflection) would be identical to ink on paper, meaning you could view it in direct sunlight or under a reading lamp; it would not be backlit. The smart book would probably include its own book-lamp, so reading in the dark would be just as easy as in the daylight.

A more complex version would use spheres with red, green, and blue sectors, in addition to adjacent spheres with black and white. This would operate like a color television screen or monitor, giving you full color illustrations.

Other versions of e-paper include products under development by E-Ink, where extremely tiny black spheres and white spheres float together in a viscous medium. Please don't start singing "Ebony and Ivory," or I shall do you a violence. All these black and white spheres (and the fluid) are contained within a larger sphere (about the diameter of a human hair).

The black spheres have a negative static charge, the white are positive. By creating a static charge on the bottom of the container, either the black or the white spheres can be sent to the top, where they become visible, giving you either a black dot or a white dot. Add them up, and you have a "printed" page. Distinct hotspots on the bottom of the hair-sized container with distinct static charges can send a mix of black and white spheres to the top, giving you a grayscale.

Finally, there is the possibility of crystal "pixels" that can simply change color in response to tiny electrical currents.

How would this change the universe? You must understand that the huge majority of readers cannot read lengthy books or entire magazines on monitors... or at least, we do not enjoy doing so. Those who get much of their news from online sources sometimes have a hard time grasping how many people are locked out of instant, online publication simply because they can't or won't read on a computer monitor. But with e-paper, "books" would be reduced to mere software, yet would be just as readable as the printed page. Online would cease to mean "on a CRT screen," and could mean on a "paperback book" in your pocket, with the same flexibility and internet access as a hand-held web portal. Blackberry soup for the soul.

Ordinary readers could carry hundreds of books with us wherever we went. If we needed a book we didn't have, it would be a download away.

But more to the revolutionary point, e-paper -- which is coming sooner than you might think -- will end up blogifying the mainstream print media. Today, if you want to publish a book or magazine in any quantity, you have to scrape together $20,000 or more. Various "instant press" companies can print you single books at a time; but they require a much higher unit cost to print than printing in quantity, which cuts into your profits as an author.

Therefore, authors have to submit proposals or manuscripts to editors at big publishing houses in New York. These editors have tremendous power to determine what does and does not get published; before a reader can read a book, an editor (usually a New York leftist) has to buy it first. The few publishers that will handle conservative or libertarian books (notably Regnery Publishing) get so many submissions from authors locked out of the mainstream press that they cannot possibly publish them all... or even the tiny fraction of authors who are worth more than $1.29 -- clothes, pocket change, blood chemicals, and all. And you know they're just going to love me for putting their URL up here!

But when anyone who can use text-editing and page-layout software can "publish" a book or magazine (by selling downloads) that looks just as professional as those from Warner Books or Time Life Publications, the distinction between a professional e-paper magazine and an e-paper magazine from the pajamahedin will boil down to editing and advertising. This will break the back of the New York literary mafia, the gatekeepers to literature and nonfiction for the masses. Reviewers will become the new elite; if you know you like the type of books that I like, then if I recommend some e-paper book in a review, you'll likely buy a download... especially since the cost will be tremendously less than buying a hardback from Amazon.

The author makes much more money per book because he owns it; rather than getting a mere 10% royalty on each copy sold, as he gets today (if he's lucky), his profit would be income minus expenses; books could be sold for half of today's prices and still net the author five times what he makes per book today. Which is another way of saying that an author can make the same profit from a book by selling only 20% of what he would sell through a big publisher. Ordinary people, who don't have multi-million dollar advertising budgets and distribution to thousands of bookstores, can still sell enough books to live on writing income alone.

E-paper is to books and magazines what blogging is to online publication... except E-paper will reach orders of magnitude more readers.

Next invention from the ring of three wishes: High-Temperature Ceramic Engines.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 11, 2005, at the time of 11:44 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Flakey Cable Modem - Scaley Classics Upcoming!

The flipping cable modem in this hotel in Waikiki is fading in and out. I'm struggling manfully to make posts, but it's difficult.

In the meanwhile -- and I will still continue posting new stuff, don't worry -- here are some Scaley Classics, posts from the misty past, vast aeons ago, sometime between the Dark Ages and the last mini ice age. Well, stuff I formerly posted on Captain's Quarters and Patterico's Pontifications, while I was still trying to cajole the bank of little lizards to run inside their Faraday cages (that's what powers this website, you know).

Here is a three-parter: the Wishing Ring, about three inventions that will change the universe.

Note: There may be some old information in here; just let me know, and I'll update it. Thanks!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 11, 2005, at the time of 11:42 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

French Introspection? Ooh La La!

As if the New York Times has been reading blogs, they have started examining the question of France and whether or how much the French lack of a national identity is in part responsible for the non-assimilation of their Moslem immigrants.

Some choice quotations, all emphasis added by moi:

"I was born in Senegal when it was part of France," [Semou Diouf] said before putting the pipe in his mouth. "I speak French, my wife is French and I was educated in France." The problem, he added after pulling the pipe out of his mouth again, "is the French don't think I'm French."

That, in a nutshell, is what lies at the heart of the unrest that has swept France in the past two weeks: millions of French citizens, whether immigrants or the offspring of immigrants, feel rejected by traditional French society, which has resisted adjusting a vision of itself forged in fires of the French Revolution....

"People have it in their head that surveying by race or religion is bad, it's dirty, it's something reserved for Americans and that we shouldn't do it here," said Yazid Sabeg, the only prominent Frenchman of Arab descent at the head of a publicly listed French company. "But without statistics to look at, how can we measure the problem?"....

The idea behind France's republican ideal was that by officially ignoring ethnic differences in favor of a transcendent French identity, the country would avoid the stratification of society that existed before the French Revolution or the fragmentation that it now sees in multicultural models like the United States. But the French model, never updated, has failed, critics say. "France always talks about avoiding ghettoization, but it has already happened," Mr. Sabeg said, adding that people are separated in the housing projects, in their schools and in their heads [Yeah, well this "fragmented" United States ain't having no Moslem riots at the moment! -- the Mgt.]....

Most second-generation Muslim immigrants are generally no more observant than young French Catholics. But the legacy of discrimination [or the lack of any specifically French identity -- the Mgt.] creates the conditions for young people who feel neither French nor North African to seek an identity in Islam - often anti-Western, political Islam.

I don't know what to make of that last assertion. It's classic Times: vast, sweeping, unsourced. But it strikes me as more or less true, or at least verisimilitudinous: if true, doesn't this mean that the French antipathy towards non-European culture and especially against religion is, in fact, driving young Arab French into the arms of a particularly violent and primitive religion, militant Islamism?

