On the sixtieth anniversary of the invasion of Okinawa, Victor Davis Hanson offers some lessons from that experience:
For all the horror, stupidity
Asking For Trouble
The Democrats are apparently going to put up a fight against the nomination of John Bolton:
Although Democrats have challenged a number of diplomatic nominees, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, “they see this nomination as more distasteful, and they’re more united,” said one Democratic Senate aide.
The split on the panel is one of several signs that the proceedings, set for April 7, could be acrimonious.
Advocates have organized letter and ad campaigns for and against Bolton. Democrats said they intended to investigate Bolton’s comments on a variety of issues, an exercise that Republicans said could stretch the hearing into a second day. Republicans said they were concerned that Democrats might attempt to filibuster the nomination if it reached the Senate floor.
Bolton, undersecretary of State for arms control, is controversial because of his criticism of the United Nations and other international institutions and agreements.
“He’s been contemptuous of the U.N.,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer (news, bio, voting record) (D-Calif.). “There’s a lot to talk about at this hearing. It’s going to be very contentious.”
I think they’re misreading the mood of the public, and setting themselves up for an Ollie North moment, in which the witness makes fools of them. Bolton will have two messages: 1) the UN is very badly broken, and he will lay out all the evidence for that, from Darfur to Oil-for-Palaces to child sex rings among the “peacekeepers, with a Secretary General who is either incompetent, corrupt, or incompetently corrupt, and defiantly unwilling to step down; and 2) that his job is to reform it, not wreck it, something that cannot be done without a clear recognition of its many problems. In their own blind transnationalist love for the UN as they’d like to fantasize it, rather than as it is, the Donkeys are going to end up looking like defenders of the status quo, and I suspect that this will be quite obvious to anyone watching the hearings. This will not be a smart political move for them.
The Point Is Moot Now
The people who thought it would be about two weeks seemed to have it right. The body of the person who was Terri Schiavo has finally stopped metabolizing. How many more weeks will it be before we stop talking about it?
There are lots of comments over at Free Republic about “bless her soul,” and “she’s with God now,” and the like.
While my heart goes out to the long-suffering family, whose hearts are surely now fully (if only figuratively) broken, at the risk of being (more than) a little iconoclastic, as long-time readers know, I’m not fully down with this soul thing. Perhaps those who are can enlighten me.
At what precise instant did the soul pass from her body, and was transported to God’s sitting room?
Was it when she stopped breathing? When her heart stopped beating? When the phosphor trace on her EEG (assuming that she was on one) stopped wiggling? Even now (or at least a few minutes after the end of these activities) she could have been resuscitated with CPR and defibrillator, and resumed these activities, at least briefly, particularly if rehydrated. Had someone done so, would the soul have had to rush back from heaven, to take up residence in the body again, in case there was still one more legal appeal to play out? Or was the body a lost cause, and the soul would know it? But if the latter then why wait for the conventional functional shutdowns that we arbitrarily use to declare legal death? Why not vamoose once it was clear that all the appeals were exhausted, and the organs were failing, regardless of the respiratory and cardiac state?
The relatives said that Terri has been communicating with them, and they with her, but was that wishful thinking? Did they see a spark in her eyes that they imagined was her, words in her vocalizations that they, in their grief, fantasized as expressions of love and human desires? If so, and those who said that she was truly in a “persistent vegetative state,” uncomprehending of self or anything else, are right, then is it possible that her soul actually left when her cortex collapsed, years ago, and that since then they’ve only been feeding an empty shell in the form of a human being?
I ask these questions for two reasons. First, because I’m genuinely curious, not about souls per se, because I don’t believe in them, but about how those who do justify their beliefs, and how they think about them. Second, because I do think that this bears on a more practical issue to those of us who do want to live as long as possible–at what point should someone be allowed to go into cryonic suspension? While the issues of soul dispositions and locations shouldn’t enter into legal discussions, it’s inevitable that they will, and I’d like to know how the arguments in court might go.
