WASHINGTON (APUPI) The media and political pundits lauded the preliminary results of the months-long commission to determine the true ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle today.

“This has been a troubling national issue, since the nation’s founding. Several legislatures have attempted to proclaim the value of pi, in order to simplify mathematics for our students, but the effort has always been viewed as partisan and controversial,” stated the introduction to the initial report, released today.

It was a long-standing controversy, viewed by many as a policy quagmire, that has been finally almost been laid to rest by a compromise report from a panel of distinguished experts from all sides of the political spectrum. The goal was to inject some “realism” into the debate, and because the blue-ribbon commission had equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats, no one can any longer claim that the recommendations provided are partisan in any way.

“Obviously, there has been a lot of dispute over this issue over the years,” said the commission leader, Lincoln Chafee. “We wanted to ensure that we could generate a report and recommendations that most could accept, regardless of their self-contradictory, and trivial pabulatory nature.”

Many had argued for a value of 3, claiming that this was the simplest number to use in calculations, and one that most students would have a prayer of remembering. Others thought that this was a laudatory goal, but that it would be too incongruent with the actual ratio to be useful, arguing instead that the number should be determined to be 3.142, which would be close enough to usually generate actual useful results, but not too difficult to recall. Another group thought that the value should be 4, to ensure that the number would not suffer from self-esteem issues by being too low.

One extremist radical contingent, dismissed by the mainstream members of the panel, insisted that it was an irrational number, computable only by adding an infinite series, and unable to be completely memorized by any human being. This was obviously an unacceptable solution, politically, since given its infinite nature, it wouldn’t have been able to even be printed in the report in its entirety, let alone made statutory law.

Everyone was pleased when the determination was made to take an average of all of the members’ positions, arriving at the value 3.45 (after throwing out the suggestions of those favoring the irrational solution, since adding it in would have made the final solution unprintable and unmemorizable as well).

“We expect that the president and Congress will quickly act on our recommendation once we finalize it, since it was made on a bipartisan basis, and based on months of discussion between washed-up diplomats, spongy former Supreme Court justices, and also-ran wishy-washy politicians,” said a spokesman for the group.

“Of course, there is one more key step to determining the final number,” she added.

“We have to ensure that this will be an acceptable decision to the world community. Therefore, before we finalize our report, we want to sit down and get the opinions of Iran and Syria, and incorporate their thoughts into the results. We’d like to include Israel as well, but we fear that, like those on the panel familiar with actual mathematics, they’ll be too unrealistic. And irrational.”

[Copyright 2006, by Rand Simberg]

And thanks to Andy McCarthy for the inspiration.

[Thursday morning update]

Lileks isn’t kind to the commission recommendations:

Imagine a government report on organized crime, demanding the following:

* The Mafia

In honor of tomorrow’s sixty-fifth anniversary of Pearl Harbor, I’ve dredged up a sixty-year-old Routers piece on who was really behind it…

December 7, 1946

HONOLULU (Routers) Five years after the sinking of the battleships in Pearl Harbor, many still question the official government story of what happened on that fateful day, and who was responsible. Some believe that the Roosevelt administration did it themselves, deliberately, making it look like Japanese religious fanatics were responsible, in order to drag the country into a war that they could get by no other means, to benefit arms merchants and the Jews.

The controversy has been renewed by a recently released film documentary, titled “Loose Ships.” It makes a compelling case against the Shinto extremist theory, citing inconsistent eyewitness reports, mistaken radar readings, and structural analysis of the sunken battleships.

“It makes no sense to think that Japanese Shintoists could have done this,” explains one of the film’s producers. “Shinto is a deeply spiritual religion, derived from Buddhism, worshiping nature. A Shintoist would never have desecrated Pearl Harbor with all of that leaking and burning diesel fuel and oil. It is fundamentally a religion of peace.”

He points out that many eyewitnesses saw American planes in the air that day, and that the radar images that many claim, preposterously in his view, were of the attacking Japanese aircraft, were actually a squadron of American B-17s on its way to Hickam Air Force Base, perhaps to take part in the plot. The Truman administration itself has admitted that there was a group of bombers in the area that morning, on its way from the mainland, though a War Department spokesman claimed that it was too far away and in the wrong direction to appear on radar at that point in time.

The documentarian went on to expand on his theory. “We don’t think that Japanese aircraft would have the range to get here all the way from Japan, but if by some miracle they did, it was probably to protect Honolulu, in which many Japanese live, from the administration plot. That’s probably what people were seeing.”

Some have examined the wreckage of the Arizona, and claim that it wasn’t brought down by aerial bombs, but by charges planted on the ship beforehand.

“Look at those two huge circular holes in the front and rear of the sunken ship,” he said. “No bomb is big enough to make a hole that size, and do it so cleanly. It was obviously a shaped charge of some kind. It’s just not possible to take down ships that big with the little bombs that are carried in those little Japanese airplanes.”

“They killed thousands of sailors for their filthy war, and many of them died a long and horrible death in air pockets. And take a look at the roster of the people who died on the Arizona. How many Jewish names do you see there? I think they were warned ahead of time. And how do they explain the radio transmissions that were picked up with cries of ‘Torah, Torah, Torah’?”

“It was all part of the Zionist neo-liberal conspiracy to drag America into a needless war of choice.”

In response to suggestions that the Japanese used aircraft carriers, and that many of the Japanese planes were torpedo bombers, and that the large holes were the empty sockets for the gun turrets, that were removed afterward, he scoffed. “That’s all just Franklin Delano Rosenfeld administration propaganda,” he sneered knowingly.

Some enterprising and innovative people have carried the analysis further. In one sequence shown in the documentary, a man built a wooden model of the ship in his pond, and filmed himself dropping lit firecrackers on it from above, to demonstrate how preposterous was the notion that ships could be sunk by bombs. They seemed to have no effect other than a slight scorching of the deck, and the sturdy little toy remained afloat.

He was proud of his own small part in uncovering the cover up. “Other than the fact that the ship is wood, which is much weaker than steel, and I used firecrackers instead of iron bombs, and that there was no ammunition magazine aboard to explode, this is a perfect simulation of what the Roosevelt administration claims happened to the Arizona. But there the ship floats, to show to one and all the administration’s lie. And how convenient of Roosevelt to die a year and a half ago, so he can avoid having to answer these questions.”

[Copyright 2006, by Rand Simberg]