The real problem, as I see it, is that this "transcendent French identity" they seek is one founded in the French revolution of 218 years ago and, as the Times notes, "never updated." It cannot function as a specifically French identity today because it is so inextricably bound up in the social milieu of eighteenth-century Europe. Unlike the American "organic laws" -- the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 -- which actually do transcend their eighteenth-century origins by avoiding too close an embrace with the petty questions of the day, the French Revolution degenerated into "the Terror" and became thoroughly and horrifically tied to a particular place and time (especially after its inauspicious end at the hands of one of its own, the "Emperor" Napoleon Bonaparte.

At least some of the French private sector is starting to understand the true solution:

Karim Zeribi, a former soccer player and political adviser, said a study he carried out earlier this year found that résumés sent out with traditionally French names got responses 50 times higher than those with North African or African names. In the wake of the study, Mr. Zeribi established an agency in April called Act for Citizenship, which canvasses minority neighborhoods for qualified job candidates and markets them to corporations.

"We want to create a network for these people where there is none," Mr. Zeribi said. Still, he said, his young candidates are regularly asked if they are practicing Muslims when they are interviewed for jobs.

This clearly is the way to go... apart from whatever the French government has to do to reassure the immigrants that they are not confined to particular ghettos in France -- "mosquitos trapped in amber," as Sachi put it in a previous post -- the best step is for business and private interests to seek out, on their own franc, qualified Moslem employees and students.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 11, 2005, at the time of 2:02 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

Calling Persia's Bluff

Iran has long insisted that its nuclear reactor development is purely for "peaceful" power generation, and that they only need uranium enrichment in order to have a steady supply of fuel for electrical power (aside from their vast oil reserves, one assumes). But the United States and most Western European nations have strongly suspected that Iran is enriching far more Uranium than it needs for power production and plans instead to use it for nuclear warheads.

So in a very clever proposal, Russia -- now joined by the "EU3" (Great Britain, France, and Germany) and also the United States -- has offered Iran a compromise deal:

1. Iran is allowed to proceed with its nuclear reaction plans, except --
2. Iran agrees to give up its Uranium enrichment program; in exchange for which...
3. Russia agrees to enrich Uranium for Iran, taking the entire enrichment program out of the hands of the ruling mullahs.

The beauty of course is that Russia already has all the enriched Uranium (and Plutonium) it could ever use for warheads, so we're not worried about them enriching more. But Russia, which during the Cold War was allied with Iran against Israel, has now become very suspicious of Islamists, due to the ongoing problem in Chechnya and also due to the backlash against Russia (and before them, the Soviet Union) caused by their invasion of Afghanistan, a brutal occupation that spawned the mujahedeen... one of whom broke away from the main, anti-Soviet group the MaK in order to found his own base of operations, called simply "the Base" (in Arabic, al-Qaeda). Hence, the Russians will not be eager to funnel enough enriched Uranium to Iran to allow them to build nuclear bombs; those bombs would be just as likely to end up in the Chechens' hands as Hezbollah's.

Iran gets one concession:

Under the Russian plan, Iran could continue with uranium conversion, the step before enrichment -- something the West had previously wanted Iran to renounce too.

Sure, the deal would prove Iran's peaceful intentions if they took it -- by making it nearly impossible for them to do otherwise. And for that very reason, nobody really expects Iran to accept. But when they reject it, it will be that much harder for Russia or the EU3 to argue that anything about this negotiation is really on the square.

And perhaps that much easier to move on to the next step, which has to be the UN Security Council for significant economic sanctions, with likely even Russia and China refusing to veto the plan.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 11, 2005, at the time of 1:03 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Sobering Reminder - UPDATE (twice!) and bump

UPDATE: See below.

Just a few days ago, in a stunning victory, the Senate voted to approve drilling in a microscopic sliver of ANWR, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Today, we have this news:

Arctic drilling dropped from House bill
It could still return when, if Senate and House negotiate budget

House leaders late Wednesday abandoned an attempt to push through a hotly contested plan to open an Alaskan wildlife refuge to oil drilling, fearing it would jeopardize approval of a sweeping budget bill Thursday.

They also dropped from the budget document plans to allow states to authorize oil and gas drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts — regions currently under a drilling moratorium.

"But wait!" you cry, "we have the majority! How could the Democrats block drilling in the House, where there is no filibustering?"

Oh, that's easy:

The decision to drop the ANWR drilling language came after GOP moderates said they would oppose the budget if it was kept in the bill. The offshore drilling provision was also viewed as too contentious and a threat to the bill, especially in the Senate.

This is the point that I think a lot of conservatives miss when they savagely swarm-attack George W. Bush for not ramming through more conservative legislation: the fact is that while Bush has had a Republican majority in both houses since 2003, he has not had a conservative majority in either house of Congress for his entire administration. Given that serious limitation, he has done staggeringly well; and that also explains why he must often compromise or bargain -- such as with his immigration proposal and the MediCare prescription-drug benefit --rather than maintaining absolute purity on all ideological issues (were he even inclined to do so).

It also explains why George Bush is the president and not someone like Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX).

There is still a good shot at getting drilling in ANWR; since the Senate voted for it, if Sen. Frist (R-TN) has picked senators for the joint conference who insist upon it, and if Hastert picks representatives who support it or don't care, they may reinsert it... and once it's been approved by the joint committee, it's much harder for the fourteen Republican defectors in the House to prevent its passage.

Marnie Funk, a spokeswoman for Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., said that Domenici considers the ANWR provision, which the Senate approved, “one of the most critical components” in the budget package. “He is committed to coming back to the Senate from the conference with ANWR intact,” she said.

But please bear this in mind for the next three plus years: unless more conservatives are elected to Congress in 2006, it will be impossible to get a "conservative agenda" through... not because Bush isn't a good leader or isn't trying hard enough, but because leading Congress is like herding cats: you can only take them wherever they planned to go anyway.

UPDATE: And now, the House has canceled the vote on the budget bill entirely! It seems that even after getting their way on ANWR drilling, those same House "moderate" Republicans demanded that budget reductions stay away from Medicaid, Food Stamps, and other entitlement programs.

I have no idea where they imagine significant cuts can come from if both entitlement programs and necessary military spending are off the table... so the only two possibilities are that these "moderates" want Bush to slash money meant to pay for anti-terrorism and nation-rebuilding operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and everywhere else we're engaged in the world -- or else they want him to balance the budget by some huge tax hike on "the rich," which (if the usual definition is used) typically means any family making more than $35,000 per year.

What did I tell you?