What Would We Do Without Harvard Studies?
Even as early as 1943, the whiz kids there had figured out that Adolf Hitler “held grudges, couldn’t stand criticism, craved attention and had a tendency to bully others..”
The Sky Is Falling
Now where have we read things like this before? Oh, yeah.
The very headline is absurd. For it to make any sense, one must believe that “resources” are some fixed quantity, rather than a product of technology and human ingenuity. Which was of course exactly the same mistake that Dennis Meadows made in “Limits to Growth.” Not to mention Paul Ehrlich.
[Update at 2 PM]
Phil Bowermaster has further thoughts. He also has some great SF movie titles. I’ll bet these are being optioned as I type.
Did General Sanchez Perjure Himself?
Mark Kraft thinks so. At first glance, that’s how it looks to me, too, but I’d be interested to see what the General or his defenders have to say.
Unlike him, though, I don’t see any basis of inference that Rumsfeld did anything wrong. Of course, I don’t consider any of the things listed in that memo torture, or relevant to the more egregious acts at Abu Ghraib. I am concerned about the possible perjury before Congress, though. As they say, it’s not the act, it’s the cover up.
Living In The Past
Walter Pincus says that the usual suspects are hysterically opposed to US military superiority.
To realize how absurd this is, imagine the response at the time if an article were to appear in the WaPo like this:
Plans by U.S. to Dominate The Seas Raising Concerns
Arms Experts Worried at Navy Department Push for Superiority
April 1, 1938
WASHINGTON (Routers) Arms control advocates in the United States and abroad are expressing concern with the Roosevelt administration’s push for military superiority in the world’s oceans.
A series of Navy Department doctrinal papers, released over the past year, have emphasized that the U.S. military is increasingly dependent on shipping lanes and ocean-based assets for offensive and defensive operations, and must be able to protect them in times of war.
The Department in August put forward a Counterocean Operations Doctrine, which described “ways and means by which the Navy achieves and maintains maritime superiority” and has worked to develop weapons to accomplish such missions.
Earlier this year, Secretary of the Navy Claude Swanson signed a new National Ocean Defense Strategy paper that said the use of the world’s oceans “enables us to project power anywhere in the world from secure bases of operation.” A key goal of Swansons’ new strategy is “to ensure our access to and use of the seas and to deny hostile exploitation of them to adversaries.”
The Navy Department is developing and procuring aircraft that could hit targets almost anywhere in the world within hours or minutes of being launched from ocean-based aircraft carriers. It also is developing systems that could attack potential enemy ships and submarines, destroying them or temporarily preventing them from sending signals.
Michael Dumpeesnik, president emeritus of the Woodrow Wilson Peace Center and a former arms control official, said the United States is moving toward a national ocean doctrine that is “preemptive and proactive.” He expects the Roosevelt administration to produce a new National Ocean Policy statement soon that will contrast with the one adopted by previous administrations.
“We previously adopted the traditional U.S. position of being a reluctant ocean warrior,” Dumpeesnik said. “The seas were to be used for peaceful purposes, but if someone interfered with us, we couldn’t allow that to happen. But it was not our ocean policy preference.”
Dumpeesnik last week attended a conference in Geneva organized by the Japanese and German governments on preventing an arms race in the oceans. Tokyo and Berlin have for years promoted a new treaty to govern arms at sea.
One of those attending last week’s session was Franz von Kliptherschipps, the German ambassador to the League of Nations Disarmament Conference. At a LoN disarmament meeting last year, von Kliptherschipps criticized efforts to achieve “control of the seas,” as well as research into new weapons that can be used there. “It is no exaggeration to say that oceans would become the third battlefield after land and air should we sit on our hands,” he said.
Dumpeesnik said a new treaty is needed because “if the U.S. proceeds to weaponize the oceans, anyone can compete, and that makes sure everyone loses.”