They hope to reschedule the vote for sometime next week, after the holiday weekend (God forbid the congressional darlings have to work on a Saturday)... but nobody is holding his breath.

UPDATE II: John at Power Line has an interesting alternative take on what all these shenanigans tell us.

But I still like mine better.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 11, 2005, at the time of 12:26 AM | Comments (17) | TrackBack

Date ►►► November 10, 2005

Why Congress Should Not "Ban Torture"

I made the mistake of reading an editorial in the Hololulu Advertiser this morning; it perfectly encapsulates why we must not allow Congress to charge off on McCain's newest crusade against "torturing" our detainees. (It is, of course, yet another attempt by McCain to aggrandize himself by smearing President Bush. But that's a given, considering who we're dealing with, and beside the point.)

Here is what caught my eye:

There is an Alice-in-Wonderland quality to some of the rhetoric coming from the White House these days on the subject of torture and treatment of detainees held in the war against terrorism.

On his South American swing, President Bush responded firmly to questions from reporters: "We do not torture," he insisted, when asked about alleged secret CIA prisons overseas.

That should be reassuring, but what, precisely, does the president mean? That's a legitimate question, considering back in Washington his administration is struggling to exempt the CIA from a proposed law that would bar cruel and degrading treatment of people held in U.S. custody.

Apparently, in some semantic netherworld, "cruel and degrading" treatment does not add up to torture.

The problem is not in the banning; nobody of any significance in the government supports or would even tolerate actual torture, either conducted by us or by some other state actor in our presence or with our knowledge. The problem is that every time a body like Congress addresses the issue, they define torture downward.

Here, for example: "cruel and degrading," the language used in the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, is so nebulous and malleable that it can mean anything some international tribunal chooses it to mean.

Far from "offer[ing] clear and consistent guidelines for troops who are charged with handling and questioning detainees," the definition of what constitutes torture or "'cruel and degrading' treatment" would be a moving target that changed daily (or perhaps hourly). Since no CIA field interrogator could ever be sure he wouldn't run afoul of Congress's new defintion -- and since the penalties would be harsh -- none would ever so much as ask a tough question or dare raise his voice for fear that he would find himself in a cell next to Charles Graner.

The Universal Code of Military Justice already bans torture... obviously; look at what happened to the idiots at Abu Ghraib. But the military makes the definition "clear and consistent." Congress, by contrast, could change the definition on a whim (or a good election day for the Democrats). All right... but what about the CIA? They're not under the UCMJ; should they be barred from engaging in anything that Congress, relying upon an international tribunal, defines as "cruel and degrading?" Or should they be allowed in extreme cases to use more aggressive interrogation?

It would be reasonable to leave the final decision up to the president, not Congress... which by an odd coincidence is the very exemption that the Bush administration is seeking:

The White House initially tried to kill the anti-torture provision while it was pending in the Senate, then switched course to lobby for an exemption in cases of "clandestine counterterrorism operations conducted abroad, with respect to terrorists who are not citizens of the United States." The president would have to approve the exemption, and Defense Department personnel could not be involved. In addition, any activity would have to be consistent with the Constitution, federal law and U.S. treaty obligations, according to draft changes in the exemption the White House is seeking.

Not that the CIA should be allowed to romp through the torture chamber like Tomás de Torquemada, but that in very exceptional circumstances (the "ticking bomb" scenario), they be allowed under direct presidential directive to use aggressive interrogation techniques, even those that don't sit well with the berobed pedants at the Hague (or in Congress).

This is precisely the sort of operational decision that must be made by the Commander in Chief, not by preening senators like John McCain (R-AZ) or anti-military, anti-war, anti-Bush House zealots like Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Bernie Sanders (S-VT).

It's as easy to say "I'm against torture" as it is to say "Nazis are bad," and just about as meaningful. Opposing a Congressional takeover of operational military decisionmaking is, quite naturally, portrayed in the press as supporting torture, as the Advertiser does above. But on this issue, Bush has no choice: he must do as he is doing, and just hope that there is enough sanity in Congress that they will sustain his inevitable veto.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 10, 2005, at the time of 2:40 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Mosquitos Trapped in Amber

We already know that the Moslem immigrants in France were not allowed to assimilate into the French society. But it is not so well known that the French children of Moslem immigrants are still ensnared in government housing projects, echoing in France what happened for decades in the United States. They are mosquitos trapped in amber, struggling against the sticky sap that binds them in place.

The projects were built in the 1960's as a part of modern urban planning. At first, poor working-class Frenchmen and immigrants lived side by side. As the French economy improved, job opportunities soon opened up for the native French; but for a variety of reasons, they were not equally open to the immigrants, especially Moslems from North and Central Africa.

A home-buying program of the 1980s allowed most of the native French to move out of the projects; but without jobs, few Moslems qualified. Soon they were left behind; with no jobs, no future, and (most important) no sense of being part of society, many Moslem youths turned to crime, probably for the same reason disaffected and alienated youth do here: impulse, boredom, bad example, and a deep feeling of "apartness."

The police instituted a crackdown in the projects in 1983; that police reaction led to a riot. This is very similar to what is happening today across much of france: rootless young Moslems, alienated from a society they have seen only via interaction with police, riot in response to a crackdown on real crimes.

"There's nothing to do, and frustrations have added up until in the end it has become like a bomb that they carry inside," said Azzouz Camen, 44, at a small snack bar he owns between the neighborhood's apartment blocks and a gleaming new mosque.

Most of us have the impression that the inaction of the spineless French police has greatly contributed to the crime surge in the region. However, the residents see just the opposite, overly aggressive police tactics, as the real cause. Both could be true simultaneously, as France lurches from crackdown to appeasement. From this angle, it's hard to see who is more right.

It really doesn't matter anyway; today's rioters don't care whether their lifelong belief about the crackdown was accurate then or now... they believe it, and it drives their actions. You can't argue someone out of his basic belief system. Especially when, like the French, you don't have any basic beliefs of your own.

The riot of twenty-two years ago was put down very heavy-handedly... and I think it became a part of the mythology of the current rioters as they grew up: they would hear much about the supposed gallantry of the protesters and the (still evident) brutality of the French police, and that would alienate them even more from the society inside of which they live.

Nothing permanent came from that riot in 1983:

[Harlem] Désir emerged as a leader from that unrest and helped organize a march for equal rights that started in the immigrant neighborhoods outside Lyon and ended in Paris.

The press dubbed it the March of the Beurs, using the immigrants' slang word for Arab, and France's left-leaning intelligentsia embraced the cause, seeing in it an echo of the United States' civil rights movement. President François Mitterrand received some of the marchers at Élysée Palace and euphoria swept through the country's children of immigrants. They had stood up and been heard.

However, the government response to the problem turned out to be merely cosmetic with no substance. They repainted projects and assigned a few social workers to "help" youths. But they did nothing to assimilate the immigrants into the general population.

As things grew steadily worse, crime in and from the projects grew. An effort by the last Socialist administration helped improve things a bit by putting police officers on the beat in the neighborhoods and providing money to create jobs for young residents. But both programs ended after Jacques Chirac became president [in 1995].

His tough interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, replaced the police on the beat with officers from an anti-crime brigade who cover several towns at a time. Their aggressive tactics have won almost universal scorn in the projects and created an air of hostility that has precipitated the current violence.

Chirac's response to this problem was to keep the immigrants in the projects and lock the door. Assimilation is farthest from his mind. His tactics reminds of a Japanese saying: "put a lid on a smelly pot." All the while Moslem jihadis were recruiting potential terrorists in the projects.

France has been ignoring the probelm for too long. If you cut some segments of the population off from the rest of the society, tragedy is inevitable. They should have known this would happen. This is not to excuse the rioters, just to note that when you light a fuse, you shouldn't wonder that a bomb explodes.

Many people in the world have the wrong impression that the United States suffers from an unusually high rate of racial discrimination. I always tell people from other countries that you hear about our racial problems only because we are willing to face them. We heard nothing about the racial tension growing in Europe, but that does not mean there was none; it only meant they never had guts to face the reality.

If you ignore reality long enough, it will bite you in the face like a swarm of hungry mosquitos bursting free of their amber prisons. Well, Europe, are you ready to face the reality now?

Hatched by Sachi on this day, November 10, 2005, at the time of 4:18 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

"In But Not of" California

Here are some thoughts, in no particular order, upon further reflection on the California elections.

Where were you conservatives?

Hugh Hewitt rightly points out that Arnold Schwarzenegger has not really reached out to the conservative base of the California Republican Party:

Name the conservative icon upon whom you depend and to whom you go for solid advice? There isn't one.

Name the single conservative cause with which you are associated.
Spending restraint? Private property rights? Limits on abortion? Second Amendment advocacy? Judges?

You have picked fights with all the right people, but over what? Redistricting that might have cost the GOP crucial seats in D.C., a spending cap that wasn't, teacher tenure tweaks? Again, mixing it up with the public employee unions was fine, but off-year elections aren't exactly gladiator time, especially when the budget got passed because your advisors didn't want a show-down in the summer....

Bring in some senior advisors with pedigrees on the right and listen to them. Ask Bruce Herschensohn to spend a couple of days a week in the offices, as a "minsiter without portfolio." You don't have to do a thing he recommends, but there is no more respected figure on the California right than Bruce. Associated with Bruce, but also with Reagan, is Ken Khachigian. Ask Ken to take up a post somewhere on the battlements. And raid Hoover --get Robinson to convene a three day idea-fest with the folks who haven't spent their lives trading quarter percents with Sacramento's lobbyists.

But this is a rare moment when I'm really going to take Hugh to the woodshed. All right, Mr. Smarty-Pants Political Mavin... where the hell were Bruce Herchensohn and Ken Khachigian in this bloody ballot fight?

What is Hugh's point? That Herschensohn could have helped us out, but that he sat on his hands and did nothing because he didn't get a personal invitation from the governor? Well for God's sake, neither did I: but I did everything I could to push for these initiatives, in particular the two most important ones: Propositions 75 (paycheck protection) and 77 (redistricting reform). Just click on the Politics - California topic on the right (it's under Politics).

I'm sure those posts must have bored a lot my non-Californian readers. But I wouldn't give up; this is my state, and I'm not going to hand it over to the corrupt Left without a fight.

Evidently, Brush Herschensohn made a different choice.

If "there is no more respected figure on the California right than Bruce," then why the hell can't I find him on the front lines? Or even the rear guard? Did he even write a column about these initiatives? I sure didn't see it, and I can't find one now.

How about Tom Campbell? Bill Simon? Where was everybody? For that matter, where was Hugh Hewitt? The only California story I recall on Hugh's site in the past few weeks, the very time that the initiatives started to have trouble, was about the UC San Diego student who made a porn film. I listen to Hugh's radio show pretty religiously (I don't mean I don phylacteries; I mean I listen every day), and I don't recall any segments devoted to, say, paycheck protection, or even to Proposition 73, that would have required a waiting period and parental notification before a minor got an abortion. If there were, it wasn't enough for me to notice, let alone Hugh's readers who weren't sure whether they would vote. I guess Hugh Hewitt is "in but not of" California.

It's nice he found time to lecture Schwarzenegger about why he lost; but why couldn't Hugh find time to fight for the initiatives while he still had a chance to change the outcome, when he could have fired up the base? In fact, damned few California bloggers or pundits pitched in to help, and almost no well-known conservative (or at least Republican) politicians. Where were Pete Wilson and George Deukmeijian?

How many people did the Cal-GOP bus to the polls? How many did they call and remind about the election, urge to vote? I know I got exactly ZERO phone calls from human beings urging me to support these initiatives; I did get a couple from Democratic activists trying to talk me into voting against them. I even called the local Glendale GOP headquarters myself several times, asking what I could do to help the election: they said "we'll get back to you," and of course they never did.

This is Dan Lungren and Matt Fong all over again. This was a very low-turnout election. Had the conservative base turned out and voted, we would have won -- at least on a few of the initiatives, including the most important one, Proposition 75 (paycheck protection).

Look, Arnold Schwarzenegger is not a conservative. He has never claimed to be a conservative. Yet he has done many things for conservatives in this mixed state in the past two years: for example, he vetoed the same-sex marriage bill, despite the fact that he supports same-sex marriage, because the voters had voted against it.

He refused to raise taxes, even when that would have made it much easier to cut a deal with the Democrats in the legislature. And he pushed an initiative onto the ballot that was undeniably conservative -- a big one, too: Proposition 75 would have required public-employee unions to get written permission before using any membership dues money for political purposes. Not only that, but the Governator also endorsed Proposition 73, which put restrictions on abortion. Conservatives can maybe argue against Propositions 74 (teacher tenure reform), 76 (state spending restrictions), and 77 (redistricting reform) for not being "pure" enough conservatism... but 73 and 75 were purer than Ivory Soap.