Margaret Atwater, vice president of the Center for War Information, also attended the Geneva session and said a low-ranking U.S. diplomat attended as an observer but did not speak. She said experts there discussed where the issues stood and how one could verify a treaty for ocean security. “That included a code of conduct and even just banning anti-ship weapons,” she said.
Analyzing the proposed Navy Department fiscal 1939 budget just sent to Congress, Atwater and her colleagues pointed to $680 thousand for an experimental XXS ship whose “payloads” could attack enemy ships. Another $60 thousand is earmarked for an experiment that would use electromagnetic jamming technology to disable enemy ship transmissions.
Navy Department officials make no secret that they are working on new defensive systems to protect the nation’s ships.
“I think everybody that I know in the United States military and the Department of the Navy understands the important role that our naval assets play in our national security,” Secretary of the Navy Swanson told the House Armed Services Committee March 10. “One of the biggest issues that we had to deal with was trying to figure out what was happening to a particular capability if the function was interrupted.”
One system under development would be able to identify a ground station or ship interfering with U.S. ships, so that it could be destroyed.
As another defensive measure, the United States last October announced deployment of its first mobile, ground-based system that can temporarily disrupt communications from an enemy ship. The Counter Communications System uses electromagnetic radio frequency energy to silence transmissions from a ship in a way that is reversible. Two more units are due later this year.
Any bets on what language residents of Europe and Asia (and perhaps even North America) would be speaking if this had been the prevailing attitude in the 1930s?
The bottom line is that these folks oppose US military superiority, period. They’re just waging that war on any battleground they can find, and space is the next retrenchment for them. They know that the other theatres are a lost cause, because we’ve long become accustomed to seeing them as military theatres. They are engaging in linguistic legerdemain here to hold the line against any further expansion of US/Anglosphere capability to win wars.
Around The Corner?
Professor Reynolds is optimistic about NASA, and particularly about the prospects for space elevators and solar power satellites. I certainly agree with him that prizes are much more promising than NASA’s past approaches, but it’s discouraging to see the huge ratio between funds expended for traditional ways of doing business and those used for prizes. Still, at least the ratio is no longer infinite, as it has been in the past. If the prizes are successful, it should (at least in theory, though bureaucracies and politics can be perverse) make it easier for their proponents, like Brant Sponberg, to expand them in the future, and carve out a bigger budget for them.
As for the prospects for space elevators and SPS, I’m a little less sanguine. Successful prizes will move us closer, but it’s still not clear that SPS will ever make sense compared to terrestrial alternatives (e.g., fusion, or nano-assembled solar-powered roads and clothes, or even nuclear if we can come up with more sensible reactor designs and attitudes toward waste). The inefficiency issues with power beaming are never going to go away, though advancing technology may mitigate them. I think that this will be a technology race, and it’s not at all obvious to me what will ultimately win.
But because we can’t know that, it also isn’t to say that it’s not an avenue that should be pursued, and perhaps even more vigorously than it has been. It’s certainly been underfunded relative to those more conventional solutions. And if it is going to be pursued, as Glenn says, it’s certainly better to do it via a technology prize route.
But It Checqued Out Fine
This probably isn’t news to people who are both good writers and use MS Word, but its grammar checker sucks.
I personally find it a frustrating mix of useful and extremely annoying. It does occasionally catch a word I misspell (something that I do rarely), but it almost never gives me good grammar advice. Ninety percent of the time (probably more) its recommended changes are either of no value, or would actually be wrong (I notice in particular that it has problems recognizing subjects and objects when recommending singular or plural forms of irregular verbs). I’ll probably keep using it, but given my writing style, I wish that I could disable the “long sentence, no suggestions” feature, because that’s the one that I most often get false alarms with.
Anyway, as the article says, if you’re a student (or worker) and think that your product is spelled correctly and grammatical just because Microsoft says so, think again. There’s still no substitute for a human editor, whether yourself or, if you’re unsure, another.
[Via Geek Press]
How Many Excess Deaths?
Alastair Mackay has a post-publication peer review of the Lancet study on excess Iraqi civilian deaths from last fall.