And of course, since no good deed goes unpunished, how did conservatives respond? By sitting on their hands and refusing to turn out and vote. Great strategy, guys! Now guess what? Hugh's advice to Schwarzenegger has become garbage, because the governor is now the lamest of all lame ducks. As Daniel Weintraub noted, the reason Schwarzenegger went to the ballot box in the first place was that the Democrats in the State Senate and the Assembly refused to negotiate in good faith. So he went over their heads to the people.

And because the conservatives refused to turn out, they turned the governor's threats into idle smoke. Now Schwarzenegger has absolutely nothing to bargain with, nothing he can threaten, and the only things he can offer is Liberalism Lite.

Gee... how much good-faith negotiating with Governor Schwarzenegger do you suppose the Democrats intend to engage in now? How much of the conservative agenda do you think will get enacted? Smooth move, Ex-Lax.

Sometimes I completely understand why we're so often called "the stupid party." I know many of you weren't thrilled with every initiative Schwarzenegger was pushing, and you're angry that you can't get a hard-core conservative governor in this blue state, and you wish he were Ronald Reagan. But for God's sake, even Reagan knew enough to understand that if half a loaf is all that you can get, you take it and be glad... then you start bargaining for the other half.

But you know what we have now? Crumbs. Bupkis. And now there's about a 50-50 chance we'll have Governor Angelides by January 2007. Let's do the math: ultra-leftist state legislature + left-liberal governor = what?

I suspect conservatives who sat home and sulked may soon come to feel like the Sunnis shortly after that first election. The only difference is, we won't get a Mulligan.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 10, 2005, at the time of 1:09 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

Date ►►► November 9, 2005

Same Old Same Old

Post-Mortem and Dead-Dog Party

Well, very disappointing results in California. I tend to be optimistic (have you noticed?), so it's always a shock to me when Republicans get in a "mood," sit home, and sulk, ceding the election to the Democrats -- and then complain that Gov. Schwarzenegger isn't doing enough conservative stuff!

But taking the long view across the nation, what we saw was a "status-quo" election: voters everywhere decided not to change anything. That was bad for Republicans in California, New Jersey, and Virginia (two liberal Democratic states and one mixed state), but good for them in New York City, Texas, and Ohio.

• California: every initiative failed -- the Governator's four, parental notification, both the consumer activist phramaceutical plan and the one pushed by the pharmaceutical companies, and even energy reregulation, a big deal with the California Democrats. Short-term fallout: bad news for Arnold; unless he creates a huge turnaround in GOP support (or the Dems nominate a doofus), he's a dead duck in 2006. But the legislative Democrats don't fare any better.
• New Jersey: Sen. Jon Corzine won as governor; ho-hum. This one was never in any doubt. And of course, NJ was already in Democratic hands before the election, so it's not a crushing defeat for the Republicans or a "harbinger" of 2006, no matter what the MSM tries to sell you. Short-term fallout: Corzine may now fancy himself a serious contender for the presidency, having been both a senator and a governor. But massive vote buying ($60 million to buy his senate seat, another $30 to buy the governor's mansion) may play well in Sopranos territory, but it's not the righteous stuff to get elected president.
• Virginia: I thought we had a shot in this one; Jerry Kilgore started out the campaign strong, but he was a weak finisher, and he was hurt by Republican apathy in the wake of the various setbacks of the first year of Bush's second term. Democratic Lt. Gov. Tim Kaine, buoyed by the stratospheric approval ratings of Mark Warner (the outgoing Democratic governor), finished strong, persuasively beating Kilgore by five points. Note that, again contrary to the MSM spin, Virginia is not a "red state," at least as far as the governorship goes. As Rich Galen points out, four of the last six governors of Virginia have been Democrats. Short-term fallout: Mark Warner's stock for 2008 significantly improved, which may cause problems for La Hill, giving her another strong competitor to the "moderate" mantle she is (falsely) trying to claim. I don't believe she will even be nominated, and this is just one more straw on her camel's back.
• New York City: the huge surprise was that Mayor Michael Bloomberg got only 59% of the vote, instead of 99%. This is the fourth straight election in which Democrats have been thumped in the city they have long thought of as their capital... and it's the most decisive drubbing in modern New York City history, larger even than Fiorello LaGuardia's 1937 landslide of 19%. Short-term fallout: shellshocked New York Democrats will huddle to decide whether they would have better luck running a Chupacabra in 2009.

 



 

• Texas: another entry in the "I saved traditional marriage" sweepstakes! There are now nineteen states (I believe) that have passed explicit constitutional amendments defining marriage as a union between one man and one woman. Short-term fallout: one out of every twenty-three left-liberals in the country will spontaneously combust.
• Ohio: curiously, in Ohio, it was the Democrats who were desperate to have someone other than the legislature draw the district boundaries. I have no idea if the Ohio redistricting (State Issue 4) was as egregious a gerrymander as the one in California -- it's hard to top "perfection" (not a single seat changing parties in 2004). But in any event, the voters rejected the identical change whether it would benefit Republicans (California Proposition 77) or Democrats (Ohio). Short-term fallout: nothing changes (same with 77). Ohio State Issue 4 was rejected by an even bigger margin (70 to 30) than was California Proposition 77 (59-40)... and three other significant, Democrat-backed changes to Ohio elections procedures (State Issues 2, 3, and 5) were likewise turned back.

So not a great day, but not a catastrophic one, either. Basically, everything was put on hold by the voters until 2006 (or 2009, in the case of New York).

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 9, 2005, at the time of 3:27 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Date ►►► November 8, 2005

With Friends Like These...

Reading about the arrests of seventeen terrorist suspects in Australia -- suspects who appeared on the verge of executing massive bombings of the train system there until Prime Minister John Howard pushed sweeping anti-terrorism detention and investigation laws through parliament and used them to break up the plot -- I was struck by the concluding sentence of the AP story.

After discussing the plot and the arrests, Mike Corder's story ends on the familiar-to-the-point-of-satire dodge of the terrorism apologists:

Opponents say Howard's strong support for the U.S.-led strikes on Iraq and decision to send troops there and to Afghanistan have made it inevitable Australia will be attacked.

I find this claim increasingly surreal... given this, the other big international story of the last two weeks!

The French must be thinking, With friends like these....

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 8, 2005, at the time of 2:17 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Vote Early, Vote Often!

All of the polls on the important California ballot inititatives have turned south, but I'm not buying their turnout models. For one thing, the idea that Californians would vote down an initiative to require that before minors can get an abortion, they merely have to notify (not even get permission from!) their parents is troubling to me. Well, we'll see how it turns out.

There are two initiatives that are worth the entire rest of the ballot put together: Proposition 75 (paycheck protection) and Proposition 77 (redistricting reform). The first is slightly leading or trailing, depending on the poll, and will definitely be decided on turnout: if we do better than expected, we'll win this one!

Prop 77 is dicier: it will take every concerned Republican to go and vote for us to pull this one out... but arguably, it would have been a slam-dunk, were it not for the lying, tendentious campaign against it. A campaign that was so scurrilous and tricky, it actually sucked in some well-known neocons to rail against the silly caricature of Proposition 77 that the Left put out... including David Horowitz as the prime "useful idiot!"

Horowitz was somehow led to believe that it was "judicial activism" to allow retired judges to draw the proposed district lines -- which would then have to be approved by a vote of the people before it could be used. I understand now why Horowitz was so easy to convince that in the 1960s that Marxism was the wave of the future: he's just plain gullible.

All we need to do is beat expectations, and we'll win this election. If we live down to the sniggering presumption that Republican bumpuses won't bother to show up and vote -- I guess we're too busy picking fleas out of each others' hairy pelts and peeling bananas with our feet -- then we'll lose. It's as simple as that.

But even if you are a Democrat, you should vote for both of these: why should unions be able to extort dues from members then use them to promote policies and candidates that the member hates? That's just plain nuts. Vote YES on Proposition 75 to force the unions to get prior written consent before using a member's dues for that purpose. That is as fair as can be.

And second, right now, your vote counts for nothing -- even if you are a Democrat! This is because right now, there is exactly zero incentive for any strong challengers in this intensely gerrymandered legislature. It makes no difference how you vote; they don't need to listen to you, and they don't care about you.

They don't have to care: their seats are all assured. In 2004, despite scores of seats up for "election," not one single seat changed parties!

Vote YES on Proposition 77 -- erase all these "safe" seats and bring back competitive districts, as God and the Founders intended.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 8, 2005, at the time of 6:32 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Hawaii Blogging 1: the Polynesian Cultural Center

We are in the Island of Oahu, Hawaii. My work brought me here for a week. (I declined the opportunity to go to Norfolk Virginia and picked Hawaii instead. That was a hard decision.) Since I am already here and have a hotel room and a rental car, Dafydd decided to join me.

Today, we drove to the northern part of the island to visit the Polynesian Cultural Center. The main reason for the visit was to eat Luau and see a show. But on the way, we stopped to see a famous Buddhist temple called "Byodo-In."

This is a scaled-down replica of a Japanese temple found in Uji, much smaller than the original. The serene scenery was emphasized by the prosaic, almost hypnotic buzz of a gasoline-powered hedge trimmer.

The temple itself is not particularly interesting, but I was very impressed by the jagged mountain behind it, shrouded with greenery. It looked like the giant Roc from the Sindbad stories had clawed the side of the mountain! The fog over the spearhead crags reminded me of old Chinese brush paintings. The temple also has the world's largest carved Buddha not from ancient times; it was carved in the 1960s, laquered in gold, and then covered with gold leaf.

A pond curled around the front of the building like half a moat. But instead of sharks or crocodiles, it was filled with koi (big Japanese goldfish; actually, they're a kind of carp), some of them humongous. I guess tourists have been feeding them like crazy; when we stood still and looked at them from a bridge, a huge mass of them noticed us and crowded around, their mouths wide open. I imagined them saying "feed me!" like the plant in the musical version of Little Shop of Horrors.

A black swan was also in the pond, pecking at something invisible on the bank. It was floating oddly higher than the waterline, and it suddenly occurred to us that it wasn't floating at all: it was standing on the backs of some koi, like they were floatation devices. The fish didn't seem to care.

We took a few pictures and moved on.

The Polynesian Cultural Center is kind of like Florida's Epcot center, separated into several different Polynesian pavillions, each corresponding to a different island: Fiji, Samoa, Aotearoa (Maori New Zealand), Tahiti, Hawaii, the Marquesas, and Tonga. We rode a small canoe on a canal that runs between all the "island" pavillions. Then we started visiting the different cultures... which seemed very similar, except they had different styles of thatched hut.

In Islands of Marquesas, we saw a couple of women, one old, the other new, teaching a gaggle of tourists how to weave long grass into some shape: it consisted of two big loops, with the ends of the foot-long blades shuttling inside and out in some complicated pattern. We moved on to Tahiti... and came across a pair of women teaching a clutch of tourists how to weave long grass into some shape: closer inspection revealed it was exactly the same as the previous "island."

We found the same teachable moment in Tonga; this time, it was two old women. Crossing over the bridge to Fiji, we saw the same pattern, but the loops and ends pointed the opposite direction. Then we saw the old Fijian woman writing something and realized she was left-handed.

This must have been basket-weaving day in Polynesia, because the next pavillion (Samoa) had an old woman and a young one teaching the exact, same patter of grass weaving (right way round this time; anybody want to bet the head woman was right-handed?) The last pavillion we visited, just before we got to the Luau, was Hawaii -- and there were no women and no basket-weaving gawkers; if they were there, they had already left. We did, however, find a single blade of long grass on the ground; it had split down the middle. We deduced that at least one tourist hadn't listened to his old woman.

Hawaii is not exactly known for great food. Oh, sure, it's better than our backpacking trip through the Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite, where we hiked for five days on nothing but dried pieces of buffalo, squid jerky, and oatmeal. But you don't go to Hawaii for the fine cuisine.

The one exception to this rule is the luau. We honeymooned in Hawaii some time ago, and the luau is the only meal we can really remember. (Dafydd says he remembers every lobster from our trip to Maine a couple of years ago.) We're pleased to report that the luau at the Polynesian Cultural Center is just as good as or better than the one we had on Maui last time.

If you played a word-association game and someone said "Hawaiian luau," I'll bet the first word that would pop into hyour mind would not be "Mormons," but that's who runs the Polynesian Cultural Center: Brigham Young University. In practice, this only means that you can't drink alcohol on the premises... so if the highlight of any luau for you is a gigantic Mai-Tai, you have to go somewhere else. But the food at the Center's luau is excellent.

The highlight of any luau is the kuala pig, steamed underground in a hole that acts like an oven: they line it with heated rocks, drop the dead pig on it, toss on herbs and vegetables and other food, then bury it under cocoanut husks. Then they drape wet burlap over it, so it steams instead of burns. And then they leave it alone for about twenty-four hours.

By that time, it's done. In fact, it falls off the bone; so they serve it the only way they can: shredded, as part of a huge buffet. I didn't like the pig that much, but Dafydd said it was really good. I liked all the vegetables, even the poi (made from pounded taro root). At the end, the cocoanut cake was excellent, but I could only eat a bite. I thought I was going to explode like the anaconda that tried to digest an alligator!

The last thing we saw at the Center was the traditional dancing and singing show. It's called "Horizons;" but even with such an insipid name, it's a terrific show. The second half was a lot better than the first, with actual hula dancing (which seems to have come to Hawaii from Tahiti) and the fire dancing. The fast movement of the hips is incredible. I could never figure out how anyone can move a hip that fast without moving anything either above or below it.

The acrobatic dance using fire was from Samoa. Three guys litereary sat on fire to put it out. They were walking over the fire and torching their grass skirts on purpose.

The star of the last half was a Samoan who we watched at the Samoa show a few hours earlier. He was very funny... he knew a few words in a lot of different languages (French, Chinese, Korean, Japanese), and he knew how to make fun of people's languages without getting them angry at him. At one point, he had a stick that was burning at both ends, and he threw it high up on the stage to another guy. The guy on the upper stage caught it and started spinning like a baton. Later, he threw the torched stick back to the guy on the lower stage. I don't see how they can do all that without burning themselves!

The drive home was uneventful. We decided we had been eating too much of food that wasn't all that great to begin with; so we stopped off at a supermarket and bought fixings to make sandwiches instead, for lunch and dinner.

Yeah, right. We'll see how long we stick to that budgeting plan!

Hatched by Sachi on this day, November 8, 2005, at the time of 6:01 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Date ►►► November 7, 2005

Post to the Post

I wonder if Deborah Orin reads Big Lizards? Somehow I doubt it... though it's a nice thought to contemplate. In any event, I must rise to correct one small point in her otherwise excellent New York Post column on the Joseph Wilson scam, flagged by my favorite blog, Power Line. Actually, though it's a small point in her column, easily corrected, it's a monumental, colossal point in the history of the Iraq war and aftermath.

The column lays out, with perfect clarity, the case that far from wanting to keep the lid on Joe Wilson, the CIA actually encouraged his repeated lies about his trip and what he found (and "didn't find"), even though it knew this would jeopardize the career of his CIA employed wife, Valerie Plame Wilson. In the course of the column, Ms. Orin found occasion to wonder why they would be so complicit in Wilson's attacks on the president; she concluded, with admirable straigtforwardness rare in the MSM, that the CIA was in full CYA mode by the time Wilson went public in mid-2003:

But then, all this came at a time when the CIA division where Wilson's wife worked had an intense need to cover its rear: Remember — they were the ones who (along with every other intel agency in the world) had insisted that Saddam had WMDs — but no WMDs were being found.

The irony of this could choke a horse. The reason that "no WMDs were being found" is that the Iraq Survey Group, a creature of the CIA as well as the Pentagon and the IAEA, was headed at that time by David Kay; and Kay had made a conscious decison not to count as WMD any item that had a dual civilian use. Read how carefully Kay parsed his words when he resigned in January 2004 (via Wikipedia):

I believe that the effort that has been directed to this point has been sufficiently intense that it is highly unlikely that there were large stockpiles of deployed, militarized chemical weapons there.

Note that this would elegantly rule out any chemical weapon that was not "deployed" -- that is, rockets made to accept chemical payloads but which were currently empty, even if they were found twenty-five feet away from 55-gallon drums of cyclosarin-based "pesticides" in a camouflaged ammunition bunker. This is akin to cops searching a convicted felon's home and refusing to arrest because all the guns they found were unloaded, thus not "deployed" and "militarized."

So if the CIA was in the doghouse, as clearly it was, its embarassment was entirely of its own making... both for predicting (one can only presume) that we would find warehouses of carefully labeled WMD, all loaded up and ready to fire -- and then after the war, for allowing David Kay to construct a definition of WMD so crabbed and narrow that virtually nothing would qualify except the cartoonish scenario above.

That in turn causes me to wonder whether there were some in the CIA so anti-Iraq War, so anti-President-Bush, that they were willing to sacrifice even the good name of the Company itself, so painstakingly rebuilt from the nadir of the Carter era, if only that would hurt President Bush's reelection chances. If so, all we would have shown (alas) is that the liberal rot was no less advanced within the CIA than within the State Department, academe, and the mainstream media.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 7, 2005, at the time of 1:07 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Oil for Blood

NOTE: This story was developed in collabortion between Sachi and Dafydd.

Is the United Nations trying to change the subject from its own complicity -- for literally years -- in the massive theft from the Iraqi people that is the Oil for Food scandal?

According to the New York Times on Saturday, a UN-sponsored auditing board, called the "International Advisory and Monitoring Board of the Development Fund for Iraq," is recommending that the United States should "repay as much as $208 million" to Iraq for alleged overcharges by Kellog, Brown and Root (KB&R), a subsidiary of Halliburton that has come under fire before by the Democratic Party and their allies in the press and the UN.

An auditing board sponsored by the United Nations recommended yesterday that the United States repay as much as $208 million to the Iraqi government for contracting work in 2003 and 2004 assigned to Kellogg, Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary.

The work was paid for with Iraqi oil proceeds, but the board said it was either carried out at inflated prices or done poorly. The board did not, however, give examples of poor work. [all emphasis here and elsewhere added]

Even the Development Fund Board isn't quite sure just how much actual money they think should be forked over:

The monitoring board, created by the United Nations specifically to oversee the Development Fund - which includes Iraqi oil revenues but also some money seized from Saddam Hussein's government - said because the audits were continuing, it was too early to say how much of the $208 million should ultimately be paid back.

In other words, it could be $208 million... or it could be zero. Or anything in between. But such irrelevant questions won't stop the UN from playing "let's you and him fight."

Let's open a tab: the UN Board recommends that the United States pay "as much as" $208,000, but doesn't actually know how much of that money is actually overcharge and how much is perfectly legimate; and they also criticized KB&R workmanship but couldn't point to any specifics. They just dropped the last charge without going through all the fuss and bother of finding actual evidence of any wrongdoing.

A spokeswoman for Halliburton, Cathy Mann, said the questions raised in the military audits, carried out in a Pentagon office called the Defense Contract Auditing Agency, had largely focused on issues of paperwork and documentation and alleged nothing about the quality of the work done by K.B.R. The monitoring board relied heavily on the Pentagon audits in drawing its conclusions.

"The auditors have raised questions about the support and the documentation rather than questioning the fact that we have incurred the costs," Ms. Mann said in an e-mail response to questions. "Therefore, it would be completely wrong to say or imply that any of these costs that were incurred at the client's direction for its benefit are 'overcharges.'"

I wonder... how much thought has the Board given to the actual costs of working in Iraq during the chaos starting right after the collapse of Saddam Hussein's government? Civilian workers had been subjected to roadside bombings, kidnappings, and even beheadings. In order to attract workers to work in such a hostile environment, KB&R would have to offer much higher salaries than other companies -- not mention enormous insurance premiums and the cost of a large number of security personnel. Since KB&R is a private company, not a government organization, they had to provide security for their own employees.

But there is no evidence the Board considered any of these explanations for the high cost. The Times says they "relied heavily on [earlier] Pentagon audits" in preparing these recommendations; but it does not quote from any of those previous audits; so we have no way of knowing whether the Board's recommendation agrees with the Pentagon's audits or contradicts them.

Why is the United Nations releasing this report, with its hearsay and inuendo, at this particular moment in time? Several reasons leap out: First, there is the continuing investigation into the UN's Oil for Food bribery scheme. With both its own investigation by Paul Volcker and the investigation by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations nipping at the heels of Secretary General Kofi Annan, his family, and cronies over the billions of dollars stolen from the Iraqi people by Saddam Hussein with the connivance of the United Nations heirarchy (who took their own bribes and kickbacks), they desperately need someone else to be the villain for a while. Since there seems no way to blame Israel for any of this, the United States is elected.

Second, for those who have always opposed the war to remove Saddam, there is the urgent task of getting more Iraqis to hate the United States and perhaps demand our immediate withdrawal, while there is still time for the Baathists to return:

The monitoring board authority extends only to making recommendations on any reimbursement. It would be up to the United States government to decide whether to make the payments, and who should make them. But Louay Bahry, a former Iraqi academic who is now at the Middle East Institute in Washington, said the board's findings would stoke suspicions on the street in Iraq, where there had always been fears that the United States invaded the country to control its oil resources.

"Something like this will be caught in the Iraqi press and be discussed by the Iraqi general public and will leave a very bad taste in the mouth of the Iraqis," Mr. Bahry said. "It will increase the hostility towards the United States."

And finally, most in the UN would much prefer to see the Democrats in charge in the United States, rather than "warmongers" like George W. Bush and the Republicans. Anything that will further that cause is always in order.

The audits may also come at a bad time for the Bush administration, since Vice President Dick Cheney's former role as chief executive of Halliburton has led to charges, uniformly dismissed by Mr. Cheney and the company, that it received preferential treatment in receiving the contracts. The early Kellogg, Brown & Root contracts in Iraq were "sole sourced," or bid noncompetitively.

"The Bush administration repeatedly gave Halliburton special treatment and allowed the company to gouge both U.S. taxpayers and the Iraqi people," Representative Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat who is the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Government Reform, said in a statement on the new audits. "The international auditors have every right to expect a full refund of Halliburton's egregious overcharges."

Speaking of "a full refund," when will the UN pay back all the money they helped loot from Iraq in the last years of Hussein's bloody rule? Perhaps after they do that, we can talk about this tendentious audit.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 7, 2005, at the time of 2:16 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Date ►►► November 6, 2005

French Postcards

The headline is scary -- Police Find Bomb-Making Factory in Paris -- but the guts of the article tell us that both more and less than meet the eye are going on in France.

First, the bad news: clearly, the riot is getting more organized, more violent, and of course, spreading far beyong the flashpoint of Clichy-sous-Bois. The rioters are no longer just rampaging Moslem youths; they are rampaging Moslems with an organized plan and a goal: to be "let alone," which is to say, to be allowed to create a sharia-based "bantustan" in the heart of Western Europe, where they and they alone are the law.

The good news is that the "bombs" they're talking about are Molotov Cocktails, and the makers were juveniles... just relatively organized juveniles. But what they are not is as important as what they are: the fact that they're still using improvised incendiaries (it's easy to make a Molotov Cocktail), rather than an explosive ordnance like a modified mine or artillery shell, shows that the order in these riots arises out of chaos, not out of an international terrorist organiztion like al-Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood. Clearly, some Moslem immigrants in France are members of one or both of these organizations, but the unsophisticated nature of the weapons this "factory" was manufacturing demonstrate that it's not a jihad just yet... though it might well be an "intifada" by now.

It also shows that much of the worst violence, the gasoline bombs, may very well be a "crime of opportunity": alienated young Moslems are looking for a way to express rage and satisfy their violent tendencies, and suddenly somebody hands them the perfect means of doing so: a ready-made Molotov Cocktail. There may have been no more planning about what they would bomb and why than there is in a typical gang fight.

The third shoe, which has not yet dropped, is that if French inaction continues (I mean a lack of effective action to end the rioting), the French "intifada" may well turn into the French jihad. As we take note of what is happening in France and Belgium, Denmark and the Netherlands, so too are the real terrorists taking note: they see these spasms of ill-directed rage nevertheless shaking a once mighty nation to its core, and they surely will try to move in and take over, inciting terrorist acts so horrible that there would be no going back.

There is still time to avert this, but France must slap itself awake from the nightmare of apathy and hostility to Western virtues. Little Nemo must awaken from Slumberland. France stands at a crossroads, and the rest of us stand alongside her; we don't know which way the coin will land because it's still spinning... but very quickly, we shall know whether it's heads -- or tails.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 6, 2005, at the time of 7:37 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

Go Ahead -- Be Silly!

I think this is good news. Or maybe it's just silly news.

BlackFive reports that soldiers and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan, who have problems with houses that have been booby trapped with tiny tripwires (so small they're invisible in the dark) attached to explosives, have found an amazing way to find those tripwire threads: Silly String!

Evidently, they spray the stuff into dark areas; when it floats down, it allegedly is caught by the tripwires, dangling from them. Since Silly String is bright, it makes the booby traps easy to spot and avoid, or to detonate from a safe distance.

Now, I caution that this could be a hoax; I have no way of knowing. It seems pretty reasonable on its face. BlackFive links to this website (not a blog), which has authentic-looking photos of the site author testing the theory in his home. And there's nothing inherently preposterous: Silly String is much, much lighter than a human brushing against a wire: it seems unlikely that it would have enough weight to trip the explosion.

I wonder how old this idea is? Silly String was around in the early seventies; supposedly, it was invented in 1969 -- so theoretically, it could have been used in Vietnam. But you'd think if this trick were a mainstay, BlackFive would have heard of it before. So is this new? Anybody out there use Silly String in previous military engagements to find invisible tripwires?

This is either a spectacularly clever practical joke -- or else it's a spectacular example of American ingenuity and sideways thinking, coming up with a brilliant solution using a child's toy to prevent Coalition and Iraqi forces from being killed by terrorists.

Either way, I reckon it's good news!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 6, 2005, at the time of 2:51 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

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